by Kara Thomas
She couldn’t even bring herself to throw out Ethan McCready’s poem.
“Do you know what happened to Ethan?” I ask. “After he graduated?”
“He didn’t. He was expelled that fall.”
“Why? What did he do?”
Outside Mr. Ward’s room, the voices reach a crescendo. The thud of a body against the door. Rowdy newspaper kids. I’m holding up the meeting.
“I don’t know. I always thought the whole thing was blown out of proportion,” Mr. Ward says. “But a girl saw him writing names in his notebook and went to Mr. Heinz.”
“Whose names?”
Mr. Ward hesitates. “The names of all the cheerleaders.”
“Like a hit list or something?” My stomach turns over.
“That’s what the administration decided it was, at least.” Mr. Ward glances at the door. “I don’t know, Ethan never struck me as violent. But I don’t blame them for not wanting to take chances.”
He stands. My cue to exit. He starts walking me to the door. “You know, you can stay for the newspaper meeting. We’re short on staff writers this year.”
“I’ve kind of got a full plate. But thanks.”
Mr. Ward doesn’t look at me as he opens his door. The boy leaning against it topples into the room, to laughter from the other kids gathered outside.
“Just a sad year all around,” Mr. Ward says.
* * *
—
I have thirty minutes before practice starts. I head upstairs, dodging Rach’s and Alexa’s texts asking if I want to go to Starbucks. I’ll tell them later that I had to get extra help in chem.
The sign on the library door makes me deflate. CLOSED FOR CONSTRUCTION. I vaguely recall Mrs. Barnes chirping over the morning announcements that we got funding for a new “smart learning” station.
I peer through the glass pane on the door. The lights are on, and the librarian is inside, arms folded, deep in conversation with a teacher who has her back to me.
The woman’s wiry gray-streaked hair is tied up in a scrunchie. There’s only one person in the school—and probably all of Sunnybrook—who wears scrunchies every day.
I back away, ready to haul ass, but the librarian spots me over Mrs. Coughlin’s shoulder. She frowns and walks toward me, and I’m trapped. Mrs. Coughlin turns around, eyes narrowing when she sees me.
The librarian cracks the door open. “We’re closed, hon.”
“I know,” I say. “I just need one specific book.”
“Which one?”
“An old yearbook.”
“Check with Mrs. Goldberg.” The door clicks shut in my face.
I sigh. Mrs. Goldberg is the graphic design teacher and yearbook advisor. Her room is downstairs, in the same wing as the photography darkroom and painting and sculpting studios.
The lab door is open. I poke my head in—it’s eerily quiet. The handful of kids on the computers work silently, eyes on their screens. I don’t see Mrs. Goldberg.
Someone says my name, softly, from the back of the room. Ginny Cordero is watching me from her computer. She waves me over.
“Hey. Is Mrs. Goldberg here?” I blurt it in a single breath. I don’t want Ginny to think I’m stalking her or anything.
“She went to use the copier a little while ago,” Ginny says. “I didn’t know you took graphic design.”
“I don’t. I need an old yearbook. The librarian told me Mrs. Goldberg has it in her office.”
“Yeah, she has all of them. I can get it for you. I’m on yearbook staff, so she lets me in her office. Which one do you need?”
“The one from five years ago.” I pause. I’m not sure if someone who was expelled before the yearbook went to print would be in the portraits section. “Maybe the one from six years ago too.”
Ginny nods and ducks into the back room. Stuck to Mrs. Goldberg’s office door is a giant poster of a galaxy. I peer more closely at it; a bunch of faces are Photoshopped among the stars. WE LOVE YOU MRS. G!!! —5TH PERIOD SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGN.
When Ginny returns, she’s holding two yearbooks. “These are her copies, so you just have to stay here with them, if that’s okay.”
“Of course. Thanks.” I take the books from Ginny and slide into the seat at the empty computer next to hers. She turns back to her work on the yearbook layout, but I catch her eyes flicking away from the screen and toward me as I flip through the pages of the first yearbook.
