I mean, it was all on me. I kissed her. At first, she didn’t even kiss me back. But then, yeah, after a bit she got into it.
The whole time I was kissing Lauren, I was thinking, Stop. Stop, you idiot. And when it was over we were both like, crap, that did not just happen. I remember the first thing out of Lauren’s mouth was, We cannot tell Kady. Please don’t tell Kady. Which was fine by me. That was the last thing I wanted to do.
Because this would kill her, Lauren said.
Mason: Anyway, I don’t know how, but Kadence found out about me and Lauren being in the fort together, and the next day at lunch, she stormed over to where Lauren was sitting and yanked her up by her hair.
Kopitzke: Her hair?
Mason: I know. Lauren yelled something like, “What the hell?” and Kadence went all ballistic. She yelled, “You slept with my boyfriend?” super loud. Everyone heard it. I was like, Holy crap. And Lauren was like, “Are you insane?” Because we hadn’t done anything close to that. And Kadence was like, “I know everything!” She was devastated. It was tearing me apart inside.
Kopitzke: Then what happened?
Mason: Then Lauren turned her back, and Kadence grabbed her around the shoulders and spun her around. I don’t think Kadence pushed her exactly, but Lauren went down hard. People were yelling “Fight! Fight!” because two girls fighting is pretty rare, and those two best friends fighting…
I glance down at the tape recorder and stop talking as my thoughts go someplace dark. I should have stepped in. I should have manned up and owned my part in the whole thing. I shouldn’t have left Lauren alone to defend herself. The trouble was, I didn’t know who I was supposed to go to. Was I supposed to rush in and comfort my girlfriend? Or was I supposed to help my friend, who was lying on the floor?
I remember some guy was standing behind me in the doorway to the cafeteria. He nudged me in the shoulder and said, “Dude! Did you really sleep with Lauren DeSanto?” And it froze me solid, right in the spot where I was standing.
Kopitzke: Did Lauren fight back?
Mason: No. She stood up and walked out of the cafeteria like it was nothing. It was almost eerie how calm she was. And the whole time, Kadence stood there crying. Some girls went up to her. I wanted to go to her too. I really did. I wanted to tell her that it was all a big misunderstanding. But I couldn’t talk to Kadence. Not there in front of everyone. So...anyway, I tried to talk to Kady after school, but she wouldn’t give me the chance to explain. We hadn’t talked at all in the days before her show at Cuppa Cuppa. That’s why I didn’t go.
Kopitzke: I was going to ask you about that.
Mason: I thought it would be too upsetting for Kady to have me and Lauren both there. I didn’t want all our shit to distract her from putting on a good show. But if I’d known…if I’d known it was going to be my last chance to see her…Please! I don’t care about anything else. I’d give anything to see her again.
Eighteen
Lauren
Mary Blake’s Residence
Thursday, April 5
5:00 p.m.
It took me and Jude over an hour to track down Mary Blake. She wasn’t listed on the White Pages, and I had to call around to a bunch of old friends—by which I mean Kadence’s friends, many of whom wouldn’t even speak to me—before finding one that had Mary’s new address and was willing to share. Even now that we’ve driven an hour out of town, I’m not 100 percent sure we’re at the right place.
The house looks a lot like mine: a 1960s ranch with shutters on the large picture window. I can predict the layout inside. Living room at the front, kitchen to the back. Three bedrooms and a bath to the right. I wonder what else Mary and I have in common, and I wonder if it even matters.
I’d hoped maybe we could avoid coming here, but Jude’s chat with Jeremy was fruitless. Apparently the guy was still a huge Kady fan despite how much she embarrassed him at the pep rally last year. That was Kady for you. Inspiring devotion and loyalty. How did she do it? Why did we all fall for it?
Jude sets the kickstand on his bike and kills the engine. It seems suddenly too quiet. At first it scared me to be so overpowered by a machine, but Jude makes it feel safe. He never goes too fast or banks the corners too tight, though sometimes I still have to close my eyes. He seems protective of me.
