by Kara Thomas
“Is it true the whole thing was cheerleaders?”
“And the football team.” Mike’s face is grim. “What a mess. We had a lot of hysterical parents calling the station that week.”
“But he wasn’t charged with anything? He was just expelled?”
“There wasn’t anything to charge him with. He didn’t make any explicit threats. Didn’t have any weapons or shooter-worship stuff in his house.” Mike shrugs. “He didn’t have a lot to say about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had to question him about the list, and even he didn’t seem to know why he wrote it. I thought it was probably an attention thing.” Mike sips his beer again. “His mom had advanced cancer, no dad in the picture. Ethan wasn’t exactly rolling in friends. Some kids will do anything to get noticed.”
My right hand is still sore from clamping around the handgun. I massage the area between my thumb and index finger. “It’s a little weird that two of the girls on his list were murdered a week later, and he was never a suspect.”
Mike smacks his lips. “There weren’t any suspects because it was clear who did it.”
Mike was there when Tom shot Jack. Mike and Tom had only been riding together for a couple weeks when he followed Tom into Jack Canning’s house, because that’s what partners do. They have each other’s backs. No cop wants to see his partner get in trouble for making a snap decision.
Five years ago, I was terrified that Tom would get fired or go to jail. I prayed every night that Mike would help the truth come out. Back when I was so sure of what the truth was. That Tom was only shooting a killer.
I want to ask Mike if he still thinks about that day, but he’s had a haunted look on his face ever since I brought up the murders.
“I’m sorry I brought it up,” I say. “People at school were saying stuff, and I figured I’d ask you.”
Mike frowns. Scratches the corner of his mouth with a knuckle. “No, I see why it’s unsettling, considering the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
Mike sets his beer down. “Ethan lived around the corner from you. Tom used to complain about him wandering the neighborhood at night. You didn’t know that?”
I glance over at Tom, still trapped in conversation with the waitress. As if sensing me watching, he turns his head. Catches my eye. Frowns.
“No,” I tell Mike. “I had no idea.”
Rachel is in a mood when she picks me up Monday morning. I thought she would be over Coach reaming her out on Friday, but a weekend of stewing must have made things worse. She’s actually scowling as I get into the car.
I’m buckling my seat belt when my phone vibrates. I have a text from a number I don’t recognize, but it’s not Ethan McCready’s number.
As we back out of the driveway, a fine mist hits the windshield. Rachel smacks the handle that controls the wipers harder than she needs to. “So glad I straightened my hair this morning.”
I want to ask her if she’s aware that there are wars going on in other countries, but she might actually be angry enough to make me walk. Now I wish she’d stew quietly so I could fucking think.
I don’t know who would want to meet me in Mrs. Goldberg’s room. I’m about to tell the sender that they have the wrong number when another message comes through.
I exhale a little. I don’t know why, but Ginny’s message buoys me and carries me all the way to lunch.
Mrs. Goldberg’s door is open when I get there, and I spot Ginny at the same computer she was sitting at last week. I settle into the chair next to her.
“I found something I wanted to show you,” she whispers.
I follow Ginny’s eyes to the computer screen. She clicks on My pictures and scrolls down to a folder labeled Homecoming, which sprouts more folders: Prep, Parade, Game, Dance.
Ginny opens the Prep folder. The night before the football game is when everyone gathers in the school parking lot to add the final touches to the class floats.
She tilts the screen of the iMac so I can see what’s in the folder. A quick scan, and I feel my forehead furrowing. None of these people look familiar. Ginny points to a group of girls gathered around a giant Pac-Man head. One of the girls is ducking, wriggling away from a boy whose hands are covered in papier-mâché goop.
I sit up straight. I know her. In one of the other photos snapped in the same scene, Susan Berry poses over the Pac-Man head, a yellow-dipped paintbrush in her hand. Lips closed, tight. Susan rarely smiled; even while she was cheering, she always wore the dutiful expression of someone who was performing a task and wanted to get it over with. These pictures are from five years ago.
