by Kara Thomas
She’s been the coach for four years now, taking the team all the way to nationals every February. Before she arrived, the dance team was all glorified ass shaking to the sorts of rap songs that suburban white girls have no business dancing to. Anyone with talent was a cheerleader, until the girls died and their coach quit and Principal Heinz thought it was way too painful to keep the squad together.
Coach ignores the Kelseys and turns to the rest of us, who are chatting in our groups. Ginny Cordero is off in the sidelines, eyes on her water bottle.
“Hate to interrupt your riveting conversations,” Coach says. “But your new uniforms are here.”
Some squeals of delight as everyone gathers around the box Coach drops at her feet. Alexa picks up a package labeled SMALL. She looks at her chest and sighs, exchanging the uniform for a medium. We each grab our proper sizes and head off to the locker room.
Last year’s uniforms had V-necks, and apparently they were too scandalous, because now we have sleeveless triangle tops that cover everything but our arms and shoulders.
Coach shouts into the locker room, asking what’s taking us so long, and we trickle out, tugging at the waistbands of our pants, smoothing the spandex over our butts. The uniforms, slick as a seal’s skin, show every lump, every roll, and no one wants to be forced to try on the next size up.
At the end of the hall, there’s a series of smacks and squeaks of rubber on linoleum. A pack of cross-country guys is running toward us; they can’t run outside in the thunderstorm, so Brandon must be making them do laps inside the building.
My stomach twists. I angle myself behind Rach as the pack of guys flies by. Kelsey G preens, stretching her arms over her head. Some of the seniors whistle; Joe Gabriel slaps one of them upside the head.
“That’s my sister, dumbass.”
“Keep moving. No gawking at the ladies.” Brandon. He’s trailing behind the guys, a small smile of amusement on his face.
“Hi,” Alexa shouts, and I want to strangle her.
Brandon doesn’t look up from the stopwatch in his hand. “Hi, girls. Better not keep your coach waiting.”
When he’s out of earshot, Alexa lifts her ponytail off the back of her neck. “He is so hot.”
“He’s got a girlfriend,” Kelsey B says, bored with us all.
My shoes stick to the floor. I lurch forward.
Alexa eyes Kelsey. “How would you know?”
“I saw him at the mall,” Kelsey G says. “He and some girl were looking at coffeemakers in Macy’s.”
I force out a single word: “When?”
“This weekend.” Kelsey shrugs. “Kels was with me.”
We all look at Kelsey B, who nods. It’s true.
This weekend. While I was under the covers, heating pad smashed into my abdomen, pillow over my mouth so Tom and Petey wouldn’t hear me crying, Brandon was playing house with his girlfriend.
Girlfriend. Brandon has a girlfriend.
After practice, I tell Rachel I have to get something from my locker and that I’ll meet her and Alexa by the car. Once the halls have emptied of the after-school athletes, I pause outside Brandon’s office door. Inhale. Rap on the doorframe.
His eyes go wide when he sees me. “Hey.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Okay. Come in.” Brandon steps aside. He motions to close the door but promptly drops his hand to his side, realizing what a bad idea that would be.
I shoot a glance into the hallway. No one’s there. I whisper anyway. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Brandon’s lips part. He clamps his mouth shut.
“Okay,” I say. “Great. Good to know.”
“Monica, wait,” he says, even though I haven’t shown any intentions of leaving. “She and I weren’t together over the summer. I swear.”
She. The word lands like a kick in the gut. She confirms that she exists. A girlfriend. Brandon has a girlfriend.
“I’m sorry I never asked you why you stopped texting me,” he says softly. “She moved back from Boston a couple weeks ago. We broke up when she took a job there a year ago. It just kind of happened.”
“It’s fine. It was done. Whatever we were doing.” Pressure builds behind my eyes. “I’m going to go now.”
He says my name, but I don’t turn around. Two hard blinks and a look at the light overhead in the hall. Foolproof tear quelling.
Ginny Cordero is sitting cross-legged on the ground, her back against her locker. She looks up from her copy of The Grapes of Wrath as Brandon steps out of his office.
My stomach goes hollow. Ginny looks from Brandon, to me, then back down to her book. Cheeks pink. Brandon steps back into his office and closes the door, but it doesn’t matter; it’s too late. She knows I was in there, alone with him.
“I missed the bus,” she blurts. “I’m waiting for my mom to come get me.”
I don’t say anything. I just haul ass out of there, too ashamed to look at her for some reason.
* * *
—
The locked drawer in Tom’s desk has been haunting my thoughts.
My brother has soccer on Wednesday evenings, so the house is empty when Rachel drops me off after practice.
I close and lock the front door behind me. Mango runs circles around my feet. I sidestep him and make my way into the kitchen. He gets on his hind legs and scratches my calves until I relent and dig a Milk-Bone out of the pantry for him.
Mango loved Jen more than he loves any of us. He slept in her bed every night, and every afternoon, he would sit on the back of the couch, looking out the bay window, waiting for her to get home from cheer practice.
While the dog spreads out on the kitchen floor and crunches his treat, I eye the dark hallway leading to Tom’s office.
