Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  I gulped down the orange juice. Every swallow seemed to make me thirstier, and I crushed the container trying to get the last sip.

  Mom asked if I wanted anything else, but I didn’t. The food and the orange juice had restored me, given me the strength to grasp the reality of the last eighteen hours. It took over the room, an invisible swell that wouldn’t break for some time. Just carried me around in its arch wherever I went, drenching everything in misery.

  “I was wondering”—Anita leaned forward and pressed her hands on her knees, directing a needy glance at Mom—“might I speak to TifAni alone?”

  Mom knitted her shoulder blades together and stood up straighter. “I think that depends on what TifAni wants.”

  It was exactly what I wanted, but with Anita’s support, my desire felt too powerful to yield. I said softly, so as not to hurt her feelings, “It’s okay, Mom.”

  I don’t know what Mom expected me to say because she looked very surprised. She collected the empty orange juice container and the napkins off my lap and said, primly, “That is perfectly fine. I will be right outside in the hallway if you need me.”

  “Do you think you can close the door behind you?” Anita called after her, and Mom had to struggle with the doorstop and she couldn’t get it for an excruciating few seconds and I felt so bad for her. Finally she did, but the door dragged lazily behind her, so that I saw Mom when she thought I couldn’t see her. She was looking up at the ceiling and then she wrapped her arms as far around her skinny body as she could manage and rocked back and forth, her mouth stretching out in a silent sob. I wanted to yell at Dad to hug her, goddamnit.

  “I have the sense it’s difficult for you to be around your mother,” Anita said.

  I didn’t say anything. I felt protective of her now.

  “TifAni,” Anita said. “I know you have been through a lot. More than any fourteen-year-old should ever be expected deal with. But I need to ask you a few questions about Arthur and Ben.”

  “I told Officer Pensacole everything yesterday,” I protested. After I’d fled the cafeteria, so sure Dean was dead, I barreled down the same path Beth had taken, only I didn’t scream like she did. I didn’t know where Ben was, didn’t want to call attention to myself. He had already put the gun in his mouth at that point, but I couldn’t have known that. When I came upon the row of SWAT officers, crouched low, guns drawn on my nearing body, I thought they were aiming at me. I actually turned around to go back into the school. But one of them chased after me and ushered me through the crowd of googly-eyed bystanders and mothers hysterical in their embarrassing dog-walking tracksuits, screaming names at me and begging to know if their babies were okay. “I think I killed him!” I was saying, and the medics tried to put an air mask over my face, but the officers intervened, demanding details, and I told them it was Ben and Arthur. “Arthur Finnerman!” I shrieked when they asked, over and over, Ben who? Arthur who? I couldn’t even remember Ben’s last name.

  “I know you did,” Anita said. “And they are very grateful for that information. But I’m not here to ask you about what happened yesterday. I’m trying to assemble a clear picture of Arthur and Ben. To try and understand why they did what they did.”

  I was suddenly nervous about this Anita character. “Are you the police? I thought you were a psychiatrist.”

  “I’m a forensic psychologist,” Anita said. “I do occasional consulting work with the Philadelphia police force.”

  That sounded more intimidating than the police. “So are you the police or not?”

  Anita smiled, and the skin around her eyes collected in three distinct lines. “I’m not the police. But to be absolutely up front with you, I will be sharing whatever you say to me with them.” She shifted in the small chair and cringed. “I know you’ve provided some very important information already, but I thought we could talk about Arthur. Your relationship to Arthur. I understand you were friends.”

  Her eyes moved back and forth over me, quickly, like she was reading a newspaper. When I didn’t say anything, she tried again. “Were you and Arthur friends?”

  I plopped my hands on the bed, helplessly. “He was really mad at me.”

  “Well, friends sometimes fight.”

  “We were friends,” I said begrudgingly.

  “And what was he so mad at you for?”