“Stay on the bike,” he says as he removes his helmet. I take mine off too. “I’ll be able to see you the whole time, but I should probably talk to her alone.”
It’s nice to know we’re on the same page. After what happened with Caleb, clearly I am not an asset to this investigation. As I asked Jude before we set out, who on our list is going to admit any guilt when the perfect scapegoat is standing right in front of them? You’d have to be an idiot, and I don’t remember Mary Blake being an idiot.
Jude had said not to worry, that he had a plan. He’d revved the Harley to life before I could ask anything else.
“What are you going to say to her?” I ask now that we’ve stopped in front of Mary’s house. I pull my jacket tighter around me.
“I’m going to thank her.” He takes off his gloves and shoves them in his pockets. The bike rocks under us as he shifts his weight.
“Thank her?” I ask to the back of his head.
“Yeah. I thought of it too late when we were talking to Caleb. It might have worked better with him, but I’m going to thank her for doing what I wasn’t brave enough to do myself—taking care of the Queen Witch for good. Then I’m going to sit back and see how she responds.”
“Be ready to duck,” I say.
“Huh?” he asks with a halfway glance back.
“You’re a stranger. You’re planning to go to her door and thank her for offing somebody? You’re going to be lucky if she doesn’t punch you in the face.”
“Yeah, okay,” he says with a quiet chuckle.
I put my helmet back on. Anonymity is my friend.
I watch Jude walk up the sidewalk. Last year’s brown grass fills the cracks. A part of me wishes Jude had parked his bike farther away, or that we’d brought a car. I feel vulnerable and exposed sitting out here in the open, alone at the curb. I glance over one shoulder, then the other.
The street is quiet.
Jude knocks on the front door and glances back at me with a confident smile. A minute passes. No one answers, though I think I see some movement at the curtains on the picture window. He knocks again. Another minute.
I’m about to call, “Hey, let’s go,” when the door opens and a tall, blond girl is standing in its frame. She’s wearing jeans and an oversized, shapeless sweatshirt. Her long hair hangs forward, shielding her face.
I can’t hear her very well. I assume she says, “Yeah?”
If it really is Mary Blake, her teeth look good. At least as far as I can tell from the curb. I wonder if she got braces. I don’t think she recognizes Jude, but then nobody does. She has to be wondering who this hot guy is standing on her doorstep, but she doesn’t flirt or even smile. Her face is absolutely flat. If anything, I detect a hint of fear.
Jude shifts from one foot to the other, and I assume he’s trying out his plan to build rapport—one victim to another. As he talks, Mary’s face takes on a look of incredulity, then there’s a flash of pain.
She looks past his shoulder to where I’m sitting. I’m tense. Spine straight, shoulders stiff. I’m dwarfed by the size of the bike and must look like a nervous little kid.
I sense an intake of breath. Whether it’s hers or mine, I can’t tell.
“You!” she screams, launching herself from her doorstep. Jude swings sideways like a matador dodging a raging bull.
I don’t have a second to process what’s going on before she has crossed her front yard. I feel hands on my shoulders, then the next moment I am sailing backwards, looking at the sky. I have a weird slow-motion moment where I consciously think about how
nice the clouds look, and then my helmet bounces off the concrete. BOOM! Boom. boom.
I slide on the ground and feel the roadway digging into my back. A second later the helmet is ripped from my head, wrenching my ears.
“Ow!” I cry, and the response to my pain is a sharp slap across the face. So I guess Mary Blake can be taken at her word. Payback certainly is a bitch.
“Hey!” Jude says. “Get off her!” Mary is pummeling my body with her fists. I cover my face, deflecting the blows as best I can because this girl is fighting like a Class A freak.
Jude wraps his arms around Mary and pulls her off me. Her legs kick and swing, circling in the air like she’s doing some elaborate dance routine meant to maim me.
“You bitch!” she screams. “How dare you come here?”