Petey’s practice started at five, so he and my mom won’t be home for at least another hour, and Tom’s shift ends at seven. I head up to my room and peel off my sweaty dance tights, replacing them with cotton pajama bottoms.
Back downstairs, Mango is scratching at the back door. I let him into the yard, leaving the door open so he can come back in when he’s done, and pad down the hall to Tom’s office.
Like always, his door isn’t locked. I push it open and head straight for the desk. I pull on the second drawer again before revisiting the top drawer. No key. The pullout tray under Tom’s keyboard is empty, save for a pen and a few stray rubber bands and paper clips.
I’ve seen Alexa pick the lock on her parents’ liquor cabinet with fewer tools. I grab a paper clip and bend it into a hook shape. Bite my lip and feed the paper clip into the lock.
I can feel where the bolt meets the desk. I just need to wedge something between them. The house phone rings; I ignore it and wipe away the sweat forming at my hairline. Somewhere around my hundredth attempt, Mango wanders into the office and scratches my knee, asking to come onto my lap. I nudge him away. “No. Bad dog.”
Another paper clip. I untwist the second paper clip so it’s straight as a needle. While that’s wedged between the bolt and the lock, I stick the hooked clip in and twist, nearly jumping out of Tom’s chair when the lock clicks.
Inside the drawer looks innocent enough. There are several file folders; I thumb through them—pages of account information for the power company, the mortgage on the house.
I replace the folders; something at the back of the drawer glints, catching my eye. The screen of a cell phone.
A foul taste comes into my mouth. I’ve seen the movies about cheaters. I know what a second phone means.
It’s an older model—the kind I used to have a few years ago. Smaller than the version my whole family owns now. I pick it up and turn it over.
Juliana’s, Susan’s, and my sister’s faces smile up at me.
My fingers go numb. Juliana had this case made as a Christm
as gift for my sister; the photo was taken at their first football game. The girls are huddled together, arms draped over each other’s shoulders. Hair partless, slicked back and shiny, blue ribbons tied around their ponytails.
I hold down the power button, but nothing happens. Of course it’s not charged—my sister has been dead for almost five years.
So why the hell does Tom have her cell phone?
In the hall, Mango is going berserk. Barking, nails sliding on the hardwood floor. I shut the drawer at the same moment a car door slams in the driveway.
My foot snags on the carpet as I stand up. The drawer. I don’t have the key to lock it back up. I survey the office, panicked, as Tom’s voice calls out.
“Monica?”
I step out of the office and shut his door, quietly, my pulse pounding in my ears. I round the corner of the hallway at the same time Tom steps into it.
“You’re home early,” I say.
Tom frowns. “Guy who’s supposed to fix the AC unit is running early. Mom said she called you to let you know I was on my way.”
“My phone is upstairs.” Jen’s phone weighs down the thin material of my pajama pocket. I put my hand over it. If Tom knows that my mother called the house line as well, he doesn’t say anything.
He gives me a curious look before eyeballing his office door. My pulse stills; Tom’s gaze sweeps over it, and seeing nothing of interest, he heads back toward the kitchen. “I’m gonna throw in some pizza rolls, if you’re hungry.”
I’m the opposite of hungry. The thought of Jen’s phone locked away in Tom’s desk drawer all these years has me deeply unsettled.
“I’m okay. I have homework to start.” I head upstairs without looking back at him.
I don’t like doubting Tom. He’s always been more of a father to me than my real dad, who I hear from only on Christmas and my birthday. I was three when he moved out and then in with the professor from his university he’d been having an affair with. They bought a house in Iowa when he accepted a teaching position at a college there, and not long after, my mom met Tom.
For as long as I can remember, Tom has been there. Installed in his armchair from nine p.m. on, watching those shows my mom hates about people treasure hunting in abandoned storage lockers. Tom is the one in the family photos from trips to Disney World, the one who showed up to my dance recitals with an armful of roses. Around the time Jen died, Tom was teaching her how to drive.
Even though she wasn’t his real daughter, Tom was as devastated by Jen’s death as the rest of us. Sometimes I think it’s possible it was worse for him than for the rest of us. He saw Colleen’s and Bethany’s bodies at the crash site, Juliana’s and Susan’s at the murder scene; when Jen wouldn’t answer her phone the morning she died, Tom was the one who went to check on her and had to break down her locked door.
Tom loved my sister like a daughter. It makes sense that he’d want to go through her phone after her death; Jen didn’t leave a note. When a child kills herself, isn’t every parent desperate to know why?
But I can’t think of a single good reason why he’d hang on to her phone all these years.
I pick my way through the storage tubs in my room, Jen’s phone jangling in my pocket. Somewhere in this mess is a box of crap from my old nightstand. I know an outdated phone charger that will fit Jen’s phone is buried among it.
I lift a box of my winter clothes; in the tub below it, I can see a charger, coiled and fraying. I dig it out and sit back, my heart pounding like a jackrabbit’s.
I know it wasn’t him. Connect the dots.
