by L. E. Flynn
Her password. j-e-r-s-e-y-g-i-r-l. She must have changed it before she left, a lifeline tossed out for someone who knew her well enough to go looking.
“You drove her away,” I say. “What happened after that?”
“I went,” he says. “To New Jersey. This town called Lambertville on the Delaware River. I was going to be there and she was going to see that I was the one who cared. The guy who was always there for her. And we were going to come back home together.”
I thought about Trixie’s funeral, about how Jasper wasn’t there. Now I know where he was. I tried to picture Trixie seeing him instead of Toby, the way disappointment and shock would sharpen her features.
“But what happened? She wouldn’t come back with you?”
Jasper looks around again. I’m very aware that the door to my room is closed. The doctor said I could press the button on my bed if I needed help, but maybe help won’t get here fast enough. My hand hovers over the button.
“It was an accident,” he practically whispers. “She was standing on this bridge, where I told her to meet Toby. To meet me. I came up behind her and put my hands over her eyes. She turned around and smiled, then she saw it was me and freaked out.” His voice catches. “She pushed me into the railing. I told her it was me the whole time, that Toby wasn’t coming back. I said we were meant to be together. But she just kept shoving me and trying to punch me. I grabbed her to make her quiet down, and she wouldn’t. She started to scream and that’s when I…” He trails off.
“That’s when you what?” I feel like I’m going to throw up. I ball my hands into weak fists, knowing I can’t do anything with them.
“I shoved her. She was shoving me, and I just shoved back, and I didn’t mean to shove so hard—but she lost her balance and went over. She was wearing that backpack and she just disappeared under the water. I was going to jump in after her but the current was so strong, and I couldn’t even see her anymore. I ran down to the banks, figuring she’d wash up onshore and I could save her. But she never did. I walked back and forth for hours. And the next day I checked the news, and the day after that, and I’m still doing it every single day, because her body must be out there somewhere and it’s going to wash up and somebody’s going to find it.”
He starts to cry in earnest. Obviously, this is the first time he’s telling this story, maybe even the first time he’s admitting to himself what he did. I shared most of this year with a monster. I started kissing Jasper as a way to get revenge on Trixie, but the whole time I was playing house with her killer.
Killer.
Trixie is dead. She really did drown with that backpack on. She really is in a watery grave. Except, she didn’t walk into the water. She was pushed into it. I try to imagine what her last moments were like, the panic that must have spread over her body like fire and ice, the helplessness she felt when the river dragged her under. I wonder if she looked up at Jasper and knew he would be the last person she ever saw. I wonder if she thought about Toby. I wonder if she believed in an afterlife where she would get to be with him.
I can keep wondering forever but what I want to do is go back in the past, to a stupid-hot September day when I was walking to cheerleading practice with Jenny. All I want to do is go to that practice and not run back to my car.
“I’m going to call the police and tell them everything.” The coldness in my voice surprises me. I don’t care about Jasper anymore. Whatever part of me ever cared about him is gone, weighted to the bottom of a river in New Jersey. He once mentioned that Byron St. James remembered all the details because he saw Trixie die and you don’t forget watching a person die. But he was talking about himself the whole time. I wonder how many times a day he sees her face, hears the splash she made when she landed in the water.
“Don’t.” Jasper wipes his face, clears his throat. “Don’t call them. I’ll do it myself. If that’s what you want.”
I almost press the button, but the doctor’s words echo in my ear. You were lucky. Your friend. He made the right call.
“This whole year was one giant lie,” I say. “You knew she wasn’t in Tijuana. You just didn’t want me to get close to figuring it out. You just wanted to keep me in the dark. That’s why you got close to me.”
“No,” Jasper says, reaching for one of my hands. “Tijuana was so you’d see she was gone. I wanted us to move on together. I love you.”
I pull my hands away. “Just like you loved her.”
“We could be together, you know,” he says, hushed. “Keeping this from you almost killed me. Now that you know the truth, and that it was an accident, you know all the dark parts of me. You know I’m not a bad person. I just made a mistake.”