“Settle down!” Jude yells. “Settle DOWN!” But it doesn’t look like his words are having any effect on Mary, who must be having some kind of psychotic break because I’ve never seen anybody use their body like that—every part of her working independently to wound me.
“You ruined my life!” She’s still screaming, completely enraged. I crab-walk backwards, then scramble to my feet.
“I didn’t do anything to you!”
“Bullshit!” She spits at me, but misses.
Jude is still holding her back. “Lauren’s not who you’re mad at, Mary.”
“Like hell she isn’t,” Mary says. “She stole my boyfriend and ruined my life.”
“Not me,” I say, holding my hands up, ready to defend myself if Jude loses his grip. “Kady. Kady did that.”
“Kadence?” she asks. It’s the first time I see any drop in her hostility. But then it’s back. “You probably killed her, and now you want to blame all your sins on her? You’re disgusting! How can you live with yourself? Why are the police letting you walk around like this?”
“Mary,” I say, doing my best to keep my voice level. “You’ve made a mistake. Or well, not a mistake. You’ve just been led to believe the wrong thing.”
“You don’t get to tell me anything. You don’t have the right to say a word to me. You stole Nick from me, and then Donny Mikkelson…He…he…” A ragged sob rips up and out of Mary’s throat. Tears snake down her cheeks in little rivers.
Jude and I exchange one confused look. I feel a little sick hearing Donny’s name. Neither of us understands what he has to do with anything, but our shoulders slump simultaneously because we both know who he is. Donny graduated last year and infamously got kicked off the hockey team when he was a junior for unnecessary roughness. The hockey team of all things. There are other rumors about him too. He’s never been charged with anything, but I wouldn’t want him left alone in a room with anyone I cared about. Any girl anyway.
How have I never heard any of this before? The look on Mary’s face answers my question. She can’t believe how close she’s come to admitting the truth to us. Here. Now. This is why she changed schools. The R-word hangs heavy in the air between us. I feel sick to my stomach. I try not to fill in the blanks of what happened to Mary. I don’t need that mental image. It’s horrible enough that Mary lived through it.
Mary lets out a feral scream and thrashes in Jude’s arms.
He lets go of her immediately, his hands in the air. “Easy,” he says, positioning himself between me and Mary. He faces her. She stumbles back from him, heaving in deep gulps of air. She wraps her arms around her middle. My hand goes to my mouth. She’s like a wounded animal. This is not the girl I remember. Mary Blake, who could give Kadence Mulligan a run for her money as far as confidence and showmanship on stage.
Jude continues talking, his voice gentle. “I won’t touch you again. I just didn’t want you to hurt Lauren. I’m sorry about what happened to you, Mary. So sorry.” His compassion is genuine. I spent enough time around Kadence to know the difference. “But it’s not Lauren’s fault.”
“It is completely her fault,” she says, reaching around Jude and poking me hard in the chest. “I only went out with Donny to get back at Nick. I never would have done it if not for you.”
“I didn’t do anything with Nick,” I protest weakly. “It was Kady.” Mary looks at me with such accusation, such hatred.
“Nick told me it was you,” she says.
“Well, then Nick lied,” I feel the heat creep into my face.
“Why would he lie?” she asks.
Before I can put together an answer, Jude steps in. “Maybe he had something to lose if he didn’t go along with Kady’s lie.”
“Lie?” Mary asks.
“If Nick told you it was Lauren, it was because Kadence made him lie,” Jude says. His confidence in me is surprising, but I’m as thankful for his trust as I am for his explanation.
“It wasn’t me,” I say again, hoping I sound as believable as Jude does. I want to cry but then feel like I don’t even deserve to. Mary is the only one entitled to tears here. After all that’s happened to her…
“Kady?” Mary asks, like she’s struggling to make sense of everything she thought she knew.
“I’m really sorry,” I say. My words don’t do justice to what I’m really feeling. How do you even begin to apologize for something like that? Is “apologize” even the right word? “Sorry” is an inadequate word too. Maybe all words are inadequate. Even for a wordsmith, language fails in moments like these. “About everything,” I continue lamely. “But do you have any idea what happened to her?”
