by Kara Thomas
But I don’t have the balls to say that. I never have, and probably never will. I clear my throat.
“Don’t give your mom shit about me being here right now,” I say. “We were at the prison this morning.”
“I know.” Callie balances her phone on her knee. The screen goes dark. “I’m sorry about your dad,” she adds, as an afterthought.
“We didn’t— That’s not why she’s upset.” I swallow. “It’s Stokes.”
Callie flinches, and for some reason, it makes me brave.
“We saw his lawyer,” I say. “The one handling his appeal.”
“Okay.” Callie drags the word out, as if she doesn’t get why I’m telling her this. But I see her digging her fingers into the arm of the couch.
I shrug. “I thought you should know. It might be in the news.”
Callie’s expression shifts to one I used to know well. I used to look out for that face like it was a tornado siren. Now I’m glad she’s mad. I’m glad I’m the one who did it.
“Why the hell are you bringing this up?” Callie hisses, her cheeks flushed with anger.
“Because it involves us,” I say.
“Not anymore. He’s guilty, and he’s never getting out.” It’s a phrase Maggie’s drilled into Callie’s head over the years, no doubt. She even looks like her mother when she says it—has the same flattened, defiant upper lip. I can’t tell her that the article claims his lawyers have new evidence; Callie will demand to know what it is, and when I can’t tell her, she’ll give me one of those looks that level me.
Callie was always the one people listened to. Eight going on eighteen, Maggie would say. Even now that we are both eighteen, I feel like a stupid child around her.
“Things are different now,” I mumble.
“What are you talking about?” Callie springs up from the couch. Closes the family room door. “Do not tell me all those lunatics from Cyber Sleuths got into your head and now you want to take back your testimony.”
So she did get my message.
“Of course not,” I say. “But it’s been ten years. If they retest the evidence, who knows what they’ll find.”
Callie folds her arms across her chest. “Tessa. He stalked Lori and he killed her. You were there when he threatened her at the pool. Don’t you remember?”
Of course I remember. I’ve remembered it every day for the past ten years. The three of us were headed to where Lori’s car was parked. Wyatt Stokes was leaning against the chain-link fence, smoking a joint. The day before, Joslin had let him borrow her lighter. I don’t know what Stokes said to Lori, but she got uncomfortable and ignored him.
He sucked on his joint and said, “What’s red, white, and blue and floats?”
Lori pressed her hands to our backs and pushed us toward the car as he called out, “A dead bitch,” and laughed to himself all the way into the woods.
I realize I haven’t responded to Callie when her eyes flash. “I saw him,” she says, but I hear what she really means: Wyatt Stokes is the man who killed her cousin. Even to consider the possibility that it isn’t true is treason.
I lift my chin so that I can meet her eyes. Callie was always taller than me. She towers over me now, though, her low-slung jeans showing off a sliver of her toned stomach.
“How can you remember what you saw?” My voice quakes. “It was dark. We were only eight.”
Callie lets out an exasperated laugh and grabs the doorknob. “I’m done talking about this.”
She whirls around to face me, and I flinch. Her face softens—or maybe I only imagined it, because now she’s glaring at me again. “Just remember that you said you saw him too. You can’t say I lied without accusing yourself of the same thing.”
Callie slams the door behind her. The sound may as well be the period at the end of the sentence Wyatt Stokes is guilty.
Two more days in Fayette.
It might as well be two years.
•••
We begged Lori to let us sleep in the Greenwoods’ sunroom that night. Maggie had said absolutely no to our setting up Rick’s tent in the backyard. She’d promised we could camp out there some other time, when she and Rick would be home and someone could stay in the tent with us.
The sunroom was the next best thing. It made Lori nervous that a screen was the only thing separating us from the outside, but Callie insisted that nothing bad ever happened in our neighborhood. Lori relented, and we dug through the camping gear in the crawl space beneath the stairs to the basement to find me an old sleeping bag. We vowed to stay up all night and watch for bears, but by ten, we were fading, cloaked in a sun-and-chlorine-soaked bliss.
