“Take care of yourself.” I grab my purse, my hands shaking.
“Wait. Aren’t we going to figure this out? What are you going to do now?”
“I’m not sure. I just want to move on from all of this.” I stop when we’re at the door, my last question flickering to life. “You wrote a short story about a girl named Clarissa. Who was she, really?”
“She was you,” he says without hesitation. “I wanted to send you the story, but it was too much. I don’t know why I sent it to Flora. Maybe I wanted her to realize it wasn’t about her. But she was so happy, and I couldn’t ruin it.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get to read it.” Even though I don’t believe him, I’m sorry it existed. Clarissa fed the envy I already had for Flora. Clarissa turned it into an animal, a servant of instinct.
“Me too.” He smiles sadly as he closes the door. “Be careful, okay?”
I text Billie when I’m back in the rental car and apply fresh lipstick over Kevin’s kiss. I need to feel anchored to something normal, reminded that the world outside of here exists. I might have done something very bad.
Her reply is immediate. I told you he would show up!! What happened?
Billie, a hopeless romantic, even after she stood up at our wedding, saying she knew from the first time she met Adrian that we’d end up together. I don’t know if it’s disgusting or impressive that girls can do that for each other. That we can achieve that level of deceit in the name of sisterhood.
THEN
It wasn’t clear whether the investigation into Kevin’s involvement would turn into an actual trial. But his personal trial happened every day. Wesleyan lit up with protests. The Butts C girls—the ones I had once envied for their beauty, their effortless cool—were eternal activists, stopping their regularly scheduled skirmishes against campus authority to take up Flora’s cause. They rallied, a riot of hair and teeth. Chalking had been banned the year before, but people stopped caring. We stepped over their messages everywhere we walked. Justice for Flora. Knives and Guns Aren’t the Only Weapons. Words Can Kill.
My paranoia was a dead weight, making it hard to get out of bed. I skipped classes, holing up in my new room. I didn’t want to party anymore. I just wanted to survive the year.
When I did leave my room, I got ambushed by girls expecting me to spearhead a movement against something they had no idea I had caused. Suddenly I was in demand, just when I wanted to be invisible. I avoided them as much as possible, but one day, Lauren caught up with me when I was doing laundry.
“You haven’t been to any of the protests.” She crossed her arms. “Do you not want this asshole to pay for what he did?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped. “But I don’t see what some sidewalk chalk will accomplish. It’s up to the lawyers, not us.”
“You could still show your support,” Lauren said. “Don’t you think you owe her that?”
Everyone seemed to think I owed Flora something, which pissed me off most of all. She had been a damsel needing rescue in life, and death hadn’t stopped her from playing that same role.
“Unless you have another reason for not showing up,” Lauren said, turning to leave before I could see her face and figure out what she knew. The Kevin rumor was nothing more than a wisp at that point, but it was about to gain substance.
I’d taken to staring at my Friend mug, alternating between stuffing it under the dirty clothes that piled up on my floor and keeping it out where I would see it, a reminder of what happened when I wanted something I wasn’t supposed to have. In the end, I left the mug behind when I moved out of the Butts after freshman year but kept the picture of Kevin, the one I had stolen from Flora’s wall, flattened inside John Donne, its final resting place.
I barely slept at night, certain that the police weren’t satisfied with my answers and would come for me again. I went to MoCon with Sully but only pushed food around my plate. My teeth chattered constantly, my thoughts flipping from mundane to fatalistic.
“You need to relax,” Sully kept saying. “It’s over. We can go back to normal.”
She was wrong.
The day the police found me for real, on my walk back to Butts A from Olin, I should have expected them. I should have known what to say.
“Ambrosia Wellington,” the officer said. He was the same one who’d questioned me before. Felty, with the blue eyes and pleasant smile. My legs trembled. I needed Sully to coach me through this, to tell me what to say and how to say it.
“Can I help you?”
“I was just hoping for a few minutes of your time.”
We ended up at a window table in Summerfields. I got a black coffee, even though I hated the acidic rot it left in my stomach. Did Officer Felty make a habit of going to campuses, taking girls for coffee, or was he doing this to put me at ease, like being in my own habitat would make me open my mouth and spout out what he wanted to hear?
“Thanks for taking the time,” Felty said. He was big on time, I could tell. Probably frustratingly punctual, the kind of person who acted pissy if he had to wait two minutes for his wife to get ready.
“No problem,” I said. The coffee burned my gums. “What did you want to talk about? I told you everything I remember about that night.” I dropped my voice for the last two words, as if I were suffocating them with a pillow.
“I know.” He fished the bag out of his peppermint tea and plunked it on the table. “But I’m hoping you can help fill in the gaps. The timeline just doesn’t make sense.”
