The Grip Lit Collection

by Claire Douglas

  “Oh.”

  “Only Ruben’s bong’s not in his glove compartment. Just this.” Jamie holds up a baggie filled with little white pills, shakes it so it makes a sound like maracas.

  I let out a low whistle. “There must be a thousand dollars’ worth in there.”

  “More like a dollar.”

  “You too stoned to count?”

  “I wish. No, Ruben’s pretty sure his new supplier’s scamming him, selling him aspirin. Not all the time but some of it. He’s been getting an earful from pissed-off customers, I guess.”

  “If I was a customer, I’d be giving him one,” I say softly. Just then a pair of headlights swings across the parking lot. Before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve plucked the pills from Jamie’s hand, dropped them in my bag and angled my shoulders so his joint’s blocked from view. A Chevy Impala painted in the school colors, the words CAMPUS SECURITY stenciled on the side, slows to a suspicious crawl when it reaches us but doesn’t stop.

  “Shit,” says Jamie, once the car’s rolled out of the lot. “The rent-a-clowns are out in full force tonight. Quick thinking, Gracie. Phew, you know? Like I need any more hassles.” He sniffs. “Anyway, normally I’d just get the bong I keep in the glove compartment of my car but my car’s—”

  “At home,” I interrupt, out of patience, my heart pounding from the closeness of the call. “Your engine light’s flashing.”

  He blinks. “Whoa. How did you know that?”

  “Can I come in? I need to talk to you.”

  He reaches for the handle, moving like he’s underwater. I get in, shutting the door behind me but not all the way, so that the interior light stays on. For a while we just sit in silence. I’m about to turn to him, tell him what I know. He turns to me first, though. Taking a drag on his joint, he puts a hand on either side of my skull, cupping my ears, then blows a long, thick stream of smoke into my mouth. Shotgunning, it’s called. He and Nica used to do it to me in the old days, try to trick me into getting high with them. Only of course they weren’t really trying and I wasn’t really tricked, rearing back, making a big show of coughing and sputtering before I’d breathed in more than a wisp. But this time instead of pushing him away, I draw him in, placing my palm on his neck, tilting my head so that we’re kissing without touching lips. When he’s emptied his lungs into mine, we look at each other and grin.

  Jamie leans back in his seat, dipping into his pocket for his Altoids tin. As I watch him pinch the tip of the joint, tuck it inside with care, his gestures long-fingered and graceful, his downturned face beautifully gaunt in the sunken light, I think, Why does it have to be him? I wish suddenly that I’d never gone dredging for the truth about Nica, about any of it, had just left it all alone. It’s a desperate wish. Pointless, too. But I wish it, anyway, wish it hard, then let it go.

  “It was you,” I say.

  He laughs, sliding the tin back into his pocket. “Yeah, probably. I mean, no doubt. But what, specifically, was me?”

  “Who killed her. Our sister.”

  He looks at me, loose-mouthed, and then his lips come together and his eyelids drop, like he’s closing himself off, sealing himself up. For a long time he just sits there, unseeing and unmoving. Finally he whispers, “Oh man, oh dude.” And then he says, “I didn’t kill her. I did but I didn’t. Not the way you mean.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  “Where I am?”

  “In the story. Tell me how much you know.”

  I do like he asks. When I’m finished, he rotates, and with a quick, darting motion, leans into me. I jerk away before I even understand that’s what I’m doing. He lets out a dry, unhappy sound, more like a bark than a laugh. “I’m not going to hurt you, Grace. I’m just closing your door. If I’m going to tell you what you want to know, it can’t be in the light or I won’t be able to do it. Okay?”

  I nod.

