Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  You say this at least once a week. You’re not transferring. We both know it. I’ll just kill them all for you. How’s that sound?

  Swell. How are we doing it?

  I have my dad’s gun.

  What happens if you get caught?

  I wouldn’t get caught. I’m wicked smart.

  I didn’t know how to make the detectives understand. This was how we spoke to each other. We were all young and cruel. One time a freshman JV soccer player choked on an orange slice on the bus ride to an away game, and, instead of helping him, or even displaying the least bit of alarm, Dean and Peyton and all the guys laughed at the way the blood rushed to his face and his eyes bugged out of his head (the assistant manager finally realized what was going on and performed the Heimlich maneuver). For weeks afterward, the guys regaled us with this story, over and over, the veins in their necks straining with their laughter while the poor kid who choked on the orange stared at the lunch table, trying not to cry.

  “I’m almost positive that when we look in your school notebooks we will see this is your handwriting, and that you use a green pen.” Detective Vencino patted his paunch, satisfied, like he’d just eaten a great meal.

  “Well, you’re going to have to get a warrant to search TifAni’s things to be able to do that. And if you had that, you would have used it by now.” Dan leaned back in his chair and smirked at Vencino.

  “It was just a joke,” I said, softly.

  “TifAni!” Dan warned.

  “Really,” Detective Dixon said. “It’s better if we hear it from her. Because as we speak, we are getting that warrant.”

  Dan blinked at me, trying to decide. Finally, he nodded. Sighed, “Tell them.”

  “It was a joke,” I said again. “I thought he was joking.”

  “And were you?” Detective Vencino asked.

  “Of course I was,” I said. “I didn’t ever think something like this would happen. Not in a million years.”

  “I know it’s been a few years since I’ve been in high school”—Vencino began to pace—“but, little girl, you better believe we never made jokes like that.”

  “Did you two ever discuss this . . . plan . . . verbally?” Detective Dixon asked.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “What is this ‘I don’t think so’?” Vencino demanded. “Either you did or you didn’t.”

  “I just . . . didn’t pay attention to it,” I said. “So yeah, he could have joked about it, and maybe I did too, but I didn’t make, like, a mental note of it or anything because it wasn’t something I took seriously.”

  “But you knew he had one of the guns used in the attack,” Dixon said, and I nodded. “How did you know that?”

  I glanced at Dan, and he gave me the go-ahead. “He showed it to me.”

  Dixon and Vencino looked at each other, so astonished that for a second neither of them appeared angry at me anymore. “When was this?” Dixon asked, and I told him about that afternoon in Arthur’s basement. The deer head. The yearbook. The way he’d pointed the gun at me and I’d fallen on my bad wrist.

  Detective Vencino shook his head in the corner, shadows darkening his face like a bruise. Muttered, “Little fucking punk.”

  “Did Arthur ever joke”—Dixon bunny-eared that word—“about hurting anyone else?”

  “No. I thought he wanted to hurt me.”

  “See”—Vencino tapped his grimy fingernail against his chin—“that’s funny because Dean is saying just the opposite.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Dan jumped in. “What is Dean saying?”

  “That Arthur offered the gun to TifAni. Told her now was the chance to shoot this—and excuse my language, but these are the types of kids we’re dealing with here—cocksucker’s cock off.” Vencino scratched a patch of skin under his eye and grimaced. “He says TifAni reached for the gun.”

  “I never said I didn’t!” I exploded. “I was going to use it on him, not Dean.”

  Dan warned, “TifAni—” at the same time Dixon slammed his fist down on the table, sending a few copies of the yearbook pages into the air, where they hovered, still as a picture, before slicing back and forth through space, not even hitting the floor for some time after Dixon shouted “You’re a liar!” His face was heart-attack red, the way only a natural blond’s can get. “You’ve been lying to us from the moment we met you.” He had been lying too, fooling me with his friendly mask.

  By the end of it all I just assumed no one ever told the truth, and that was when I started lying too.