Is that why Tom has her phone? Did he try to connect the dots? The alternate scenario sends a chill through me. Tom was the responding officer to the scene of Bethany and Colleen’s accident. He shot Juliana and Susan’s killer.
Tom found Jen’s body.
Tom is what connects the dots.
I scoot over to my nightstand and plug the charger into the outlet behind it. Plop onto my bed and sit cross-legged, the phone on my lap. When I stick the charger into the phone’s port, the screen stays black, and I think maybe the phone is actually dead dead.
Then, movement. A lightning bolt icon pops up on the screen.
I wait for what feels like an eternity, but when the screen flickers to life, the time shows that only two minutes have passed. Jen’s wallpaper loads; it’s a photo of her cradling Mango, his heinous underbite on full display as he accepts a belly rub.
Something isn’t right. I shouldn’t be able to see Jen’s home screen. My sister kept her phone locked; I know because I was a little snoop, and whenever she left her phone within reach, I would try to guess her passcode.
Tom must have found a way around the passcode and disabled it. I take in a breath that’s sharp in my nose and open Jen’s text messages.
There’s nothing there.
Did she delete all her texts? Did Tom?
I switch to her call log and exhale. It’s intact. The calls end the morning of November 7.
My mother called her every hour from work that morning to see if she was okay. I still remember she was only working a half day. Jen had woken up nauseous and my mom let her stay home.
Sandwiched between two of those calls is a number I don’t recognize.
It’s not stored in her phone under a name. The skin on the back of my neck prickles. I scroll through the rest of the call log.
The number isn’t there. Whoever the number belongs to only called Jen once, the day she died. The conversation was seventeen minutes—too long to be a spam call or a wrong number.
The conversation ended around 10:20 a.m. Not long after, my mother called Jen three times. She must have sent Tom to the house to check on her after that.
This room is too hot. I strip off my sweatshirt, panting in my dance tank top.
I copy the number into my phone and address a text to it. Stare at the screen, thumbs hovering over my keyboard.
This is absurd. There’s nothing I can say to the owner of this number that won’t sound totally absurd.
I hit SEND and swallow and type out:
My whole body tenses as I press SEND again. I stare at my screen, palms sweating. The delivery message flashes to read. An ellipsis appears. A few seconds later, a text pops up.
My pulse ticks in my ears. I respond:
The read receipt appears. I stare at the screen, waiting for the ellipsis to pop up, to signal that he or she is typing. My stomach sinks lower with every moment that goes by and the screen is still blank.
I reach over to my nightstand. The second I set my phone down, the screen lights up.
My fingers are flying over the keyboard so quickly I screw up the message twice and have to retype it.
I hit SEND. Lean back into my headboard, holding out the phone in front of me with one hand and covering my mouth with the other.
Five minutes go by without a response. I blink, warding off tears of frustration, and text him or her again.
I watch the screen, desperate, but this time an answer comes quickly.
Then:
FIVE YEARS AGO
AUGUST
Jen never wanted to be on top. The top was for petite girls, like Juliana, or pea-shoot-thin girls like Susan, muscles toned from years of tennis. Jen, who’d shot up like a sunflower the summer before eighth grade, knew she was forever relegated to being a base. And she was fine with that—she’d accepted her position as one of the hazards of being a tall girl. Flying was simply a thing she’d never be able to do, like wear high heels or date a guy under six feet.
Her sister, who had just started middle school, was going through her own growth spurt. Monica’d already had several meltdowns about her new body. She towered over all the girls in her ballet class, and the boy who sat behind her in math asked to switch seats because her head was blocking the chalkboar
d.
Jen wanted to grab Monica and shake her sometimes. The boys will go through puberty soon! There are worse things in life than being tall!
Mom was always telling Jen to chill. Monica was only eleven, and Jen had also been the worst when she was eleven.
Jen would kill to be eleven again.
“Five, six, seven, eight!” Allie—she refused to let the girls call her Coach—singsonged the numbers. Jen cupped her hands over her partner’s, knees bent so they could lift Juliana.
Juliana’s hands barely seemed to touch Jen’s shoulders as she popped up. The other fliers put all their weight on the bases’ shoulders, the girls buckling under the weight. Juliana, who was barely five-one, had a rare mix of grace and athleticism.
The other girls only had one of the two, if they were lucky. The truly cumbersome girls were sidelined during the stunts, left to do the pom-pom waving and actual cheering.
Jen knew she was more athletic than graceful. She’d wanted to be a gymnast as a kid but lacked the focus or discipline of the girls who trained at Jessie’s Gym six days a week. She’d played softball and basketball in middle school; it had been Juliana’s idea to try out for cheerleading the summer before high school.
Jen was grateful for her arm strength as she launched Juliana into a perfect toe touch. Juliana landed in the girls’ outstretched arms, legs together and feet pointed.
“Nice, Ruiz!” Allie clapped her hands. “Take five and we’ll run it from the top.”
Jen stole a look at Susan’s face as the girls broke formation, moved into their clusters. Susan divided her ponytail in two and yanked to tighten it, eyes cast down. No doubt feeling the sting of Allie not complimenting her performance. Susan was programmed that way—to believe she was a failure when she wasn’t the best.