by TE Carter
Not.
Guilty.
Caleb and Noah will serve time in prison for my death. Probably the better part of their lives. They’ll always be remembered for it. The media has plastered their faces across the Internet, across everyone’s television sets, and Sunday morning breakfast tables on the front page of the newspaper.
They didn’t win. I should be happy. I’m hurt by what Caleb said, but I should be happy. They’ll pay. They’re guilty. My father has closure. They won’t walk past him on the street. He won’t see Wayne Breward’s face on an ad somewhere or on campaign posters for the next election. He’ll be allowed to heal. I’ll be avenged.
Except …
The words again.
Not guilty.
Not.
Not.
Not.
Not.
It’s a drumbeat. A metronome of denial. Twelve people heard it all. Or at least enough. They heard enough not to trust them. Not to believe their stories, but they still couldn’t be convinced that it wasn’t my fault.
“Just drop my case,” Gretchen says to Officer Thompson as the crowd disperses. “It’s a waste of time.”
“Not necessarily,” she argues. “Ellie wasn’t here to give her side. She—”
“She’s dead—and they still don’t believe her. Drop my case. I don’t know what Kailey’s going to do, although I doubt she’ll continue, either. If they have a body, and they have DNA, and they have proof, but it’s still impossible to prove to a jury that Ellie didn’t go there hoping for that to happen, just let it go. Please.”
Thompson nods. She has nothing else to offer. “I want you all to still meet. It’s something, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Sure. It’s something,” Gretchen says.
chapter fifty
After it’s all over, around Christmas, Kate comes to see my dad. I don’t know where she’s been or how much she’s heard about the trial, but she shows up one night with a tin of cookies her mom made. They didn’t want to acknowledge me. To even use my name. But they can’t not send cookies.
Kate stands on the porch, looking at the broken screens. The Christmas lights hang down by her forehead, blown free during a recent storm. Her hair is shorter now. A pixie cut, I guess it’s called. She dyed it pink. A color that doesn’t work with how dark her eyes have gotten. A color I always hated, but she wouldn’t know that.
“I’m Kate,” she says when my dad opens the door. “I live behind you. I knew Ellie. I brought you cookies.”
“Come in.” He holds the door open and lets her cross inside.
“My parents didn’t want me to know,” she tells him while he pours her a glass of lemonade in the kitchen. The glass is an old one with a giraffe on it; he bought it for me at the zoo once when I was little. “About the trial. About what was happening. They still don’t want me to mention it.”
“I wondered why you didn’t get involved,” he says.
Kate takes the lemonade but doesn’t drink it. Instead, she traces patterns on the glass in the little water droplets as they form. Erasing them before they exist.
“I don’t know if I could’ve helped anyway. There’s not much I know that wasn’t in the news. Ellie liked Caleb. She was scared about starting school. She didn’t know many people. It’s all pretty much true.”
“He said she begged him,” my dad says. “During the trial. He said that she was desperate to hang on to him.” He wants her to deny it. He wants to hold on to the girl I was.
Kate shrugs. “She was too nice. Too trusting. I remember when we first met … that summer when I took her to the mall. For the clothes and stuff?” My dad nods. “She was just … she wanted so badly to be part of something. There was this group of kids. They were standing below us at the mall. We were in the food court and we could see them. The guys kept trying to grab the girls and the girls were flirting with them, playing hard to get. I remember Ellie said to me, ‘It must be nice to be able to say no.’ I had no idea what she meant by that. But I feel so bad I didn’t.”
“Was she happy?” my dad asks.
“She really liked him. By the time she disappeared, I was gone. I don’t know how it was for her then. But that summer? Yeah, she was happy. She was sure he felt the same way.”
My dad nods and paces the kitchen. He tidies the bills on the counter and starts the dishwasher. Anything to keep himself from thinking.
Kate’s parents’ kitchen is bright. Sunny. Ours is cold. It feels like the kind of place that’s dirty no matter how much you clean it. The table is old. Jagged holes and scars cover the top of it. My dad tried to add stain to make them less obvious, but now they’re just gaping sores. None of our appliances match.
“I wanted to help,” Kate says. “I did. I don’t know what I could have said, but I did want to help. I talked to one of those cops a few times on the phone. It’s just … my parents … they didn’t want me involved. They found me things to do this summer after school got out. They tried to keep me out of it.”
“They came by once. After they found it. Found her. Your mom made me banana bread.”
Kate starts to cry. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Frias. I did like her. I liked Ellie a lot. I wish I knew more. More about what happened. More about who she was. I wish I could go back, could figure out what I could’ve said. I wish I’d tried harder. Stayed in touch. I wish there had been something I could have done. I wish I could’ve saved her.”
“I know,” my dad says.
“Sometimes I think it’s my fault.”
“Why’s that?” My dad sits and waits. Kate sips the lemonade, taking in the way our kitchen doesn’t shine; she sees how everything here feels old, even if it isn’t.
“Ellie and I weren’t close. But we should have been. When she came to me, I had a lot going on and I thought it was fun. She was just a kid. She wanted help with clothes. Maybe with high school. I had so much happening in my own head and it was a distraction. But I never … I should have been her friend.”
