Envy ec-1

by Gregg Olsen

  CULLANT: Y WN’T U MEET ME?

  She took a second before answering. Being too quick would signal desperation.

  KATIEBUG: CAUSE I DN’T KNOW WHO U R.

  His typing was slow as he hunted and pecked his way across the keyboard, stopping, correcting.

  CULLANT: THAT’S THE PT IN MeTING SOME1.

  Katelyn was almost sixteen. She was nobody’s fool. But she was undeniably lonely.

  KATIEBUT: THX 4 THE NICE THINGS U’VE SAID. BUT 4 ALL I KNOW, UR SOME OLD MAN IN PORT ORCH & U GET UR ROCKS OFF BY GNG AFTER TEEN GRLS.

  CULLANT: LOL. THAT’S GOOD. LYK I’VE EVER BEEN 2 PORT ORCH.

  KATIEBUG: K. DAT WZ A LOW BLOW.

  CULLANT: A PERV IS FINE, BUT PORT ORCH? UR HITTING BELOW THE BELT.

  Katelyn laughed; it wasn’t an LOL, but an actual genuine laugh. She liked this guy. Whoever he was. She needed someone to like. She’d felt so abandoned, so lost. Nothing had been going right. Her grades had slipped precipitously from the year before. It was as if she’d been freefalling and there was nothing to land on. And as lame as it was, she felt her only hope was the guy on the other side of her computer screen.

  KATIEBUG: WHEN RU SENDING A PIC?

  CULLANT: WOT KIND OF PIC DO U WNT?

  KATIEBUG: NOW U REALLY R BNG A PERV. U KNOW, THE KIND U MIGHT GVE UR MOTHER.

  A short pause was followed with some more typing.

  CULLANT: K. JUST SO HAPPENS I TK A NEW 1 2DAY. HERE IT COMES.

  She waited for the image to upload in the window of her instant messenger. One pixel at a time. The wait was excruciating, and she wondered how much longer her parents would make her live without broadband.

  They had it at the Timberline, of course.

  Like they ever needed it there.

  Katelyn’s eyes lingered over the photo as it came into crisp view. It was a casual shot, not of the quality pulled from some male model site on the net. The boy had dark hair, blue eyes. Hot.

  KATIEBUG: DAT’S U?

  CULLANT: YUP. DAT’S ME. U LIKE?

  KATIEBUG: IF DAT’S REALLY U, I DO.

  CULLANT: IT’S ME.

  Katelyn knew there were other stupid girls out there who’d fall for some Internet guy, but she wasn’t that type of a girl. Even if she was, even if she allowed herself a little fantasy, it was something that she needed right then. She wanted the attention of someone special, because she no longer felt special herself.

  KATIEBUG: LET’S TALK 2MORW.

  CULLANT: K.

  KATIEBUG: BYE.

  CULLANT: TTFN.

  Katelyn clicked the icon to close the IM window. She went into her bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror in a way a stranger might: critically, with an eye to pick her apart in the meanest way possible. She wasn’t really fat. She had good skin. Her hair was cute. Cute-ish, anyway. When she really processed what she saw in her reflection she knew that she should feel better about herself. But she just couldn’t get there. She could blame it on any number of things—her parents and their stupid restaurant, living in Port Gamble, and probably the worst of it, not making the cheerleading squad.

  When it came right down to it, it was all Starla’s fault. She was to blame for everything wrong in Katelyn’s world. She never could have imagined a betrayal from someone who had been a part of her life for nearly as long as she could remember. Yet it had happened. It came swiftly and irrevocably. It was like Starla’s cold indifference to her had literally frozen her out of the life she’d imagined.

  Katelyn pulled her clothes off, one item at a time, until she was naked, except for her bra and panties. She sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub and reached for the razor that had been calling to her all day. The cold metal blade’s handle felt molded to fit her fingers and hers alone. Although it had become increasingly difficult to find the right place—a place that could not be seen by anyone but her—she managed to find a fresh spot on her upper right thigh. She drew a deep breath, like the kind she’d done when she’d tried to smoke cigarettes with Starla when they were kids.

  When they were still so very, very close.

