Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  I dozed off just as the sun came up, and, when I came to again, the TV was off and I couldn’t find the remote control anywhere.

  “Daddy took it,” Mom called from the kitchen, when she heard me flailing around. “He went out and bought you a bunch of magazines before he went to work though.”

  Usually, Mom would monitor the magazines I read. But she gave a long list to Dad and told him to buy them all, even the ones that promised to teach me how to “Set His Thighs on Fire.” It was a small peace offering, I knew, because they’d banned TV. I cherished those magazines, still have them in a box underneath my childhood bed to this day. They made me want to move to a city—any city—wear heels, and live a fabulous life. In their world, everything was fabulous.

  It was some lazy time in the afternoon, Mom napping on the short couch, me stretched out on the long couch, studying a smoky eye tutorial, when the doorbell rang.

  Mom sprung up and looked at me accusingly, like I’d made the noise that woke her. We stared at each other silently until the doorbell rang again.

  Mom ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing it at the dark roots, and patted her fingers under her eyes, clearing out the mascara smudges. “Damnit.” She shook her foot as she stood, trying to knock the sleep out of it. It didn’t work. She hobbled all the way to the front door.

  I heard the low murmur of voices. Mom saying, “Why, of course.” When she returned to the living room, there were two frowning men in suits, that basement-couch kind of brown, by her side.

  “TifAni.” Mom was using her hostess voice. “This is Detective . . .” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I’m so sorry, Detectives. I’ve already forgotten your names.” Her voice dropped its pleasant tenor and she looked like she was going to cry again. “It’s just been such a time.”

  “Of course it has,” the younger, skinnier one said. “I’m Detective Dixon.” He nodded at his partner. “This is Detective Vencino.” Detective Vencino had that same complexion so many of my relatives sport for most of the calendar year. Without a summer tan, we take on a sickly shade of green.

  Mom addressed me. “TifAni, can you stand please?”

  I folded the page to my smoky eye tutorial and did as I was told. “Did someone else die?”

  Detective Dixon’s blond-white eyebrows clustered together. If they didn’t bristle off his face haphazardly, it would be easy to mistake them for not being there at all. “No one has died.”

  “Oh.” I examined my nails. The article I’d been reading prior to the smoky eye how-to had said that white spots on the nails were signs of iron deficiency, and iron is what gives you thick, shiny hair, so you didn’t want to be iron deficient. No white spots. “My parents won’t let me watch the news so I have no idea what’s going on.” I shot the detectives a look like, Can you believe it?

  “That’s probably for the best,” Detective Dixon said, and Mom gave me this smug little smile that made me want to throw the magazine at her head.

  “Is there someplace where we can all sit and talk?” Detective Dixon asked.

  “Is everything okay?” Mom brought her hand to her mouth, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I meant has something else happened?”

  “Nothing else, Mrs. FaNelli.” Detective Vencino cleared his throat, and the loose green skin on his neck wobbled. “We just want to ask TifAni a few questions.”

  “I already talked to the police at the hospital,” I said. “And that psychiatrist.”

  “Psychologist,” Detective Dixon corrected. “And we know. We just want to clear up a few things. We were hoping you could help.” He arched his spiky eyebrows pleadingly. So many people who needed my help.

  I looked at Mom, who nodded. “Okay.”

  Mom asked the detectives if they wanted anything—coffee, tea, a snack? Detective Dixon asked for coffee, but Detective Vencino shook his head. “No, thank you, Mrs. FaNelli.”

  “You can call me Dina,” Mom said, and Detective Vencino didn’t smile at her, the way most men do.

  The three of us sat at the table while Mom poured coffee beans into the top of the coffee machine. We all had to raise our voices above the whirring grind.

  “So, TifAni,” Detective Dixon began. “We know about your relationship with Arthur. That you two were in a fight. At the time of the . . . incident.”

  I bobbed my head up and down: yup, yup, yup. “He was mad at me. I took this picture from his room. I still have it if you—”

  Detective Dixon held up his hand. “We are actually not here to talk about Arthur.”

  I blinked, dumbly. “What are you here to talk about then?”