  The news informed me that Liam’s funeral was the first, a full ten days after the fact. A few hours later, an e-mail went out to the Bradley “family.” That’s what they started calling us after this. The “Bradley Family.” And even I, black sheep that I was, received the message.

  Mom received it too, and she asked me if I needed to go shopping for a black dress. My laugh was my way of calling her demented. “I’m not going to that.”

  “Oh, yes you are.” Her lips pulled in thin as a slice of grass.

  “I am not going,” I repeated, more fiercely this time. I was sitting on the couch, my stockinged feet on the coffee table, hair and lint stuck all over them. It had been three days since the interrogation, and I hadn’t showered, hadn’t put on a bra. This skank stank.

  “TifAni!” Mom cried. She took a deep breath and brought her hands to her face. In a reasonable tone she said, “We did not raise you like this. This is the decent thing to do.”

  “I am not going to the funeral of the guy who raped me.”

  Mom gasped. “Don’t you speak like that.”

  “Like what?” I laughed.

  “He’s dead, TifAni. He died a horrible death, and while he may have made some mistakes in his life he was just a child.” Mom pinched her nose, sniffed back the snot. “He did not deserve that.” Her voice went up high and weepy on the last word.

  “You never even met him.” I pointed the controller at the TV and turned it off, the grandest statement I could make. I kicked off the throw covering my hairy legs and glared at Mom as I passed her on my way up the stairs, to my bedroom, which I hadn’t stepped foot in for the last two days.

  “You are going or I won’t pay for you to go back to Bradley!” Mom called behind me.

  The morning of Liam’s funeral the phone rang. I snatched it off the hook. “Hello?”

  “TifAni!” My name was spoken with surprise.

  I twirled my finger in the cord. “Mr. Larson?”

  “I’ve been trying to call,” he said, hurriedly. “How are you? Are you okay?”

  The line clicked and Mom said, “Hello?”

  “Mom,” I snapped. I’ve got it.”

  All three of us were silent for a moment. “Who is this?” Mom asked.

  There was the unmistakable sound of a man clearing his throat. “It’s Andrew Larson, Mrs. FaNelli.”

  “TifAni,” Mom hissed. “Hang up the phone.”

  I hooked my finger in the cord tighter. “Why?”

  “I said, hang up the—”

  “It’s okay,” Mr. Larson said. “I was just calling to see if TifAni was okay. Good-bye, TifAni.”

  “Mr. Larson!” I shrieked, but it was only Mom there, raging over the dial tone. “I told you to stop calling! She is fourteen years old!”

  I screamed right back. “Nothing happened! I told you nothing happened!”

  You know what the sick part is? Even though I was dreading Liam’s funeral, even though I was so mad at Mom for making me go, I still wanted to look pretty for it.

  I spent an hour getting ready. I curled my eyelashes for forty seconds each, so that they stuck straight up in wide-awake surprise. Dad had to work (sometimes I think he was just sitting in an empty office, scowling at his powered-off computer), so it was just Mom and me, not speaking in her bright cherry BMW with the heat that worked only when her foot pumped the gas pedal, so that we shivered in unison every time we stopped in fron
t of a red light.

  “I want you to know,” Mom said, as she released the brake along with a plume of deliciously warm air, “that I don’t condone what Liam did. Of course I don’t. But you have to take responsibility for your part in this too.”

  “Just stop,” I pleaded.

  “I’m just saying. When you drink you put yourself into situations where—”

  “I know!” We merged onto the highway, and the car was silent and warm after that.

  The church I used to attend at Mt. St. Theresa’s was beautiful, if you’re into that sort of thing. But we weren’t going to a church for Liam’s “memorial service” (no funerals, everyone had a memorial service). Liam was a Quaker, and we were going to a meeting-house.

  My confusion was so great it actually dulled my irritation with Mom long enough to muse, “I thought Quakers lived in their own communities and didn’t believe in, like, modern medicine or whatever?”

  Mom bit into a smile, despite everything. “That’s Amish.”