  With a steady hand and a practiced technique, Katelyn Berkley cut. It was slow, deliberate. Even strokes. One. Two. Three.

  She watched the blood ooze and closed her eyes to savor the feeling that came with the cut. The release was better than she imagined sex might be. She wondered when she would have sex.

  And if it would be with the boy she’d met online.

  IT CAME TO HAYLEY RYAN IN A DREAM, the way a lot of things did. She was in the middle of the food court of the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale. All around her were the people of Port Gamble. Her family. Her neighbors. Mill hands whose names she didn’t know because they lived in Little Boston or on the other side of the Hood Canal Bridge, but whose faces were very familiar. Beth. Colton. Starla. Even Segway Guy. No one seemed to be talking to each other, though the noise of their voices fought with the sound of dueling blenders at the Orange Julius counter. She watched herself wait for Taylor’s smoothie—raspberry and banana. All around her. The noise. The people she knew. The girl behind the counter made change and handed it to her. She didn’t recall ordering anything and was going to hand the money back to her sister, who was sliding a straw through the “X” cut through the plastic lid.

  When she held out her hand, she noticed something peculiar about the dollar bill crumpled in her palm.

  Hayley looked down, closer. Written over George Washington’s unattractive green face:

  THE CAUSE OF HER DEATH

  IS AMONG YOU

  For a second, all sound stopped. It was instantaneous. Hayley looked up from the money and then quickly scanned the crowd in the food court.

  Everyone from Port Gamble was there. For a moment, she even thought she saw Starla’s dad, Adam Larsen, who’d been gone a couple of years. He waved at her, and then he vanished. All of them did. Gone, like the smoke from a birthday candle.

  The next morning, while the twins put on makeup in the bathroom mirror, Hayley told Taylor about the dream.

  “Weird. I hate bananas, and you know it,” Taylor said, running brown mascara over her fair eyelashes.

  Hayley knew her sister was playing with her. “I thought it was strange, too.”

  “Seriously,” Taylor said, “I had a dream sort of like that last night too. Not exactly, though. Mine wasn’t set in the mall. It was in Katelyn’s room. Same idea. The feeling that the person responsible for Katelyn’s death is right here, among us.”

  Hayley thought a moment, checking herself in the mirror.

  “I know you’re not going to tell anyone about our dreams, or whatever they are. But if you ever feel tempted, please leave out the part that I was in the food court in my dream. It sounds so lame.”

  Taylor put her makeup into a small pink and black makeup bag.

  “Are you kidding?” she asked, heading down the hall. “If people think you’re a dork, then that’ll transfer to me. Half the people around here think we’re the same person. As far as I’m concerned, the mall dream never happened.”

  But it did.

  chapter 22

  IT WAS THE MORNING OF HER FORMER best friend’s funeral. Starla Larsen stood in front of the mirror in her Kingston High cheer outfit. The dress was red, trimmed in gold with a narrow white edging. It was a color combination left over from the days when cheerleaders were wholesome and when it didn’t matter what color their pom-poms were—as long as they shook them with enough persuasive vigor when the team put some numbers on the scoreboard.

  It was clear that no one back then took into consideration what a girl like Starla Larsen could bring to the uniform.

  Starla knew.

  White and black would be better, she thought as she turned in the mirror. White and black don’t compete; they enhance.

  She had a point. Starla usually did. She was that kind of a girl.

  Because of her looks and somewhat overly seductive personality, Starla was an easy target for the B-
word. If gossip ever got back to her, Starla merely looked blankly at her informant.

  “Really? Wow, I never even noticed her. Wonder why she feels that way?”

  It wasn’t easy for most girls to look as hot as she did, and Starla almost felt sorry for them. It was true that she was blessed with her mother’s and father’s good looks, but it took more than genetics to change things in the physical world.

  She was good at embarrassing girls, teasing boys, and making things worse. Those, along with her undeniable in-your-face beauty, were her gifts.

  Starla’s teeth were white, her eyes glacial blue, and her hair spun gold. Those things were easy to alter. Sure, teeth could be whitened, and she routinely did that. Her eyes, thankfully, were the right hue of blue. Not blueish. Not gray. Intense icy, icy blue. Certainly, her hairstylist mom helped her with her hair. That was more out of convenience than the fact that Starla thought her mom really knew what she was doing. Starla read enough fashion magazines and watched enough Style TV to understand that the cut was more important than the color.