She drinks the whole glass of lemonade and pushes it across the table to my father. He wraps his hands around it and spins it back and forth.
“Caleb and Noah Breward are assholes,” Kate continues. “I never liked Noah when I was in school with him, and I figured Caleb couldn’t have been much better. But even then, she liked him. I warned her what they were like, but I didn’t know. I only knew they were jerks. They were rude. They thought they were better than everyone. I told her what they were like, but I didn’t even know what they were like.”
“I know the Brewards,” my dad says. “Everyone does.”
Kate nods. “When I was in high school, Noah and his friends were horrible to me. They made up rumors. Nothing that mattered, but it made high school pretty miserable. And on top of it, I missed a lot of school. I hated them. But I didn’t know. And Ellie … she liked Caleb so much. She insisted she saw something in him and the way she talked about him, I believed her. I knew what it was like to have someone make you feel like you didn’t deserve to be happy, but he did the opposite for her. I tried, but I didn’t want to argue. I didn’t tell her no, because I thought she was right. I should’ve said no.”
My dad sighs. “She needed someone. She was lonely. I don’t think I understood how lonely she was, but it was hard. Without her mom. I loved her more than I ever thought possible, but I was only one person. I was just her dad.”
“I should have been a better friend,” Kate says. “I should have been better. The whole time, I was just wrapped up in me.”
“Yeah, well, we all kind of are, aren’t we?”
They consider that over the streaks of condensation from the lemonade that now tie them together across the table. Kate feels guilty, but I didn’t know her, either. I was just as wrapped up in myself. I wish they could know. I wish I could tell them. I wish I could tell them it’s not their fault. That they did everything they could have done.
“Your parents said you were sick,” my dad says. “Are you doing okay no
w?”
He gets up and puts the glass in the sink, wiping the table dry with his sleeve when he sits down.
Kate leans back in her chair and looks outside. From the window, under the shade that never goes all the way up, her house peeks over the rock wall. It’s at the bottom of a hill, but the shingles are visible when you’re sitting at the table.
“They worry too much,” she says. “I was sick. Well, I guess I’m still sick, but I function. I have seizures. They’re random. They don’t seem to be triggered by anything specific, and they worry that I’ll have one and I won’t be close by and nobody will know what to do. It took so long to convince them to let me leave, to let me go away for school. By the time I did, it was too late. I had to take a year off.”
“Ellie said you were taking a year to figure things out,” my dad says.
Kate smiles. “It sounded a lot better to say I was discovering myself. Reinventing myself. That’s what I told Ellie. Because I didn’t want to say that sometimes I freak out and my parents were afraid I’d scare people. That I’d been in and out of hospitals and nobody could find a reason for it. That we never knew if I’d get better or worse. We were so afraid of the possibilities.”
“How have you been? Especially after everything that’s happened?”
“I’m good. My parents were so careful. They wanted me to start over. I knew I had to be somewhere else, and they made sure nothing from this town came with me.” She pauses, debating. She wants to say she’s sorry. To apologize again for running away. For taking care of her and leaving me here, but she doesn’t need to, and my dad shakes his head. He knows. It’s over now anyway.
“It’s better,” Kate says. “Ohio is nothing special, but it’s not here. This town does something to people.”
“You’re telling me.”
They sit at the table, silently remembering me, trying to find anything to say. They both have a missing piece now, but the pieces look different. The holes aren’t the same. The edges of what I was to Kate don’t line up with where the missing part is for my dad. They try to connect anyway. To find solace in knowing someone else gets it. But it’s not the right fit for what’s missing.
Fred starts to bark from outside. It’s late and he needs a walk. My dad stands up to get the leash.
“Thanks for coming by, Kate. I think Ellie would’ve been glad you came.”
She gets up and hugs him. It’s awkward and uncomfortable like it should be, but it also makes me long to be a part of it. To be there between them as he wraps his arms around her. Trying to remember what it feels like to hold a daughter in his arms.
chapter fifty-one
What are the things that make a girl? Are they the things she does? The people she knows? The clothes she wears?
Kate goes back to Ohio after Christmas. Gina Lynn stays in California. And Cassie heads back to wherever she came from after the sentencing, when Caleb and Noah were told they’ll likely never see the outside again.
Detective Gomes retires. He suggests Thompson get his position. They give it to a man from another town instead.
Hollow Oaks tries to go back to normal. As normal as it can be. There’s more sadness here now, though. Sometimes people see me in the places that are left behind. They remember the house where I died. The bank decided to have it demolished, but it was only one house. And without the Brewards, more and more houses stay abandoned. They don’t get cleaned up, and the whole town starts to look like a memory. It’s the image from a faded postcard you find in a general store in another broken town on your way to somewhere living.
My dad has been trying to move on. He goes to meetings for parents like him. Parents who’ve lost someone. Nobody understands exactly what he’s been through, understands his kind of loss, but he goes because it’s the closest thing he has to sympathy.
There’s a woman there. Tonight, she’s coming over for dinner. He cleaned all afternoon and then I watched him sitting on the couch, waiting, trying to get Fred to stay on the floor.
