After the composites were finished, Caro and I decided Heather needed to go home, so we walked her to our suite, only a short distance away. I waited until both Heather’s and Caro’s lights clicked off, then snuck back to the frat, hoping I’d been fast enough and Coop was still there.
The foyer was empty, the cleaning supplies gone. I crept upstairs to the second floor, thinking he might be huddled over some end-of-the-night drinks, but found all the doors locked. Just to be thorough, I opened the basement door and jogged down the steps.
Near the bottom, I froze. In the corner of the room stood Frankie and Jack. Jack’s arms were braced against Frankie’s shoulders. He leaned in close. Frankie’s eyes were red.
“You don’t have to come out to anyone,” Jack said, rubbing Frankie’s shoulders. “I’m not trying to pressure you. Obviously, I’m the last person to talk. But you can’t do that. You can’t gay-bash, Frankie, even if it feels like protection. It’s wrong, and it makes me worry you secretly hate yourself.”
“I don’t. I just—” Frankie’s voice was strained, so low I could barely hear it. “What I said is true, isn’t it?” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I can’t have both. You see anyone out in the NFL? No, and I have to get there. That’s what it’s been about my whole life. Training, working my ass off, eating healthy. No drugs. Total discipline. All so I could be what the NFL wants, do what my dad couldn’t. You don’t understand. He’d kill me if I messed up. He’d kill me.”
“Whoa,” Jack said, touching Frankie’s jaw until he opened his eyes. “First of all, I do understand. Have you met my parents? Second, please don’t talk like that. I get what you’re dealing with, but it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom, the end of the world. I need you to have a bigger imagination.”
Frankie eyed him skeptically. “What, like you, me, and my parents, one big, happy family? Going to mass together? Tossing around a football on the beach?”
Jack shrugged, drawing Frankie closer. “Sure, bud. If that’s your version of dreaming big, let’s do it.”
Frankie sighed and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. But after a second, his eyes fell back down to Jack’s face. They were tender. “You know…I think shit like that’s possible when I’m with you.”
I’d never seen a look like that on my friend’s face. My heart swelled with affection.
Jack leaned in, and Frankie closed his eyes. That was when it slapped me in the face, overdue and obvious: I don’t belong here. I turned to leave, but suddenly my foot slipped, and I gasped, clutching the banister to stop myself from tumbling down the stairs.
Jack and Frankie whirled to face me.
Chapter 13
Now
Frankie hurt Heather?
There was a moment of shocked silence, and then everything happened at once. Caro gasped, Courtney shrilled, “You asshole,” Coop shoved Frankie onto a radiator, and Mint let him. Eric walked in a half-moon around Frankie, hands behind his back.
“Explain,” Eric said, with a strange measure of calm.
Courtney pointed at Frankie. “He just confessed. Call the police!”
“I didn’t kill Heather,” Frankie said, hanging his head. “But I…did something terrible. That night.”
“What’d you do, man?” Coop ran both hands through his hair, making it stand up straight. “Tell the truth; set yourself free.”
“If we’re going to talk about this, we should call the cops.” Caro looked at Frankie. “He should have a lawyer.”
Frankie shook his head. “I’ve kept this secret for too long.” He looked up at Eric. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” Eric paced slowly in front of Frankie, watching him.
“The night of the Sweetheart Ball, Heather got really, really drunk. Like, blackout. Courtney told me she needed to go home, so I took her.”
All the heads in the room swung to Courtney.
“Um, no, do not look at me like that. Heather was really upset at Jack. She said she wanted to forget her whole night. I’m not about to deny a girl her therapy.” Courtney tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Besides, how was I supposed to know to worry about Frankie? He was one of you stupid East House Seven.”
“Nice, Courtney,” I said. “Way to take her home yourself like a good friend.”
“Shut up. You weren’t even around. She kept thinking you were going to show at Sweetheart, but you never did.”
