“That’s not true,” I said.
“Of course it is.” If I remember correctly, we were playing badminton—or rather, lazily bopping the little projectile thingy (oh my god, I just looked it up and it’s called a shuttlecock) back and forth across the net with our rackets, since neither of us really knew how to play. (Though I guess it only matters that I think we were playing badminton, not whether it’s true, haha.)
“What about money?” I pressed. “It doesn’t matter if people think you have money—it only matters if you can afford to pay your bills.” This was a loaded example to raise, I admit, since I knew you were at camp on full scholarship, and also knew I was the only one who knew it. You’d told me some things about your family’s problems with money—your dad running up huge debt because he felt entitled to spend on whatever—and whoever—he wanted, while also being a tightwad at home. Your anger at your mom for letting him control way too much and not noticing what he’d done until it was far too late. Your exhaustion and worry over hearing them fight about that and everything else in their lives, until they stopped fighting and that felt worse. But I’d also witnessed how the impression you gave everyone else was that your family was loaded. I sort of understood the lie, but I was curious how you would explain it.
“No, that’s a perfect example,” you said. “If people think you have money, they one hundred percent treat you differently than if they think you’re broke. Like, if the bank thinks you’re rich, it’s more likely to give you a loan. If other people think you’re wealthy, they treat you with respect and authority—and if they think you’re poor, they’re more likely to look down on you. Shopkeepers follow you around if they think you can’t buy things. Cops see you as criminal. People assume you’re probably lazy or ignorant, even though poor people have to work harder than anyone else. It doesn’t matter if you have money, because what matters in how they treat you is their perception.”
“If the people are jerks,” I said.
You shrugged. “Maybe. Or if they’re human.”
I wanted to argue against the injustice of that, but you didn’t seem the least bit worked up.
“Or take the Dive and You’ll Die legend,” you continued. Emma and a friend walked past for the millionth time. For the millionth time, we ignored her. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true. People believe it, so it changes their behavior.”
I snorted. “Except Jackson’s.”
You lunged for the shuttlecock (damn, I wish we’d known that word) and missed. “Nope, him too. You think he’d care about diving there if people didn’t assume it was dangerous? There’d be no point if he wasn’t showing off.”
You were right, of course. Again.
Did you tell your lawyer that story, about the counselor who supposedly died when they dove off the dock into too-shallow water, on a long-ago drunken dare? That’s something I did tell the cops. Not the legend, but the night we all discussed it—and how Jackson reacted when you brought it up.
He rolled his eyes. “They just tell us that to scare us. It’s no realer than the ax murderer who lives in the woods.”
For once I agreed with him. “Every camp needs an unhappy ghost to haunt it.”
“And to teach us a valuable lesson on water safety,” he added. “There’s probably a ghost who died from running with scissors or not brushing their teeth down at the kiddie camp.” I laughed, and a small moment of camaraderie passed between us.
Across the lake, a loon wailed, and Nitin shivered at the sound of it. You were tucked against Jackson, but you smiled at me. The loon calls were so eerie and beautiful at night. I loved that you loved them too.
“No, it’s true. A counselor did drown after diving into the rocks,” Nitin said. “My parents went to camp here—it’s where they met—and they told me the story too.”
You sat up. “Your parents knew the person who died?”
He snapped his gum, a dozen tiny rapid explosions. “No, they just heard about it. It was long before they were campers.”
“Yeah, but if your parents were here thirty years ago, and they also heard it happened thirty years ago . . . ,” I said. You nodded—we’d been thinking the same thing.
Nitin tilted his head. “Oh. Good point.” I loved how Nitin, who got embarrassed about so many things, was never embarrassed to be wrong. Unlike Jackson, who would dig in harder on anything rather than admit he might be mistaken.
You peered over the edge, though the water was like ink. “I think you would have to dive from a place with more height. Or be incredibly unlucky,” you said. “I mean, to actually die.”
“Yeah, only a numbnut would dive straight into a rock,” Jackson said. You giggled, but can we just admit right now he wasn’t all that clever or funny? I’m sorry, I should be nice, the guy is dead, but come on.