“What?” she asks, looking back and forth between me and Jude. “Kady? No. No. Should I?” Her eyes settle on me. I can tell it’s going to take her a long time to see me any differently than she has for the last year.
Behind us, the front door opens and a thin woman with permed hair calls out to us. “Mary? Oh how nice, you have friends visiting! You know your father and I’ve been saying that you should invite people over more. Well, don’t just stand out here, invite them inside! I just frosted a pan of chocolate chip bars.”
“They’re not hungry,” Mary calls to the woman who I assume is her mother.
“Actually, I’m famished,” Jude says.
I look at him incredulously.
“You see!” the woman says, waving us toward the house. “Come in. Come in.”
Jude smiles and leads the way while Mary and I exchange a look of sheer discomfort. I’m pretty sure the last thing Mary Blake predicted when she woke up this morning was that she and I would be eating cookie bars together at her kitchen table. When we get inside, Jude is already sitting and Mary’s mom is pouring milk.
The three of us sit in relative quiet except for Jude making nom nom nom noises. Boys. Nothing ever interferes with their stomachs. Mary picks at her chocolate chip bar with her fingers. I stare out the window at their bird feeder.
Out of nowhere she says, “I was going to be like you.”
“Huh?” I ask, taking my eyes off the birds.
Jude stops chewing.
“I was going to be like you and Kadence. I loved to sing.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I say, smiling. “You beat us for first place at the eighth-grade talent show. You sang that Adele song. “Set Fire to the Rain,” right? We weren’t even a close second.”
“That’s because I had been training. You guys were still just playing around back then.”
“I didn’t know people trained for junior-high talent shows,” Jude says. Both Mary and I look over at him.
“Not for that,” Mary says. “That was just this little thing I did. I was training for something bigger. By the fall of our junior year, I’d made it through two rounds of auditions for a new Nickelodeon TV show. It was like a sketch-variety show. All the kids had to be triple threats: dancers, singers, actors. Singing was my strong suit, but I did pretty good with the others too.”
There’s a beat of silence, then Jude asks, “Who told Kadence?”
> Mary shifts uncomfortably in her chair. “I did. I thought she’d think it was cool. That we had something in common since you guys were starting to record your songs.”
“You bested her.” Jude’s eyes are full of sympathy.
“Only for a minute, I guess,” Mary says.
“What happened with the auditions?” I ask.
She shrugs. “After everything that happened, I asked my mom to call the producer and withdraw my audition tapes. I wasn’t interested anymore. I just wanted to stay home.”
“Kady stole your dream,” Jude says.
“I don’t know,” Mary says with a sad little laugh. “It’s not like I was ever offered the job. I probably wouldn’t have made the final cut.”
By this time, Mary has decimated her chocolate chip bar. It’s completely destroyed and lies in a pile of crumbs at the center of her plate.
Jude tosses back the rest of his milk, then pushes himself up from the table. “That,” he says, pausing for emphasis, “was good, but we should get going now.”
“What?” I ask. That’s it? We’re leaving?
“It’s getting late. Some of us have homework.” He looks down at Mary, his expression softening, but without condescension or pity. “It was nice to meet you.”
“Oh, okay then. I guess we’re going,” I say, but something more needs to be said. “Mary,” I start again, but then I pause. I sense that words are going to fail me again. “It was good to see you. I’m sorry for…everything.”
I try not to visibly cringe at how stupid that sounds. But then I ignore my own discomfort. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how awkward a moment is. I’m reminded of the same thought I had last night with Jude: I want to be the kind of person who helps put people back together, not the kind who tears them down.
“I don’t know what’s best for you—maybe you never want to think about any of us ever again. But if…maybe…you do want to talk to someone, someone who was there, someone who knew what Kady could be like…or just about anything…I’ll leave you my number.”
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