  A moment later, we’re plunged into darkness. Silence, too. A silence that lasts and lasts. And in it I notice that my vision is shimmering at the edges, the pale green light from the clock in the dashboard surrounded by a halo of paler green light that seems to throb and pulsate. I’m high, I realize. I feel a flicker of panic. Before it can spread, though, I hear Jamie inhale deeply, then exhale, a cue for him to start, his voice halting and slow, his tone lost and dreamy, like he’s talking in his sleep: “After my mom … dropped the bomb about Nica … I was devastated … I understood that we’d never be together again … that there was no chance … no hope … I left my cell at home … so when I got to campus … I called her from the pay phone by Great House … I told her I knew the truth … and if she didn’t talk to me … I’d kill myself … that I had one of my dad’s guns … that I’d use it …

  “She agreed to meet me at our spot … the tree in the graveyard … It has a hollow in the trunk we used to store things in … condoms … cigarette packs … notes … My mom told you … I had a drug problem … That was during my freshman year … The first one … at Choate … I was fourteen … My parents’ marriage had hit a rough spot … my mom was having some sort … of nervous breakdown … and I guess I was too … It got bad … I lost control … My dad found out what I was doing … and I had to quit … It’s nothing like they show in the movies … yelling … screaming … slamming your head against the wall … You suffer … are in agony … but it’s quiet … I kicked though … I did it … And for two and a half years I was clean … I still smoked pot … drank beer … took the occasional dose of acid … but no hard stuff … Then Nica dumped me … I was dirty inside a week …

  “My parents have always been tight with money … They got even tighter after rehab … But I knew where Shep kept his stash … so I—”

  “Stash?” I say. “Of what? Drugs?”

  Jamie turns to me, a blank stare on his face. And there’s a long pause, like I’ve broken into his dream rather than his story. Which maybe I have. He certainly sounds more awake and like himself when he finally says, “I forgot. You don’t know that about Shep.”

  “Know what? That he’s some kind of drug kingpin?” I laugh. When Jamie doesn’t laugh with me, “Nice hippie-dippie Shep?”

  “He’s hardly a kingpin. He just always has really good dope is all. He does deal a little but only to friends and practically at wholesale and only consciousness-expanding stuff—marijuana and psychedelics.”

  “And heroin.”

  “Heroin, too.” Jamie sighs. “So that night I used Shep’s spare key. I went to the bathroom and helped myself and …”

  As he’s talking, I feel a tremor of recognition pulsing through me. The night of the Outdoor Club meeting. Jamie, sniffly and watery-eyed and on edge—strung out, obviously, obviously in retrospect, anyway—dragging Polly Abbot into the bedroom after Shep gave him the thumbs-up. That must’ve been the signal, Shep’s way of letting him know he had the goods. I remember the look of annoyance on Shep’s face when the door closed. I’d thought Shep was annoyed because Jamie was going to mess up his sheets. But now I understand he was probably annoyed because he wanted Jamie to wait, be more discreet. Poor Polly. A drug beard. I wonder if Jamie even kissed her before disappearing inside the bathroom.

  I tune back into his voice. It’s taken on that dreamy, slow-motion quality again: “… my stomach hurt … my nose … my head … the joints in my legs.… As I’d driven to school … I could feel the car hurting too … the grinding of the gears … the howl of the engine … the screech of the brakes … and when I’d twist the wheel … the torque.… It was in unbearable pain … same as me. But then the drug hit … and this warmth came over my nerves and muscles and mind … and everything softened, began to glow.… The harshness of reality disappearing …

  “And by the time I met Nica I felt good … I’d taken just the right amount … the Mama Bear amount … not too much, not too little … I figured Nica would never be able to tell I was high … She did, though, right away … She started r
anting, raving … At first I thought she was angry at me because I’d relapsed … But she wasn’t … It was your mom she was angry at … She blamed your mom for everything … for our relationship, sick she called it, perverted she called it … for my addiction … for her exhibitionism … for your dad, how weak he was, how beat-down … She kept saying how glad she was that you’d be in college in a few months, safe and out of reach …

  “She was mad, really, really mad … Then she was sad, really, really sad … I went over to her, just to hold her … And that’s all I did … for a while … But then I started kissing her … She resisted, but only at first … And then we … we …”

  Suddenly dizzy, I shut my eyes. That doesn’t shut out his voice, though.