I turn to Ginny. “How did you get these?”
“People submit tons of photos for the yearbook every year. We keep them all on flash drives, whether they make it into the book or not.”
Ginny scoots her chair over and pushes the mouse toward me. I scroll through the pictures. Realize with a pinch in my chest that I’m looking for my sister. But Jen was at home that night, bundled in a blanket in a Chloraseptic and antibiotic haze, pissed off that she was missing everything.
“Scroll down a bit,” Ginny says. “Look at the one…”
Her voice trails off, because I see it: a picture of all the cheerleaders, huddled together, arms tucked around each other’s backs.
Tiny Juliana Ruiz is crouched in front of the group, hands in the pocket of her cheerleading hoodie, mouth stretched in a dizzying grin. Juliana’s giddiness was infectious. Jen said Juliana regularly got kicked out of class for her uncontrollable giggle fits. She always cheered the loudest at games, in a way that would be obnoxious if anyone else were doing it.
“Look what happened next,” Ginny says, voice low.
The rest of the pictures were snapped in succession, like a flipbook. In the next one, Juliana is retreating from the group of girls. Then she can be seen at the edge of the frame, standing by the fence separating the parking lot from the football field, cell phone in one hand, one finger hooked over the metal link. She’s not smiling. She may even be crying; it’s impossible to tell from the angle.
In the final shot, Juliana is standing at the fence, still, face in her hands.
I don’t know what to say.
“It’s probably nothing,” Ginny says quietly. “I just thought it was weird that she was crying…”
“And a few hours later, she was dead.” I bend my head closer to Ginny. “Is there a way I could look at all of these?”
“I can put them on a flash drive for you. Hold on.”
Ginny disappears into the back room. The ball of anxiety that’s taken up residence in my chest grows, and by the time Ginny returns with the flash drive, I’m so dizzy I have to put my head in my hands.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I look up at her. “My stepdad lied to me. When I brought up Ethan McCready, he acted like he didn’t remember his name. But his partner told me that Ethan lived in my old neighborhood and that Tom used to complain about him all the time.”
“You didn’t know Ethan lived near you?”
I shake my head. “A lot of kids lived in our neighborhood. I remember there was this group of boys who were kind of sketchy. Ethan could have been one of them but they definitely weren’t the type of kids my sister hung out with.”
Ginny takes a hamster-small bite of the sandwich she’s snuck out of her tote bag. On Mrs. Goldberg’s whiteboard, a sign reads NO FOOD IN THE ART LAB!!! in large letters. She chews and swallows. She almost looks as nervous as I do. Her voice is barely above a whisper when she finally speaks again.
“Your stepdad was the one who shot Susan Berry’s next door neighbor.”
“Yeah. He was.”
Neither of us says what I know we’re both thinking; something had upset Juliana earlier that night, before she and Su
san got home and Jack Canning noticed they were by themselves. It might not be connected to the murders, but if it is…it means there’s a chance that Daphne was right and Juliana’s attacker was someone close to her.
It means there’s a chance that Tom killed an innocent man—and whoever did kill Juliana and Susan is still out there.
* * *
—
When I get home from practice, I deposit myself at my laptop. I plug in the flash drive Ginny gave me and sit back as the pictures load onto my hard drive.
Juliana Ruiz and her mom were closer than any mother-daughter pair I’d ever seen. When Juliana and Susan would spend a Saturday night at our house, Juliana would be up first thing in the morning so she could get breakfast with her mother before church.
One of my clearest memories is of Juliana, draped across our living room couch, musing out loud about which of the boys in their grade she’d like to kiss during spin the bottle at Susan’s thirteenth birthday party and which boys she’d kissed the year before. Jen clammed up the whole time, cheeks burning, because Mom was in the kitchen, within earshot.
“What?” Juliana said, rolling onto her stomach. “You don’t tell her everything? I tell my mom everything.”
Mrs. Ruiz might know what made Juliana cry earlier the night she was murdered. It could have been nothing serious—her homecoming date blowing her off, maybe. Either way, I need to know.