  The Quaker meetinghouse was a single-level clapboard home, a faded, somber shade of white behind the oak arms that flapped around it, red and orange leaves clinging to random bark veins. Even though we were forty-five minutes early, there was a long line of shiny black sedans waiting in the muddy grass, and Mom was forced to park at the top of the hill. She tried to hold my arm as we climbed down, but I pulled away from her and stormed ahead, the rhythm of her high heels behind me unsteady and satisfying.

  But as we neared the entrance, I saw the crowd of people, the TV cameras, and my classmates, in groups hugging and comforting each other. It was enough to make me lose my nerve and slow down so that Mom could catch up with me.

  “What a scene,” Mom breathed. Faced with the women in chic black pantsuits, gumball-size pearls around their necks, Mom clasped her large cross pendant self-consciously. The fake diamonds were dull, despite the bold blast of the late morning sun.

  “Come on,” Mom said, forging ahead. Her high heel stuck in the grass, and she boomeranged backward. A few frosted hairs caught in her pink lip gloss, and she spat them away. “Goddamnit,” she muttered, working her shoe out of the mud.

  As we came up on the edge of the crowd, a few classmates paused, eyes wet and wide on me. A few even stepped away, and what gutted me most was that they didn’t do it meanly. They did it nervously.

  The meetinghouse wasn’t even half full yet. It would be packed to capacity and then some, but for now, there was a spectacle to be made outside, in front of the cameras. Mom and I hurried inside and found seats in the back of the meetinghouse. Right away Mom hunched over, searching beneath the pew ahead of her for a kneeler. When she didn’t find one, she slid forward in her seat, making a swift sign of the cross and pressing her palms together. She squeezed her eyes shut, and her plastic-looking eyelashes crunched on her cheeks.

  A family of four—the daughter, Riley, a junior at Bradley—entered the pew to the left, and I had to nudge Mom to open her eyes. She was blocking their way.

  “Oh!” Mom slid back into the pew, turned her knees to the side to give the family room to make their way in.

  They sat down, Riley nearest to me, and I nodded solemnly at her. She was a member of school council, always up at the podium at Monday’s morning assembly, talking about how much money the car wash raised over the weekend. Her mouth was the largest feature on her face, and, when she smiled, her eyes retracted, like they were hiding from her lips.

  Riley nodded back, the corners of her big mouth poking into the sides of her face. In my peripheral vision, I saw her lean toward her father, mumble something in his ear. There was a domino effect: now the father slanting toward the mother, and the mother toward the younger sister, who whined, “Why?” The mother whispered something else, a warning, a bribe, however their family operated, and the girl stood, eyes rolling and legs still slightly bent at the knees, and she shuffled out of the pew, her family following.

  This happened a few more times. Classmates either recognizing the Judas in the back pew and not even bothering to stop, or getting up and moving when they noticed me. The pews were filling in fast, and like in a crowded movie theater, families and cliques of friends were having to split up in order to get a seat. I studied every person who entered, worried it could be Hilary or Dean. I knew they were in the hospital, that they would be for a long time, but still I looked for them.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have come,” I whispered to Mom, triumphant. She knew nothing.

  Mom didn’t answer, and I looked over at her. Two pink circles had fought their way to the surface of her cheeks.

  Eventually, some nice old people came by. Asked if these seats were saved. “They’re all yours,” Mom said gallantly, like she’d been holding the spots just for them.

  Within minutes, attendees were forced to stand around the outside of the meetinghouse, pressing their ears against air-conditioning vents to hear. I can personally attest to the fact that half the students at the funeral had not spoken more than a few words to Liam since he started at Bradley that September. Strange, but I felt a sort of special bond with him. I knew what Liam had done was wrong. I found something like forgiveness for him my freshman year of college, at the sexual assault seminar every incoming student was required to take.

  After the initial presentation by a local police officer, one girl raised her hand. “So if you’ve been drinking it’s rape no matter what?”