Ethan McCready isn’t in the book from the year my sister died. I set it aside and open the previous year’s yearbook, flipping to the freshman portraits. Trace a finger over the last names on the sidebar. Mackie, Maroney, Maldonado, McCready.
I count over four pictures, landing on a picture of a boy with dirty-blond hair hanging in his eyes. His shoulders are hunched forward under a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. His eyes are so dark they almost look black.
When I look up from the pages, Ginny is watching me, a curious look on her face.
I swallow and point to Ethan. “Have you ever seen this guy before?”
Ginny peers at the picture. “I know him.”
“Really?”
“Well, I know who he is,” Ginny says. “My mom was his mom’s home nurse when she was really sick. I went to her wake with my mom. He looked really lonely, like people were staying away from him. My mom told me he got expelled that fall.”
“He had a hit list,” I say. “The cheerleaders were on it.”
I study Ginny’s expression, seeing the pieces slide into place for her—the car accident, the murders, my sister’s suicide. And a boy who wanted all of the girls dead.
Supposedly. “He says he was friends with Jen.”
“But Jen was a cheerleader,” Ginny says. “Why would he put one of his friends on his hit list?”
“I don’t know.”
Ginny is quiet for a moment. “Does this have anything to do with what you asked me yesterday? About the house?”
My throat goes tight. The note leaver wasn’t some innocent friend of Jen’s who had a crush on her. He’s the guy who was expelled for wanting my sister and her friends dead. And he knows where I live.
“Ethan was there,” I say. “He left something for me—a note my sister wrote him.”
Ginny blinks at me. “Why would he do that? How did you find it?”
I hesitate. “Can you take a break for a couple minutes? Maybe we could go outside.”
“Sure. I was finishing up anyway. One second.” Ginny saves her work on the computer and picks up the gym bag resting at her feet. She adjusts its strap over her shoulder.
The courtyard is brimming with people waiting for sports practices to start. I spot Jimmy Varney throwing around a Frisbee with some of the cross-country guys. He turns his head and waves at me; the Frisbee hits him in the chest and falls to the lawn.
I drop my bag on the grass below one of the trees outside the gazebo and sit. Ginny follows suit. Inside the gazebo, a pack of girls is gathered, lying on their backs on the benches, chattering about some invitational meet coming up. The louder it is out here, the better.
“Sorry I’m being so weird,” I say. “I just don’t want anyone to hear us.”
“It’s okay.” Ginny pulls her knees up to her chest. The moment she does it, a Frisbee flies straight into her shins.
“Sorry!” Jimmy Varney comes trotting over, his face scarlet. In his wake, his friends are laughing; one of them smacks Joe Gabriel on the back. Joe grins and yells, “My bad,” his voice anything but apologetic.
Ginny picks up the Frisbee and hands it to Jimmy. He flushes an even deeper shade of red. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Ginny says.
Jimmy gives me a sheepish smile. “Hey, Mon. Sorry.”
“It’s seriously okay.” I don’t mean to snap at
him, but I just want Jimmy to go away so I can talk to Ginny.
As Jimmy heads back to his friends, locking eyes with Joe and muttering something under his breath, I say to Ginny, “Joe is such an asshole. He hit you on purpose.”
“I don’t think he meant to hurt me,” she says. “He just did it so his friend could come over and talk to you.”
I feel a tug in my chest. It hits me, why I like Ginny so much—it’s not only because of her connection to my sister. Ginny reminds me of Jen. My kind sister, who always gave people the benefit of the doubt, even if they didn’t deserve it.
Ethan McCready’s yearbook picture comes into focus in my mind and his role in all this starts to come together—that note, his claims that Tom can’t be trusted—it feels much more insidious now. Is he trying to make me doubt Tom to shift the suspicion from himself? Aside from Jack Canning, Ethan’s now the only person who wanted cheerleaders dead.
Ginny is watching me expectantly. I feel like a dam inside me is about to break.
