“You came to cheer me on,” Frankie said, with unexpected emotion. He looked at us, searching our faces, lingering on Mint’s. “This is even better than I pictured. Come up front with me.” He tugged Mint with him; the rest of us followed, looking at each other uncertainly.
At the front of the float, Frankie turned to me. “Just like freshman year, huh?”
Jack banished. Heather dead. And your friends ambushing you to ask if you killed her. Yes, Frankie, exactly the same.
I cleared my throat. So many people in the crowd were waving to him, shouting his name. One man even wore his Saints jersey.
“They love you,” I said. “You really are a star.”
Was Frankie still using? What would all these people think if they knew?
“Let’s hope so,” Frankie said. “Because I stayed up all night thinking. And I have a plan.”
“We’re here to ask you something,” Eric cut in, voice rising to be heard over the cheering. “About Heather.”
Frankie looked around at us, the first hints of understanding—and betrayal—dawning on his face. “Wait. You’re here to interrogate me?”
“You knew Heather was planning to out Jack during Parents’ Weekend,” Coop said. “And your parents would likely hear the news right beside them. Your dad would hear. Why didn’t you tell us that part?”
“It’s a pretty big motivation to kill Heather,” Mint said, pulling no punches. “Killing her would keep her from telling your dad about Jack, maybe making him suspicious, making him ask you questions.”
Frankie’s mouth dropped open. All around us, people kept shouting his name.
“I can’t believe you guys. I didn’t tell you about Heather’s plan to out Jack because I didn’t want to say something so ugly about her.” Frankie scrubbed his face with his hands and paused. “She wouldn’t have gone through with it.”
“How do you know?” Caro leaned against the rail, dark hair fluttering in the wind.
“Because she regretted even telling me Jack came out to her. She cried and said she was too drunk, and wasn’t supposed to say anything, especially not to me, because she thought I’d hate him. Try to kick him out of Phi Delt. She remembered what I’d said about Danny Grier the night guys were drawing on his picture in the frat house. She thought I was a homophobe. She died thinking I was a homophobe.”
I thought of how Caro had described Heather reaming out Frankie for dragging Jack into his steroid cover-up. “She was trying to protect Jack,” I said. “Like always.”
Frankie nodded. “That’s why I know she wouldn’t have told his parents. I know it in my bones. What she said to Courtney—she was just hurting and letting off steam.”
Suddenly, I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to know, even though Caro was going to kill me.
“Did you stop taking steroids? Senior year of college, when Heather confronted you and Jack, did you come clean like she asked, or did you have Jack cover for you? Are you still using them?”
Caro gasped, but everyone else grew deadly quiet.
“Are you suggesting Heather had more dirt on Frankie?” Eric asked, eyes narrowing to slivers. “Career-ending dirt?”
Frankie stared at me, too surprised to do anything but gape. “Heather told you?”
I could feel Caro’s eyes burning my face. “It’s not important. Answer the question.”
“There’s no way Frankie—” Mint glanced at the crowd and the other football players waving near the back of the float. It was too loud for anyone to hear us, but still, he lowered his voice. “Cheated.”
To my surprise, Frankie shook his head. “It’s true. I was an idiot. I messed around with that stuff back then. Jack helped me pass the drug tests, and the last time, senior year, Heather caught us. She threatened to tell my coach. Jack and I did it anyway, and I kept expecting the sky to fall. But nothing. I guess Heather changed her mind.” He looked at Eric. “So I had no reason to be pissed at her. And I stopped using, anyway. She scared the hell out of me, and that was what it took.”
Why hadn’t Heather told Frankie’s coach, like she’d sworn to? I tried to find Caro’s eyes, but she wouldn’t look at me. A puzzle piece was missing.
“So all that talent,” Mint said, “that was the drugs, not you? Not the pride of Oahu?”
“I swear, my NFL career has been all me,” Frankie said.
“No one’s perfect,” Coop said. “People in glass houses, right?”
“No, Mint’s right.” Frankie looked across the sea of people. “I’m tired of pretending to be someone I’m not. I’ve done so many things because I didn’t think who I am was good enough. It’s time to stop being afraid. I’m going to have a bigger imagination.”
Before anyone could say anything, or ask any more questions, Frankie grabbed the microphone from the stand in the corner and closed his eyes—briefly, only for a second—then opened them and shouted into the mic with a giant smile: “Happy Homecoming, Duquette!”
His voice boomed through campus like the voice of God. The crowd roared back. I clutched the railing.
“My name is Frankie Kekoa, class of ’09. For those who don’t know, I led the Crimson football team to four division championships while I was here.”
Everyone shook their pom-poms and whooped.
“And then I was drafted by the Saints.”
The stomping and shouting grew louder.
“And you won a Super Bowl!” someone screamed, followed by a ripple of laughter.
“And I won a Super Bowl,” Frankie agreed, laughing. “Maybe two. Who knows? This year’s looking pretty good.”
The crowd ate it up. Frankie was a natural; he always had been. A huge personality. So much like Heather.
“But let me tell you some things you don’t know about me.”
