by TE Carter
“How is it at home?” Gomes asks. “Do you want to go somewhere else for a bit?”
He shakes his head. “No, I’ve got Fred there. My dog. Plus, it’s … Jesus, I miss her so much.”
“We should have the tests back soon. That’ll give us something to work with.” He drinks his coffee, crushing the cup in his hand. “I want to see them pay, Alex. I’ve never wanted something so badly.” Gomes shouldn’t tell him this. He knows it, but he never expected to handle a case like this. These things just don’t happen here.
“I just want my daughter back.”
They don’t say good-bye. My dad finishes his coffee, too, and then they both walk away—Gomes inside to face the media there, my dad in the direction of the press congregating at the foot of the stairs. Gomes answers questions, but my dad walks past. Walks home.
It starts to rain while he walks.
chapter forty-four
Gina Lynn meets with Officer Thompson in a diner out of town a few days later. She waits, flipping the menu over, pretending she’s here to eat. The waitress comes back a few times, but gives up when Gina Lynn can’t decide. She just flips the plastic page over and back, looking for something on the list that isn’t there. Looking for something to fulfill her.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Thompson says as she slides into the booth.
The waitress returns almost immediately.
“I’ll have a coffee and … um…” Gina Lynn hands the menu over, and Thompson skims it. “Egg salad. On wheat.”
“Anything for you?” the waitress asks, looking at Gina Lynn.
“Water. And vanilla ice cream.”
Once the waitress leaves, Thompson takes out a notepad and Gina Lynn sinks deeper into the seat. The windows beside the booth are large—diner windows—and she can’t be unnoticed enough. The irony. The girl who’s always noticed wants to disappear, while the one who faded so easily just wants someone to remember.
“Is there anywhere you can go? Even for a little while?” Thompson asks.
“I don’t know. I asked my dad if I could go there, but.… my mom … she says it’s all ridiculous. She says I’m overreacting. She loves Caleb.”
“You’re her daughter.”
Gina Lynn pulls a napkin from the dispenser, tearing it apart strip by strip. “There are things my mom cares about. And there are things she doesn’t. Some people matter more to her.”
“Ellie Frias wasn’t one of them, I’m guessing?”
“She doesn’t believe it. She says it’s a misunderstanding. That Caleb wouldn’t … How does someone misunderstand finding a body in a backyard?”
Thompson shakes her head. “People have a hard time believing what they don’t want to believe. What makes them look inward.”
“My mom says girls like that, like Ellie, you know? Well, she says these things happen to girls who put themselves in situations because they’re desperate. But … I’m one of those girls, right?”
“What do you mean?” Thompson asks.
“I was with him. I had a relationship with him. I slept with him. We had sex the same night he probably killed her. Did they…?” She pauses, trying to find the words. “When you found her body, was she … Had they…?” She can’t say it.
“We’re still investigating, but yes, we do think…” Thompson can’t say it, either.
Gina Lynn piles the strips of napkin into a snowbank. She blows on it, letting it drift away from her. “I’ll never get that off of me. I feel dirty all the time. That night. I feel … he was there, you know? With her still on him.”
The waitress comes back and gives them their food. Gina Lynn stirs her ice cream and they’re both quiet. Thompson eats while the ice cream turns to liquid.
“We can certainly keep an eye on you, protect you, but it’s bigger than that, isn’t it?” Thompson asks.
Gina Lynn nods. “I have to get away from here. I have to get rid of this.”
“Get rid of what?”
“I don’t know. There’s no word for it. This. All of it. Of this being who I am. Who I was.” She looks out the window. “I have to get out. I’m going to California. To my dad’s. My mom doesn’t understand, but I need to get away from here.”
“Have you talked to anyone?”
“Anyone who?”
“A professional?”
“You mean a therapist or whatever?” Gina Lynn asks.
“I suppose. Someone who can help you with the things you’re dealing with.”
“Why?” She gathers the napkin strips and dips them in her ice cream. It’s noise. Activity to take her mind away from the thoughts. “What can I say? I feel guilty because I slept with a guy the same night he raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend? Poor me for feeling dirty? She was literally in the dirt. I don’t have a right to that.”
“You have a right to whatever you’re feeling,” Thompson says.
“I need to leave. I need so badly to go away.”
“You know we need you, right?” Thompson asks. “Without anything tying Caleb to that house, without being able to prove there are hours missing in his story when Ellie went missing, there’s a good chance we lose. You said you wanted to help. You can focus on that. You can have that to pass the time, right?”
“How long is it going to last? How long do these things take?”
The waitress comes back, glaring at Gina Lynn as she removes the ice cream filled with napkin pieces.
Thompson sighs, stirring her coffee and filling it halfway with sugar. “Too long. I can’t say for sure, but I promise, it will be far longer than you think you can handle.”
“At least you’re honest.”
“We can assign someone to your house. Someone to stay with you as long as you need them with you. We’ll figure out the best way for you to testify. Try to make it easy on you. I can get you a referral for someone to talk to. I’ll be here. Whatever you need, Gina Lynn. But we need you, too. Ellie Frias needs you.”