It’s crazy, but for a second, I think about what that would look like, us being together. Nobody would ever know the truth except me and Jasper. I don’t owe Trixie anything. She never cared about me, and Jasper does. He pushed her, but he didn’t mean to kill her. Or at least, that’s what he wants me to believe, and what he wants to believe. Maybe he meant it.
Or maybe he picked that bridge in the first place because he knew it was easy for a person to go over the railing. Maybe he smiled when he heard the splash. Maybe he laughed as he wrote those emails, picturing Trixie’s face when she opened them.
“I swear, Fiona. It was an accident. I messed up so badly, and I have to live with that. But you don’t have to throw away what we have.”
I don’t know what version of Jasper to believe. The one who loved Trixie or the one who says he loves me, the one who killed her or the one who saved my life when he could have left me to die in my bedroom with a burst appendix. I can go to the police and tell them everything, or I can keep it all inside me, stretched under my skin. But for once in my life, I know what I have to do. That’s the thing about choices: When you put them on either side of a scale, they never weigh the same.
One is bound to be heavier.
92
SHE’S NOT COMING back. And I’m not sure I would even want her to. Because I don’t think she would ever forgive me, and I don’t know if I can forgive her either.
I still see her a hundred times a day, in a hundred different girls I pass on the street, in the mall, everywhere. She’s every girl with short blond hair and a lip ring. She’s every girl with long brown hair and a collarbone that juts out. She’s every girl with a cigarette, every girl in denim cutoff shorts. She’s every laughing girl, every crying girl, every girl standing by herself, every girl in a hurry with her head down. She’s everywhere and nowhere, just like she was the whole time I knew her.
Maybe I made the wrong choice, because I still think about the other way my life could have gone. I think a lot about choices these days. Not just the huge, colossal ones that plant themselves like boulders in front of you. Those start to crash down, even when you push your whole weight against them. Those, inevitably, will crush you.
But so will the pebbles, the little bits of plaster that crumble down. You don’t think about those at the time. They’re so small, so insignificant. You wipe off the dust and forget about them. You shouldn’t. Because being buried alive really does happen.
I chose to blow off cheerleading that day, and I chose to drive with her away from Robson. I chose Trixie, and she chose me. I thought I knew her, but everything was the opposite. Her happy was sad. Her sad was jealous. Her jealous was angry. She wore her emotions like clothes, and none of them fit right.
Sometimes I think of me and Trixie as people in one of Alison’s favorite rom-com movies, except without the happy ending. She picked me for a reason, because she wanted to break Beau for the way he wrecked her life. She didn’t care about what it would do to me, not at first. But it became about a lot more than revenge to her. It turned into friendship and sisterhood, and when she left to find Toby, I like to think it was hard for her to leave me.
I could be wrong. But I don’t think anyone can lie that well.
EPILOGUE
Six months later
WINTER IS EVERYTHING I thought it would be. Big coats and fuzzy hats and mittens and boots. Snow, actual snow, not just shaving cream and baking soda. Sometimes, when I’m all bundled up and trudging across campus, I feel tiny, like I could disappear going from my dorm room to the lecture hall and nobody would even notice.
I have disappeared, but only from the broken versions of myself, and reappeared as someone I want to be. I cut my hair short and used my graduation money from Mom to buy a new sewing machine, a big one that sits in the corner of my dorm room and takes up too much space. I haven’t done anything with it yet, but I will. I don’t talk to Dr. Rosenthal anymore, but I’m seeing someone here. Little by little, I’m trying to be nicer to myself, to not feel like such a prisoner in my own body. Maybe one day I’ll even like who I see when I look in the mirror.