I woke up to Callie shaking me, her Cinderella sleeping bag bunched up to her shoulders.
“Tessa. There’s someone out there.”
I don’t remember being scared. I thought it was probably an animal, until we heard another twig snap. Footsteps. Callie dug her nails into my forearm. “What if it’s the man from the pool?”
I shushed her, and we peered out the screen together. Callie cried out as a dark figure skulked around the side of the yard. I yanked her through the sunroom door and into the living room, where Lori was on the couch, the television muted, a book facedown in her lap.
“There’s someone outside,” Callie said.
Lori grabbed a flashlight. Callie started to cry.
“It’s probably a raccoon,” Lori told her. “Just wait in your room.”
We huddled on Callie’s bed until Lori came back a few minutes later.
“No one’s out there,” she said. “But why don’t you just sleep in here tonight, okay?”
“Can’t you sleep in here with us?” Callie asked her.
Lori laughed. The three of us couldn’t have possibly fit in the twin bed. Lori had insisted we’d be fine in Callie’s room.
Imagine if she hadn’t? I heard my mother whisper to Maggie afterward. Lori was their guardian angel.
When Maggie and Rick got home from dinner and drinks at a friend’s house, Lori wasn’t in the guest room, and her bed was still made. Callie and I hadn’t heard a thing. The guest room was across the house from Callie’s room. Lori’s killer had surprised her, probably caught her asleep on the couch after the excitement from earlier had calmed down. She’d never even had the chance to scream.
Callie and I had to describe everything that happened that night so many times. Eventually, it felt like we were the criminals; Maggie kept reminding us that the prosecutors just wanted to make sure they were able to put away the man who’d hurt Lori. They poked holes in our testimony; they looked for places where our stories didn’t match up. Callie started to cry when the assistant district attorney grilled her about what we’d had for dinner. I said Maggie had made us corn to go with our hot dogs. Callie had forgotten about the corn. Any potential hole in the story had to be plugged up; the prosecution needed us to say we saw Wyatt Stokes sneaking onto the Greenwoods’ property, but they couldn’t risk us looking unreliable and sinking their case.
I don’t remember eating the corn now. I don’t remember how the hot dog tasted or which pajamas I was wearing.
Does it even matter now if Callie and I never really saw Stokes’s face? Once he went to jail, girls stopped turning up dead along the Ohio River.
Marisa Perez. Rae Felice. Kristal Davis. All strangled, robbed, and left half naked like trash off the highway, down by the river. Three girls who were so different from Lori, except for their proximity to Wyatt Stokes.
Just tell us what you saw, sweetheart. There are no wrong answers.
Every now and then another answer to what happened that night sneaks in from the darkest corners of my mind. I usually squash it like a mosquito—there’s no point dwelling on questions no one can answer for me.
But now that I’m here, I can’t ignore certain things any longer.
There are worse things in this world than monsters, and somehow, they always manage to find me.
The sun’s goin
g down when I wake up. I’m curled up on the guest room bed, my head half off the pillow. I notice that I never took my shoes off, and sit up, guilty.
Someone’s knocking on the guest room door. Maggie opens it tentatively, peeking her head in. “Get some sleep?”
“I guess so.” I try to think back on what I was doing a few hours ago, but my brain is fuzzy. I probably crashed from being up for more than twenty-four hours.
“It’s almost dinnertime,” Maggie says, over the sound of the door across the hall closing. “I was thinking maybe the four of us could go to the Boathouse.”
Before she can clarify exactly who she means by the four of us, Callie’s head appears over Maggie’s shoulder. “I’m going to Em’s graduation party tonight. I told you that.”
Maggie’s eyes flick to her daughter, then to me. “Well, it’s been a long day, and it’s too hot to cook, so you’re more than welcome to come with Rick and me to dinner.”
Rick Greenwood has said maybe ten words to me in all the years I’ve known him. It’s not personal; it’s just how he is. He’s a quiet man, the type who gets home from work and self-medicates with online poker. The stone-faced dad in the audience of Callie’s baton twirling competitions who sighed and looked away every time a routine involved any sort of ass-shaking.