So I tell her everything. I start with the letters in Tom’s drawer and how they led me to Jen’s cell phone and Ethan’s phone number. I recap my meeting with Daphne and all the inconsistencies about the murders. Ethan’s warning that Tom is hiding something.
Ginny eyes me while I speak, a look on her face that I can’t quite pin down. I think of Rachel’s reaction the other day when I asked her if she thought everything that happened that year wasn’t a coincidence.
“I know it sounds ridiculous,” I say. “But my sister—I never believed it, that she would kill herself over her friends dying. And maybe that makes me sound like I’m in denial or something, but this stuff with Ethan McCready—him calling her the morning she died…I don’t know.” I take a breath. “It can’t be a coincidence.”
Ginny mulls this over. She rearranges her feet so she’s sitting cross-legged. “You know that theory about a butterfly flapping its wings could cause a tsunami or a tornado across the world?”
I nod. “It sounds familiar. Like, something small can happen and set off a bigger reaction.”
“Yeah,” Ginny says. “The opposite of a coincidence.”
I tug at a blade of grass tickling my ankle and wrap it around the tip of my finger. Ginny’s simple explanation has parted the jumble of thoughts clouding my brain. I don’t know why I didn’t think of the possibility sooner—that the deaths aren’t a bunch of dots waiting to be connected, but a single series of events, set into motion by something that fall.
But what happened? How am I supposed to find the exact spot where a butterfly flapped its wings five years ago?
And how am I supposed to believe anything Ethan says—how he was friends with Jen, how I shouldn’t trust Tom—when according to Mr. Ward, he wanted her dead?
* * *
—
Tom’s car is in the driveway when I get home from practice. The spot in the garage where my mother parks her SUV is empty. I remember her saying something about Meet the Teacher night at Petey’s school. She left a Chinese takeout menu on the kitchen island.
Ethan McCready was expelled for making a hit list that would have had Juliana’s and Susan’s names on it. A couple of weeks later, they were murdered.
There’s no way Tom wouldn’t have made the connection between Ethan McCready and the girls. Principal Heinz would have gotten the police involved if one of his students had made a hit list.
The case against Jack Canning was convincing, but it wasn’t airtight. I need to know if Ethan was ever a potential suspect; the problem is that the person who can tell me for sure is probably the last person who wants to talk about the possibility that someone other than Jack was the killer.
Tom’s office door is closed. He usually keeps it open while he works. I ignore the paranoia needling me and knock.
“Come in.”
I open the door and find Tom hunched over his computer. He’s clicking through photos of a Honda Civic with a smashed-in bumper. He minimizes the window and swivels his chair around. “Hey, kid. Wanna call in dinner? I’m getting hungry.”
“Sure.” I nod to his computer. “What were you looking at?”
Tom rubs his eyes. “A hit-and-run from last month. Been bugging me.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to take your work home with you.”
“When you do what I do, the work is never done.” Tom studies me. “You all right? Mom says you haven’t been yourself.”
“I don’t know,” I say, combing over my words carefully before they leave my mouth. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
Tom’s eyebrows lift. Whatever he expected me to say, it wasn’t that. “Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“Do you know a kid named Ethan McCready?”
“Ethan McCready?”
“He was in Jen’s grade. He got expelled that fall for threatening to kill cheerleaders.”
“You mean the hit list kid? I sent people to his house. He didn’t even own a gun.” Tom frowns. “I didn’t know you knew about that. Your mom and I didn’t talk about it around you or your brother because we didn’t want to upset you.”
“Did you know Ethan wrote Jen a creepy stalkerish poem?” I ask.
Tom stops bouncing the leg crossed over his knee at the ankle. “Did Jen tell you that?”
I hesitate. “I found it in her stuff.”
Tom holds up a hand. “You went through Jen’s things? When?”
“What does that matter?” Anger flares in me at the tone of his voice—like he’s suggesting I dug up my sister’s grave to get that poem.