  Her mom almost never cut her hair.

  Starla had it all, and she was only a sophomore. That, she was certain, had to be some kind of a freaking record.

  The only downside in Starla’s world, besides her anxious little brother, Teagan, and her omnipresent stage mother-wannabe, was her mom’s boyfriend, Jake Damon. Even at almost thirty, Jake was eye candy, to be sure. He had a decent chest—pecs, not boobs—and arms that looked muscled but not overly gross when he purposely flexed around the house doing some chore that Starla’s father would have done without making such a show of it.

  Yeah, she thought, Jake is the perfect guy for Mom. She still thinks she’s in her twenties, and Jake is stupid enough to go along with it.

  Starla’s mother came into her room and planted her four-inch pumps into the floorboards like she was nailing something down for posterity. Mindee was a sight as always. Her hair was gooped up with so much product, Starla wondered how her mother’s pencil neck could support it. Mindee wore a simple black dress, her asymmetrical hair clipped with a questionable matching black bow, but Starla didn’t say a word about it.

  This time it was Mindee’s turn to be critical.

  “You’re wearing that to the memorial?” she asked, indicating the cheerleading uniform with a jab of her fingertip.

  Starla faced the mirror again and carefully reglossed her lips. “The squad is going to be there. All in uniform.”

  Mindee shook her head disapprovingly. “I don’t know about that, Starla.”

  “We aren’t going to do a cheer, Mom.”

  Mindee pulled her heels from the floorboards and walked closer, touching Starla on the shoulder.

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “I was thinking, you know, about how Katelyn felt about you being a cheerleader. It seems inappropriate.”

  Starla pulled away. She wanted to say something about her mom’s boyfriend being inappropriate, but she held it inside. After all, the day wasn’t about her, her mom, or Jake. It was about Katelyn Berkley and her suicide or accident.

  Or whatever. Starla didn’t care. Dead was dead, no matter how someone got there.

  Teagan, a preteen with the pink flush of emerging acne and a modified Bieber haircut, wore black jeans and a sweater. He’d been unusually quiet for the past week, and Starla took his hand. It was clammy, but she didn’t mind. She liked having Teagan around to use as a human shield between her mother and her boyfriend.

  “Let’s go. Let’s go say good-bye to Katie,” she said.

  “I guess so,” he said, dropping her hand. “I don’t need you to drag me there.”

  Starla and Teagan started down the stairs, their mother behind them. At the landing was Port Gamble’s answer to a jack-, or in his case, a Jake-of-all-trades, master of none. Jake Damon was the town’s handyman. Until he took up with Mindee Larsen, most women would have said he was reasonably handy—with or without his toolbox.

  Or something like that.

  Jake smelled of beer, which was how he usually smelled. He looked Starla up and down and raised a brow in that creepy way he had when he was drunk and thinking he was sexy.

  “Go, Buccaneers,” he said, nodding like a dashboard bobblehead.

  Starla wanted to ignore her mother’s squeeze, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. “Why don’t you go off somewhere and buccaneer yourself?”

  Jake clinched his fists. The large veins on his arms stretched against his skin, and Starla thought he was a bigger jerk than she ever could have guessed.

  “Did you say what I think you said?” he asked, stepping closer.

  “You heard me,” she said, giving proof to all doubters that pretty could also be tough. “I said Bucc You!”

  Mindee yanked on her daughter’s hand. “Starla! What a mouth you have.”

  “Let go of me,” Starla said, twisting away. “I didn’t say anything that bad.”

  Mindee looked at Jake, pleadingly. “She’s grieving; let it go.”

  “She’s a pain in the ass,” he said in his Bud breath. “But sure, I’ll let it go.”

  The four of them slipped on their coats and started out the door. The church was only a short distance away and they decided that, despite the cold weather, they’d walk. There wouldn’t be any conversation—just hurried steps through the cold led by a very pissed-off cheerleader.