“Still. I wouldn’t try it,” I said. But Jackson was already standing.
“As long as you don’t dive at, like, ninety degrees, it’s deep enough. Watch,” he said. “I’ll do it right now.” He whipped off his shirt, which I assume was the point of that display of bravado, and you squealed and fussed and pulled him back down to you, and wrapped yourself around his bare torso.
Nitin and I stayed silent. The moment no longer involved us. You nibbled Jackson’s shoulder and Jackson looked smug, like he’d proven or accomplished something. I never saw him dive in for real, but it wasn’t the only time he mentioned it.
Jackson didn’t take anything seriously. He walked through the world like he knew he could get away with whatever he wanted, and for the most part, he did. His default mode was the assumption he would be lucky, right up until his luck ran out.
He was exactly the kind of numbnut who would dive straight into a rock. Overconfidence plus entitlement should be bottled and sold as a drug. He definitely got high off it.
I don’t know what’s true about the Dive and You’ll Die story. I’m starting to feel like I don’t know what’s true about anything anymore. If you were here, we would talk it through and you would make it make sense, and my head would stop spinning, finally.
Maybe.
Whatever you said, would I believe you? Should I? I’d still want to.
Here’s where you’re right, I guess, about the fourth rule: It doesn’t matter anymore if you killed Jackson or not. It only matters what the jury believes.
Love,
Kayla
November 6
Dear Lainie,
I take it back. That was bullshit, the stuff I said about the fourth rule. It does matter what’s true. It matters to me, anyway.
But what even is truth? Because we all have different perceptions and those perceptions shape our truths, and two contradicting things can be true at once, and argh and ugh and so forth.
Plus with something like love, friendship, or memories . . . those aren’t tangible, provable things. They exist in our heads and hearts, and perceptions there are everything. So how does one determine the truth of them?
Your perceptions of your relationship with Jackson probably differed a lot from his (which differed still from mine, Nitin’s, Emma’s, or anyone else’s), but that doesn’t mean either of you was wrong, just that no one could have the full picture. Which I guess brings us back to your original hypothesis, and I can picture you smirking and raising your eyebrows like “See?”
But there is a true story of how Jackson died, even if perceptions of why are all different. Even if multiple whys might be true. And that story must matter, because if it weren’t true, he wouldn’t be dead. Right?
Excuse me a moment. [Screams into the void] *Brain explodes*
I hate working through impossible questions like this on my own now, without you—or with only the you in my head. It was so much better bullshitting out loud together. If we could meet on the dock and hash this all out, it would feel like we were solving the puzzle of the universe, not turning my brain to mush just trying to assemble the pieces.
It must be cold out on the dock now. Prob
ably windy and frigid, like it is here today. That seems appropriate on the one hand and strange to imagine on the other. In my heart, it’s endless summer there. A place we can never return to but that would always welcome us back. I guess the leaves are gone too. And any last trace of his blood.
Here’s a complicated truth, and one I forget sometimes in the After, because it no longer fits with what I want to believe, but: Jackson was my friend too, in a way.
There’s an alternate path this all might have taken, if the police had stuck to their original theory and declared Jackson’s death an accident. A version of the After where instead of shoving us apart, his death would bring us closer together. Where there would be no arrest and no trial, no blame to throw around, and we would mourn and remember him together.
We would reach out sometimes just to say things like, “Remember the time he kept saying ‘beignet’ when he meant ‘bidet,’ and we all thought it was a story about washing his butt with a pastry, and you laughed so hard you nearly wet your pants?” Or, “Sometimes I picture the dimple that appeared on his right cheek whenever he was about to say something ridiculous, and I don’t know whether to smile or cry.” Or, “He was a jerk sometimes, and so damn full of himself, and I’d give anything to get to be annoyed with him again, you know?” And the other person would remember too and understand.
