by Jessie Rosen
September 5
Laura
By Friday afternoon, people had mostly stopped greeting Laura’s face with awkward stares, but Charlie didn’t seem to fall into that category. He’d gone from friendly to standoffish since that first English class, and Laura assumed it must have something to do with Amanda’s “word” with him on the first day of school. Since that moment, Charlie had backpedaled on being the friendly Big Man on Campus. He wasn’t exactly ignoring Laura, but he and his friends were suddenly very busy over lunch. Luckily, she had found a place to hide out for the half hour.
On Wednesday morning of that first week, Laura found the activities bulletin board posted outside the guidance counselor's office. Smack dab in the middle was a piece of white paper with the words “THE CHRONICLE NEEDS SMART PEOPLE THAT LIKE TO WRITE. INSANE SCHEDULE & WE WORK OVER LUNCH. DON’T COME IF THAT’S A DEALBREAKER.”
Laura didn’t know who wrote that sign, but they seemed to have exactly the kind of bold personality she was looking for more of in her life.
Becca Asher, editor in chief of The Englewood Chronicle, EHS’s weekly student newspaper, did not disappoint. Not only was she feisty, independent, and clearly whip-smart, but she was also only a sophomore. Apparently the student-run paper was defunct before she arrived—no one in their generation read anything that didn’t come to them via text, and no upperclassmen had stepped in to take it over. Within the first two minutes of the Chronicle info session, Laura learned that Becca’s mom was the editor of the county’s largest paper, The Chronicle would soon be in print and online, and everyone in the room had two articles due tomorrow.
“So, if you’re still standing in this room, you start right now,” Becca said, making Laura like her even more.
Becca was a Lois Lane-type shrunken down into a four-foot-eleven Filipino frame. She dressed exclusively in jeans and T-shirts, ate her weight in junk food that never seemed to affect her tiny build, and rarely spoke in complete sentences. She was the polar opposite to Laura—the former people pleaser—which was one of the reasons Laura loved her instantly. The other? Becca was immediately honest about the meaning behind all those strange stares.
“You’re that girl everyone’s talking about,” she said within seconds of the new Chronicle staff’s first lunch session.
“Yeah, if only I knew what they were saying,” Laura replied.
“You look like Sarah Castro-Tanner.” Becca said it so matter-of-factly that Laura almost didn't realize it was the first time she was finally hearing an explanation.
“Who’s Sarah Castro-Tanner?” she asked.
Becca's face fell, but she plowed through whatever thoughts were behind that feeling.
“Was,” Becca corrected. “Killed herself a year and a half ago.”
“Oh my God…” Laura said. “That’s…awful.”
“Gets worse,” Becca said. “First suicide on record in this lily-white Disneyworld of a town.”
“Does anyone know why she killed herself?” Laura asked.
“No,” Becca said, “not really. And you definitely won’t get anyone to talk about it.”
Laura understood. There was something about a suicide that made people more nervous than a murder. With a murder, there was someone to blame. With a suicide, you can't face the killer and ask, why? Or what could I have done to prevent this? Or more importantly could this happen to me, too? It was clear that, in Englewood, people preferred things neat and tidy, not in any way out of control.
Charlie clearly fit that description, and yet Laura couldn’t seem to shake the fact that she totally adored him. By the end of English class on Friday morning, she had to stop herself from visibly swooning.
“Okay, I’ve struck out five out of five times on understanding a word O’Malley is saying today,” Charlie complained. “She is speaking English, correct?” Laura knew that he was trying to focus on anything other than the fact that they’d just been awkwardly paired to dissect love letters exchanged between poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett before their marriage. It was like the cosmos knew how Laura felt about him and wanted to have a little fun. Laura wondered whether the cosmos was, in fact, an incredibly observant English teacher.
“Once you’ve finished interpreting the words, I want you to rewrite them in modern English and present them before the class,” Ms. O’Malley said. Laura wondered if the entire class could hear her heart start beating out of her chest at that addition to the assignment. The last thing she needed was more eyes on her, though the chance to work with Charlie turned some of those anxious nerves into excited ones.
“Just to warn you, the only acting I’ve done was a play in fifth grade,” he said, “and I don’t think there’s much in common between Cowboy Number Two and this Robert Browning dude.”
“It’s okay. Everyone will just be staring at my face anyway,” Laura said.
Charlie looked back at her as if he was trying to decide whether he could pretend he hadn’t heard what she just said.
“Curse of the new girl?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?” She lowered her voice. “I guess I look like that girl who died. Sarah Castro-Tanner.”
Charlie’s face froze, like he was shocked to hear someone say that name out loud.
“Yeah. I heard some people talking about that,” he said eventually, “but I think they’re exaggerating.” His tone was kind, and Laura loved the fact that the comment implied he’d been looking at her pretty closely over the past few days.
“Did you know Sarah?” Laura asked. She couldn’t resist the chance to hear someone talk more about this mysterious doppelgänger, and why Amanda wanted Charlie to avoid her because of the connection.
“Nah,” he said. “She kept to herself.”