I jerked back like she’d hit me, but it was the truth.
“What happened when you took her home?” Eric pressed.
Frankie’s eyes darkened. “I got her to her suite, no problem. But when we got inside, she didn’t want to go to bed. She wanted to talk.” Frankie’s voice cracked. “She was going on and on about how Jack betrayed her. That night, he’d told her he’d been cheating on her, and she was devastated. She always thought she was going to marry him. I really didn’t want to talk about it, especially when she was drunk.”
He looked at Eric, pain in his eyes. “I tried to put her to bed, but she didn’t want to lie down. I finally got her in Jess’s bed, since it was the closest, but we kind of wrestled for a second, and then…she fell and hit her head. I didn’t think it was bad at the time, you have to believe me, but after…after I found out what happened, I kept worrying—what if I gave her a concussion and it kept her from fighting back when the murderer came?”
So that’s why Heather was found in my bed. I’d always wondered, assumed she’d simply been too drunk to tell the difference.
“That’s why you climbed to the top of the bridge?” Eric’s voice was made of steel. “Because Heather hit her head and you felt responsible?”
“No,” Frankie said miserably. “It was the other thing she told me.” He looked up at me from his seat on the radiator, and I knew what was coming. “That night Jack didn’t just confess he was cheating on her. He told her he was bi.”
I caught Caro’s eyes, and she raised a brow. The news about Jack wasn’t a surprise—he’d come out after he’d been cleared by the police, saying he wanted us to know the whole him, no reservations. But the fact that Jack had told Heather the night she died was new information.
“I don’t know why she told me,” Frankie continued. “Other than she was drunk. What Heather didn’t realize was that I already knew. Because I was the one Jack was cheating with.”
A moment of incredulous silence.
He did it. Frankie had actually uttered the words out loud. Years of keeping the secret because I loved them, of covering because it was the right thing to do, bubbled over inside me.
“You and…Jack?” Courtney looked like she’d been presented with the world’s most bewildering math problem. “Together?”
Coop shook his head. “So let me get this straight. You were going to literally jump off a bridge because you were into Jack? I don’t mean to minimize what you were going through or anything, ’cause I definitely remember what your dad was like, but that’s a little Lifetime movie, don’t you think? I mean, Jack was handsome. Who wasn’t attracted to him?”
Frankie shook his head. “It wasn’t that. I mean, yes, I was carrying a lot of shame back then. I would’ve done anything to keep people from finding out. And then Heather, of all people—my friend who I felt so guilty about, because of Jack—wanted to talk about it. Really talk about it. And even though it was about Jack and not me, I couldn’t stand it. I just wanted her to stop talking. I was trying to pull the covers over her, and she was resisting, and then she fell.” He looked at the floor with wet eyes. “I hurt Heather because she made me so uncomfortable, I couldn’t stand to be in the room with her one more minute. That’s what horrified me. It wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be.”
“I kept thinking, over and over, that I’d hurt Heather because I was trying so hard to hide, while Jack had the guts to be himself. I always used to talk about my dad, how he’d hat
e me if he knew, but Jack’s parents were just as bad. And he still did it. I went to the bridge that night because I kept imagining my life, and I couldn’t see a way I would be happy if I couldn’t be myself. But I also couldn’t imagine ever being brave enough to give up on the NFL, on everything I’d worked for. Jack used to say I didn’t have a very big imagination, and he was right.” I could hear the traces of something close to love in Frankie’s voice—still, after all these years—until he cleared his throat. “That was before I knew what Jack did.”
The affection I’d felt listening to Frankie talk about Jack disappeared like smoke in the wind. “Wait… You actually think he killed Heather? Even though you know what kind of person he is?”
Frankie met my eyes. He looked exhausted. “I think he could’ve changed his mind, gotten scared. I can even understand it.”
The words hung in the room until Frankie continued. “Jack had to have done it. Because if he didn’t, I lost him for no reason.”