I’m starting to understand Trixie more and more, why she got so deep into becoming somebody else. It’s easier than I thought it would be to shed my old skin. Nobody here knows anything about me or Trixie or any of last year. I make myself talk to everybody. I go to the bar with my fake ID and drink frothy beers out of huge pint glasses. I study in the drafty library with hot chocolate. I have a group of friends, including Alison—who is in two of my classes. We’re not like we used to be, but we might be able to get there again. Right now, I don’t let anyone get too close. Trixie left a space that is not only too big, but too oddly shaped for me to ever fill, no matter how many people I try to stuff into it.
Sometimes I think I’m just a repeat of the women in my life who made huge mistakes. I’m my mom, a teenager dealing with things so much bigger than she is. I’m Jenny, whose heart got broken in a million pieces. I’m Trixie, a girl who loved the wrong boy and lied to protect that love. But mostly I’m just me, a girl who figured out who she was the hard way.
Today, I can’t pay attention because this lecture room has windows and all I want to do is watch the snow falling outside, big fat flakes and little flurries. Everything is white. Blanked out. A fresh slate. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
He’s waiting for me after class, standing in the stairwell outside Intro to Fashion Design. He’s put on weight since last year. His jawline isn’t as sharp and his ribs don’t jut out and his arms are meaty where they used to be wiry. I like feeling smaller than him, I like how his body curves around mine in my little dorm room bed.
He wraps me in a one-armed hug and kisses my cheek. He’s holding out a coffee. I smile and take it, and now that both his hands are free, he puts one on each of my cheeks. One is hot and the other is ice-cold. He has stubble on his cheeks and chin, and it’s coarse against my skin as he gently places his lips on mine.
“‘The heart will break, yet brokenly live on,’” he whispers so quietly the wind almost carries away his words.
“Lord Byron,” I say. He bought me a real book, just like he said he would, but I kept the disintegrated one too, because it’s a reminder that you can dig up the past and, sometimes, you can fix what was wrong with it.
We walk across Washington Square Park holding hands. We’re together now. Boyfriend and girlfriend, out in the open. He doesn’t go to school, but now that he’s clean, now that he goes to AA meetings every day, he’s thinking about starting next year, maybe studying poetry. Or astronomy. He rides his bike everywhere, and sometimes I ride on it with him, gripping the handlebars tightly. We can’t go back to the people we were, but the people we are feel something like okay.
“I love you,” Beau says, spinning me around to kiss me in the snow. After everything, all the times I wanted to say it to his face, he was the one to say it first.
It was always Beau. He was always the choice that weighed the most. I didn’t report Jasper to the police, because after I told him I would, he went and turned himself in. He’s spending the next several years at a psychiatric hospital in Chula Vista. Maybe I’ll visit him one day, but probably not. We wrote emails to each other for a while, which is morbid in itself, considering emails were the trail that led Trixie out of her life and onto that bridge. Sometimes I wish I could fully hate him, cut off all communication with him and pretend he doesn’t exist. But the truth is, he’s the last link I have to Trixie, and he might have saved my life. That bond is something I wish could cave in on itself, but it never will.
I got an envelope in the mail from him yesterday, a picture of me and Trixie. The one that used to be in our locker, the one that disappeared from the frame. Just the picture—no note, no explanation.
Maybe we have both said all we could possibly say.
I think about what his jealousy drove him to do and I can’t breathe, because I used to be jealous too. Jealous of Trixie, jealous of Jenny, jealous of people who had what I didn’t. Jealousy is on the inside like a bad appendix, something you don’t need that can burst and destroy you. Maybe I was closer than I think to letting it ruin me.
I still have the list, the one I made with REASONS WHY TRIXIE DISAPPEARED written at the top of the page. There’s still only one name under it: Jasper Hart. Turns out, I was right the entire time, from the very beginning.
“What are you thinking about?” Beau asks as we descend a hill, our boots crunching the snow underfoot.
I kiss him again. He asks me that a lot. What are you thinking about? I never tell him the truth. We don’t talk about Jasper. We don’t talk about what happened between Toby and Trixie. I know that Beau likes to pretend they’re out there together, that they both found their way to the surface and met up somewhere in the world. He likes the lie—points out that no bodies were ever found to prove otherwise.
