The Girl in the Park

by Mariah Fredericks

  All those signals, all those clues. I saw them, heard them. I just didn’t understand.

  He glances at the door, then says, “You should probably shut that.”

  There are people outside, I think as I close the door. Still, I stay standing by the door, my hands behind my back.

  “You said I should come to you,” I tell him. “If I found out anything.” My voice is calm, steady.

  Shoving back in his chair, he says, “If you found out something that implicated someone other than Nico, yes.”

  At first, his tone is all impatience, dislike. He wants to frighten me with disapproval.

  But then he switches, says with kindness, “By now, I’m hoping you understand better what I said. You see I’m right—”

  “Oh, I do,” I say, seizing the chance. “You were right—about one thing. It was an E pin they found near Wendy.”

  I pause.

  “Your E pin.”

  He laughs slightly. “My—” Then he looks sad. “Oh, Rain.”

  “I know you have one. It says so in the yearbook.”

  “I …” He raises his hands, drops them into his lap. “I do have one, yes.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t wear it because it’s a meaningless status symbol.”

  “Bring it in tomorrow, then. Show me.”

  “I don’t have the first idea where it is.”

  “I think you do. I think you know that it’s your E pin the police have. The one they found near Wendy’s body, the one she pulled off your finger when she tried to pry your hands off her neck before she died.”

  He shakes his head. “Rain, I don’t know what you think you know, but you have to understand …”

  I have done well up till now. I have been cold, detached, as if this is all happening to someone else. But when Farrell says again that I have to understand—as if I could understand—I say rapidly, “No, I actually do not have to understand. There is no understanding what you did. Okay? Here’s what I do understand. I understand that Wendy is dead. And you’re alive. That means her life is over. She rots. While you get to talk to people, to hug your son. You get to breathe, to eat food—”

  He turns his head abruptly. “I don’t eat,” he says quietly. “I don’t sleep.”

  He rubs his eyes, gestures to a chair. “Sit down.”

  “No.”

  “What are you thinking, Rain?”

  “That I should leave. Now. Leave and tell someone.”

  I reach for the doorknob. He stares—I see you, Rain. I think about you.

  I turn the knob, pull the door open.

  “No, wait—” He holds up his hand. I let the door gently swing shut.

  Mr. Farrell doesn’t speak right away. His briefcase is on the table, and he opens it. The picture of his little boy with his bright, loving eyes is still there. He stares at it a long while. Then he slowly closes the lid.

  He whispers, “Before you … do anything, will you listen? Please?”

  And I can’t say no. After all, I am a listener. I take my hand off the knob, nod.

  He sighs deeply, exhaling. “I come from a family of achievers, Rain. Professors, writers, legal scholars. To simply be like everyone else is not enough. Remember,” he says in a voice from far away, “that time in the diner? When I told you I only had eyes for the girls I couldn’t have?”

  I swallow. “Yes.”

  “That was my life here. When I was a student at Alcott. I can’t tell you how many times, how many girls …” He looks at me and I know what he’s talking about. The days you come to school, hoping just to see that person. The joy when you get a chance to talk to them. The dreams you have about them.

  “I didn’t speak to a single one of those girls,” he says. “In fact, I don’t think I spoke to more than five people the entire time I went to school. Nothing beyond the empty ‘Hi’ or ‘Sure, you can borrow my notes.’ I was terrified of getting it wrong. Of giving it away that I was … wrong.” He smiles sadly. “That’s what we all think, isn’t it? In school? That we’re the only ones who aren’t … right, somehow? We keep silent because we’re worried that one wrong word will give it away.”

  I look at the empty walls, remembering how I thought it was so cool that he didn’t slap up a bunch of pictures like the other teachers. He kept it clean, pure. Now I know why. He was afraid he might pick the wrong ones, reveal himself. The blankness isn’t openness; it’s a mask.

  He sits back. “Wendy wasn’t like that, was she? Frightened? Worried? She did exactly what she wanted, never seemed to care about what people thought.” He looks at me. “That’s why we wanted to be near her, as if we could learn.”