You would acknowledge he’d been kind of a shitty not-boyfriend, and we would talk that through too: the ways he hurt you. The mistakes you made. The closure you might never get from it. But that would help you move on, in a way. Eventually the missing-him would subside and he would become, for us both, a bittersweet memory. A tragic loss we shared.
I’m Team Lainie to the bitter end, but imagine if there were no teams to be chosen.
Dr. Rita thinks that’s “something we can work on,” the ability to allow myself to mourn Jackson without it feeling like it’s a betrayal of you.
I’m not there yet.
I’m still working on admitting you hurt me.
You know what’s strange? How completely fucking normal this week has been. You are on trial for Jackson’s murder and I have been going to school like usual. Eating lunch with Dina Who I Usually Have Lunch With. Trading smiles with Ian in math class. (He hasn’t tried to kiss me again—nor have I lunged at his face with mine—but we talk a little. Pass notes now and then. It’s nice. Slow and nice. Way more normal than I thought it would be.) Doing homework. Having dinner with Peter and Adele. (They’ve been extra hawklike with the mood surveillance, but each day of your trial that I don’t have a breakdown, they relax their feathers a touch.) Talking about my feelings with Dr. Rita. Reading about my best friend the murderer online for hours each night.
It’s surreal.
In the sketch artist’s drawings of the daily proceedings, you look pretty but steely. There’s a harder look in your eyes than I can imagine actually being there, which I’m guessing means the artist thinks you’re guilty. It’s so weird that a courtroom sketch artist wouldn’t try to be unbiased, but I watched an interview with one in a documentary about another case, and the artist talked about how at first he drew the defendant one way, but as the trial continued, he felt more sympathy toward the guy, and started drawing him differently. Isn’t that wild? I guess the jury doesn’t see the sketches until after they’ve given their verdict, but still. Everyone else does. And how you look definitely influences what people think, for better and for worse.
The coroner’s testimony started today, and I swear, the press is practically salivating. People sharing stuff online are definitely drooling all over themselves. They’re devouring every graphic detail.
I hadn’t thought about this before, but I guess part of the reason people are so fascinated by Jackson’s murder (besides that he was young, white, pretty, and rich, and you’re young, white, and pretty), is they can’t get over the idea of someone like you being violent. Girls and women aren’t supposed to be killers. We’re supposed to be nurturers, healers, and life-givers. I don’t think anyone would be this obsessed if they thought Nitin smashed Jackson’s head with a rock. But the idea of you doing it horrifies and thrills them.
Last night I looked up other murder cases where the alleged killer was female, and it’s the same thing. People get obsessed. No one’s surprised when men are violent. We expect it. Almost celebrate it. Men can kill for fun or out of entitlement or greed, and people only blink twice if the victims are famous or children, and white.
But an attractive female killer gets everyone all worked up. Uncomfortable. Excited. (Less so if it was self-defense. We expect that too: Women kill to escape men; men kill to own women. A lot more of the latter than the former, from what I can tell.) It’s like society has this need for women and girls to be only victims. Your case fascinates because you defy the stereotypes. People want to find a way to explain it away and they can’t. They reassure themselves you must be psycho.
Clicking around last night, I read a think piece you would love about how the world can’t handle girls being bloody, unless the blood we shed is our own—once a month, or in childbirth, and keep that mess to yourself, please.
God, can you imagine if cis men cramped and bled every month? We would celebrate them with trophies and see it as a sign of their power. The jerkiest dudes would wear thin white pants and bleed through them on purpose, just to show off how tough they can be.
(Yes, I’m on the rag right now and bitter about it.)
I wonder if it’s true that women are less violent. Maybe we’re just smarter. I wonder how often women kill and don’t get caught.
(I love that expression, though. On the rag. I love the dry, droll way you’d say it, like someone’s chain-smoking grandma with four cats on your lap and no fucks left to give about anything.)
Anyway.
Blah blah blah.
I’m going to see if Adele will let me take one of her Ambiens. I’m sick of my brain and I want it to shut up and sleep.