  “Dean.” Detective Dixon watched for any effect the name might have on me. “Were you and Dean friends?”

  I traced my naked toe on the kitchen’s hardwood floor. I used to slide across these floors in my socks, arms flung out, pretending to surf. Then one day a three-inch-long splinter punctured the fabric of my socks, lodged itself neatly into the arch of my foot, and that was the end of that game. “Not exactly.”

  “But you were,” Detective Vencino jumped in. It was the first time he’d spoken to me, and up close I noticed his crooked nose, skewed left, like a lump of wet clay someone had pushed to the side before it dried. “At one point?”

  “I guess you could say that,” I allowed.

  Detective Dixon glanced at Detective Vencino. “Were you upset with Dean recently?”

  I glanced at Mom, straining to hear my answer above the blade’s whine. “A little, yeah. I guess.”

  “Can you tell us why?”

  I examined my hands, my healthy nails. Olivia would never have to worry about being iron deficient again. I suddenly remembered that she’d been wearing green nail polish when I’d seen her last, in Chem, hunched over her desk, furiously scribbling notes. Hilary had been wearing it too, must have convinced Olivia to try it, because Olivia wasn’t the type to experiment with makeup. Or maybe it was to show their support for the soccer team. I dazed off, wondering, if you die with green nails, if you’re not going through life bumping into things and washing your hair—all those everyday things that chisel away at the veneer—will the Sally Hansen persevere? The way your teeth and bones remain when the rest of you decays? Here is Olivia, her green fingernails all that’s left. Detective Dixon repeated his question.

  “TifAni,” Mom called. The machine’s motor shut off with a click, and the next thing she said came out loudly, with accidental emphasis. “Answer the detectives, please.”

  Like one of those bath toys that swells to four times its size in a warm tub, I fattened up with tears. I wasn’t going to be able to hide what happened that night. Why did I think I could? I jammed a fist into an eye and rubbed. “There were a lot of reasons,” I sighed.

  “Maybe you’d be more comfortable talking about them if Mom weren’t here?” Detective Dixon asked, kindly.

  “I’m sorry.” Mom placed Detective Dixon’s coffee cup by his elbow. “Be more comfortable talking about what? What is going on?”

  The windows at the Ardmore police station were opaque inky squares by the time the lawyer arrived, introduced himself as Dan under the sallow hallway lights. Detective Dixon insisted we didn’t need a lawyer, and he was so nice Mom almost believed him, but she changed her tune after she called Dad at the office. The lawyer came recommended by Dad’s co-worker whose daughter had been arrested for a DUI over the summer. Neither Mom nor I was impressed. He was a schlubby guy in a suit with pant hems that collected in bunches around his ankles like the bulky neck of a bulldog.

  Dan (“No competent lawyer can be named Dan,” Mom hissed) wanted to hear the entire story from me first, before the detectives joined us in the frigid interrogation room. They really do lower the temperature, try to make you feel as uncomfortable as possible so you would confess sooner, the detectives home in time for dinner.

  “No detail is unimportant.” Dan rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt, a royal blue eyesore that seemed the product of a buy two,
get one free sale at Jos. A. Bank. He’d taken off his coat and hung it on the back of the chair, not noticing when the left shoulder slipped, the right shoulder clinging on with all its might. “Everything from the beginning of the school year. Every connection you had to everyone involved in this. Everything.”

  Even I couldn’t believe how well it had all started out for me, that I was ever sought after by the likes of Dean or Olivia, how badly and how swiftly my good fortune had spoiled. I rushed through the details of the night at Dean’s, burning bright as I recounted how I’d come to with Peyton, doing, you know, to me. “Performing oral sex?” Dan asked, and under the unrelenting fluorescent lights I must have looked sunburned. “Yes,” I mumbled. I went through the list, the way I’d drifted through the night, coming to at various points with Peyton first, the others who followed. I told him what happened afterward, the night at Olivia’s, the cut on my face that wasn’t from her dog. I was wary of involving Mr. Larson in the whole thing, but Dan said no detail was unimportant.