  He wants you on his side, I tell myself. He’s trying to make you feel that you and he are alike.

  Coughing slightly, he continues. “Well, I certainly wasn’t like Wendy at school. I was fanatic about doing the right thing.” He drums his fingers on the table. “Homework in on time. Rule follower par excellence. Top of the class, of course. Not a single mistake. But it never seemed to add up to the great … get out of jail free card I expected. I never felt right. Not later at college, not at home. So, I thought, I’ll go back to Alcott. Yes, I’ll be a teacher for a while, but then I’ll sell my novel, be a success. But …”

  “Didn’t work,” I say.

  “No. Except”—his voice cracks—“for the girls. The girls were different. Prettier, sexier. And now they would talk to me. Even flirt with me. But now they were off-limits.” He looks down at the hands in his lap. “Then when Wendy made it clear that she was … interested, I decided that for once, I wasn’t going to …” He corrects himself. “I thought I—” He breaks off.

  Finally he says, “I wanted to see what it felt like to do the wrong thing. Because doing the right thing …”

  I think: being married, being a dad, being a teacher when you want to be a writer.

  “… didn’t feel good.” He sighs this last, stares down at the hands in his lap.

  “So, what did wrong feel like?”

  “Should I tell you awful?” He looks me in the eye. He’s daring me to hear how wonderful Wendy was.

  “Then what happened? If it was so great.”

  He looks down. “Nothing like that is great for long,” he says in a low voice.

  I think of that picture in his briefcase. The little boy with so much love.

  Mr. Farrell continues. “You were right, Rain, when you said Wendy wasn’t good at keeping secrets. When we started, she broke it off with Ellis. Said he was ‘too nice a guy’ to fool, and she didn’t want to pretend. She expected me to not want to pretend too.” He snorts slightly; I am meant to feel irritated with Wendy. How could she want what was so obviously impossible?

  “That’s when I realized, she was a girl who needed people to know she was loved—or what she thought was love.”

  He frowns. “People were starting to notice; Wendy was practically daring them to. So I said, If this is going to continue, you need to be more discreet. You have to keep the secret. And we need a cover, another guy. One who’s not so nice.”

  “Nico.”

  He nods. I wait for signs that he’s ashamed: a turn of the head, a cough, a fidget. Nothing. The fact that he framed one of his own students—with my help—doesn’t seem to bother him.

  I ask, “If Wendy didn’t want to pretend, why’d she agree to it?”

  “She didn’t like it.” Now he drops his head, clearly remembering arguments. “But Nico had treated her pretty badly over the summer. And she liked the idea of getting back at Sasha. Who, as you know, can be unkind.” He gives a tight smile.

  “Wendy seemed to really get into Nico, though.”

  “She did. I wondered at times,” he says slowly, “if she was trying to make me jealous. Frankly, what I hoped was that she would move on to Nico, forget about me.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  He shakes his head. “There started to be these … tests. Would I talk to her with
other people around? Would I show her I cared? Prove it to her. One night I found my wife chatting with her on the phone. That was the wake-up call.”

  “So you told Wendy to get lost and she freaked.”

  “That about covers it,” he says tensely.

  “And you knew she was a girl who knew how to get back at people who hurt her, right? That the way she got back at people was by making a big noisy scene. To do something that would get everybody talking.”

  “She was going to tell my wife,” he says. “Not to mention the school.”

  “Whose idea was it to meet in the park?”

  “Mine.”

  “Were you already thinking …” My throat seizes up. I can barely think the words.

  “No.” He sits up, reaches out. “No, this was a terrible, terrible accident. Please. Please believe me about that. I never would have planned such a thing. I still …” He sits back, exhausted. “I still can’t believe it happened.”

  He rubs his forehead. “I just wanted to talk to her. Somewhere no one would see us. Wendy had been saying, I want to see you, why can’t I see you? And I was stupid enough to think that was all she wanted.”

  The bitterness creeps into his voice again, the blame.