  I fiddled with a loose string in the hospital blanket. I couldn’t get into the whole story without getting into that night at Dean’s house. And I couldn’t get into that, not ever. “I stole this picture . . . of him and his dad.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  I pointed my toes, trying to stretch out the irritation. It was like when Mom asked too many questions about my friends. The more she dug, the harder I wanted to hold on to all the information she was so desperate to get. “Because he said some really mean things to me and I was just trying to get back at him.”

  “What did he say?”

  I pulled harder on the loose string, and a little family of threads bunched up in response. I couldn’t tell Anita the awful things Arthur said to me because then I’d have to tell her about Dean. And Liam and Peyton. Mom would kill me if she ever found out what happened that night. “He was mad because I started hanging out with Dean and Olivia and those guys.”

  Anita tipped her head once, like she understood. “So he felt betrayed by you?”

  I shrugged. “I guess. He didn’t like Dean.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Dean was mean to him. He was mean to Ben too.” And suddenly I had the map in my hands, the one that would lead me out of this mess unscathed. I had to guide everyone in my direction with swift surety, otherwise they would dig, dig, dig. All the way back to that night in October. I said, generously, “Do you know what Dean and Peyton did to Ben?”

  Curiosity simmered in Anita’s dark eyes. I gave her everything.

  Anita seemed very satisfied with the information I provided her, and thanked me for being so “brave and candid.” I could go home now, if I wanted to.

  “Is Dean in this hospital too?” I asked.

  Anita had been collecting her things to go, but she paused when I asked this. “I think he might be. Did you want to see him?”

  “No,” I said. Then, “Maybe. I don’t know. Is it bad?”

  “My advice?” Anita said. “I would go home, be with your family.”

  “Do I have to go to school today?”

  Anita regarded me strangely. It was another important look, but I didn’t realize why until later. “The school will be shut down for some time. I’m not really sure how they are planning to finish the semester out.”

  Anita hadn’t built up any traction in her new sneakers, and they squeaked on the shiny hospital floor as she walked away. Then Mom was back, this time with Dad, who looked like he would rather be anywhere else but where he was, stuck with us two crazy broads.

  I was surprised how sad it made me to leave the hospital, to see the people hurrying to work, the men in their dry-cleaned suits, the women driving their kids to the public school, cursing because they missed the light at Montgomery and Morris Ave and now they were going to be late. Knowing that when you’re gone the grind will go on. No one is special enough to stop it.

  Dad drove because Mom was too shaky. “Look!” She held out her bony, trembling hands as proof.

  I climbed into the car, the leather cold and hard beneath my thin hospital scrubs. Those scrubs would remain in my wardrobe until college. They were my favorite thing to lounge around in when I was hungover. I only threw them out when Nell pointed out how creepy it was that I’d held on to them.

  We looped around the Bryn Mawr Hospital parking lot until we found an exit. Dad rarely came out this way, and Mom pestered him the whole ride home. “No, Bob, left. Left!” “Jesus, Dina. Relax.” When the road ran away from the scenic towns, and the highlights changed from cute little boutiques and luxury car lots to McDonalds’s and no-frills strip malls, a sort of panic scoote
d into the elaborate labyrinth of my emotions. What if class never resumed at Bradley? There would be nothing left tethering me to the Main Line. I needed Bradley. Too much had happened to return to Mt. St. Theresa’s, to that spectacularly middlebrow life.

  “Am I going back to Bradley?” The question seemed to settle heavy on Mom’s shoulders. They sagged even further down right in front of me.

  “We don’t know,” Mom said at the same time Dad said, “Of course not.”

  Mom’s profile was stern as she hissed, “Bob.” Mom was a good hisser, it was a gift she passed along to me. “You promised.”

  I righted myself, leaving a rhombus-shaped smudge on the glass where my forehead had been sulking. That Dove bar had been no match for my shiny T-zone. “Wait. What did you promise?”

  The way no one answered me, the way they both continued to stare straight ahead, made me even more nervous.

  “Hello?” I said, louder. “What did you promise?”