Googling Juliana’s parents’ name doesn’t yield anything: no address, no phone numbers, no emails. Just a couple of articles briefly mentioning Juliana’s murder. A few months after the murders, Mr. and Mrs. Ruiz sold their grocery store and moved closer to family in Westchester. The Berrys divorced shortly after they finally sold their house.
I step into my closet and dig out Jen’s phone; I’d buried it in my jewelry box, just in case Tom noticed it was gone and decided to come snooping up here. I scroll through the contacts, but Jen doesn’t have Mrs. Ruiz’s number.
My mother’s voice carries up the stairs: “Monica, we’re eating.”
“I’ll be down in a sec,” I yell. I click out of the windows on my laptop and sit back in my chair.
My mind swivels to the first anniversary of Jen’s death. That evening, my mom shut herself in her bedroom; I stood outside her door, listening to her murmurs, trying to figure out who she was speaking to on the phone. Tom had put a hand on my shoulder and steered me away; when I pointed out that Mom had been on the phone for almost an hour, Tom said, “She needs to talk to someone who’s been through the same thing.”
I slink out of my room and down to the end of the hall, listening for a break in the sound of the pots clanging and the oven timer beeping downstairs.
The door to the master suite is open a crack; I push my way in, the door purring against the carpet. The room is done up in cream—the paint on the walls, the carpet, the silky bedspread. It’s so bland, it’s disorienting. The only thing out of place is a pair of Tom’s jeans strewn across the chaise beneath the bay window.
Tom is not a chaise guy. The jeans on said chaise are from Costco. If Jen were here, she’d find the whole scene hilarious. She’d find this house hilarious.
My mother’s iPhone is on her nightstand, hooked up to its charger, where she always leaves it. I swipe a finger across the screen and enter her password—Petey’s birthday. Same as the security code to open the garage door. At least I know where I stand with my family.
I scroll through her contacts; I notice there is no one with the last name Berry or Steiger or Coughlin.
My mom may have lost touch with the other girls’ parents out of self-preservation, but Mrs. Ruiz wasn’t just a cheer mother. When Mrs. Ruiz came over to say goodbye before they moved, Mom clung to her and sobbed more than I’d seen her cry since Jen died.
And sure enough, at the bottom, there’s Tina Ruiz.
“What are you doing?”
I look up. Petey is in the bedroom doorway, index finger jammed in his ear, digging at earwax even though we’re always telling him that’s disgusting. I set Mom’s phone down. “What are you doing?”
“Telling you to set the table.” Petey cocks his head. “Were you on Mom’s phone?”
“Mind your own business.”
I know what he’s going to do the second his lips part. I rocket off the bed and cover his mouth with my hand, muffling his cry of Mah-OM. “There’s a twenty-dollar bill in my nightstand. Stay quiet and it’s yours.”
Petey shrugs out of my grasp and flounces into the hall. Moments later, I hear my bedroom door click open.
I shake my head and text Tina Ruiz’s number to myself from my mother’s phone, deleting the outgoing message when I’m done.
* * *
—
When the plates are cleared from the table, stray crumbles of taco meat scraped into the garbage, I head back up to my room. No one questions my antisocial behavior, and that’s fine. The more unpleasant my family thinks I am, the more likely they are to leave me alone to do whatever this is that I’m doing.
After I scratch out some answers to my pre-calc problem set, I sit cross-legged on my bed, palms damp with sweat. I rehearsed what I want to say, combed over every word, but it doesn’t make calling Mrs. Ruiz feel less wrong.
I stare at the number on my screen for a solid minute, my heartbeat mimicking a metronome. I swallow and hit the call button.
A woman picks up. “Hello?”
“Hi. Is this Mrs. Ruiz?”
“No, it’s Maria. Who is this?”
Juliana’s sister, Maria, was younger than I was when Juliana was killed.
“My name is Monica Rayburn,” I say. “Can I talk to your mom?”
I wait for Maria to decide I’m a scammer, then lie and say that Mrs. Ruiz isn’t home. Instead she says, “One second.”