It isn’t fair how she invokes my name. That I can’t say what I need. I don’t like being a symbol. I don’t like being the dead girl who unites people in Hollow Oaks, or the dead girl who helps the police take apart a family that should’ve been taken apart a long time ago. I don’t like any of these things, but most of all, I don’t like that it’s true. If Gina Lynn decides it’s too much, that her life is more valuable than mine, this could end. If she decides to lie for him, Caleb and his family and their lawyer will bury it. Will bury me and Gretchen and Kailey Howe and the girl with the gum on her shoe and every single girl they’ve hurt. We will be as ubiquitous as the empty houses, and our ghosts will fade into this town.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Gina Lynn admits. “I want to help. I really do, but … I want to live, too, you know.”
“I know,” Thompson says. “I do.”
Because that’s how it goes. Gina Lynn’s life for mine. Or mine for hers. Mine for Gretchen. Kailey for me. One girl always a sacrifice for another.
chapter forty-five
They hold the funeral without my body. While I’m still evidence. I guess that’s what I always wanted. To be something. To leave behind a record that I existed.
I’m surprised how many people show up. I never talked to any of them. My dad and our priest are the only people here I actually knew. The whole church is full of strangers. Crying. Sharing their grief. Standing by a board my dad put together with pictures of me. Including the yearbook photo. These people I never met, never spoke to, stand there, hugging each other, talking about how much they miss me. People who never even said hello while I was alive.
If I’d been hit by a car, would this many people have come? Do they merely feel invested in the tragedy of it all?
It hurts that Kate’s not here. I don’t know if her parents told her. Maybe she can’t get home from Ohio. My mom’s not here, either, but that doesn’t hurt. She probably wasn’t invited. She probably doesn’t even know I’m dead.
My dad sits up front, tryi
ng not to cry.
Right before Father O’Connell starts speaking, I see her. She sneaks in at the last second and sits in the back. The pink is obliterated now, but it’s still there. The gum that can’t be removed.
I would have thrown the shoes away.
Father O’Connell reads from the Bible. It’s the same service we used to go to on Sunday, but every so often, he somehow links it to me. He works my name into the same script he reads every weekend.
I hate how cold it is. This isn’t remembrance of me; it’s functional closure. I feel selfish, wanting to be more important than Jesus in church, but right now, I do. I want to have an hour for me. He has an entire religion.
The hour is just another Mass, though. Another empty gathering of words that doesn’t say anything about the space I held.
Until my father speaks.
“This is hard for me,” he says. “It’s hard to stand here and miss her. It’s hard to say the things she was and all the things she wasn’t or that I didn’t know about. In the last few years, something happened with me and Ellie. I don’t know what it was. We were close, but then, we weren’t, and neither of us really tried to fix it.”
He pauses and looks to where there should be a casket. To where there isn’t a casket, because I’m being taken apart and studied so that my killers can be found guilty. So that I can serve as a testament to all the ways we die.
“I tried my best,” my dad says. “I know I wasn’t always what she needed. She should’ve had her mom. She didn’t, though, and I had to deal with that. I tried to be both. I tried to make up for it. When her mom left, I was still young. I didn’t know if I could be a father, never mind try to raise her by myself. We don’t really get those choices, though, do we? She needed me, and I had to figure it out. For Ellie.
“Standing here is impossible,” he continues. “It just doesn’t make sense. I’ll never know why. No matter how many tests they run, how many things they tell me, I’ll never really know what she thought. I hate that I’ll never know if she was scared. My daughter … Ellie … she died somewhere, alone. She was put in the ground carelessly, and I wasn’t there for her. I can’t live with that, but just like loving her, I don’t have a choice.”
He breaks down and Father O’Connell moves toward him, ready to lead the rest of the Mass, but my father puts his hand up.
“I want to be honest. It’s really hard to believe in God today. I know I shouldn’t say that. Not here, of all places. But I’m struggling to have faith in anything. Yet I hang on to the idea of Him because I need to. I need to know somebody is watching after Ellie. I tell myself someone will help me, will help all of us here today, will help us get through this. Someone will make sure those boys are punished. For Ellie and for everything else they’ve done.”
He looks out at the full church, at all these people who weren’t part of our lives but are now forever a part of his. Who now share his grief whether reluctantly or willingly. “I wish I could tell you that forgiveness is more important than revenge,” he says. “But I can’t say that. I don’t believe it, but I don’t want that kind of hate in me. So I’m here, hanging on to the idea that there’s something out there with a plan. That God needed Ellie more than I did. That He had to have her beside Him. She was that kind of person, you know? She was the kind of person you just need. I only wish God hadn’t needed her yet.”
There’s a lifetime of things I wish I could say. I wish I could tell him I loved him as much as he loved me. That I needed him the same way.
He sits down. Father O’Connell is quiet for a moment, letting it all sink in, letting everyone process before he begins a prayer.
While they pray, my father mouths pleas to God. I wish I could tell him God had nothing to do with this, but then I realize he needs to believe it. He needs to hope. To imagine me somewhere else. I want to tell him I’m here, but I would rather have him believe I’m happy.
As people filter out when it’s over, the girl with the gum waits. She waits until it’s only my father left.
