The Cheerleaders

by Kara Thomas

  But I text him anyway.

  He responds right away, as if he was waiting to hear from me.

  After a minute goes by without a response, I text him again.

  I cover my mouth. Hold in a sob while a tear trickles down my face, over my hand. She knew she was going to die that day. Knowing it for sure doesn’t make it hurt less. I blink away my tears and read the message that’s just come through from Ethan.

  He doesn’t reply for several minutes.

  It sends a fresh wave of hope through me. Maybe Ethan is right, and now we can all move on. We can forget about the heinous act and what it did to us, and in the process, the burden of missing the girls might just become a little lighter.

  I make a promise to myself to try to move on. To think about them a little less every day. I’ll never forget Bethany and Colleen and Juliana and Susan and Jen.

  I can’t, because my story is tied up in theirs forever.

  FIVE YEARS AGO

  OCTOBER

  She always loved the way the rain looked when it hit the windshield of her father’s truck. It was only a gentle mist, but the forecast called for a thunderstorm later.

  “Where are we going?” Ginny asked, even though she knew the answer.

  It was a Friday night and her mother was working at the hospital. The last time she came home at two in the morning and found Ginny on the couch, watching infomercials on Nickelodeon, Daddy nowhere to be found, Mom called and said she’d kill him if he ever left her daughter alone again.

  He came home from the bar, stinking of cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey. Mom told Ginny to go to her room, to her closet that locked from the inside. In the morning, Mom’s eye was purple and swollen and when she got up from the kitchen table, her spine went stiff and her face pinched like she was trying not to cry.

  This time, she went to the emergency room for a broken wrist, taking Ginny with her. This time, when the hospital social worker asked if she should call the police, Ginny’s mother nodded through the tears, her body limp as if all the fight had left her.

  Mom tried to shield Ginny from everything that came after—talk of bail, a court date, the seriousness of the charges her dad was facing, and murmurings about him staying at a motel in Beaverton. Earlier that night, Mom had had no choice but to drop her off at Grandma Cordero’s, since no one else could watch Ginny.

  When her father showed up to his mother’s house, he screamed at Grandma Cordero until she let him take Ginny with him. She’s my daughter. I’m allowed to see my goddamn daughter.

  “We’re going to get ice cream,” Daddy grunted, his yellowed, calloused fingers tapping against the steering wheel of the truck. “I just have to make a quick stop first.”

  Ginny wondered what kind of ice cream place was open at ten-thirty at night, but she knew better than to question it. Her father had never touched her, but she wasn’t sure if someday that would change.

  Daddy pulled up outside the 7-Eleven and thrust the truck into park. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  Ginny knew better than to ask him how long he’d be inside. Was it enough time to make it to the pay phone? She wasn’t sure her dad was allowed to pick her up and bring her anywhere and he’d obviously already had a lot to drink. “Okay.”

  He left the engine running and swung himself out the driver’s side, wincing. As he walked up to the store, past the boys with skateboards who were always smoking in the parking lot, Ginny noticed that his lopsided gait was getting worse. That fact, coupled with how foul her father’s mood had been, made her suspect that his orthopedist wasn’t prescribing him as many pain pills as he needed.

  Ginny looked in the side mirror, craning her neck to see behind her, at Jessie’s Gym across the street. When she was four, her mother signed her up for “toddler tumbling,” and she’d liked it so much she wound up going to class three nights a week, once she was old enough. She would have signed Ginny up for every class Jessie had to offer, if they could’ve afforded it. Ginny knew she wanted to get her out of the house, away from her father.

  Ginny closed her eyes and smelled sweat and rosin. Heard her father squealing up to the curb outside Jessie’s Gym in his truck, nearly taking down the sign listing a sandwich special for the deli next door.

  When Jennifer Rayburn saw and marched off to tell Jessie what she’d seen, hair flying out behind her, all Ginny could think was that Jen was an angel. A blond-haired, green-eyed angel.

  But then Ginny would get embarrassed, worrying about everyone else at the gym thinking she was a loser whose parents never picked her up on time or who showed up drunk.

  Her father had managed to ruin gymnastics too.