  “If that were true I would have been raped hundreds of times in my life,” replied the pretty senior moderating the talk, so proud of herself when the room tittered. “It’s only rape if you are too drunk to consent to it.”

  “But what if I say yes but I’m blacked out?” the girl pressed.

  The senior looked at the police officer. This was where it always got tricky. “A good rule of thumb,” the officer said, “and we’re telling the men this too—you know what a blacked-out person looks like. You know when someone’s had too much. That should guide your partner more than a yes or no.”

  I silently begged the girl to ask the next question. “But what if he’s blacked out too?”

  “It’s not easy,” the police officer admitted. She gave us all an encouraging smile. “Just do your best.” Like it was mile-time day in gym class or something.

  I think about that sometimes. Wonder if Liam was so bad. Maybe he just didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. There comes a point where you just can’t be mad at everyone anymore.

  I had never been to a Quaker service before, and neither had Mom, so we’d looked it up on the Internet and found out that there is no formal service. Rather, people just stand and speak when they feel compelled to do so.

  So many people stood to say nice things about Liam while his parents, his little brother with his same disquietingly blue eyes, clutched each other in the corner. Every now and then, Dr. Ross would start in on a low, slow howl that crescendoed, reaching either wall of the meetinghouse, exiting through the pipes and vents so that the people outside stepped away, the metal magnifying the sound like a microphone. Long before the Kardashians made it public knowledge on television, I knew what it looked like when someone who had gone overboard with the injectables cried. Turned out Dr. Ross, the wealthy, highly sought after plastic surgeon, was no different than the slithery housewives who came to see him, willing to try anything to reverse the damage they’d done when they were trying to pin down a husband in the first place.

  He could barely contain himself as people stood to say how unique Liam was, how funny and good looking and bright. Bright. Now there’s a word parents always use to describe kids who don’t get good grades, either because they don’t work for them or because they aren’t, in fact, bright. In that moment I decided, no matter what happened, that I wasn’t going to futz around and wait to find out which one I was. I’d put in the work. Anything to get out of here.

  After the service, we filed out of the meetinghouse, packs of crying girls three or four deep, the sun winking
callously in their blond hair.

  The graveyard was directly to the left of the meetinghouse, and all were invited to the burial after. Since Mom and I had sat so close to the entrance, we were in the inner loop of the circle that formed around Liam’s grave. I sensed someone at my shoulder as the rest of the crowd gathered. Then I felt the Shark’s sticky hand in mine and I squeezed gratefully.

  Liam’s father was holding a silver vase, which at first I thought was going to be for flowers to mark Liam’s place, before I realized Liam was inside the vase. I hadn’t been to many funerals in my life, but the few I had attended, everyone had been buried in a casket. Three weeks ago Liam was talking about how much he hated onions on his hoagie. I couldn’t reconcile how a person could go from complaining about onions to turning in the incinerator, crumbling to ash.

  I saw Mr. Larson on the other side of the circle. I sneaked a glance at Mom to make sure she wasn’t looking and gave him a half wave. He half-waved back. There was a blond woman next to him, who had always been faceless and beautiful whenever I remembered her. Now I knew her name: Whitney.

  When enough black dress shoes covered the soggy grass, Dr. Ross passed the vase to Mrs. Ross. You’d think the wife of a plastic surgeon would look like one, but Mrs. Ross presented typical mom. A little chubby, and all oversize tops to conceal it. What would she have done if she knew the way Liam behaved that night at Dean’s, if she knew he’d taken me to Planned Parenthood for the morning-after pill? It wasn’t impossible to imagine her sighing and saying, “Oh, Liam.” Just as disappointed in him as Mom is in me.

  In a clear voice, Mrs. Ross said, “This may be where we mark Liam’s time with us, but I don’t want you to think this is where you have to come to think about Liam.” She held the vase close to her chest. “Think about him always.” Her mouth puckered. “Anywhere.” Dr. Ross picked up his arm and smashed Liam’s blubbering brother into his chest.