“She can come with me,” Callie says. When she realizes that we’re staring at her, speechless, she starts pulling at the ends of her ponytail. “I mean, if she wants.”
I don’t know whether I should be grateful that Callie’s offering to rescue me from the most awkward dinner ever, or annoyed that she can’t look me in the eye while doing it.
“Tessa knows Emily,” Callie says, acknowledging the skeptical look Maggie gives her. “They were friends as kids.”
“I wasn’t invited,” I cut in. They both turn to look at me, as if they’d forgotten I’m sitting right here.
“It’s open house,” Callie says, seeming to think that both Maggie and I need the explanation. “Half the people who’ll show up probably weren’t invited.”
Maggie’s eyebrows form a V. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Mom, her parents are throwing it for her,” Callie says. “It’s not gonna be a rager or anything. I want Tessa to come.”
Her eyes shift to the right. So, she doesn’t really want me to come to the party with her. Then why the hell invite me?
In any case, I want to go to that party even less than Callie wants me to be there. What I really want to do is stay here—so I can get onto the Greenwoods’ computer again and follow the first lead I’ve had on my sister in years. But I know Maggie, and she’ll never let me stay here alone.
I swallow and look at her. “Maybe I’ll go to the party. If that’s okay.”
I catch the slightest frown bend her lips before she catches herself. “Of course. Just be careful, girls, all right?”
Callie rolls her eyes. “I’ll text you as soon as we get there.”
Maggie smiles and tells us to have fun and make sure to lock the doors before we leave. Callie gives me a funny little nod, as if to say, Well, okay then, and disappears back into her room.
I look down at my sweatshirt. There’s a spot of grease on the sleeve from the grilled cheese Maggie made me for lunch. It’ll have to do—I didn’t bring enough clothes for the cool evening weather. It’ll probably be too dark for anyone to see anyway.
I’m wrestling my hair into a fresh bun when Callie appears in the doorway. “Ready?”
No. “Yeah.” She’s changed into low-rise jeans and a cotton peasant shirt. I fold up the cuffs of my sweatshirt to hide the grease stain and follow her downstairs.
“Shouldn’t we bring a card or something?” I gesture to Callie’s empty hands as she locks the front door behind us.
Callie is several strides ahead of me on the driveway. “It’s not a party.”
“You were pretty convincing back there.”
Her face reflects in the windshield of Maggie’s minivan. She’s glaring.
“Would you rather sit around my depressing house all night?” She unlocks the car and we climb in.
Callie doesn’t know the first thing about depressing. Gram’s house is full of ashtrays and tabloids from when Princess Diana died. Regardless, I don’t answer her question, and she doesn’t press the issue. Callie turns for the main road, and I pretend to be immersed in reading the signs at each stoplight. One advertises a spooky walk behind the firehouse—for Halloween, nine months ago.
Callie clears her throat, dashing my hopes of spending the rest of the ride in silence. When I look over at her, she gets this look on her face like she might pass out.
“It wasn’t personal.” She grips the steering wheel so hard that her nail beds turn white. “How I acted when you moved away…It was just hard for me.”
If I weren’t so gutless, I’d ask her exactly what she thought was so easy for me. My mother abandoning me? Having to move in with a woman I’d never met?
“It was a long time ago” is all I say.
She moves her hand from the steering wheel and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. Her fingers linger there, as if she can’t help herself. I almost feel bad for her. But not bad enough.
“Did you ask me to come with you so I wouldn’t be alone with your mom?” I ask. “Are you afraid of what I’ll say to her?”
Callie sets her hand in her lap. “There’s nothing for you to say to my mom.”
The uncertainty that was in her voice thirty seconds ago is gone. I loop a finger through the hole in my jeans.
“The trial almost destroyed my family,” Callie says quietly. “My mom blamed herself for years—she said if she hadn’t gone out with my dad that night, Lori might still be alive.”
Pathos. I learned the term in my public speaking and debate class last year. Pathos is an appeal to someone’s emotions. Callie’s message is clear: if I try to dig up things that have been buried since the trial, I’ll only bring the Greenwoods more pain.