Love,
Kayla
November 9
Channel 13 News
“Testimony continued today in this second week of the second-degree murder trial of teenager Elaine Baxter, who, as most of our viewers are aware by now, is accused of killing her summer-camp boyfriend, Jackson Winter, in August. Our reporter James Hsu is outside the Maplewash County Courthouse with updates. James, what can you tell us about what happened inside that courtroom today?”
“Thank you, Nina. Today jurors had another grueling day of hearing graphic testimony from local coroner Isabella O’Meara, who told the court on Friday about the blows Jackson Winter suffered to the head, which, she testified, in her opinion, were sustained before his body entered the water. Prosecutors entered into evidence last week several charts, photographs, and reports detailing the angles and extent of the two blows that the coroner’s office ruled contributed significantly to Winter’s subsequent death by drowning.
“In a lengthy cross-examination today, Baxter’s lawyer, Michael Desir, seemingly tried to cast doubt on the coroner’s level of expertise, asking a long string of questions about her medical experience before she became a county coroner, and how many cases of suspicious or violent death she has encountered in her years working as coroner in this sparsely populated rural area, which does not employ a full-time forensic pathologist or medical examiner. The answer boiled down to: not many.
“O’Meara remained cool on the witness stand and stayed firm in her testimony that in order for the blows to be self-inflicted, Winter would have had to, quote, ‘dive in, hit the back of his head on a rock, then climb out and dive in to hit it again. Or, hit two perfectly positioned rocks, which investigators have not found to exist in that area of the lake,’ end quote.
“Baxter’s lawyer pressed, ‘But he could have?’ to which the coroner replied, ‘That’s extremely unlikely, but I suppose it could be technically possible under just the right circumstances, sure.’
“In redirect, the prosecutor sought to emphas
ize the unlikeliness of that possibility, asking, ‘Is there any doubt in your mind that Jackson Winter received those two forceful blows to the head before his body entered the water?’ to which the witness said simply, ‘No.’ ‘Could there be doubt about that fact in anybody’s mind?’ the prosecutor pressed, and the witness replied, ‘There shouldn’t be.’
“It remains to be seen whether jurors found today’s line of questioning from Baxter’s defense attorney to seem credible, or merely desperate.”
“Thank you, James.”
“You’re welcome, Nina.”
November 9, 8:11 p.m.
hey
hey
what are you up to
not much
homework and stuff
cool
listen,
I know we don’t really talk abt what happened last summer or what’s going on with your friend
but I wanted to say
I’m here if you ever need someone
to listen or whatever
or to distract you from what’s happening
if you don’t want to talk about it
that’s cool too
whatever you need, I’m here
just wanted to say that
I hope I didn’t make things weird bringing it up
sorry if I did
no, it’s fine
thanks
that means a lot
really
I’m good for now but I’ll let you know if I need to talk
ok cool
see you at lunch?
yup, see you then
Camper and Counselor Interviews, Statements, and Posts
August 14–November 24
“The night of the big rainstorm, we were in the mess hall, playing charades in groups of ten. Jackson wasn’t on our team at first, but he switched with someone so he could be with Lainie. Anyway. When his turn came, the phrase we had to guess was ‘one brick at a time’ and at first he was pantomiming the work of a bricklayer, but no one got it, so he made the ‘sounds like’ symbol for the second word, and started pointing to his crotch and miming like he was jerking off. Half the group was laughing too hard to guess and the rest of us were trying not to barf, and then time ran out and we didn’t get it. Jackson threw his hands up and yelled ‘Brick! Sounds like dick!’ and shook his head like he was annoyed we were all so stupid. He was being a jerk. Lainie stood behind him and acted out picking up one of the invisible bricks he’d been building a wall with before, and hitting him over the head with it. Everyone cheered and she took a bow, and Jackson was grumpy like I thought maybe he might storm off, but he lifted her up and swung her around and she kicked and they both started laughing. It was Lainie’s turn next and she had ‘three peas in a pod’ and Kayla guessed it right away and I forgot about the brick thing until now but it’s weird, right? Like, a little too on point.”
Nobody Knows But You Page 10