by Kara Thomas
Demarco takes a sip of his coffee. “I’ll cut to the chase. Mrs. Coughlin is trying to put together a memorial ceremony, in the courtyard.”
Mrs. Coughlin, the health teacher. Colleen Coughlin’s mother.
Mr. Demarco doesn’t give any further explanation; he doesn’t need to. Colleen Coughlin was in the passenger seat of Bethany Steiger’s car when she hydroplaned during a storm and drove into a tree. The car was so mangled that supposedly the coroner had trouble figuring out which girl was which. One of the paramedics at the scene vomited.
The first two cheerleaders to be killed that year.
“A memorial.” I take off the ponytail holder on my wrist and wrap it around my fingers, cutting off the circulation in the tips. “Like a religious thing?”
“No, not at all,” Demarco says. “Just a small ceremony in the courtyard. Mrs. Coughlin asked if you’d like to be a part of it.”
At my stricken expression, Demarco picks up his empty cup, taps the base of it against his desk. “Obviously you don’t have to say yes. Mrs. Coughlin did pick out some poems she thinks would be nice for you to read.”
He hands me a stack of paper held together by a butterfly clip. I don’t look at it. “It’s just…,” I mumble. “It would feel weird. I didn’t even know Colleen and Bethany.”
“Oh no, we’d honor all the girls at once. Everyone thought it would be best that way.”
In other words, get the memorial out of the way before homecoming, because my sister’s two best friends died five years ago the night before their homecoming. It wouldn’t be very nice to remind the crowd about the horrific way Juliana Ruiz and Susan Berry were killed when everyone just wants to watch some football. “Wow. Okay. Thanks. I actually think I have a quiz next period.”
“Of course. I’ll write you a pass.”
While Demarco fishes around in his drawer for his stack of passes, I let my eyes wander. There’s a Sunnybrook Warriors pennant over his desk, right next to a New York Giants calendar. Right above a framed photo of the Sunnybrook football team from six years ago, posing with the state championship trophy. We haven’t won it since.
* * *
—
If you look at pictures of my family, you might wonder whether my sister was adopted. Mom, Petey, and I all have shocks of brown-black hair and blue eyes. Jennifer was blond, like our real father, and had his green eyes.
I remember a time when she liked me. There’s proof: photographs of us trick-or-treating dressed as sister Disney princesses and videos of us putting on plays on the back patio, starring ourselves and Mango, our Jack Russell/rat terrier mix.
But we were four years apart, and once Jen started middle school, it seemed like my very existence offended her.
“That’s just how it is with sisters,” Mom would tell me when I was still small enough to climb onto her lap, face stiff with tears after a fight with Jen. Feel her fingers grazing over my ear as she played with my hair. “Aunt Ellen and I didn’t become friends until we were in college.”
Before homecoming her sophomore year, I gave Jen strep throat. It wound up saving her life. For a little while, at least.
Susan’s parents were in Vermont for her cousin’s wedding the night before the game, and Juliana and Jen were going to stay at her house with her. Susan refused to miss homecoming, even for the wedding, and besides, someone needed to be at home with Beethoven, the Berrys’ beloved Saint Bernard.
Mr. Ruiz was going to pick them up in the morning so they could grab breakfast at the diner before the homecoming game. It was a tradition Juliana had with her family—pancakes before she performed.
It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls spending the night by themselves. Sunnybrook was one of the safest towns in the country, and on our street, everyone looked out for each other. But when Juliana’s father arrived to pick the girls up the next morning, both of them were dead.
They’d been strangled. Juliana’s hands were sliced open, and one still held a shard from the broken mirror that hung in the foyer. She had fought like hell.
Susan hadn’t seen it coming. She was on her back at the top of the stairs, staring at the ceiling. Across the hall, the shower was still on. She must have run out when she heard Juliana’s screams.
If my sister hadn’t been too sick to sleep over at Susan Berry’s house that night, Susan’s deranged neighbor would have murdered Jen too.
Lucky, everyone called her. Blessed.
In the end, though, it didn’t make a difference.
Some people say a curse fell over our town five years ago. What else could explain the tragic deaths of five girls, in three separate incidents, in less than two months?
Some people think Jen’s death was the most tragic of all.
Jen was in the top three in her class, beloved by everyone who was lucky enough to know her. She wanted to spend the summer before her junior year in South America, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. She was planning on going to veterinary school, because as much as she loved helping people, her heart belonged to animals—especially the horses she used to ride as a child.
Jen wouldn’t have done it. That’s what they don’t understand. My sister, with her pages-long to-do list of everything she wanted to do in life, never would have killed herself. Maybe it makes sense to them that she would do it, once they put themselves in Jen’s shoes. Would living every day having to imagine what Jack Canning would have done to her if she’d been at that house be much of a life at all? Was life even worth living if all of her friends were dead?
I don’t know if we’re cursed. All I know is that my sister wouldn’t have killed herself. And if she did, why didn’t she leave a note explaining why?