I’d be causing Maggie pain. Maggie, who picked me up that night at the gas station and saved me from being dumped into the foster system. Maggie, who always slipped an extra sandwich into Callie’s lunch box in case my father stole my lunch money from my jacket pocket while I slept.
I keep my eyes on the spot on the horizon where the sun is disappearing. I think of Lori Cawley and her hands that always smelled of lilac lotion, brushing the one unruly curl away from my forehead. I picture her body, swollen from the river and colorless except for the ring of bruises around her neck. Only a monster could do this, the district attorney said, pointing to the photos of the victims’ bodies lined up side by side for the jury. The sick feeling in my stomach is back.
Not for the first time, I briefly envy Wyatt Stokes. Because at least if he’s guilty, he doesn’t have to live with himself forever.
•••
The “not a party” is a bonfire on the outskirts of town, across the highway from a trailer park where my father occasionally played poker with his coworkers. We park in knee-high grass, trek down a beaten path, and emerge in a field. By the light of the fire, I spot a barn in the distance. The chatter by the bonfire ebbs as everyone turns around to see who’s arrived.
A girl holding a brown paper bag is the first to reach us. “I thought you weren’t coming.” She leans in and gives Callie a peck on the cheek. I flinch, thinking she’s going to do it to me too, even though obviously not. The girl takes a step back. She has brown hair that fades into blond at her shoulders.
“Holy shit,” she breathes. “Tessa?”
I glance over at Callie, whose eyes bulge as if to say The hell you looking at me for? I clear my throat and nod. Aside from her hair, Sabrina Hayes looks exactly the same. “Hey, Sabrina.”
By the fire, someone leans into the person next to them and mutters my name. I count seven people sitting in chairs and on crates by the fire. A guy in a Steelers hat turns to get a look at me. Sips from his beer and turns back aroun
d, apparently unimpressed.
Sabrina ducks her head toward Callie’s. “So is this why I couldn’t get ahold of you all weekend?”
A guy with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over his head emerges from the dark. He stops next to Callie and lowers his hood, running a hand over his short hair. “No one can get ahold of her. Miss College is too good for us now.”
Callie’s mouth forms a line. The guy smirks. His shoulder is touching Callie’s—there’s something weirdly intimate about it. And then it hits me: Callie has slept with this guy. Ryan Elwood, who played soccer every day at recess while Callie, Ariel, and I pulled wild green onions from the field and pretended to make soup.
Ryan used to have a floppy blond mushroom cut and a round face. He’s slimmed out and muscled up in the usual manly places now, but still has awkward-boy mannerisms. Like the way his eyes never meet mine as he nods and says “Hey, ’sup.”
Sabrina passes the brown bag to Callie, who shakes her head. “Brought my own.”
We all migrate to the fire, Callie hanging to the side. She removes a flask from her purse and unscrews it. An actual flask, which is something I thought existed only in old Western movies. I shake my head when Sabrina passes the bag of mini liquor bottles to me. Someone has to get us home in one piece.
Ryan catches my eye and nods toward an upturned milk crate, as if to tell me it’s okay to sit. I lower myself next to a girl in jean shorts and cowboy boots. She uncrosses her long, tanned legs and sits up to look at me. “I can’t believe it’s you,” she says, with mild awe.
I return Emily Raymes’s tentative smile. Her lower lip is pierced, and the smooth, golden hair I was once jealous of is now bleached platinum and frayed at the ends. She sips her beer. “I’m not trying to sound rude or whatever, but what are you doing back?”
I cradle the unopened can of beer someone has passed me. “Visiting my dad.”
Emily gives a polite nod, and I can’t figure out if she remembers that I’m the girl with the armed robber for a father. I decide I won’t tell anyone that he’s dead; even if this isn’t Emily’s graduation party, there’s probably someone here who thinks it’s their night, that life can’t get any better than being under a cloudless summer sky and warmed by booze right now. And I don’t want to be the buzzkill.