  Outside the truck, someone was yelling. Her father was yelling. She’d recognize that sound anywhere. Ginny peered out the window.

  Her father was standing in front of a beat-up pickup truck. A man was leaning against the side, and one was seated in the driver’s seat, his arm dangling from the window. Ginny swallowed back fear and lowered the window just enough to hear what they were saying. She caught her father midsentence.

  “S’matter with you?” he was shouting. “Those girls are less’n half your age.”

  The guy leaning against the side of the truck laughed, clearly unthreatened by her father. “Whatever, old man.”

  Ginny’s blood ran cold as her father stood up straight. “The fuck did you just call me?”

  The driver of the truck stopped smirking. He opened his door, sending a flood of panic over Ginny. She lowered the window and called out to her father.

  “Daddy, please. Don’t.”

  The man standing outside the truck swung his head toward her. He gaped, then turned back to her father. “You’re standing there blitzed out of your mind, and you got a fucking kid in the truck?”

  Ginny flitted back and forth between hoping the men would call the police and praying that her father wouldn’t put his beer down and go after the driver. He may have been stronger than her mother, but this was a fight he couldn’t win.

  “Daddy,” she pleaded. “Let’s go. Come on.”

  To her surprise, he didn’t take another step toward the men in the truck. He hoisted his twelve-pack of beer up and headed around to the driver’s side of his own truck, while the other man got into his truck. They peeled off, leaving Ginny trembling in her seat.

  “I told you to stay out of shit like that.”

  Her father’s voice jolted her. He tossed the beer into the backseat and slammed the door shut. Ginny’s heart thumped as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “I didn’t want you to get hurt,” she whispered.

  Her father grunted. Ginny picked up the stench of beer on him that wasn’t there when he entered the store, and she strongly suspected that one can was missing from the twelve-pack in the backseat.

  “Those men were harassing some girls,” he said. “I don’t like when animals like them look at girls like that. One of them could be you someday.”

  Ginny breathed through her mouth as he fumbled to put the truck in reverse. She didn’t say it, but she didn’t think there was a man out there who was more dangerous to her than her own father was.

  The rain was falling sideways in sheets now; one of those fall storms that shifts gears with little warning.

  “It’s really rainy,” Ginny said. “It’s too dangerous to drive.” It’s too dangerous for you to drive.

  Daddy grabbed her by the chin. “Hey. Look at me. Have I ever put you in danger before?”

  His words slurred together. Ginny shook her head. Her father released her, and Ginny felt a red spot bloom on her face where his fingers had dug in. “I don’t put my family in danger. You’re safer with me than ’nyone else, you got that?”

  Ginny nodded. She thought of the cell phone in the pocket of her father’s jacket. If she could sneak it without him se
eing—

  He leaned over and began to cycle through the radio stations. The moment his eyes left the road, the truck swerved onto the shoulder. “What d’you think? The Stones or the Moody Blues?”

  Ginny squeezed her eyes shut.

  “What, now you’re not talking to me?” Daddy whipped around in his seat to face her, jerking the car into the oncoming lane. Ginny grabbed the dashboard, seeing the headlights of the other car through the rain—

  She felt like she was leaving her body, like it was someone else screaming Daddy Daddy Daddy—

  He yanked the wheel back. The sickening sound of the other car’s horn, then the screech of metal on metal; Daddy slammed on the brakes and the truck spun a complete three-sixty. Ginny felt the tires leave the pavement—they were falling, both of them screaming. Her skull cracked against the ceiling and then everything went still.

  Upside down. They were upside down. With trembling hands, Ginny unbuckled her seat belt. Next to her, her father was motionless, blood trickling down his face.

  Ginny lowered the window and climbed out, the scene swirling around her. The truck had flown over the guardrail; the ground sloped below her, her feet sucking into the mud. The water from the lake below was rising with the rain.

  She stumbled up the hill back toward the road, her sneakers sounding like suction cups in the mud. She walked through the pain in her shoulder, or maybe her collarbone. She had never broken a bone before, but she imagined this was what it felt like.