“Suicide is so terrible,” Laura said. “I can imagine how hard it was for everyone in school that year.”
“It was,” Charlie said, “but it’s not fair that you have to deal with it now.”
The sweet look on Charlie’s face made it clear that he felt genuinely sorry for her; that maybe if it were up to him, he wouldn’t be staying so far away. Laura was wildly curious about what else Charlie had to say, but she didn’t want to push him too far on the issue—not while he was finally warming up again.
“Let’s get into this project,” she said instead. “We can’t embarrass ourselves up there when we present.”
Thirty minutes later, Laura found herself standing in the front of the room reading an insanely romantic love letter to Charlie Sanders—the single most gorgeous boy in the senior class, if not the entire town. In that moment, none of the rest of the weirdness between them mattered to Laura, and from the completely captivated look on Charlie’s face as he read his lines to her, she thought there was a chance he might agree.
Laura spent the rest of that afternoon in the newspaper office trying to concentrate on the story she was researching.
“Some kids are pushing for a crew team. Principal Hayden claims none of the rivers in town are safe to row on. Look into it,” Becca said through a mouth full of crumb cake at the beginning of their meeting.
Laura tried to focus on the assignment, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Charlie—the way his lips parted and came together when he was reading the love letters earlier in class, how tight his shoulder muscles were against the long-sleeved T-shirt he was wearing, and that one curl of hair on the crown of his head that flipped in the opposite direction of all the others. This is trouble, Laura told herself. It’s the first week of school, and he’s clearly taken.
She forced herself to shove all the Charlie images out of her head as she continued on with her research, entering a few search terms into the news database. She watched as dozens of links related to the term “safe + river” popped up. The top result on the page was the last line Laura expected to see: Local Girl Takes Own Life in Freezing Navesink River. It was her story.
via The Asbury Park Press
Englewood, NJ �
�� The ritzy commuter town of Englewood is shocked today by reports that fifteen-year-old student Sarah Castro-Tanner may have taken her own life with a plunge off the abandoned freight train tracks into the icy Navesink River.
Castro-Tanner’s parents, Jim Castro and Alice Tanner, both longtime Englewood residents, reported that the teen went out at 6:00 p.m. on the night she went missing to go see a movie. They called police when she did not return by the next morning. Forty-eight hours later at approximately 11:00 a.m., articles of clothing matching her parents’ description washed up where the riverbank meets the Hazlet inlet.
“We are exploring this from every angle, including a suicide,” a spokesman for the Monmouth County sheriff’s office told The Press. “We have yet to discover a body. However, we’ve estimated that river temperatures were twelve degrees overnight. A body between 100 and 150 pounds loses consciousness after approximately ten minutes in below-freezing water, and death from hypothermia can follow just fifteen minutes after. Currents of the Navesink and proximity to the Atlantic inlet also mean a body would move out to sea very quickly. Further investigation is, of course, ongoing.”
The spokesman also reported that police collected evidence of Castro-Tanner’s fingerprints along the railing of the bridge, which sits over thirty feet above the river. Hers were the only fingerprints found. The Castro-Tanners have requested privacy regarding the matter, promising to update through the sheriff’s office following an investigation.
Laura’s mind filled with questions the moment she finished reading the article, but one kept sticking out: why did the town assume Sarah was gone?
For the next thirty minutes, she was caught in a spiral of internet searching. She read at least a half-dozen other cases where bodies were presumed to have washed out to sea—bodies from murders, accidents, or suspected suicides like Sarah’s story. In each case, police assumed the person would never be found, but sport divers or fisherman ultimately discovered them every time, sometimes years later. According to this article, it had only been eighteen months since Sarah disappeared. Laura couldn’t think about the poor girl’s body slowly freezing without getting chills all over her own body.
Laura went back to the original article she’d stumbled upon and stared at the screen, fixated on Sarah’s sophomore yearbook picture. She didn’t exactly see the connection that everyone else saw, but it made sense that the whole school was affected by someone that even remotely resembled Sarah; her story was totally tragic.
Then Laura noticed that the article featured a whole gallery of images from Sarah’s life. She clicked through to find one of eleven-year-old Sarah holding up a watercolor painting of a goldfish, eight-year-old Sarah blowing out the candles on her chocolate-chip-cookie birthday cake, and Sarah around age five, riding on her dad’s shoulders as they walked through an amusement park. Every single Sarah had curly black hair, stark-white skin, and deep brown eyes, and every single Sarah wore the exact same expression on her face: loneliness.
“Everything okay?”
Laura’s stomach jumped as she whipped around in her chair. Charlie.
“Sorry to startle you,” he said. “Are you in here all alone?”
She looked around. Apparently she’d been too wrapped up in the article to notice that Becca was gone.
“I guess so,” she said, quickly wiping her eyes. If she’d gained any ground with Charlie earlier, looking like an emotional mess would certainly send her back to square one. “I was just reading about—”
“Yeah, I see that,” Charlie said. His eyes were fixed on the picture of Sarah blown up on the computer screen behind her. The gallery had flipped back to that first photo, fifteen-year-old Sarah. Laura realized that it was the version of Sarah that Charlie would have last seen, which probably explained why his face was now the color of chalk.