She’s pretty. When she stands on the porch waiting for him, her hair doesn’t shine in two colors. It does sparkle, though. It looks a little like sunlight. I like that; my dad needs some light in his life again.
He lets her in, and I leave them alone for tonight. I most likely have eternity to watch out for him, so I leave him his moment. An opportunity. All the things that were put on hold for him while I was alive.
I don’t begrudge him this. He loved me. I loved him, too, and I want there to be a place in the world where that love still springs. We all deserve to know that we’ve carved a place out, a place that is noticeably empty after us, but there’s plenty of space for us each to have that. Plenty of space for me and for the woman with the shiny hair.
I head to the church basement, where the group of girls waits. Kailey stopped coming right after the trial. She couldn’t handle it. She’d been the one who said she wanted the group to continue, no matter what, but after she heard, after she spent a few days under the weight of not guilty, she realized she couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t sit there and face the reminder that the group was for girls who weren’t heard. That she’d been raped by someone twelve strangers declared not guilty. While they were punished for my dying, Kailey never got that kind of justice. She left, but new girls started coming.
Officer Thompson talks quietly. There are sixteen girls now. One or two knew Caleb or Noah, but most are like Kim. I don’t know what happened to some of the girls I saw in that room, but now there are girls who have nothing to do with me here. More girls who found this place. Not because of me, but because of their own stories. Because Caleb and Noah Breward can spend the rest of their lives in prison, but there will still be a need for places like this. A place where someone might finally listen.
One night, after the trial, I followed Officer Thompson home. I watched her with her daughter. Malik was there, making them waffles for dinner, their relationship evolving into something else. Something new because of me, and I think I like that. I saw Thompson lying on the floor, listening to Rana tell her stories with her stuffed animals.
I wonder how she keeps that safe. How she can survive, knowing that her daughter is at home with her stuffed animals while sixteen girls—plus Kailey and me and however many Thompson hasn’t heard from—wait every week in a church basement. I don’t know how she does it, but she does, because it’s her job. Because she has to. Because someone has to.
The girls talk about what happened, what they hope for next. What they wish for.
You know what I wish? I wish my dad called my mom after they found me and that she flew back and they fell in love again. I wish she cried over my grave and that she regretted every minute we could’ve had but didn’t.
That didn’t happen. She never returned his call when he left a message. Had to say on voice mail that their daughter was dead. Maybe she doesn’t even know. Maybe the message somehow missed her and the next card will come. When I should’ve been seventeen, my dad will go to get the mail and he’ll see that envelope. Always the wrong date. He’ll start to heal, but then he’ll open the mailbox and the card will be there, mixed among the bills he still can’t pay, and he’ll have to relive it every year until my mom finally forgets. Until she realizes I’m gone.
The things we wish for don’t happen. This is how things really go. That’s who my mom is.
I listen to the girls talk, and I don’t take my dad’s moment tonight. Because maybe if I don’t, next year when he gets that card, the woman with sunlight in her hair will be inside making coffee. Maybe he’ll tuck the card away and head back into the kitchen, tossing it aside with the rest of the mail and then he’ll wrap his arms around her. Maybe he’ll sob against her back, but it will be harder for him to reach all the way around her because her stomach is just a bit bigger than it was last month. Maybe they’ll live and there will be life and things will keep happening. Maybe they’ll have a girl.
Maybe in this ghost town, with all these empty h
ouses, there’s a chance for that.
So while these girls sit and try to heal and talk about what they wish for, I join them, sitting here with my own ghosts. I sit with all my memories and all the things I didn’t say and won’t ever get to say. I unload my own wishes and regrets, even though nobody hears me.
A room full of girls holding on to each other’s hopes and stories. They’re not the same story, but that’s okay. Because all the things that make us different are also what we need to believe in when they try to break us.
You can break a girl. You can destroy several parts of her, but a girl is made up of so many things.
There aren’t nursery rhymes this complicated. When you ask what makes a girl, they tell you it’s sugar and spice and everything nice, but it’s not. It’s regret and wishing and summer kisses and falling in love and being hurt and heartbreak and fear and fishing with your father and wearing the wrong clothes and getting drunk because you feel so bad you want to die. It’s hoping and the memory of sunlight and how you can’t stop lightbulbs from burning out. It’s all the big things and the little things in between. It’s living and it’s dying.
A girl is everything I was and wasn’t and all the things I thought I’d be and all the things I didn’t know I was until later. It’s all the things that died when Caleb put me in the dirt that night.
These are all the things that make a girl—and it starts with just that one piece to put her back together again.
chapter fifty-two
One time, one evening similar to this one, although warmer, my dad found a tent in our attic. He’d been looking for something of his from school—I don’t remember what it was—but he’d found an old tent instead. From before I was born. He said he and my mom had loved camping, especially on warm nights.
We brought it outside and sat in front of it, under the stars. The store’s lights spilled across the sky throughout the town, but there were some breaks in it. Breaks that came from the trees by the lake on one end. The darkness overhead was milky, but there were strips of full dark inside it, so I could see a few stars. Never enough for a constellation, but pieces of a story. Of a person.