“It would matter to your mother,” Tom says. “Monica, this month is going to be hard enough for her as it is.”
“You think it’s not hard for me? For the rest of us?”
“Don’t raise your voice. And that’s not fair—you know I didn’t mean this isn’t hard for you too.” Tom looks at his lap, pinching the bridge of his nose. When he picks his head up, he looks exhausted. “I don’t see what your end goal is here. I don’t know what you want from me.”
I bite back the urge to scream: I want you to stop acting like you’re hiding something. I want to ask him why he had Jen’s phone and whether he knows Ethan McCready was the last person to talk to her.
“Don’t you get it?” I ask. “Ethan wanted all the cheerleaders dead, and then Juliana and Susan were just randomly murdered?”
“Monica,” Tom says. “Ethan McCready weighed a hundred ten pounds soaking wet.”
“So?”
Tom leans back in his chair, the leather upholstery farting under his weight. He watches me for a moment before saying, “Susan and Juliana were strangled.”
“I know that.”
“They were very fit girls. Between them, they had about twenty pounds of muscle on Ethan. Do you know how much strength it takes to strangle someone?”
My stomach puckers as I fight off the instinct to picture a pair of hands wrapping around Susan Berry’s neck. “No.”
“Ethan had limbs like toothpicks. Susan could have broken his arms with her eyes closed,” Tom says. “The girls were overpowered. Their killer was much bigger than them.”
“You mean the killer was Jack Canning’s size.”
Tom’s eyes flash with a warning. “This isn’t a conversation I want to have anymore.”
“Well, I do. Ethan was in love with Jen.” My throat goes tight. “What if he decided that if he couldn’t have her, he’d go after her friends? What if he knew she was supposed to be at Susan’s that night, and he went there and—”
“Monica!” The force of Tom’s voice almost blows me back. My stepfather has yelled at me maybe once in the past ten years.
I know he realizes it, too, because he winces. “The person who killed Susan and Juliana is dead. He’s not going to hurt anyone ever again
. If someone is telling you otherwise, send them to me and I’ll set them straight.”
My stepfather isn’t a stubborn man. It’s why it’s scary how sure he is that he had a reason to shoot Jack Canning.
“Monica. Look at me.”
I do. Tom forces a smile. “Okay?”
The pit in my stomach widens. “Okay.”
On my way out the door, he tells me to order him some General Tso’s chicken. His voice is measured, cheery. Letting me know that he’s willing to forget this conversation, as long as I never say the names Ethan McCready or Jack Canning to him again.
FIVE YEARS AGO
SEPTEMBER
Juliana had big plans for sophomore year. They had shed the label of annoying freshmen; last year’s seniors who wouldn’t even look their way were gone, replaced with upperclassman boys who stole glances at them even while their arms were around their girlfriends’ waists.
Jules didn’t seem to notice the looks from the older guys. Not like Susan, who would suck in her stomach and tuck her hair behind her ears when the football and soccer players came to hang out in the gym where the cheerleaders were practicing. Juliana was thinking bigger; the calendar in her room was color-coded: cheer practice, Spirit Night, homecoming. She didn’t seem to realize how popular they already were. Jen and Jules had both been voted to the homecoming court last year, and Susan was the class secretary.
Jen realized it, though. The people she grew up with suddenly seemed nervous around her. It was lonely at the top, with people keeping their distance, as if the other sophomores weren’t sure if Jen thought them worthy enough to share her presence.
It didn’t help that Jules had a different lunch period than Jen did, and Susan cut lunch out of her schedule completely so she could take an extra elective. Jen had to sit with Bethany and Colleen and their junior friends in the cafeteria.
It was a life other girls envied. It was a life she didn’t know if she wanted.
Juliana had dropped advanced math and science, deciding the workload would be too much for her to balance with cheerleading and her job at Alden’s, the grocery store her parents owned. So the only class Jen and Jules had together was English with Mr. Ward. When Jules got out of gym the period before, she’d meet Jen at her locker and they’d walk to class together.