“I started reading, and I couldn’t stop,” she explained. “I guess I feel sort of connected to her because…you know…”
Charlie nodded silently.
“Can I ask you something?”
Charlie nodded, though a little nervously, Laura thought.
“Do you think I look like her?” He clearly didn’t know what to say, and Laura couldn’t blame him. It was an awkward question to ask.
“I think everyone has a doppelgänger,” he finally said. “And I’m really sorry that yours happens to be her, but it’s not your fault.”
Laura nodded. “I just feel bad that I’m reminding people of this awful story,” she said. “It seems like there are so many unanswered questions.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I guess.”
Laura could tell that the topic was making him uncomfortable, which was the absolute last thing she wanted.
“Anyway. Sorry. Hi. How did you know to find me here?” Laura finally said.
“Kit said she heard you signed up to work on the paper. I didn’t even know we had a paper, but that’s cool that you’re into writing.”
“Yeah, I worked on the school paper back home, so…” Laura could tell that he’d come here for something specific, but was currently reconsidering whatever that had been.
“Right. Cool. Well I, um…I wanted to invite you to Jeff Haskell’s party tonight. He always does one on the first Friday we’re back at school. His parents don’t care, so it’s pretty cool.” Then Charlie paused. It was almost like he was reading her mind. “I know everyone’s been weird to you this week, but I still think you should come.”
Laura was almost as surprised by the invite as she’d been to see him in the newspaper office in the first place. Did he really want her there? How would he handle any wrath from Amanda if she showed up? And more importantly, why did he care enough to come all the way to the newspaper office to invite her? Laura mentally thanked Ms. O’Malley for that well-timed English assignment. It had clearly led to Charlie’s change of heart.
“Well,” she said, “I’m having dinner with my parents tonight. We’ve all been craving sushi since we left California, so we’re going to try out a place a few towns over. But maybe I’ll come after that. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Well, I won’t be there until later anyway,” Charlie said. “We have our first game this afternoon, and a big team dinner after that.”
“That’s right,” Laura said. “Is it a home game?”
“Yes, so please consider this an invite to that, too. Come to that and the party. I’ll make sure no one gives you a hard time.”
Whether he was trying to win her over, or was just a good guy in general, Laura believed him.
“Going in a different direction with the article?”
Laura whipped around to find Becca in the doorway, two pizza boxes in hand. “Hey, Sanders,” Becca said snottily, “shouldn’t you be signing autographs before the game?” Her comment caught Charlie so off guard that he didn’t even respond.
“Sorry, Bec,” Laura said. “I found these articles in my search for local rivers, and I got sort of wrapped up in it all.”
Becca just nodded. Laura could only assume Becca’s silence had to do with Charlie’s presence in the room.
“I should get to the field,” Charlie said, getting up. “Maybe I’ll see you later?”
“Maybe,” Laura said.
“Good,” Charlie replied as he walked out of the room. The minute he was gone, Laura realized that she’d barely breathed the entire time they were talking.
“Life can’t be that bad if the king of Englewood is into you,” Becca said. Her tone was clearly mocking. Apparently even the kids who didn’t care about being popular knew how it all worked.
“He was inviting me to this party,” Laura said, “but I don’t know if I want to go. I get the feeling some of his friends wouldn’t be all that thrilled to see me there.”
“Yeah, Amanda’s a bitch,” Becca said. “Rough breakup between those two last year.” Laura laughed. Like a skilled reporter, Becca really did have her finger on it all.
“Oh yeah?” Laura said. She instantly
wanted to know more about that juicy piece of gossip, and how Becca knew about it even though she was younger. “What happened?”
“She said things were getting too serious and she needed her space. He said she was too clingy and he needed to focus on soccer. But the third version of the story’s my favorite.”
“Okay. I’ll bite,” Laura said. “What’s the third story?”
“Something to do with Sarah Castro-Tanner.”
“Sarah Castro-Tanner? How?”
“Don’t know. Amanda’s little doormat, Kit, was my tour guide when I came to visit EHS as an eighth grader. I overheard her say something to some girl in the bathroom that day I toured around. ‘If not for Sarah, Charlie and Amanda would be together,’ she said.”
“That’s weird. Charlie said he barely knew Sarah.”
“And according to what I’ve heard, that’s true.”
“So then how did Sarah break Charlie and Amanda up?”
“Never managed to figure that out,” Becca said, pulling out a slice of pizza from one of the boxes and biting into it. “But now that you two are friendly, maybe you can crack the case.”
Charlie
Charlie walked out of the school newspaper office wondering what exactly he had just done, and why.
Why did he perk up when he heard Laura was working for the newspaper? What compelled him to ask around about where their office was located? And how could he have risked being late for the game just to walk himself down there and say hello?
Of course Jeff’s party was on his mind the entire time, and the minute he saw the outline of Laura’s face against the glow of her computer screen, he knew he was going to invite her to come. What shocked Charlie is that he’d invited her even after their awkward conversation about Sarah.