She collected all the books and DVDs she had borrowed from Teddy over the years in a box and labeled it Teddy Lawrence, just so her parents would know what to do.
For Jenna, Elin couldn’t do anything particularly out of the ordinary. They studied together at Elin’s house on Thursday night, the night before, like always, except for one thing. Elin loved studying with the television on in the background, a habit Jenna barely tolerated. That night, without saying why, Elin turned off the TV as soon they opened their textbooks. Jenna glanced up at her, a pleased but puzzled smile on her face. Elin shrugged, smiled, and turned back to studying.
And then she went through with it.
Elin remembered staring at the ceiling of the bathroom, during, and feeling like time was slowing down. Every blink took an eon, her lids heavy. They’re the top of my coffin, she thought dreamily, and the thought repeated itself in her brain. Top of my coffin, top of my coffin.
The water was warm and kind of pretty. Pink, with a growing red cloud by her left wrist. Just one wrist, because when she took the razor blade in her other hand, she was already too dizzy to finish. It didn’t hurt. It felt like someone else’s arm.
Her mouth tasted bitter from the wine, and she wished she’d thought of mouthwash, but she was too tired to stand up and get some, and the taste was fading anyway.
Elin smelled lilacs, the candles she’d lit. Her favorite smell. She’d heard in science once that the sense of smell is the oldest, evolutionarily-speaking, and the last to go. She didn’t know if that was true or not, but if it was, she wanted her very last thought to be lilacs.
Elin didn’t remember the door to the bathroom opening.
Elin didn’t remember if she screamed or gasped or simply sprang into action.
She just remembered the paramedics.
After.
33
Ket West-Beauchamp
April 18, 11:00 PM
You would think, as the only daughter of a lesbian couple, that I would be well-versed in the ways of Ladyhood. Not so. Neither of my moms ever covered how you’re supposed to sit on a dirty sidewalk in a sequined mini and keep your lacy delicates under wraps. I sat on the edge of the curb, trying to minimize the damage to my dress, ankles crossed to the side and thighs locked together like my life depended on it.
Jenna leaned on my shoulder, nearly passed out.
It was hard to stay mad at someone who was barely conscious, but I’m a trooper. I stared straight ahead, waiting for our ride and refusing to talk to her.
After Rosie and FDR decided to continue their wild goose chase looking for Elin, I stayed with Jenna, waiting for a ride to take us back to prom. Where Jenna would work her magic to get Hannah away from Ben for the evening so Elin could finally talk to him.
And then I would work my magic on Vaughn.
Listening to Jenna’s semi-snores as my ass went numb had done wonders for my resolve. The more the minutes ticked away, the easier it was for Outer Ket to rationalize our actions to Inner Ket. I was a liberated woman, right? I knew how birth control worked. And if Vaughn did break his word and our little tape found its way into the Big, Wide World, well. Screw the haters, right? Sex Positivity, Freedom of Expression, and All That?
Sure. That’d work.
The only trouble with this rationale was the person I’d had to call for a ride. Because even though Jenna’s car was still right-freaking-here, it hadn’t occurred to me until it was too late that Rosie—the only other person in the world I knew who could drive stick—had just run off with Fisher’s date.
Teddy’s car pulled up to the curb right as Jenna finally passed out, her head slumped onto my shoulder. He rolled down the passenger side window. “Are you guys okay?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, eyes on the sidewalk as I wrapped my arms around Jenna’s waist and tried to hoist her up. She slumped limply, her eyes slitted and glazed. I ground my teeth and resisted kicking her. “Scratch that. Could you help me?”
We were able to get Jenna settled into the backseat, belted in as best we could. I tried twisting around to inspect the state of my butt before climbing into the passenger seat, but the cat-calling from the bar’s patio told me I was better off just climbing in the car and conducting my derriere inspection in private.
“So you guys still have no idea where Elin ran off?” Teddy asked as he buckled himself in and started the car.