  WHILE KATELYN BERKLEY’S FRIENDS AND HER PARENTS waited patiently for the cause of death to be determined—and for grandparents Nancy and Paul to return from a four-day cruise to Ensenada they refused to cancel—her body had been kept on ice under Birdy Waterman’s watchful eye. Finally, two weeks after Katelyn’s death, it came time to bury her. Her casket was fuchsia and ivory, a color combination more appropriate to an ice-cream store than to the final resting place of a girl who eschewed such colors in favor of the drab tones that she wore in the months before her death. Behind the casket, on the church altar, were photographs of the dead girl’s life: Baby, Girl Scout Daisy, and Sullen Teen. All of Katelyn’s iterations of life stages were on display, along with a few things she’d made: a candy dish she’d glazed in purple and black at one of those coffee and pottery shops, a painting of a forlorn moon over the tar-colored waters of Port Gamble Bay, and a letter opener made in shop class that looked suspiciously like an old-fashioned barber’s razor blade.

  No one said anything about that. How could they?

  The church was full, though not particularly because of Katelyn’s popularity in the community. It was true that she was well known because of her omnipresence at the family’s restaurant, busing tables, helping the cooks, sitting at the counter reading a vampire novel with a half-naked boy on the well-turned cover. Indeed, the swelling size of the crowd at her memorial service had little to do with Katelyn specifically. People were there because of her youth. Nothing, all ministers know, brings out mourners like the death of a child. Katelyn might have been more than halfway to adulthood, but she was still a little girl.

  A very dead little girl.

  Hayley, Taylor, and their parents sat in the third row, two rows back from the Berkley family. Colton James sat behind the Ryans, and three rows farther back were Beth Lee and her mother, Kim. The order was as it had been the night of Katelyn’s death: the closer the relationship with the deceased, the nearer to the casket.

  Occupying the seats across the aisle from the Berkleys were Starla and her family. Next to them mourned the rest of the Buccaneers cheer squad.

  Taylor whispered to Hayley, “Look, it’s the pom-pom posse. If you ask me, Katelyn’s spinning in her grave now.”

  “She’s not in her grave yet,” Hayley corrected.

  “Ya know what I mean. She hated it when Starla ditched her for cheer.”

  “She hated it even more that she didn’t get on the team.”

  Valerie put her finger to her lips but thankfully didn’t follow the gesture with the librarian’s shushing noise.

  Someone pushed
a button and a CD recording of an abbreviated verse of Celine Dion’s bombastic classic, “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, tinkled aloud.

  Hayley kept her mouth zipped, but she couldn’t help but think she’d rather be dead than have that song played at her memorial. And in which case, even if she were dead, she still didn’t want Celine, Mariah, or Whitney piped into her service.

  VALERIE RYAN GRIPPED HER HUSBAND’S HAND as they looked up at what had to be the saddest sight in the world: the pink casket in the front of the Port Gamble church, a place in which historically the denomination changed with the tide and the whims of the mill boss’s wife. St. Paul’s was home to an Episcopal congregation then, but it had once been a Lutheran, Catholic, and even a Baptist church. It didn’t matter. The faithful went regularly, no matter what religion the wife had decreed for the town. Taylor and Hayley cried, not in the way that close friends shed a stream of tears, but tears born of a shared moment of tragedy. Some who lined the spaces in the old oak pews sobbed because they loved Katelyn. Others cried because of the overwhelming sadness that comes with a young life lost.

  Valerie’s own tears came from memories of when her girls were small, memories from the darkest time of her adult life.

  The event had been long ago, but the feelings of hopelessness and the fragility of life came to the mother easily while the minister talked about Katelyn’s abbreviated life. Valerie’s own girls had been side by side in Seattle’s Children’s Hospital for thirty-one days after the crash, their eyes fluttering, scanning, under eyelids both parents prayed would open. The hospital wouldn’t allow another bed in the room. Apparently, fire codes were more important than an aching heart of a mother or father. So Valerie brought a foam mattress from their home in Port Gamble, and she and Kevin took turns sleeping on it in the space between the girls’ beds.

  “Why aren’t they waking up?” she asked, over and over.

  “We really don’t know,” said the doctor, a pleasant, bespectacled man with nicotine-stained fingertips. “It isn’t physiological.”