“Because he’s quiet?”
“He’s not ordinary quiet, you know? He’s just…always quiet. Didn’t you see him disappear at the movies on Friday? Or maybe you’d already left before he did?”
When I didn’t say anything she shrugged. “Anyway, after his dad’s stroke he had to help out because his parents are pretty old, and he ended up missing a lot of school. He made it all up, or whatever, but I guess what happened to his dad messed him up because when he came back he just…he wasn’t the same.”
“How?” I couldn’t help it. I had to know.
“He didn’t talk to his friends. He didn’t talk to anyone, and I think if Mel hadn’t just assumed that when he talked, Patrick would talk back, he might never have spoken to anyone again. It’s like just being there is difficult for him, and not because it’s school and we’re all sick of it. I think something about being around a lot of people—or anyone, really—bothers him. Weird, huh?”
“His dad had a stroke at a carnival, remember? Lots of people around.”
“Right, I forgot. That makes sense. I guess it explains why he left the movie too. There was that thing at the beginning, with the old guy…”
“I remember,” I said, and thought about Patrick sitting outside the movie theater. Where he was sitting. How he was sitting. What he said. How he knew exactly what it was like to be a totally different person even though you looked exactly the same.
“It’s too bad, you know?” Caro said. “What happened to him, I mean. He was totally someone once. He did stuff. But now he doesn’t do anything. I couldn’t believe he was at the movies, actually. Mel must have dragged him there.”
“Maybe,” I said, even though I was sure he had.
“I’ve seen Patrick at two parties, maybe, in the past couple of years, and he always leaves after, like, ten minutes and goes and waits for Mel to drive him home. It’s just so sad how some people totally get messed up when someone…” She trailed off. “Not that you’re…I mean, everyone’s messed up, aren’t they?”
I made an agreeing noise and tried to remember if there was a crosstown bus stop nearby. Corn Syrup attempting to do deep? I definitely didn’t need that.
“I mean, look at me,” she continued. “I’m afraid to talk to a guy I really like because my best friend, who I hate to the point where I imagine her getting hit by a car at least twice at day, has decided she might want him.”
“Well, you could—never mind.” I got up. Bus stop or no bus stop, I was out of there. The last thing I needed to do was hang around and point out the obvious.
“What?”
I sighed, because really, for a supposedly smart person, she sure was dumb. “Beth treats you like crap, right?”
Caro shrugged.
“So stop hanging out with her.”
“Oh, right. Great idea, because high school is totally the best place to do something that will make sure I have absolutely no friends.”
I hadn’t known Caro could do sarcasm. I sat back down.
“You know, it was easy for you to ditch Beth, but then you had Julia. I’ve never had someone like that, who would stand up for me no matter what. You were so lucky, Amy.”
Were. Past tense. I stood back up. “Look, I gotta—”
“I hated her, you know. Ever since that party when we were in sixth grade—”
“Yeah, so sorry you got called on your shit.”
“Like I was the only one doing stuff to you,” Caro said quietly. “But that’s not even it. You basically stopped talking to me after you met her. You just—you acted like we’d never been friends.”
“We were never friends. You and Beth and Anne Alice were friends.”
“Beth and Anne Alice were friends. Do you know how awful my life would be if Anne Alice hadn’t moved to Los Angeles two years ago? They treated me just like you, Amy, only I had to deal with it for a hell of a lot longer. Don’t you remember what they did to me at my tenth birthday party? Or how about the time in fourth grade when you, Anne Alice, and Beth formed a secret club when I was out with chicken pox?”
“Nope.” I hadn’t remembered, anyway, until she said it. And then I did. I remembered Beth and Anne Alice showing up in matching sweaters at Caro’s birthday party and talking about what a great sleepover they’d had while Caro unwrapped her gifts.
I remembered that stupid club and how excited I was to be in it. I totally ignored all the notes Caro sent when she got back asking for a hint about the club name and begging me to talk to Beth and Anne Alice for her. Instead, I laughed with them about how badly she wanted to get in.
“Of course you don’t remember. I mean, why should you care that the last conversation I had with a real friend was about Chester, and how he was really sick and I was afraid he was going to die? Your coat’s over on that chair, by the way, and the bus stop is two blocks over.”
I stopped walking across the room. “What do you want me to say, Caro? I’m sorry I wasn’t more help when we discussed your sick dog. I was eleven. I didn’t have a degree in grief counseling.”
“God, you are so stupid. It’s not what you said, Amy. It’s the fact that the last time I talked to someone I could really call a friend was when I was eleven years old.”
“Oh.”
Caro rolled her eyes at me and got up, grabbed my jacket, and shoved it at me. “Here.”
“Look, I’m—I just—” I looked at Caro, who was staring back at me, her mouth a thin angry line. “You never said anything to me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I guess after you and Julia told me off I should have come up to you and said, ‘Hey, Amy, I totally miss hanging out with you.’ Please. You and Julia would have made me cry again and loved it.”
“We wouldn’t have…” I trailed off. We totally would have. “You just—you always seemed happy. You still do, mostly.”