  “Did Mr. Larson . . .” Dan cleared his throat. He looked as embarrassed as I did. “That night in his apartment?”

  I stared at him for a second before I understood what he meant. “No,” I said. “Mr. Larson would never do something . . . like that.” I shivered to show my disgust.

  “But Mr. Larson knew about the rapes? He could corroborate this story?”

  That was the first time anyone had ever referred to what happened to me in the plural. The rape(s). I didn’t know those other things could be considered rape. “Yes.”

  Dan made a note in his little notebook. His pen stilled. “Now, Arthur.”

  Was he depressed, was he on drugs? (“No,” I said. “I mean, yeah, but just pot.” “Pot is a drug, TifAni.”) Did he ever say anything that, looking back, could have been his way of warning me about what he was planning to do?

  “I mean”—I shrugged—“I knew he had that gun. The one he had in the cafeteria.”

  Dan didn’t blink for so long I almost waved my hand in front of his face and yodeled “yoo-hoo” like in the commercials. “How do you know that?”

  “He showed it to me. In his basement. It was his dad’s.” Dan still hadn’t blinked. “It wasn’t loaded or anything,” I stressed.

  “How do you know?” Dan asked.

  “He pointed it at me. As a joke.”

  “He pointed it at you?”

  “He let me hold it too,” I bit back. “He wouldn’t be dumb enough to let me hold it and not tell me it was loaded. What if I . . .” I stopped talking, because Dan’s head dropped to his chest, like he had fallen asleep on an airplane. “What?”

  Dan’s chest muffled his voice. “You touched the gun?”

  “For, like, two seconds,” I said, quickly, trying to fix whatever it was I’d broken. “Then I gave it back.” Dan still didn’t look at me. “Why? Is that bad?”

  Dan jammed his hands on either side of his nose, supporting the weight of his head. “It could be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if they find your prints on the gun, it could be very, very bad.”

  The overhead light shuddered and crackled, like it had sizzled a bug on a swampy summer night, and I realized what Dan meant. Had Mom known this too? Did Dad? “Do they think I’m involved in this?”

  “TifAni,” Dan said, his voice high and astonished. “What, exactly, do you think you’re doing here?”

  After Dan and I had our “powwow,” as Detective Dixon put it, like he was my football coach and I was the quarterback with the entire town’s expectations on my burly shoulders, I was allowed to use the restroom and see Mom and Dad. They were sitting on a bench, outside the interrogation room. Dad had his head in his hands, like he couldn’t believe this was his life. Like if he could just fall asleep he might wake up somewhere else. Mom’s legs were crossed, her stockinged foot half out of one of her flirty heels. I’d told her not to wear them here, but she’d insisted. She’d tried to make me put makeup on (“Maybe a little mascara before we go?”). I’d turned the lights off in the kitchen and gone and waited in the car, leaving her alone, blinking into the dark.

  Dad stood to shake Dan’s hand as we approached.

  To Mom I said, “Do you know they think I had something to do with this?”

  “Of course they don’t think that, TifAni,” she said, her voice shrill and unconvincing. “They’re just covering all their bases.”

  “Dan says they have my fingerprints on the gun.”

  “Could have, could.” Dan’s shoulders jumped a little as Mom shrieked “What?”

  “Dina!” Dad barked. “Lower your voice.”

  Mom pointed her finger at Dad, her acrylic nail shaking in rage. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do, Bobby.” She drew her hand back, making a fist and sinking her teeth into her knuckles. “This is all your fault,” she whimpered, squeezing her eyes shut, tears worming paths through the thick layer of foundation on her face. “I told you! TifAni needed those clothes. So they wouldn’t single her out, and look, that’s exactly what they did!”

  “This is my fault because I wouldn’t pay for clothes?” Dad’s mouth was open, his molars black. Dad hated the dentist.

  “Please!” Dan whispered, loudly. “This is not the place to make a scene.”

  “You are unbelievable,” Dad muttered. Mom only tossed her stiff, hair-sprayed hair back, settling into herself again.

  “I don’t know if they have her prints,” Dan said. “But TifAni shared with me that Arthur showed her one of the guns that we think”—he held up his hands like a cop in traffic telling the southbound lane to stop—“was used in the crime. And that he let her hold it.”