Mint kicked off the wall and strode toward him.
“All that time,” he said, “you and Jack were together behind my back.”
Frankie watched him anxiously. Mint was his idol. What he said meant everything.
“Have you told your dad?” Mint asked. “Your teammates?”
Frankie shook his head. “Not yet. Michael Sam’s the only NFL player who ever came out before he retired, and look what happened to him. People protested. His career was over in the blink of an eye. I keep picturing that happening to me, and I…can’t bring myself to risk it.”
Mint said nothing, only turned and walked away.
“In case you were wondering, the autopsy showed Heather had three major bruises on her head, five minor.” Eric tapped his foot on the concrete floor, stealing Frankie’s attention. “But none of them caused a concussion.”
Frankie closed his eyes and nodded, looking like he was trying very hard not to weep.
“You heard, obviously, that Heather didn’t put up the kind of fight you’d expect from anyone, let alone my sister. There was no skin under her nails, no blood from her attacker. Combined with the fact that there were dozens of people’s DNA everywhere in that room—including all of yours, and mine—the cops thought forensic evidence was a dead end.”
We’d all heard about the lack of usable DNA. It was one of the things that surfaced after Jack’s charges were dropped, when the whole campus was up in arms over him being let go, with no new suspects to take his place.
“What wasn’t public is that a toxicology report revealed the reason Heather barely fought back,” Eric said. “Her system was flooded with a drug cops couldn’t identify. It would have dulled her senses, slowed her reactions.”
A drug? Caro and I shot each other surprised looks. That didn’t make sense. We were Heather’s roommates. We would’ve known if she had a drug problem.
“The closest thing the cops could compare it to was this drug that was giving them a lot of trouble back then. A street drug called tweak.”
Tweak. I heard the glass shattering, the crunch of footsteps, the deep, terrible scream of pain. The dangerous people—violence in their eyes, darkness pulsing beneath their skin.
I didn’t have to lift my head to know who was staring at me from across the room. Like always, the pull of his gaze was magnetic.
I found him against my will, in time to watch a terrible knowing dawn in his eyes.
“That. Is. It!” Courtney shrieked, taking everyone by surprise. She picked up a discarded beer bottle and threw it against the wall, where it shattered into sharp rain. “I’m not going to stand here one second longer and listen to Heather’s creepy little brother, who used to stare at my breasts when he thought I wasn’t looking, try to frame us for her murder.”
“Court—” Mint started, an amazed look on his face.
She whirled on him. “No! I’m not playing this game. What’s next? Busting out a Ouija board? Taking lie-detector tests? Digging up Heather’s grave? I’m going back to the party, and so are you.” She turned to the rest of us. “You assholes can do whatever you want.”
A slow, satisfied smile crept over Eric’s face. He raised his hands and clapped. “Brava. Truly, a stirring performance.”
Chapter 14
January, sophomore year
Over time, I’d learned there were other girls like me—Kappas who were unhappy being second-best. No girl ever said it out loud, but still, we found each other. Our first opportunity to dethrone Chi Omega came rush, sophomore year. We poured our hearts and souls into it—hours of researching freshman girls on Facebook, buying them alcohol, holding secret rush parties in our dorms, slipping into forbidden conversations in line for frat bathrooms. We did everything we weren’t supposed to do.
I’d also learned that sometimes, the space between what you were and weren’t supposed to do was one of those messy gray areas. Like senior year of high school, when I was neck and neck with Madison Davies for salutatorian. Madison, with her perfect, corkscrew curls and hottest-girl status, was also smart, much to my dismay. The class ranking came down to winter finals. Whatever position we held at the end of fall semester was what we’d report to colleges. What I’d send off to Harvard.
It was the last exam on the last day before winter break. We were in the library, which had been cordoned off for senior tests. Over the course of ninety minutes, the other students had sighed, packed their pencils, and turned in their tests. Madison and I were the only two left, using every last minute. Finally, she stood up, shuffled her pages, and gave me a smile—not a full smirk, but a knowing look, like a smirk in church clothes.