  Help, I have to help them—

  Ginny came to a halt when the other car came into focus. It was split in half, the front end wrapped around a tree.

  When she saw a limb, completely detached from its body, lying on the grass, she stumbled forward and vomited.

  Both of the girls—Ginny thought they were girls, at least—in the car were dead. That much was clear. They were dead because of her father—or maybe it was her fault; she hadn’t answered him when he asked what music she wanted to listen to, and he’d gotten angry and taken his eyes off the road.

  In both directions, there was only blackness and rain. Why wasn’t anyone coming? Where were other drivers? Ginny ran back across the road, sliding down the embankment, grabbing on to branches as she went so she wouldn’t fall. If she could get to her father’s cell phone, she could call the police.

  That’s when she heard him moaning her name. The film of vomit still sour on her tongue, Ginny climbed over the embankment. Her father had managed to lower his window. His face was purple from the blood rushing to his head.

  “Ginny baby,” he said. “I need you to unbuckle me so I can climb out.”

  Ginny looked from his arm, twisted at an unnatural angle, to the blood dripping from his forehead. She thought of Mom’s eye, purple and swollen.

  Daddy’s voice cracked through the pain in Ginny’s skull. “Now, Ginny. I’m fuckin’ bleeding over here.”

  Ginny touched her eyebrow and examined her fingers, stained with blood.

  Her father’s eyes were pleading. “Come on, baby. You gotta help me out of here. I can’t unbuckle myself.”

  All she had to do was reach through the window, undo his seat belt so he could wiggle out the driver’s window. The embankment was flooding, the truck teetering, threatening to topple into the lake—

  Daddy was screaming her name now. Thunder sounded over the lake, and she knew no one in the houses, if they were even listening, could hear his screams. She watched, one arm around the tree, as the truck rolled into the lake.

  Then she turned and headed back up toward the road, away from the sounds of the sirens approaching, disappearing into the rain.

  Hours later, when her mother got home and wanted to know why Ginny was lying in bed with a bag of frozen carrots pressed to her fractured collarbone, Ginny said her father had done it before he left.

  It was the truth, after all.

  She knew the image of that wrecked car would haunt her for the rest of her life, but what was there to gain from admitting what had really happened? Hadn’t her father gotten what he deserved for killing those two girls, for hurting her mother, for destroying almost everything he touched?

  No, Ginny decided. She wouldn’t tell anyone.

  There are some things not everyone has to know.

  This book was a team effort with my editor, Krista Marino. Thank you for responding to my brainstorming emails in the middle of the night. Thank you for your patience, guidance, and enthusiasm (as well as our shared love of dark and creepy things).

  Thank you to my agent, Suzie Townsend, who has been by my side for seven years and counting. I’m also so lucky to have the team at New Leaf Literary in my corner: Sara Stricker, Joanna Volpe, Mia Roman, Kathleen Ortiz, Pouya Shahbazian, Chris McEwen, and Hilary Pecheone.

  Thank you to the team at Random House Children’s Books: Monica Jean, Barbara Marcus, Beverly Horowitz, Cayla Rasi, Elizabeth Ward, Kate Keating, John Adamo, and rock star publicist Aisha Cloud.

  Thank you to the Sleuthers, the best fans a gal could ask for: Mithila, Brittany, Gabriella, Ashley, Maren, Eileen, Natasha, Ryley, Olivia, Emily, Chelly, Anna, Angel, Jess, Joe, Lisa, Jordan, Inah, Rachel, Bianca, Kristen, Nicole, Alice, Bailey, Danielle, Diana, Emma, Sarah, Veronica, Whitney, Jeddidiah, Stephanie, Jessica, Hazel, Kaitlin, Tawney, April, Amber, Hallie, Krysti, Kat, Jessica, Troix, Desirai, Regina, Meigan, and Kester.

  To my patient husband and family and my friends, especially my hags.

  Kara Thomas is the author of The Darkest Corners, Little Monsters, and The Cheerleaders. She is a true-crime addict who lives on Long Island with her husband and rescue cat. To learn more about Kara and her books, visit her at kara-thomas.com and follow @karatwrites on Twitter.

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