  “… we had sex … It was beautiful, Grace, the most beautiful thing.… Not just because it was the way it used to be, but because now I knew how she felt about me … I’d never known before, not really, not for sure.… If she was willing to be with me, though, when she believed being with me was so sick, so perverted, that proved she loved me … didn’t it?… We’d be a couple again … In secret maybe, in sin, but a couple … We wouldn’t let them tear us apart … We fell asleep in each other’s arms … I’ve never been so happy …

  “I woke up a few hours later … Nica was looking at me … There was horror on her face … Then, before I knew it, she was hitting me, screaming at me, saying things like … what had happened in the past didn’t count because we didn’t know … We were innocent … But now we were as bad as they were, our parents … We were just as twisted, warped, rotten, corrupt … Didn’t I understand, she said, how hard it was for her to stay away?… How could I have taken advantage when she was afraid for me?… I disgusted her, she said, and I’d made her disgusting to herself … She hated me for it …

  “I hated me for it too … I reached for the gun … She’d have to live with what we’d done, but she wouldn’t have to live with me and our feelings for each other, too powerful to fight … It would be my apology to her, my gift … I lifted the barrel to my temple, wrapped my finger around the trigger … I thought about how, when I squeezed, my mind and memory and flesh would be blown to bits … I started to squeeze anyway …

  “And then the gun was out of my hands, in Nica’s … I was angry, furious … Why wouldn’t she let me do this for her, for us both?… I took a step toward her … I wanted that gun …”

  I breathe in, knowing what’s coming next. The world no longer exists for me, everything gone except for his voice.

  “She wouldn’t give it to me … Kept shaking her head no no no … There was a struggle, and then a sharp crack … A shot I realized … I felt a spreading wetness, hot, at my center … I thought it was me who was hit until Nica fell back.”

  From the sounds Jamie’s making, I understand he’s crying. I force myself not to think about why he’s crying because if I do, I know everything will collapse, nothing left but despair. I just look straight ahead at the windshield, wait for it to stop.

  Eventually it does.

  He starts talking again, faster this time, as if the tears have cleared a blockage: he tells me how he watched the expression in Nica’s eyes turn from confused to scared to nothing in what felt like a split second; he tells me how he snatched the gun out of her hand to keep her from hurting herself, what a joke; how he held that hand until he heard someone coming; how that someone was Graydon Tullis; how he hid behind the tree to avoid Graydon because he didn’t want the younger boy to see him crying, fucking absurd, yeah, yeah, he knew; how he found his keys in the grass next to his wallet; how he never thought he’d make it down to the parking lot without being spotted. “I did, though,” he says, with a sigh. “I made it no problem.”

  I’m staring at him—the outline of him—now silent, and I realize that’s all there is. Something inside me trembles—tremble, tremble, tremble—as if it’s going to break, but it doesn’t. It holds steady. And, after a minute or so, I’m able to say, “So covering up the accident wasn’t part of the plan?”

  Emphatically, “Never.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I walked off with the gun without realizing it. When I went to shower, I found it in the waist of my jeans. I put it back in my dad’s rifle cabinet. What else was I going to do with it? And of course I trashed my clothes. It’s not like I could wear them again. There isn’t enough Tide in the world to wash out a bloodstain that size.” He pauses. “You have to understand, I wasn’t trying to flee the scene or get away with anything. Not that there was anything to get away with. I just wanted some time, a chance to pull myself together. Then I’d, you know, face the music.”

  “But you didn’t face it.”

  “I kept meaning to. But days passed. And then the Manny Flores thing happened. If the police had actually accused someone, I would have come forward for sure. But they were blaming Manny and he was already dead. It started to just seem better if they went on blaming him.”

  “Better for who?” I say, suddenly angry. “Not for Manny.”

  Jamie, suddenly just as angry, “What did he care? He wasn’t too invested in his life, clearly, so why should I be? Plus, he didn’t have any family to give a shit about his memory. But I had a family. So did you. And if he was the guilty one, I wouldn’t have to expose the sordid little secrets of either.”

  So mad now I’m practically choking on my spit, “And, conveniently, you also wouldn’t have to expose your own sordid little secrets.”

  “That’s true,” Jamie says, his anger departing as quickly as it arrived, exhaustion taking its place. “What you’re saying is true. Listen, I wish I could tell you something that would make you look at me the way you used to but”—lifting his shoulders, letting them drop—“I can’t.”

  For a long time Jamie and I sit there. We have nothing left to say but are curiously unwilling to leave each other. It’s as if we recognize that once this conversation is officially over, the whole thing will be over, Nica will be over, dead and gone in a way she wasn’t before. Or maybe we’re just too drained to leave. I can’t think of a time I’ve felt so tired. All this effort to solve a crime that turns out not to have even been a crime, a mystery that wasn’t a mystery in the first place. I didn’t even have to force anything out of Jamie. The truth had always been there, just waiting to come out. Telling me was probably a relief for him.