There’s shuffling on her end. I catch a faint “Who is it?” followed by Maria huffing, “I don’t know!”
“Hello?” Mrs. Ruiz’s voice is guarded. A go-away-if-you’re-selling-something voice.
“Mrs. Ruiz,” I say. “Hi. This is Monica Rayburn.”
Silence. The quick rush of breathing.
“Jennifer’s sister,” I add, feeling my insides shrink.
“No, of course. Monica. I’m sorry.”
“Is this a bad time?”
“Oh, no, I was just putting the baby down. Hold on one moment.”
Baby?
The sound of a door clicking. I picture Mrs. Ruiz shutting herself in her room. Sitting on the edge of her bed, Juliana’s photo staring at her from the dresser. I nearly hang up.
“You had a baby?” I say.
“His name is Matthew,” she says.
“Congratulations.” Matthew. The name means “gift from God.” It was my ex Matt’s favorite fun fact about himself.
“Thank you. We adore him. How are you, Monica?” Mrs. Ruiz sounds brighter. “It’s been a while.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I should have stayed in touch.”
“You were just a kid. It’s good to hear from you now.”
“I just— I wanted to see how you were doing.” I can’t bring myself to tell her why I’m really calling.
“That’s very sweet of you,” Mrs. Ruiz says cautiously. “Is there something else you wanted to talk about?”
Her voice is gentle, patient. As if she’d known that at some point she would get this phone call from me.
“I’m on yearbook now,” I lie. “I was looking at some old pictures and I saw one from the night…the night before homecoming. Juliana looked really upset.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Ruiz says. This is new to her.
“Do you know what might have been bothering her?”
Mrs. Ruiz is silent. Probably wondering why I need this information so badly that I had to call her at dinnertime on a Monday nig
ht five years later.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just…I don’t know. I thought it might have something to do with my sister.”
“I honestly don’t know,” Mrs. Ruiz says. “I hadn’t seen Jen in over a week at least.”
That can’t be right. Jen spent half her weekends at Juliana’s house. “Are you sure?”
“I asked Juliana about why Jen wasn’t there,” Mrs. Ruiz says. “She said that Susan and Jen weren’t speaking to each other. Juliana wanted to stay out of it.”
My mouth is dry, my skin buzzing. “What were they…Do you know why they were fighting?”
“Juliana didn’t want to tell me.”
“Was that weird for her? Not telling you?”
“Monica. I know why you’re calling.”
I don’t know what to say. When Mrs. Ruiz speaks again, her voice is gentle. “None of it had anything to do with what happened that night. It was a terrible, horrible crime, and I can’t imagine how it must have haunted your sister.”
“I just have so many questions, still.”
“I do too,” Mrs. Ruiz says. “But after a while, searching for the answers felt like grasping around in the dark. At some point, you have to choose to live in the light.”
After I say goodbye to Mrs. Ruiz, promising I’ll stop by and meet the baby sometime once I get my driver’s license, I turn back to my laptop. All the pictures have loaded by now.
I start with the ones in the folder marked Sunnybrook vs. Shrewsbury. The game where the infamous picture of the five Sunnybrook cheerleaders was taken.
I click through them, pausing on a picture of Juliana and a blond girl. Their cheeks are painted with blue and yellow Ss. They’re blowing kisses at the camera. The other girl is about a foot taller than Juliana, her white-blond ponytail so high it looks like it’s sprouting from the top of her head. Her upper lip is pierced, and she has an edgy look to her that clashes with her cheer uniform.
I’d forgotten I took Jen’s freshman yearbook upstairs with me after I raided her things the other night. I dig the book out and arrange myself among the pillows on the bed. Flip through all the class portraits. Mango trots into my room, sniffing the air. When he sits at the foot of my nightstand, I scoop him up and plop him on the bed. While he’s circling, trying to find a comfortable spot, I turn to the front of the yearbook and search the other photos for the blond girl: team portraits, candid pictures from dances, Spirit Night.