Caro twirled a piece of hair around one finger and smiled a huge, happy smile. Even her eyes shone bright. Her voice, however, was a different story. It was flat. Drained. “I’ve had a lot of practice. See you around, Amy.”
I was glad to get out of there—big-time glad—but as I walked to the bus stop I kept thinking about what she’d said. The last time she felt like she’d really talked to someone was when she talked to me about Chester? The last real friend she thought she had was me?
Was that why she’d come after me this morning? Did she—was today about her trying to be friends with me?
I laughed out loud then because come on, really. And then I tried to picture Caro saying anything she’d said to me to Beth. I couldn’t do it. The most I’d ever heard her say to Beth was, “You look totally amazing!” or “You are so right!”
I walked back to Caro’s house. Her eyes were red when she opened the door. “Oh,” she said, and then, “What?”
“So what happened?”
“What?”
“To Chester.”
“He died.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. He was a nice dog.” God, I sounded like such an idiot. An idiot who should just leave and go back to the bus stop already.
“He was a great dog,” Caro said when I was halfway down her front steps. “Jane took a picture of him the night before he died. She saved it forever, and last year, she did this mosaic thing with it, like a hundred tiny pictures made into one big picture, and won first place in a photography show.”
I turned around. “Jane’s a photographer? Jane?” Caro’s sister was never able to take pictures. When Caro and I were eight, we went to the Millertown Festival with her family and Jane was allowed to take all the pictures. Every single one of them came out blurry, or were of things like the edge of someone’s knee or the top of someone’s head and a whole lot of clouds.
“I know.” Caro laughed. “You should have seen Dad when she told him she was changing her major from business to visual arts. But she’s pretty good. She took an amazing picture of Mom over the summer. You want to see it?”
So I went back inside and saw the photo?
??it was actually pretty good—and Caro and I ended up talking. Not about school or Beth, but other stuff. I found out her mom had a blocked blood vessel in her brain last spring, and had to have emergency surgery.
In the photo Jane took, Caro’s mom was outside, sitting in the sun and smiling at the camera, the top of her head totally wrapped in bandages. Caro told me every time her mom gets a headache she worries something bad will happen.
“Stupid, right?” she said.
“No,” I said, and then I ended up telling her about Pinewood.
I don’t know why I did. I just felt like it, I guess. I didn’t even feel weird. Well, maybe a little. But she wasn’t—she didn’t react like I thought she would. She didn’t say anything stupid, and she didn’t try to be all positive or sympathetic or anything. She just said, “What was it like?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Like how those places are, I guess. Lots of talking and stuff. Oh, and every day I had to ‘participate in active movement.’”
“Like dancing?”
“No, it was just a fancy name for gym class,” I said, and she smiled.
“So gym and talking.”
“And bad food,” I said. “I mean, I like salads and stuff, but you try sixty days with no junk food. It’s not normal.”
“No junk food at all?”
“None.”
“Ugh,” she said, and went into the kitchen, came back with a box of those super expensive chocolate-covered ice cream bars. “I was saving these for when I study for the next physics test, but you totally need one.”
I had one and wow, did I forget how great ice cream is. I never meant to eat it again, because it was something Julia and I had done together, but it just looked so good. And Caro isn’t—she’s not like I remembered. She’s human, for one thing. She’s also kind of fun. I didn’t know anyone besides Julia could be fun.
116 days
J,
Forget what I said before…you know, about what happened. Promise you’ll forget it, okay? Because I’m—things have been weird lately. Like today, for instance.
Today, I ended up spending the day with Corn Syrup (don’t be mad, okay?) and missed school.
I also got home late. (You remember how crappy the crosstown bus is.) I got home so late, in fact, that Mom and Dad actually noticed. I didn’t even get a chance to open the front door because they marched right out as soon as I came up to the house.
It was like something out of a television show, the way they started firing questions at me. “Are you okay?” “Why did you miss school?” “Have you been drinking?”
“Yes.” “I don’t know.” “No.”
“Where were you?” “What were you thinking?”
“Nowhere special. And I just…I don’t know.”
“Nowhere special? And you don’t know what you were thinking when you skipped school? Nothing comes to mind at all?” That was Dad, his voice rising with every word.
“Amy, these aren’t answers.” That was Mom. She was holding Dad’s hand. I could see their fingers laced white tight against each other.
I didn’t want to talk about Corn Syrup. My parents would think it meant Caro and I were going to be friends, and I wasn’t up for explaining how high school really worked. You know how it is…but then you aren’t here.
“Look,” I told them. “I just wandered around. I needed to think.”
My mother started to say something else and then stopped, looking lost and upset. Dad ran a hand through his thinning hair, which is a paler shade of my own. He looked angry and lost too.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” he finally said, his voice cracking, and he and Mom just stood there, looking at me.
It was so…it was amazing, seeing them like that, wild-eyed and upset over me (me!) but at the same time it made me think of you and your mother. It made me think of that night, of standing in the hospital staring at the police officers talking to me. Their faces came at me in pieces. Forehead, nose, chin, voices. Their voices sounded so far away.