  Finally he stirs. “I’ve got to get back,” he says. It’s weird to hear his voice after such a long silence.

  “What are you going to tell Ruben?”

  He looks at me, totally lost. “About what?”

  “The Doritos.”

  “Oh yeah, the Doritos.”

  “Check the vending machine in Great House. That one usually has those little bags of Cool Ranch.”

  “Thanks for the tip. I’ll swing by.” He turns, lets his gaze drift out the window, across the empty lot. Then he says, “So are you going to go to the police with this?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it yet.”

  “Anything you decide is fine with me. Just let me know so I can prepare or whatever.”

  I nod.

  He looks at me for a while, then nods back. As he opens the door, I see that he’s left his zebra-striped Bic in the cup holder. “Stay as long as you want,” he says. “Just lock up behind you.” He squeezes my arm. I’m disappointed when he grabs the lighter as he exits.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I’m home without quite knowing how I got there. Have no memory of walking back from campus, though obviously I must’ve since my car isn’t in the driveway. I can’t find my keys, am tired of looking, so I just upend my bag onto the welcome mat. They come tumbling out. So does my wallet, my sunglasses, my ludicrous lipstick stun gun, the tiny Hello Kitty figurine holding a tennis racket that Jamie won for Nica and me at an arcade last winter and Nica let me keep, a ChapStick tube with no cap, Clarissa, Ruben’s pills, a ballpoint pen, tampons—three of them, one nosing out of i
ts wrapper. Also Mom’s photographs, which land in a clump, facedown. For a long moment I just stare at them, at their vacant white backs. Then a swirly breeze passes. Before it can scatter the sheets across the porch, I pick them up. After lifting the welcome mat, pouring whatever’s on it into the mouth of my bag, I bring the key to the door, only I don’t need to. The door falls open as soon as I touch it. In too much of a rush to lock it earlier, I guess.

  I collapse on the bottom step of the staircase, unable to make it any deeper inside than a few feet. For a while I just sit there in the dark in a kind of blanked-out stupor, eyes drying out because I keep forgetting to blink. And then, from Amory Chapel, comes the chiming of the quarter hour. Returning to myself, I notice that the photographs have slipped from my hand, are fanned out on the floor. I pick them up, one by one, smoothing them on the flat of my thigh. No lights are on in the house, but there’s a streetlamp in front of it giving off just enough glow for me to see by.

  There are about thirty photos total, each depicting the same scene: Nica, lying in the grass, dead. Unlike the one hanging in Mom’s studio, though, these are full body shots, taken not from behind but straight on. Mom must have been crying and shaking as much as she said she was because at least two-thirds of them are out of focus, the frame wrong somehow, off-kilter; and gazing at them, at their slightly askew perspective, gives me motion sickness. Or maybe what’s making me want to puke is the sight of my sister curled up, not in sleep as I’d originally thought, but in pain, clutching at the smeary horror of her stomach, the blood so thick and rich and dark it looks more black than red, a trickle of it coming out the left corner of her mouth, crawling down her chin. After holding the pictures to my face, forcing myself to examine each one, I let them fall to my lap.

  I begin to imagine Nica’s last moments on earth.

  I imagine her waking up, soaked in sweat, heart slamming into her chest, relieved the night before was just a dream, the panic that must’ve set in as she realized it wasn’t. I imagine her looking at Jamie, lying beside her, with disgust and, under that disgust, love, which disgusted her more, and him looking back at her with love and nothing but, which disgusted her more still. I imagine her opening her mouth and saying the worst things she could think of so he’d feel as low and dirty and full of shame as she did. I imagine her anger, so strong she wanted to kill him, and then her terror as she saw he was going to kill himself. I imagine her grappling with him for the gun, smaller than she would have thought, heavier, too, and the sound, sharp yet muffled, that hung in the air when it went off, the shock of the bullet piercing her skin, her flesh, an organ inside that skin and flesh. And as I’m imagining all this, I’m flipping through the stack of photos. I’m not looking at what I’m doing.