My heart raced. I resisted the urge to throw my arms around Frankie, shield him.
“In addition to being the highest-scoring player to ever grace Crimson stadium, and the only Duquette alum to play in the NFL, I, Frankie Kekoa, love the color blue.”
Everyone laughed at the feint.
“I love a good steak,” Frankie continued. “I think Easter is the most underrated holiday. And—I am a proud gay man. So now you know a few things about me.”
It was amazing to watch hundreds of people in the throes of cheering suddenly freeze.
Oh god. Somehow, Frankie had found a way to get even more naked atop a Homecoming float. He stood stalwart, his shoulders held high, gazing defiantly at the crowd.
I shot Coop a desperate look over Caro’s head. We have to do something.
Coop nodded, a wild look in his eyes. “Hey, I’m going to take off all my clothes and streak across campus. Right now.”
“What?” Caro hissed.
“Fast,” I whispered.
But a strange thunder had started in the distance. It took a second, but then I realized: it was cheering. Shouting, coming from all around us, all four directions, building and building like a tidal wave: Frankie. Frankie. Frankie. The people closest to us on the sidewalks almost toppled the barriers, shaking their pom-poms. Someone screamed, “We love you, Frankie!”
The parade had turned into mayhem.
We were rushed by the members of the Duquette football team as they poured in from the back of the float, surrounding Frankie, slapping his arms and squeezing him until they lifted him, despite his protests, high in the air. Frankie Kekoa, dressed like the king of Duquette, laughed and bounced on their shoulders.
He’d done it. Frankie, always so careful, so anxious, had reimagined what his life could look like. I tried to picture what Jack would say if he could see Frankie now.
In the midst of the chaos, one hand clapped to his ear against the noise, Eric pointed to the now-empty back of the float. I didn’t want to go, wanted to stay here and soak up Frankie’s tri
umph, but the look on Eric’s face brooked no argument. The rest of us followed, gathering around him in a tight circle, pressed shoulder to shoulder.
“I don’t think Frankie did it,” Caro yelled. “I believe him.”
“Me too,” I said, casting an eye at the crowd, which was still going crazy, not paying the slightest attention to us. What Frankie told us hadn’t exactly cleared him. He could be lying, after all; maybe Heather had still planned on telling his coach and he’d done it to stop her. But I felt certain of Frankie’s innocence. Another one of my instincts.
“Now what?” Coop asked. “Where do we go from here?”
“I told you the Frankie theory didn’t match all the evidence,” Eric said. “It’s time to look at everything. Connect all the dots.”
He slipped a hand inside his jacket and pulled out three pieces of white construction paper, enclosed in sheet protectors. Mounted on each was a carefully reconstructed photograph. Three different pictures of the East House Seven. One from freshman year, outside East House. The second from sophomore-year spring break, our trip to Myrtle Beach, all of us sunburned and in bathing suits.
The last was from the final day of junior year. Coop and I stood close together in the back; I could still remember how he’d slipped his hand inside of mine at the last minute, right before the shot. How I’d jerked in surprise, but the next moment, I’d slipped on my mask. The camera had caught that instant—that millisecond—when you could see the conflicting emotions plain as day on my face.
Each photo had been torn into jagged scraps, then pieced back together, like a puzzle. In each, Heather’s head was violently scratched out in pen, so hard the strokes had cut into the photograph—manic swirling circles, knifelike X’s. In the last picture, the pen strokes had been so intense that half of Heather’s face was missing, a gaping maw where her smile should have been.
The world narrowed to those hateful marks, stabbed in ink. The noise of the crowd retreated, the float’s jerky movements falling away. My stomach plummeted. It couldn’t be.
Eric held up the photos, turning so we could all get a look. “I started investigating Heather’s case two days after you graduated. I wasn’t very good at it back then, but I was trying.”
I remembered Eric, stiff and alone, walking across the graduation stage to accept Heather’s diploma, the sound of his shoes scuffing the wood the only noise against a suddenly silent crowd.
“I sat in her room at home and forced myself to unpack her boxes, because my parents couldn’t bring themselves to do it. I knew if I didn’t, she would just sit there, alone and untouched. I remember that it felt like all I had of her was in those boxes—like she was in there, somehow, and needed me to take care of her. So I took them apart. There was a strange mix of stuff. The police had dumped things quickly, after they’d finished searching her room.”
I remembered that too, the dark-clad men rifling through my things.
“I found these strange little scraps of photographs tucked into Heather’s papers from her desk. It took me an hour to find all the pieces. But when I put the first together, lo and behold—” He tapped one of the pictures, right where Heather’s face was slashed by black X-marks. “New evidence. Clues the police missed. That’s the exact moment I knew they’d gotten it wrong, and it was going to be up to me to find my sister’s killer.”
The black hole inside me was spinning, memories spilling out, faster than I could push them down. I’d told myself I would look for Heather’s killer, but I hadn’t expected the path would lead to this.
Eric scanned the circle. “I’ve waited ten years, imagined all the possibilities. I know it’s one of you. So confess.”
“No one here is that much of a freak,” Courtney said, shaking her head. “Those pictures are straight-up stalker material. Sociopath material.”