  “TifAni.” Mom pressed her fingers on either side of her nose, dulling the oncoming headache. “We don’t even know what the school is going to decide to do. What your father promised is that we will wait to hear from the administration before we make a decision.”

  “And do I get a say in this decision?” I admit, I said it like a real snot. Dad swerved left and flattened the brake pedal to the floor. Mom swung forward, and the seat belt squeezed a mannish grunt out of her.

  Dad turned and pointed his finger at me. His face had sprouted all sorts of mangy purple veins. He shouted at me, “No, you don’t! You don’t!”

  Mom gasped, “Bob.”

  I slunk into the car’s corner. “Okay,” I whispered. “Please, okay.” The skin beneath my eyes had rubbed off raw, and it felt like someone had flung rubbing alcohol in my face when I began to cry. Dad realized he was still pointing his finger at me, and, slowly, he lowered his hand and tucked it between his legs.

  “TifAni!” Mom twisted half out of her seat to get her hand on my knee. “Oh my God, you are white. Sweetheart, are you okay? Daddy didn’t mean to scare you. He is just so upset right now.” I always thought of Mom as beautiful, but suffering made her ugly and unrecognizable. She sobbed a few times, her lips searching for something to say to comfort me. Eventually, she managed, “We are all just so upset right now!” We sat there for a while, waiting for Mom to stop crying, the car rocking like a cradle as the traffic thundered past.

  There was another standoff when we got home. Mom wanted me to rest in my room. She had a bottle of pills from Anita in case I had a breakdown, and she would bring me whatever I needed—food, tissues, magazines, nail polish if I felt like giving myself a manicure. But I needed TV. I needed to be reminded that the world was still here, normal and stupid as ever with their talk shows and campy soap operas. Magazines could do that too, transport you to a silly world, but once you completed the quiz on the last page and found out that yes, you are a control freak and it’s driving men away, the spell was broken. I required a permanent passport to Fluff City.

  Dad headed straight for the master bedroom. Twenty minutes later he emerged, shaved and wearing khakis and that ugly yellow button-down I worried about on the rare day he came to pick me up from school.

  “What are you doing?” Mom asked.

  “I’m going in to the office, Dina.” Dad opened the refrigerator and grabbed an apple. He bit into it, his teeth peeling back the flesh the way that knife had in Arthur’s back. I looked away. “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “I just thought we should be together today,” Mom said, a little too brightly, and I suddenly ached for a storied Main Line family with brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles nearby, for the house to be alive with generations of our great name.

  “I would if I could.” Dad held the apple between his teeth as he pulled his coat out of the hall closet and shrugged it on. “I’ll try to be home early.” Before he left he told me to feel better. Thanks, Dad.

  Our thin house rocked on its foundation when Dad slammed the door. Mom waited for it to right itself before she said, “Okay, if you’d prefer to lie on the couch that’s fine. But I’d prefer that you didn’t watch the news.”

  The news. It hadn’t even occurred to me to tune in to it before Mom brought it up, and now it was all I wanted to watch. I focused my eyes on her, challenging. “Why not?”

  “Because it will be very disturbing for you,” Mom said. “They’re showing images of—” She stopped and pressed her lips together firmly. “You don’t need to see that.”

  “Images of what?” I pushed.

  “Please, TifAni,” Mom begged. “Just respect my wishes.”

  I said I would even though I didn’t, and went upstairs to shower and change into clean clothes. Then I came right back downstairs, intending to put the news on, but Mom was rummaging through the refrigerator. The house was designed with a large window in the middle of the kitchen, so that you could sit at the table and watch the TV in the living room. I didn’t feel like hearing it from Mom about how I disrespected her wishes, so I turned the channel to MTV.

  A few minutes later, I heard Mom padding around in the kitchen, muttering something about how we had no food in the house. “TifAni,” she said, “I’m going to make a run to the grocery store. Is there anything you want?”

  “That tomato soup,” I said. “And Cheez-Its.”

  “What about drinks? Soda?”