“Excuse me?” she says.
My father looks at the people beyond the doors. People waiting to offer support, grief, kindness. Things we offer because what else can we do when someone’s gone? But they’re all things that sit on the edge of what we’re really missing, and that hole still grows inside us.
“Were you a friend of Ellie’s?” he asks. She’s close to my age, so he assumes we could have been friends. I wonder what it would’ve taken to have made it true.
She shakes her head and pulls the sleeves of her hoodie down over her hands, clutching at the edges of the fabric while she tries to find the words. She’s wearing a hoodie, but probably not because she’s clueless about how funerals work; it’s probably the only black thing she owns. When you’re fourteen, you’re not supposed to make a lot of funeral appearances.
“My name’s Hannah.” She says it as if she’s unsure. As if, in the weeks or months that have passed since I watched her in the room with Caleb, she’s forgotten everything she used to be. Hannah is something related to the girl she was. This isn’t Hannah, because Hannah was never with him. Hannah is still safe.
“Thanks for coming, Hannah.”
I thought it was Rebecca or Rachel. Even our names are forgettable.
“I wanted to tell you. To tell someone…” She stops speaking, waiting for him to fill in the words. Waiting for someone else to hear what she can’t say.
He sits at the end of the pew across from where she is. She hasn’t moved out of hers yet. Not fully.
“What is it?” he asks.
“He hurt me,” she says. “In the place they showed on TV.”
“Caleb?”
My dad has become resigned to the way stories unfold now. Every day, something in the case changes, evolves, mutates until what was a guy who maybe accidentally killed his girlfriend turns into something nobody believes is possible. Except it’s always possible. There’s both a strange attraction to the awfulness of it and a weary acceptance of it being almost common now.
Hannah sits at the end of her pew and they look to each other across the aisle of the church. She should be with her parents, and he should be with his daughter. But when the world breaks you into pieces, sometimes you find what’s left scattered among other people’s broken parts.
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to get one of the officers?” he asks.
She sighs and pulls her hood over her head so he can’t see her cry. She’s afraid of crying now. Afraid that it reminds her of how useless it really is.
“Hannah?”
She nods, and my dad goes outside to find Officer Thompson.
Thompson isn’t supposed to be responsible for all the girls in this town. She’s not supposed to carry the weight of everything that’s happened, but she doesn’t have a choice anymore. She sits in the pew next to Hannah, the two of them across from my dad, finding quiet in the church. She holds Hannah’s hand, comforts her in silence, while mentally adding her to a growing list of girls who need help, who need a place, who need justice.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.
Hannah shakes her head in response. The three of them sit—at my funeral—trying to put the world back together.
“I have an idea,” Thompson says. “If I found somewhere we could go—all of you—could I count on you to try to come?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah admits. “I don’t want people to look at me. To know what I am. To see all my flaws.”
“You’re beautiful. You’re kind. And you’re hurting. That’s what you are. Those aren’t flaws, Hannah,” my father says. Officer Thompson smiles weakly at him.
Hannah thinks it over. “When would we meet?”
“I’m going to get your number. And I’ll call you, okay? I promise. I’m going to fix this. All of it,” Thompson says again. To another girl. To another person who needs the world fixed.
If I accomplished nothing in my life, I accomplished thi
s by dying. I brought together the girls of Hollow Oaks, the ones who were hurt like me. I made them stronger by being part of something. Or at least I helped Officer Thompson do that.
They targeted us because they thought we were weak. But even the weakest girl has power inside her. She maybe just needs a little guidance to find it.
chapter forty-six
Inside the church basement, a circle of girls sits. Officer Thompson coordinated it, but she hasn’t figured out what it’s supposed to be yet. Beth is here, too, although Gretchen won’t look at her.
“It’s nice having so many of you here,” Officer Thompson says. Nice isn’t the right word, but there’s no word for what this is.
Gretchen, Kailey, Hannah, and four others surround her. There’s a small girl and one blond girl I don’t recognize. The other blonde I remember. She was the first. After I died and realized where I was. Three days later. They hadn’t vacuumed the carpet yet, but she got the bed anyway.
The fourth girl doesn’t look weak. I don’t know how they picked her, and I don’t know why it worked. She’s tall and athletic, her dark hair a soft flow down her back. She seems confident, the only one here sitting proud.
The first blonde is Abby and the other is Julia. I like giving her a name. Julia. Not a timeline. Not the girl who came after me.
“I met Noah through my brother,” Abby says. “They played on the same basketball team. He had a party one weekend and Noah … He was cute. They were only sophomores, but I was thirteen.”
“Did he bring you to that house?” Thompson asks.
Abby bites her nails. “No. He didn’t bring me anywhere. It was in my room. He covered my screams with my teddy bear.”
Julia doesn’t say anything. She simply nods while the other girls talk.
The small girl, Kim, doesn’t know the Brewards. “I just needed a place to go,” she says. “My brother … he’s in a program now. But it doesn’t make it better not seeing him. I still do. I still lie awake at night and can hear him in the hallway. Every time the door creaks, I’m sure it’ll happen again. Even though he’s not really there. Even though they promised he couldn’t hurt me anymore.”