I need to make another stop at the bathroom, so I head for the faculty ones by the main office, because everyone knows teachers aren’t disgusting pigs like the rest of us. You have to ask the secretary for a key, but Mrs. Barnes is married to one of the officers who works with Tom. She lets me in all the time.
There’s someone in the women’s room, so I lean against the wall opposite the front doors while I wait, watching the stragglers file into the building. When you show up late for school, you have to sign in with the security guard sitting at the desk by the door.
A brown-haired guy is bent over, scrawling something in the security guard’s notebook, laughing at something he’s saying. The guy isn’t a student; he’s too tall, too not-high-school-looking…
What the hell is he doing here?
A slick of sweat breaks out on my palms. I whip around to face the bathroom door, away from him, but it’s too late. A quick glance over my shoulder and I know he saw me.
I want to kick down the faculty bathroom door, yell for whoever is taking her time in there to let me in. Instead, I swivel and take off down the hall, in the opposite direction he’s heading, even though I’m moving away from the science wing and my chemistry teacher Mr. Franken’s room.
I speed-walk, biting the inside of my lip to distract from the stabbing in my abdomen. Straight down the hall, where there’s a pair of student bathrooms. Don’t stop—
“Monica! Wait up.”
It’s not Brandon’s voice. Of course it’s not Brandon calling out to me—why would he act like he knows me here?
I turn to face a guy wearing a Sunnybrook cross-country jersey. Jimmy Varney, one of Matt’s best friends. He smiles and nods at me. “Hey. How was your summer?”
“Good,” I murmur, afraid I’ll puke in his face if I open my mouth any wider. Jimmy’s eyes refocus on something—someone—over my shoulder. He raises a hand. “Coach! Yo!”
Jimmy rests a hand on my arm. “I’ll catch up with you later?”
I nod, and Jimmy darts off. Brandon is trapped as Jimmy descends on him. I pick up my pace and don’t stop until I hit the bathroom, where I shut my
self in the first stall.
Brandon is the new cross-country coach.
I don’t even make it to my knees before I vomit into the toilet.
* * *
—
None of this would have happened if it weren’t for that white dress.
I got the job at New Haven Country Club in June. When I told my mom I needed a ride for my first day of work, she blinked at me and said, “God, Monica, if you wanted money, you could have asked me.”
But it wasn’t about making money, not really. I’d wanted something more than summer days spent in Rachel’s backyard, practicing straddles and aerials on her trampoline. I wanted a way out of evenings at the lake, Matt’s beer breath in my ear and hand on my thigh.
The members of the New Haven Country Club have the type of money that they can shell out eighty bucks for someone to watch their kids while they play golf and sit in the spa sauna all day. My title was Kiddie Camp Counselor, but all I had to do was accompany the kids to the pool and the tennis courts and make sure they didn’t die in the process.
On my first day, I saw Brandon hanging out at the lifeguard hut, swinging his lanyard around his wrist.
I knew where I’d seen him before: at Matt’s cross-country championships in New Jersey in the fall. Matt’s family had let me ride in the car with them so I could watch him compete. Laura, Matt’s older sister, noticed Brandon first.
“Damn,” she muttered, nudging me until I spotted him at the bottom of the bleachers. I had to look away, afraid Matt might catch me staring at the other team’s hot coach.
By the end of my first day of work, I had a name for him: Brandon.
By the end of June, Matt and I had broken up. We both knew it was coming; he was leaving for college in Binghamton at the end of August. But the thought of not seeing him waiting at my locker on the first day of school sucked so much, I asked for extra shifts at the country club just so I wouldn’t sit around the house thinking about it.
Rachel and Alexa thought the perfect place to debut Single Monica was at Jimmy Varney’s Fourth of July party, since Matt wouldn’t be there; he and his family were at their lake house upstate for the weekend. Rachel had just turned seventeen and passed her road test, so she and Alexa planned to pick me up when my shift at the country club finished at six.
That morning, when I packed the white dress to change into after work, I thought of Brandon.
He was skimming the surface of the pool with a net when I got out of the employee bathroom. Brandon looked up at me, his lips parting. His face went pink and my skin went warm under the dress.
I thought about the look on his face throughout the entire party that night.
That look made me feel like I could do anything. So I started to use my breaks to talk to him. At lunch, I sat in the empty chair next to the lifeguard stand, eating my mother’s chicken salad while Brandon told me about what I’d missed on my days off. A six-year-old girl who screamed and refused to get in the water until Brandon fished out a dead beetle from the bottom of the pool.
He never asked how old I was and I never asked how old he was. We both understood it would ruin whatever was going on.
A week later, when six o’clock came around and it was time to close up, I texted my mom that I had a ride home. I offered to stay late and help Brandon clean the pool. After, we sat on the edge, thighs almost touching, watching the waitstaff set up for a wedding inside the country club.
“That was cool of you to help,” he said. “I’m sure you’d rather be hanging out with your boyfriend.”
He nudged my knee with his, and I kept my head tilted down so he couldn’t see the flush in my cheeks. “Who said I had a boyfriend?”
“Sorry,” he laughed. “I’m sure you’d rather be hanging out with the guy you wore that white dress for the other night.”