  She knew I stopped drinking that stuff when I started running. Mr. Larson said anything but water would dehydrate us. I rolled my eyes and gave her a barely audible “No.”

  Mom came around to the front of the couch, looking down at me like I was a body in a casket. She found a blanket and shook it in the air. It landed on me, the perfect trap. “I hate the idea of leaving you alone.”

  “I’m fine,” I groaned.

  “Please don’t watch the news when I go,” she pleaded.

  “I won’t.”

  “I know you’re going to,” Mom said.

  “Then why did you even tell me not to?”

  Mom sighed and sat down on the smaller couch across from me, the cushions exhaling with her weight. She picked up the controller and said, “If you’re going to do it, I’d rather you do it with me.” Like it was my first time smoking a cigarette or something. “In case you have any questions,” she added.

  Mom switched the channel from MTV to NBC, and, sure enough, even though it was the time of day the Today show should have been testing the newest vacuum cleaners, the segment was dedicated to “Another School Shooting Tragedy.” Matt Lauer was actually standing on the sidewalk in front of the old mansion, the part that had been charred by the fire in the cafeteria.

  “The Main Line is one of the most affluent areas in the country,” Matt was saying. “I’ve heard numerous times this morning that no one can believe it’s happened here, and, for once, it’s really true.” The camera cut away from him to reveal an aerial shot of the school while Matt listed the grim body count. “Seven are dead, two of them the shooters, five victims of the shooters. One of the victims died in the blast in the cafeteria, the result of a homemade pipe bomb placed inside a backpack and left near what officials have confirmed was the table favored by the school’s most popular students. Only one of the bombs detonated, while police believe there were at least five, and, had they all gone off, the carnage would have been much worse. Nine students are in the hospital with severe but not life-threatening injuries. Some are believed to have lost limbs.”

  I gasped. “Lost limbs?”

  Mom’s eyes looked bigger with tears in them. “This is what I was talking about.”

  “Who? Who did that happen to?”

  Mom brought a shaky hand to her forehead. “I didn’t recognize some of the names so I forgot them. But there was one. Your friend Hilary.”

  I kicked at the blanket. It tangled in my legs, and I wanted to tear that fucking thing thread from thread. The orange juice felt like a citrus boil in my stomach. “What
happened to her?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mom whimpered. “But I think it was her foot.”

  I tried to make it to the bathroom before I spewed that putrid green bile everywhere, I really did. Mom said it was fine, she could get the stain out with spot remover, no problem. The important thing was that I just rest. She gave me an Anita pill. Just rest.

  I came to a few times to hear Mom on the phone. I heard her say, “That’s very sweet. But she’s resting at the moment.”

  I fell into black muck after that, so dense it took physical effort to wade out of it. I tried a few times before giving up, falling under again. It was nighttime when I finally punctured the murky glaze, when I could form the words to ask Mom who she had been talking to earlier.

  “A few people,” Mom said. “Your old English teacher called to see how you were doing—”

  “Mr. Larson?”

  “Uh-huh, and also another mother. They activated that call chain thing.”

  School was suspended indefinitely. Mom said I was lucky I wasn’t a senior. “Just imagine, trying to send out your college applications in this mess?” She clucked her sympathy.

  “Did Mr. Larson leave a number?”

  “He didn’t,” Mom said. “But he said he would call back later.”

  The phone didn’t ring again for the rest of the evening, and I spent the first night on the couch, blank faced in front of the TV screen, listening to Beverly, mother of four, rave that the ABtastic DVD was the only thing that had given her her body back, and she had tried everything. The lights stayed on too. Another thing about our house is that the second-floor hallway is completely open, so that you can come out of any of the four bedrooms and look over the railing, see me, a lump beneath a pastel acrylic throw. Dad stormed out of the bedroom a few times, raging about how the sliver of light beneath his door was keeping him awake. Finally I told him I’d take that petty torment over the grisly scene on repeat in my mind, and he didn’t come out of his room again.