In her cloud of self-satisfaction, she didn’t notice the test page that slipped out of her pile and onto the floor, sliding under the proctor’s desk. Instead of stooping to collect it, she handed her test to the proctor and flounced out the door.
I bubbled my last circle and gathered my papers carefully, rising and walking to the proctor, who reached out to accept my test. I hesitated. She raised an eyebrow.
I glanced down at the corner of Madison’s missing test page, the small triangle of white sticking out from under the desk like a flag of surrender.
Then I smiled and handed the proctor my test.
She wished me a good winter break, settled my papers in her bag, and hummed on her way out. I tracked her silently down the hall until she disappeared.
I became salutatorian.
It was so easy—that’s what I thought when I looked back. It couldn’t have been simpler: spot the paper. Give the proctor that wide, ingratiating smile, like everything was normal. And then do nothing. Stay quiet. So little effort, such maximum effect. Doing nothing was comfortable, like slipping into an old, warm robe.
The other thing I thought when I looked back: how pathetic that I had to fight for second place.
But the competition with Chi O wasn’t for second. It was for first. Best. And, if I was being honest, it was for revenge.
Caro teased me about how intensely I rushed sophomore year. I suspected she was jealous of the time I spent with other girls, the ones who cared as much as I did. Caro was like that—always trying to stay glued at the hip, resenting any time we spent with people outside the East House Seven. I’d noticed she’d do anything—really, anything, even go watch Frankie’s football practice—to keep from being alone. Sometimes, when I stopped to think about it, I felt bad for dating Mint and leaving Caro behind, just like Heather did with Jack.
But other times I needed space. Sophomore rush was one of them.
The holy grail of freshman girls was Amber Van Swann. She was rich, beautiful, perfectly dressed, and dating a senior Phi Delt. The number one recruit on campus. I wanted her so bad I could taste it, and I knew—because I was friends with Heather—that the Chi Os were hungry for her, too. Heather had instituted a no-talking-about-rush rule to keep things friendly, but still.
I knew.
Then the night before Bid Day came—the night we got our list of pledges. And despite how hard we’d tried, Amber Van Swann wasn’t on it. She’d chosen Chi O. Standing in Kappa’s front lawn on Bid Day, my friends and I watched her run to the Chi O porch and get swallowed up by screaming, hugging girls. In the center of the mayhem were Courtney and Heather, wearing matching gold foil crowns and pink boas.
Stop punching down.
I stood there and imagined ripping the crowns from their heads, my hand arcing through the air, seizing the pointed tips, jerking their blond hair out, collateral damage. I shivered and blinked the picture away, turning to my friend Kristin, who hated second place as much as I did.
She looked at me and said, in a voice with zero inflection, “Amber Van Swann made a sex tape.”
I stared, but only for a beat. “Show me.”
That night, three of us sat in Kristin’s dorm room, gathered around her desktop computer—me, Kristin, and Caro, who’d insisted on following me. Kristin pulled up a video, grainy at first, then very, very clear. Amber Van Swann and her Phi Delt boyfriend, going at it. Loudly.
“How did you get this?” Caro asked, once the video ended and she’d uncovered her eyes.
Kristin shrugged. “Amber sent it to her boyfriend, and he sent it to a Phi Delt I hooked up with last weekend. He showed me as a joke, and I asked for it. Simple.”
“That’s terrible,” Caro said.
“It really is,” I agreed. “You have to be so careful what you film nowadays. What are you thinking, Kristin?”
“It’s pretty obvious,” Kristin said. “We send it anonymously to JuicyCampus.”
“What?” Caro sputtered. “Isn’t that illegal?”
“Good question.” I squinted at Kristin. “She’s eighteen, so it’s not child porn, but are there any other laws?”
“In some states. But not North Carolina.”
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