I sliced my foot through the surface of the water. I didn’t say anything. Didn’t want to give it away that he was the guy I wore the dress for.
But he must have figured it out, because he asked if I wanted a ride home. He stood and extended a hand, helped me to my feet.
When he started up his Jeep, classic rock blasted from the speakers. Something about a blue-eyed boy and a brown-eyed girl. We were the opposite.
He really was going to take me home. I’m the one who told him where to turn, and when we reached my street, I told him to keep going and he did. He kept driving until we reached Osprey’s Bluff.
“Monica.” He swallowed, shut his eyes. I undid my belt and climbed into his lap, facing him. I held his hands on my cheeks for a little while, studying his face. He stared back at me in a way Matt had never looked at me, stroking his thumb along my jaw.
Brandon said my name again. “This is a bad idea.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone.”
He didn’t push me away when I kissed him. He wanted it, I could feel how badly he wanted it, and when he asked, “Are you sure? Are you really sure?” I nodded. He leaned over and opened his glove compartment, tracing stubbly kisses around my neck the whole time.
It happened two more times before the beginning of the last week in August, when my mom took me for my annual gynecologist visit and the doctor asked when my last period was, and I said I didn’t know because I honestly didn’t remember, and she frowned and made me pee in a cup.
I called in sick for what was supposed to be my last shift at the country club, three days before school started. Brandon didn’t text me to see what had happened—why I never said goodbye.
Friday, I swallowed the first pill in Dr. Bob’s office. I spent Saturday curled up on my side on my bed, sobbing into my pillow and praying I wouldn’t throw up from the second pill, because then it wouldn’t work.
In the morning, I had a text from Brandon, asking if we could talk. I’m so stupid, I thought maybe he wanted to see me again.
But he was trying to warn me that he’d gotten a job at my goddamn high school.
* * *
—
Mom doesn’t speak to me as she collects me from the nurse’s office, signs us out, and leads me into the parking lot without uttering a single word.
The rain has turned to a light mist. I tilt my head back and let it cool my face as Mom unlocks the car.
I keep my eyes on my lap as I buckle my seat belt. “I’m sorry. I threw up.”
I watch her from the corner of my eye, searching for any indication she might ask me if there’s something else going on. She starts the car and flicks on the wipers. “You can’t keep taking painkillers on an empty stomach.”
The truck in front of us stops short. Mom slams on the brakes and all I can think is pain. I’m sweating, ears ringing. Her voice breaks through—she’s saying my name over and over. Shaking me.
I blink away the black spots clouding my vision. We’re pulled over, and my mother is staring at me. “Did you just pass out?”
“I don’t know.” Pressure builds behind my eyes. “Mom. I just want this to stop.”
“I know.” Her hand lingers on my shoulder. Her touch is light. I imagine her cool fingers brushing my hair behind my ear like she did when I was little, before my sister died and my mom stopped touching me. As if I’d become breakable.
She withdraws her hand and doesn’t say anything else until we get home.
* * *
—
Mom is the manager of a playhouse—it’s too small to be called a theater—in town. She has to pick up booster forms for the upcoming production of The Importance of Being Earnest, but she drops me off at home first and makes me chug Gatorade to get my blood sugar back up.
From my bedroom, I hear her on the phone with Dr. Robert Smith. I wonder if his name is actually Bob Smith, or if he changed it to something so generic no one could find him and pipe bomb his house.
“Naproxen can make people si
ck to their stomach. He called you in some nausea medication,” my mother says when she sticks her head in my doorway. “It should be ready by the time I leave the playhouse—I’ll pick it up on my way home.”
As she’s shutting my door, I call, “Mom?”
“Yes, Monica?”
My heart is still racing from the sight of Brandon this morning. The adrenaline is the only explanation for the fact that I have the urge to tell my mother the real reason I asked her to pick me up.
My mom and I don’t exactly have an open relationship; she had to find out that Matt and I broke up by running into his sister at Starbucks. Even if I did tell her things, it would be totally demented to admit that I had a summer fling with the new cross-country coach.
I’m not seventeen. Brandon is in his twenties. Tom is a cop. I tamp down the thought as quickly as it comes to me.
“Thanks,” I say.
“You don’t need to thank me.”
She studies me for a moment before shutting my door. It almost hurts, how taken aback she looks at my acting the slightest bit grateful. It makes me wonder why anyone would ever want children. I can’t think of a more thankless job.
When I hear the front door slam downstairs, I sit up in bed. Flinch at the fresh swell of pain in my lower body. I haven’t had a painkiller since before I went to Demarco’s office this morning.
Every second my mom is gone feels like an eternity. When I can’t bear it any longer, I drag myself out of bed and head downstairs.
The naproxen bottle isn’t on the kitchen island where my mother left it this morning. I don’t even know half the places in this house that she could have hidden it.
I pause outside the downstairs bathroom, eyeing the door to Tom’s office. Tom’s back has been messed up since his car accident last year; some dumbass kid stole an ATV and led Tom and his partner, Mike, on a chase through Sunnybrook. The kid blew through a stop sign and hit a BMW, which then hit Tom and Mike.