I glanced at my cell phone. My last two texts to Rosie had gone unanswered. “Not yet,” I said. “But I’m sure she’ll turn up soon.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Teddy said, his voice tense.
I glanced over at him. His eyes were glued to the road, but the dim neon of the dash revealed his jaw was clenched. I glanced down at my lap, ashamed. “Teddy, I’m seriously so sorry.”
“What the fuck, Ket!” Teddy burst out, the muscles in his forearms corded as he gripped the steering wheel. “You beg me to come to prom, and then the first chance you get you send me off to play chauffeur for Fisher Reese?”
I leaned my elbow against the car door, propping my head against my fist. Teddy wasn’t an idiot, so I had two choices: tell him the truth, that I couldn’t stomach the idea of him being around while I planned to sleep with Vaughn again, or give him an excuse he would believe.
I wished I was a good person, the sort of person who wouldn’t have the perfect lie pop right into her head. But I wasn’t a good person, and I knew exactly what I could say to get Teddy off my back.
Rosie likes FDR and I was trying to wingman for her—she wouldn’t have even smiled at him with you around.
Simple.
Believable.
Heart Shattering.
In one sentence, I would save myself—and undo two months of bridge-building I’d been doing for Rosie and Teddy.
Which was no choice at all. I couldn’t hurt Teddy or Rosie.
But the thought of Teddy finding out about Vaughn … unbearable.
The silence between us stretched into an eternity. “Would you believe me if I promised to explain everything tomorrow?” I whispered, voice cracking.
I thought he would yell but nothing came from his side of the car. For ten minutes, we drove back to school in silence.
“Do you hear that?” Teddy asked suddenly as we were stopped at a red light.
I turned in my seat to check on Jenna. “Jen? You okay, dude?”
She mumbled something incoherently, one arm thrown over her face like she was blocking out the sun. She raised the other and knocked it into the back of my seat.
“Is she reciting SAT words?” Teddy asked incredulously.
I rolled my eyes. “Probably.” I twisted back around. “Jen, is there a word that means ‘person who commits misdemeanors?’”
Jenna groaned, and for a second I thought she wasn’t going to answer. “Misdemeanant,” she said finally, voice raspy and thick. “Why do you need to know?”
Teddy and I looked at each other. Teddy’s lip twitched as he tried to hold back a smile. He glanced up at his rearview mirror, twisting it down so he could see her. “I’m not impressed until you translate that into Chinese,” he said.
“Fuck off, Lawrence,” Jenna muttered.
Teddy snorted, choking on laughter. The light turned green and he accelerated, turning the radio on low. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and nodded. I smiled, relief spreading through my chest as we drove the rest of the way to school.
Finally we arrived back at the dance. Teddy put the car in park, but he didn’t shut the engine off. We sat in the idling car, listening to a check cashing company commercial, neither of us saying a word.
“I wish you guys would tell me what is going on,” Teddy said, softly, so just I would hear over the music.
I turned to stare out the window. “It’s not our secret to tell,” I said finally.
And then Teddy did something he had never done in almost ten years of friendship.
He reached across the console and took my hand.
My breath caught in my throat. Teddy laced his fingers through mine, his skin rough and warm. I broke out in gooseflesh when the base of his palm pressed against mine.
He’s just being a friend. He’s in love with Rosie.
Yeah, tell that to the Naughty Tingles in my loins.
I swallowed, hoping that he couldn’t tell how much his stupid hand in mine affected me.
“How big is the trouble that Elin’s in?” Teddy asked softly.
I bit my lip. “Big,” I admitted.
“Then you can tell me tomorrow.”
34
Rosie Winchester
April 18, 11:00 PM
I stared out at the passing buildings. The roads glistened under lamplights, the only evidence of the snow that had fallen earlier in the evening. Elin had left FDR’s car unlocked, keys in the ignition, and for once I was grateful for her natural flakiness. I gripped the handle above the window nervously, flipping my phone open and shut with my other hand.
“Who still has a flip phone?” FDR joked, breaking the silence. “Is that thing an antique?”