I don’t tell him I’m thinking about them. I never do. We’re supposed to have moved on. So in a way, I guess I’m still lying, and I always will be.
“I’m thinking,” I say, “that I want us to build a snowman. A real one.”
So right there, halfway between the lecture hall and my dorm room, somewhere between my old life and this new place, we do.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I STARTED WRITING what would become Last Girl Lied To while flying to Costa Rica for my honeymoon. Looking out the airplane window, I considered the vastness of the world, and how easy it would be for a person to disappear into it. From there, I wondered what would make someone want to vanish entirely, and Trixie Heller was born. (I promise, the rest of my honeymoon was not morbid.)
I’m incredibly fortunate to have worked with an amazing team to make Last Girl Lied To come to life. Thank you to my agent, Kathleen Rushall, for believing in this book and helping it find the perfect home. To my editor, Erin Stein, whose brilliant insights made the story both darker and more incisive. To Nicole Otto, for your editing prowess. To Natalie Sousa, Connie Gabbert, and Jessica Chung, for creating a cover that perfectly encapsulates the pages within. To Dawn Ryan and Kerry Johnson, for whipping this story into shape with their copyediting magic. (Apparently I’ll never know how to properly use further/farther.) Thanks also to production manager Raymond Ernesto Colón, and everyone at Imprint who helped Last Girl Lied To become a book.
I’m not sure where I would be without my critique partner and writer friends. Endless hugs to Emily Martin for years of support and friendship, and the many hours you have devoted to reading my work (and my long, rambling emails). You understand my books so well and your suggestions always make them better. Move to Canada so we can hang out more in person! Panda love to Samantha Joyce, who always lends an ear and champions my writing (and makes the coolest book-cover cupcakes you’ve ever seen). Wine and cheese to Marci Lyn Curtis for the hilarious DM chats, book love, and Jax Teller GIFs. (Keep sending those, please!) To all of my Sweet Sixteen and Sixteen to Read friends—I’m honored to still be on this crazy roller coaster with you years after we debuted, and I’m excited for our careers to keep evolving. Thank you for encouraging mine.
My biggest supporters have always nurtured my unruly imagination, starting with the two people who knew I was meant to be a writer: my parents, Denis and Lucy Burns.
Thank you for literally everything—for cheering on every crazy dream I’ve had to sending me home with leftovers aplenty because you know I have no time to cook. I hope to raise my daughter to be fearless and bold, just as you raised me. I love you both more than I could ever say.
To my sister/BFF, Erin Shakes—you’ll always be my partner in crime, no matter how old we get. Thanks for all the chips and dip nights, shopping trips, and many (many) shared bottles of wine. I’m so glad we both have little girls (hi, Fiona!) who can grow up to be as close as we are. To my brother-in-law Jermaine Shakes, thanks for your energy and positivity, and for recommending my books to all your family and friends.
Thank you to the entire Flynn clan for your bottomless support. To the best in-laws, Jim and Doreen, and a special shout-out to Suzanne for telling literally everybody about my debut. To my many girlfriends—you know who you are, and I consider myself lucky to be surrounded by so many inspiring women. To the ladies of the RBF row for never failing to make me laugh (often at myself). To my extended family, especially Aunt Linda, Uncle Tom, and Aunt Pat, for being here for all of my milestones. And to my guardian angels Grandma Gibb and Grandma Burns, who I know are looking out for me from somewhere right now.
A thousand butterfly kisses for my daughter, Astrid, for being the sunshine in every single day and my forever muse. I want to write strong, complicated girls that you can someday read about. (Just not quite yet.) Undying love for my husband, Steve, for indulging my writerly whims and giving me the time and space I need to create characters and their stories. Thanks for bouncing ideas around, walking miles in the woods, hugging me when I need it (always!), and loving me even when I’m in my own little world (also, most always). I couldn’t imagine building a life with anyone else but you.