  The way Mom looked at me, sometimes you just have to feel bad for parents. For all the ways they think they know you. The mockery their kids make out of them when they find out otherwise. Before I’d told Dan about that night at Dean’s, I asked if he was going to have to share this with my parents. “Not if you don’t want me to,” Dan said. “This is privileged client information. But, TifAni, the way this thing is going. It will come out. And it’s better they hear it from you first.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t ever tell them this.”

  Dan said, “I can, if you want me to.”

  Heels clicking against the speckled linoleum floor announced Detective Dixon’s arrival, and we all waited for him to speak. “How you folks doing?” He glanced at his wrist, even though he wasn’t wearing a watch. “Let’s get going on this, huh?”

  I didn’t know what time it was, but when I sat down next to Dan, Detective Dixon in the seat across from us and Detective Vencino tucked into the corner, my stomach moaned impatiently.

  The table, smudged like Arthur’s glasses always were, was empty save for a cup of water (mine) and a recording device occupying the center spot. Detective Dixon pressed a button and said, “November fourteenth, 2001.”

  “It’s actually November fifteenth.” Detective Vencino tapped the face of the watch he was wearing. “Twelve oh six.”

  Detective Dixon corrected himself and added, “This is Detective Dixon, Detective Vencino, TifAni FaNelli, and her lawyer, Daniel Rosenberg.” The discovery of Dan’s full name gave me a lot more confidence in him.

  With the formalities out of the way, I told my story again. Every last vulgar detail. It’s a certain kind of hell, confessing your most humiliating sexual secrets to a room full of hairy middle-aged men.

  Unlike Dan, Detective Dixon and Detective Vencino didn’t interrupt me with questions. Which made me think it might be okay to leave out certain parts, but when I tried, Dan gently prodded me. “And it was Mr. Larson you ran into at the Wawa that night, remember?”

  When I finished, Detective Dixon stretched in his chair with a loud yawn. He stayed like that, legs splayed apart, arms behind his head, staring at me for a long while. “So,” he said, finally, “your story is that Dean, Liam, and Peyton assaulted you that night at Dean’s house? And that Dean did again, th
at night at Olivia’s house?”

  I looked at Dan, who nodded, before answering him. “Yes,” I said.

  “See, TifAni, I’m not following.” The way he was slumped into the wall, Detective Vencino’s chest curled over his little potbelly. There wasn’t one part of him that wasn’t covered in itchy-looking black hair. “I guess what I’m not understanding is if Dean, assaulted you”—there was his rude laugh—“why would you even want to save him from Arthur?”

  “I was trying to save myself.”

  “But Arthur was your friend,” Detective Vencino said, condescendingly, as though I’d forgotten. “He wouldn’t try to hurt you.”

  “He was my friend.” I stared at the table so hard it blurred. “But I was afraid of him. He was mad at me. I’d taken that picture of his dad . . . I don’t think you understand how mad he was about that. I told you. He chased me out of his house.”

  “Let’s back up a second.” Detective Dixon shot Detective Vencino a warning look over his shoulder. “Tell me what you know about Dean and Arthur’s relationship.”

  I thought of that yearbook in Arthur’s room. Their smiling, earnest faces. Not a clue in the world how it would all turn out. “They were friends in middle school,” I said. “Arthur told me that.”

  “And when did they stop being friends?” Dixon asked.

  “Arthur said it was when Dean got popular.” I shrugged. Story old as time.

  “Did Arthur ever talk about wanting to hurt Dean?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  Vencino pounced. “What does ‘not really’ mean, TifAni?”

  “No, okay? He didn’t.”

  “Never?” Dixon prodded, gently. “Think back.”

  “I mean, it was the usual talking shit about him. But no, Arthur never said, ‘I’m going to take my dad’s gun into the school and shoot Dean in the nuts.’” The word “nuts” made me giggle. I hiccuped and succumbed to a fit of silent, painful laughter, the kind that spreads like wildfire at a funeral, when someone breaks the somber silence with a wet, Diet Coke burp.