From across the circle, I felt Coop’s eyes burning into my face. He wanted me to look up, reassure him, tell him unequivocally with my eyes that there was no way I was responsible, despite what he’d said all those years ago. I kept my gaze locked on my feet and heard his sharp intake of breath.
It was enough. The black hole burst, and the memories cracked open.
Chapter 26
December, senior year
Memories are powerful things.
But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be.
It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a living, breathing story made up of the moments in time you cherish, all strung together, and those you hide. The moments that seem lost.
Until the day they’re not.
The day before Christmas, senior year, the morning my father overdosed, I woke from a terrible dream that I was trapped, held with a gun to my head. The gun kept going off, over and over, and the last thing I saw each time was a pair of eyes so dark the pupils drowned in them. When I jerked awake, heart hammering, I lost the thread of the dream, but gained a memory. It rushed back, all at once: I was eight years old, a dreamer. A naive kid with her head in the clouds. More than anything, I loved to write and draw stories. And I loved my parents—worshipped them. My angelic mother, always there when I needed her. My handsome father, an important man, someone everyone looked at with a shining admiration.
They said he was better than the steel company where he worked, a temporary job to make ends meet. He was a Harvard man with promise, after all, and eventually he’d find his way to where he belonged. Even his friends whispered it, even my mom—he’d go to Washington like he’d planned, work among the important dealmakers, use the economics degree he’d worked hard for. It was his destiny. He was so smart, so valuable. Any day now, he’d do it. Any day.
The thing about my father was—he was getting sick. At eight years old, I noticed it, even when no one else did, even as they kept whispering about where he’d go (up, up, up) and when (any day now). He’d started spending hours alone, turning the lights off in the living room and staring at the ceiling, arms hanging off the sides of the recliner like deadweight. Sometimes he nodded off, but a lot of nights, he just stared and stared at nothing.
Finally came the day when everyone else noticed. My dad arrived home first, red-faced, beelining to his bedroom and slamming the door. My mother followed minutes later, eyes bloodshot, held by her best friend—back when she had a friend, the wife of a man my father worked with. No one said anything to me, as if I didn’t exist. So when my mom went into the kitchen, I hovered at the door like a ghost, listening.
I couldn’t understand what they were saying—He betrayed me, from my mother. Threw himself at the boss, no one can believe it, from my mother’s best friend. Told her he was better than this, that he belonged at the top, with her. Everyone’s talking about it. I didn’t know what it all meant, but I knew my mother was crying, and it had something to do with my dad. Suddenly, I realized what it had to be: they’d discovered his sickness.
I knew what to do. I’d been thinking about it for a while. Whenever my mother was sick, I drew her pictures and told her a story, and it always made her feel better. I went to my room and took out my pencils—precious things I’d gotten for my birthday, the kind real artists used—and drew for an hour until I had the perfect thing. I gathered my drawings and slipped into my parents’ room.
My dad lay slumped on the bed in the dark, an arm hanging limp. I climbed up and perched next to him, sitting close to his face so he could see better. Then I took a deep breath and shook his shoulder.
He woke with a gasp. Im
mediately, my stomach clenched, instincts whispering, bad idea. His eyes were cloudy as he struggled to focus, his dark hair sweaty, breath shallow, rapid, like he’d just run a race. For a second, the face that stared back at me was a stranger’s.
“Dad?”
His voice was garbled. “Who are you?”
My heart squeezed painfully. “Jessica,” I whispered.
His gaze listed to his nightstand. He extended a clumsy hand, groping for an orange bottle just out of reach. It fell to the floor, top popping off, white pills scattering.
“Goddammit.”
“I’ll clean it, I promise.” I held up the drawings. “I drew you a story.” I peered around the paper. “Once upon a time, there was a king, see—” I pointed to the picture. “He had a beautiful wife who was the queen and a daughter who was the princess.” I pointed out the drawings of my mom and me, which I was proud of, as I’d done very good noses. “One day”—I switched to the next piece of paper—“an evil witch cast a spell on the king, and he fell into a deep sleep. It was up to the princess to break the curse. She—”
“Get off.” My dad’s voice grew sharper. “I need to rest.”
I moved closer to him, lifting the drawings. “Dad, see? It’s you and me, and Mom, in the story. I made us into kings and queens. Your wife and daughter—”
“I don’t have a wife or daughter.” He rose abruptly and I lost my balance, tipping off the bed to land, sharp, on my knees and elbows. My father stumbled from the bed and dropped beside me, sweeping the spilled pills into a pile with shaking hands.
My eyes filled with hot tears, knees and elbows burning. But I didn’t let myself cry. I watched him, his trembling fingers.
“I’m young,” my dad said out of nowhere. “I have my whole life ahead of me. I’m going to get out of this shithole town and go to DC. Use my damn degree and stop wasting my potential.”
Hunched over in the darkness, arms spread over the floor, my dad looked nothing like the king I’d drawn. I was frozen and afraid; I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. For time to race backward and deposit me, safe, back in my room.
In My Dreams I Hold a Knife Page 18