Then I heard your mother. All she said was your name but it sounded torn out of her. JuliaJuliaJulia. Julia!
I wanted a drink again. I wanted to forget today, the past few months, who I am now. I didn’t want this, all of us standing around outside acting out scenes from a play none of us knew the lines to.
I told them all of that, J. Every single word. The play bit was the best. Mom actually flinched. I liked that. I liked that they were upset. Now I know why you said things that would make your mom’s voice rise furiously and her face turn red. I know why you did it with a little smile on your face.
You owned her when she was like that. You were all she could see.
I pushed past them like they weren’t there, like all those years where they looked past me to see each other, and went inside. They followed me, and when I glanced back over my shoulder I saw them looking at me. I watched them search my face like it held answers to everything.
Finally, I had what I wanted from them. Finally, they were really looking at me. But what it took to get that…I turned away and went upstairs.
The thing is—and you know this—is that my parents were never cut out to be parents. I mean, they’re not the kind of parents you think of when someone says something like that, people who specialize in dark closets and hard slaps, creating children who know the only way they’d be safe is if they were never born.
My parents just didn’t plan on having kids. I know that’s not that big a deal. So they didn’t want kids. I’m not the first mistake ever born.
And look, I know I’m lucky. I live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. I live with two parents who are still married to each other. Who still love each other. I’ve never been spanked, never been called names or insulted. They’ve never even yelled at me.
And that’s just it. I was never even worth the effort of a raised voice. I know it’s sick, bitching because my parents never yelled at me. Oh poor me, being able to do whatever I wanted. You always said I had it made, that my parents were cool. You liked them. You liked the way they always said, “Oh, hello, Julia,” when you came over and never asked where we were going or when we would be back. You said it was a lot better than your mom, who always asked about your clothes and your hair and your friends, endless questions.
I envied you.
Oh, my parents made room for me. They gave me birthday parties when I was young enough to want them and came to my school plays and sometimes took me with them on vacation. I always got an allowance and great presents on the holidays and my birthday. I got hugs if I asked for them and always a good-night kiss on the cheek. But that was it. I was there. They knew it. The end. They’d filled their hearts up with each other and didn’t need anything else. They didn’t need anyone else.
And when I stopped trying to please them by being as perfect as I could be, when I stopped getting all As and stopped participating in all the worthless after school activities I was in, they said they understood. They said sure, I could move into the attic when I asked. They said bye, have a nice time when I’d yell that you and I were going out. They said hey, it’s okay, not everyone is cut out for advanced classes when my grades dropped to average or just below. They said they knew being a teenager was rough.
They never asked how I was.
TWELVE
I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING I told Julia about my parents before. I was lucky then, back when they left me alone. When Julia was around.
Mom and Dad came upstairs after dinner—which I refused to go down for, not just because I didn’t want to deal with them, but because I also wanted to think about the hanging-out-with-Caro thing—and sat on my bed.
They said (predictably, at the same time), “We’d like to talk to you about Julia.”
I ignored them and stared at my bedspread.
“We’re not leaving,” Dad said, and the way he said it should have told me what was coming. “Your mother and I feel that your behavior today—and not just that, but
all of your behavior lately—has been about what happened to Julia, and we want you to tell us about the night she—”
“You were at the hospital, remember? You saw me come in. You probably saw them bring her…her body in, and I don’t know what more there is to say.”
“We’d like you to talk to us,” Mom said. “Tell us exactly what happened. How it made you feel. We…honey, we want you to know you can always talk to us.”
“I can talk to you,” I said, echoing them, and they both nodded.
Now I could talk and they would listen. Now they wanted to. Now. It made something twist hard inside me because I always wanted them to really talk to me, really listen to me, but if I’d known what would make it happen—God, if I’d only known…
“Please, Amy,” Dad said. “Your mother and I think this would be helpful for all of us. We haven’t pressed you, but we think you need to talk about it. It would help us help you.”
Something bitter rolled through me then. They wanted to help me now, when it was too late, when nothing could be done. I looked at their faces, so eager to be “the parents” when before they just wanted to be “Colin and Grace, who happen to have a daughter.”
“I killed her.”
Silence. Not comfortable silence. Shocked silence. There’s a difference. Shocked silence hangs heavy, presses down on you.
“But you weren’t—you weren’t driving the car,” Mom said, leaning in and putting a hand on my knee. “Julia was driving.”
I moved away. “I told her we should leave, I walked her to the car, I told her to get in. I told her to put on her seat belt. I told her to drive.”
“Amy,” Dad said. “That doesn’t mean—”
“It does,” I said. “It does because I made sure she wanted to leave. I wanted—I wanted us to, and we did, and then she…”
And then I killed Julia.
I told them how I did it. I told them because I could see they didn’t believe me.
I knew, once I told them, that they would.
“We went to a party,” I said. “Julia’s boyfriend, Kevin, was supposed to be there. I went in first, because Julia wanted me to make sure he was there, and I saw him leading some freshman girl upstairs.”