  “So I told her to meet me in the park that night. I said, Make sure you don’t tell anyone you’re going. If someone knows you’re leaving the party, make sure they think it’s about Nico.”

  “And Wendy did just what you told her.”

  “I thought we could have a rational conversation, that she would see that hurting my wife was wrong. I tried to explain to her that my wife would leave me, I would lose my job, that I would probably never see my son again. She didn’t care. She wanted us together. Started saying that after she graduated, she would go to NYU, and we would live together.”

  It’s so close to my fantasy, I flinch.

  Farrell continues, “And when I said that couldn’t be, she got so angry. She actually got out her cell phone …”

  The one they never found, I think.

  “… and started dialing my home. ‘Time to tell wifey,’ she said. Nothing I said would make her stop. I begged her. I yelled at her. Finally, I had to physically—”

  He breaks off, then says quietly, “Once I had … hurt her, I couldn’t expect her not to tell people.”

  So you silenced her, choked the voice right out of her when you crushed her throat.

  “What were you thinking?” I ask quietly. “When it was happening?”

  He considers, wanting to get the answer right. “All I could think of, what kept going through my mind, was that the one time I do something wrong, I lose everything. It just seemed so unfair. The one time.” His voice is almost whiny as he glares down at the table. He is not an adult. He’s an angry boy.

  “Do you think it’s fair, Rain?” he asks softly. “For that one time, I have to …” He looks up, and for a moment, I feel sad for him.

  Then he whispers, “I can be in the world, Rain. I can go back to being right. I was right with you. You … well, you liked me. I could have taken advantage of that. But I didn’t. I did the right thing.”

  My spine goes ice. There’s no air in my lungs. Behind my back, my hand searches for the doorknob.

  Immediately, Farrell sees he’s made a mistake. Raising his hand, he says, “Let’s set that aside.” He places his fingers on the table, drums them gently one after the other. “I know doing the right thing is very important to you. You’re a good person.” He looks up. “But you’re also someone who understands that people with power are not always kind.”

  He searches my face, wanting to see if I’m buying it. I’m a freak, you’re a freak. Don’t hand me to the torturers.

  I shake my head.

  He nods quickly, as if he expected me to say no. “The thing is, Rain, even if you do … tell”—he smiles a little—“I’m not convinced that anyone will believe your story. As I said, much of the evidence does point toward Nico.”

  “Not all of it.” I crack the door slightly. “There must be phone calls from Wendy to your house. Even if you got rid of her cell—there’ll be a record. Talks you won’t be able to explain away. Talks on the day she died.”

  “Oh, yes,” he says calmly. “The police asked me about those. I explained that Wendy was having difficulties in my class, and I was trying to help her.”

  I say, “There were probably scratches, but of course nobody looked.”

  “No. No, they didn’t.”

  An image in my head, Wendy’s fingers clawing at Farrell’s hands, the ones lying so casually on the table now.

  To regain control, I focus on the facts, saying, “Even Wendy’s Facebook name for the guy she was dating. She called him The Hot One. T.H.—your initials. And, of course, everything they knew about the E pin—the one piece of physical evidence—they learned from you.” I cough. “One thing I don’t get?”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t Dorland tell the police the pin wasn’t from this year? That it couldn’t possibly belong to a student now?”

  “Oh.” Farrell frowns. “Mr. Dorland was unable to meet with the police. He just didn’t feel comfortable. And the bad publicity for the school has upset him very much. So I told him as acting head of school, I’d be happy to talk to the police, answer any questions they had.”

  “Why did you even tell them the school gave out pins?”

  “I thought it was better to admit it rather than have them discover it from talking to the students. Of course, I stressed to them the great need for discretion. It would be best for their case and best for the students if they could keep the existence of the pin quiet until there was an actual arrest.”

  “But you had to know Nico didn’t have one.”

  “Yes.” He looks at me. “That’s why when you came to me, told me about Sasha giving Nico the pin—well, I was grateful, to say the least.”