I stopped flipping my phone open and shut. “I’m on my dad’s cell phone plan.”
FDR glanced over at me. “That’s not an answer.”
I shrugged. “My dad gave it to me. My mom wanted me to have an iPhone, but he said they were too expensive. He thinks my mom is materialistic and that I’m always on her side, so I acted like my flip phone was the coolest, even when all my friends were getting smartphones.”
FDR smiled faintly. “That’s kind of a sweet story.”
I shrugged again. “Not really.” I stared at the dash of FDR’s car—red and blue neon lights, glowing like a spaceship.
“How so?”
I paused. I had never told anyone the rest—not even Teddy. But FDR was a stranger, a guy I would never see again. I felt the words bubbling up and out of my mouth. “Two years ago, my dad got an iPhone for himself and one for his new wife. The upgrade for my number, actually,” I said, turning my phone over in my hands.
“He never even said anything, never explained why it was materialistic when I wanted an iPhone, but normal when his wife did. I was so pissed, but whenever I get pissed, he says I’m acting like my mother. My mom said she would buy me whatever phone I wanted. She said it was to cheer me up, but really she wanted to … spite him, I guess. So I asked for a tablet so I could still get online and play music and read, but kept this phone for calls and texting.”
FDR said nothing. I flipped it open, flipped it shut. Gone this far, might as well finish. “I wanted to be the one to spite him,” I said finally. “Keep the shitty phone he gave me until it broke.”
“That’s messed up,” FDR said finally.
I felt heat creeping up my neck and into my cheeks. “I know.”
“Not you,” he said. “Your parents. That’s messed up.”
The knot in my chest loosened with relief that he understood, followed by a familiar wave of shame.
The more I talked about how horrible they were, the more I was like them.
(It’s inevitable that I will be like them.)
I tucked my phone into my clutch. “I don’t really want to talk about this,” I said. “Can we just focus on finding Elin?”
“You got it,” FDR said as he pulled up to the curb of the library and turned off his car. Sitting in silence, we stared at the old building. Elin, are you in there? I wondered.
Ever since she was a kid, Elin had had a thing for this building. When other kids were having birthdays at McDonalds or Lagoon, Elin’s parents rented out the children’s reading room. Pictures of Elin and Jenna, standing side by side from ages five to eleven, were tacked on the walls in her room at home. Even now that she was older, she liked to meet up on the front steps for frozen yogurt in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter.
If the lawn had been blanketed with fresh snow, we’d be able to see the telltale sign of footprints and know we were on the right track. But none of the snow that had fallen earlier had stuck, and the building was surrounded by dead, raffia-looking grass and heaps of crusty, gray snow. Anyone could have passed by here and we’d have no way of knowing.
For a second, I wished that it were Jenna here, tackling this problem. She never hesitated in the face of a problem. It was truly some sort of cosmic joke that she was drunk and I was here.
Sighing, I opened my car door. (Pretend you’re braver than you are.) FDR and I ran across the grass to the library. We crept along the side of the building, checking each window to see if one was open. Part of me hoped that none of them were, that this was a wild goose chase, and I could finally just call the police and have someone else take over.
“Hey,” whispered FDR, a few yards down from me. “This one is open.”
So much for the wild goose chase theory.
FDR shoved the window open and then both of us stared at the opening, just slightly higher than I could vault into myself.
A beat went by with neither of us saying anything, and then FDR grabbed me around the waist, lifting me without asking. I sucked in a sharp breath. He set me on the windowsill, and I gathered the skirt of my dress around my knees so it didn’t catch, swinging my legs into the building. FDR boosted himself up and landed lightly beside me.
I squinted, trying to adjust my eyes to the darkness. We were in the children’s reading room. Dr. Seuss cutouts plastered the walls, Sneetches and Thing One and Two and the Lorax.
They were creepy in the dark.
“Elin?” I whispered. I held my breath, straining to hear any reply.
Nothing.