  “I’m sure. But just so you know, I’ve told Nico it wasn’t Sasha’s pin they found in the park. I told him to ask for a picture just to make sure. Oh—and I talked to Ms. Laredo, too. About how they changed the color and style of the pins over the years. So it probably won’t be too long before the police figure out who the real owner of the E was.”

  “You’ve talked to a lot of people,” he says slowly.

  “Yes, I have.”

  For a moment, I see it through his eyes. We were supposed to be allies, setting Nico up, causing misery for Sasha, directing everyone’s rage toward the rich, the beautiful, the entitled. I think of Mr. Farrell as a boy, wandering the halls of this school, watching, wanting, afraid to speak.

  And hating.

  “Do you understand?” His voice is weak, doubtful now.

  I decide not to answer that, saying instead, “I think you know what I have to do.”

  A deep, deep sigh. Nodding, he turns his head, his eyes looking far, far away now. Past me. Past the door. In a ragged voice, as if someone’s twisted a knife in his throat, leaving only the shreds of sinew, he says, “Yes, that’s … you’re right. I’m sorry, Rain. I’m …”

  I can’t stand to hear him say my name.

  He’s crying now. His shoulders are slumped, his legs skewed. The hands that killed Wendy frozen in front of his face, as if he wants to hide but can’t bear to touch himself. The sobs are like blood, pumping out of a ruined heart.

  Wendy is still dead. I hadn’t understood before: it really doesn’t bring them back. Somehow, you think, despite what you know, it will be a trade. Find the person who did the wrong thing and they will suffer instead of the one who was killed.

  Instead, that person just suffers too.

  But I suppose that’s the best we can do.

  I twist the doorknob, open the door. I half whisper “Good-bye” and walk out the door.

  I am back in the crowd. Surrounded by voices. Faces spin by in a blur. I see Ms. Laredo coming down the hall. Seeing me, she stops. “Rain?”

  S’s have always kicked my ass
. Also t’s. That makes Mister a word I avoid. It comes out Mithder.

  People are slowing down around me. Stopping. Staring. I open my mouth. Think: I can’t.

  Go for it, tigress.

  And I say it.

  “Mr. Farrell killed Wendy Geller.”

  AFTER

  “Are you ready?”

  On the last day of school, Alcott says farewell to its seniors and welcome to its new senior class. Each senior and junior carries a candle. The seniors’ candles are lit; ours are not. When your name is called, you walk onstage and a senior lights your candle from hers. Then the seniors leave the stage and the new senior class is presented to the school. Being a senior at Alcott, Mr. Dorland tells us, means something. We represent the sum of an Alcott education; the high values and intellectual achievement Alcott imparts to its graduates. Or, as Taylor says, what $35,000 a year buys.

  But I can’t feel cynical today. For one thing, I’ve learned I’m not as cynical as I thought I was. I am going to miss a lot of these people. Ellis, who’s headed to Cornell. Lindsey, who’s off to Stanford. Rima, who is going to Carleton. And while I won’t miss Nico Phelps, I’ll certainly never forget him.

  Nico is not here today. After Mr. Farrell pled guilty to murdering Wendy, the school let Nico quietly finish out the year, mostly working from home. He and Sasha broke up. I heard he did apply to Brown but didn’t get in. He’s probably not that disappointed; he has a book contract for half a million to write about the Wendy Geller murder. The book will be called Falsely Accused.

  I have seen him, of course—along with the rest of the country—when he did that interview on CNN. They asked me if I wanted to be on the show. I said no thanks. Which is what I’ve said to everyone who’s wanted my “side of the story.” I have told exactly two people everything that happened: my mother and Taylor.

  It was hard, telling my mother. Because I told her the whole story about Mr. Farrell, how I felt about him, all of it. We sat on the couch, me wrapped up in her arms, my face pressed against her body, and we cried. For Wendy, for me, for two girls who weren’t such “very different girls” after all.

  Then my mom said, almost as a joke, “Hey, maybe someday we should have a talk about your father.”