FDR walked slowly to the door, his hands out in front of him to avoid smacking into furniture. “I don’t think she’s in this room,” he whispered. “Where do you think she’d be?”
“The arbor area,” I whispered immediately. “It’s her favorite.”
We made our way through stacks and shelves. FDR pulled out his phone and we advanced to the glow of his flashlight app. There was barely enough light to see four feet in front of us.
Out in the hall, every footstep echoed like a drum.
I shrugged off FDR’s suit jacket—it was drowning me anyway. “Thanks,” I whispered.
He accepted it in silence, holding his phone between his teeth while he put it back on.
We crept from room to room in the library, FDR holding out his phone to light our way. Shadows shifted between rows of shelves of books. I shuddered, only partly because of the cold—there was something disturbing about buildings you never saw at night.
And then I heard something.
I stopped, frozen in my tracks. “Do you hear that?” I whispered.
FDR didn’t reply, but he slowed to a stop. His hand reached back toward mine, and almost unconsciously I felt myself reaching for him in return. Our fingers tangled together and I inched forward on my tiptoes, unwilling to let my heels touch the floor.
“I’m not sure,” FDR began, his whisper barely audible. “I thought I did …”
I paused, straining my ears. I didn’t know if it was my imagination, but I thought I heard … footsteps up ahead. My pulse quickened—Elin?
But as the footsteps grew louder, echoing in the empty hallways, I grabbed FDR’s arm with my free hand and his grip on my fingers tightened.
The sounds were too loud to be a girl in heels.
The spotlight of a handheld flashlight skimmed over the wall, the footsteps growing louder from around the corner.
I stepped backward, and my heel slid out from under me, sending me tumbling to the ground. I winced at the pain that shot up my tailbone. Without missing a beat, FDR grabbed me under my arms and pulled me off my feet, wrapping his arm around my waist and preventing my heels from clicking against the tile.
The spotlight turned the corner, a barely-visible silhouette approaching.
And FDR pulled me into a broom closet.
35
Jenna Sinclair
April 18, 11:15 PM
>
Ket snuck me into the teachers’ lounge women’s room while Teddy went to find some food to sober me up. I blinked against the unflattering fluorescent light, holding up a hand to shield my vision. I groaned.
Was it only a few hours ago that I had looked as stereotypically prommy as a girl could hope to look? Now my makeup was smeared, my skin pale and greenish. My hair was half curled and half frizzy-flat, so I retied my headband and pulled my hair into a knot at the base of my neck, hoping to gain some semblance of … semblance.
On the ride over, I had felt like I was going to die. Not hyperbolically, not figuratively, but literally-in-the-literal-sense like I was going to close my eyes and never open them again. I’d drunk too much, taken too many pain pills. I couldn’t even remember if I’d taken two or three. I’d spent my whole life being fastidiously perfect and now I was a freaking cliché. What were my parents going to think? What about Miles? The thought sent panic coursing through my veins.
I wonder if Elin had felt like this, before. Like maybe she hadn’t wanted to hurt herself, but a series of bad decisions just … happened?
I’d thrown up on the curb after Teddy and Ket had helped me out of the car, stomach acid coming up and burning my throat, but it had helped a little. I still looked like a sparkly nineteenth-century saloon hooker, though. At least Miles wasn’t here to see me—I’d texted him to ask if he wouldn’t mind going to Fisher’s party and keeping Ben there until Elin could talk to him. He’d texted back that he’d head there as soon as the video game ended.
Ket leaned against the door, a guard against intruders. She was pretending to check her text messages, nonchalant, but I knew she was freaked out. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“I always know what I’m doing,” I said. Equivocate: to use ambiguous language to obscure the truth or avoid committing oneself.
“After tonight, I’m not so sure,” Ket muttered.
I said nothing. She had a point. And I didn’t have much fight left in me.
I’d heard on NPR once that many organizations suffer inefficiencies because of something called the “confidence gap.” The least competent people were usually the most confident. The most competent people were more aware of their weaknesses, and therefore doubted themselves the most.
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