My shoulders instinctively rode up.
“Kevin was with Flora early in the night. You said you saw them around nine thirty. Other witnesses saw them having an argument on the dance floor—an altercation that might have turned physical if a bystander hadn’t stepped in.”
I nodded. It crossed my mind that maybe I shouldn’t talk at all, that I should request that a lawyer be present. But only guilty people needed lawyers. I was just a witness, and that was how I needed to remain.
“You and Sloane spoke with Flora after the altercation. It was then that you told Flora she would be better off without Kevin.”
“It was just girl talk.” I didn’t remember telling him that. How did he know? Suddenly my story, our story, was a slippery, wriggling fish, impossible to hold on to.
“Right. Girl talk.” A hard edge had entered his voice. He knew something. He knew. “What I don’t understand are the events that followed.”
“We danced. And drank a lot more. It’s all kind of hazy.”
“And you were never alone in a bathroom with Kevin McArthur.”
I shook my head. The coffee was a bad idea. It made me jittery, like if I shook too hard, my brain might become dislodged.
“I’ve already told you I wasn’t.” My voice came out gratefully clear, almost snarky, like Sully. “Why did you come here just to go over it again?”
“Did you leave the party at any point to go back to your dorm?”
“No.” Even when I told the truth, it sounded like a lie.
He smiled, maybe in an attempt to look casual. “Kevin McArthur is a lazy texter. Smart kid, goes to Dartmouth. But a history of messages sent from his phone would lead you to believe he has no idea how to use proper grammar.” His head tilted slightly, as if he were taking me into his confidence. Kids these days.
Kevin’s emails, scattered with u and ur, the indolent abbreviations that I came to see as terms of endearment. But the texts we—I—had sent Flora were perfectly constructed, and now I understood, with ear-splitting panic, that we would go up in flames because of them.
“I wouldn’t know,” I deadpanned. “I didn’t know him. We never texted each other. I barely use my cell phone.” The photo on it, Flora and the pilot from Halloween. I willed him not to ask me if he could see it. If he did, I would ask for a lawyer.
“What I don’t understand,” he continued, “is how that night, after Kevin had admittedly been drinking heavily, he managed to perfectly punctuate his sentences.”<
br />
The silence between us might as well have been a brick wall, something thick and impermeable.
“People act different when they drink,” I said.
“You and Sloane spend a lot of time together.”
“We’re best friends. So yeah, we do.” I wrapped my hands around my empty mug and thought of the Friend mug and its shattered companion.
“And are you in the habit of making trips to Dartmouth to-gether?”
I tried to hide my shock, but I could tell from his expression that I had let the mask slip. How did he know about Dartmouth? I realized then that somewhere, Sully might have been drinking coffee too, being questioned by an officer like Felty. She wouldn’t let anything through the cracks. She would seal them off.
“Dartmouth,” I repeated, my tongue too thick for my mouth. “Not in the habit of going there. But I did go once, yes. Sully liked this guy who went there. We went to a party and came home the next day.” The actual weekend felt like so long ago that I could almost convince myself the new details added up.
“I see,” Felty said. He hadn’t touched his peppermint tea. He’d probably only ordered it to be disarming, like somebody’s grandpa. “And do you recall seeing Kevin McArthur at this party?”
It was like a video game, some sort of virtual reality. One wrong move and you went over the side of a cliff or ended up in a fiery pit. I chose my words carefully to avoid the land mines.
“It’s a big campus, Officer. I’m sure there was more than one party that night.”
His eyes were narrowed, but I couldn’t tell if it was suspicion or pity I saw in them.
“My sister was fifteen years old when I found her. I was twelve. She was hanging in our garage.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. So this was personal for him.
“She hid it well. The bullying. The girls at her school—they made her life hell. Our parents had no idea. I was too young to know the signs. Those girls are out in the world now, living their lives, and my sister isn’t.”
“That’s terrible.” I pictured those girls, now women, maybe raising girls of their own, perfect little monsters.
“It is,” he said. “I think about her every day. Do you have a sister, Miss Wellington?”
I nodded. “I do. But I should really get going. I have a lot of studying to do.” That much was true. I couldn’t keep up. I wasn’t Sully or the other girls, who worked hard and partied harder. I was easily derailed.
Felty slapped his business card down on the table between us. “If you think of anything that could help with the case, I trust you’ll let me know.” He plucked a pen out of his shirt pocket and jotted something on the back. “This is my personal cell phone.”
I took the card, planning to throw it out the second I got back to my dorm room. But it remained with me forever, moving from wallet to wallet, becoming soft and creased. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Later, when I found Sully alone in her room, I told her everything, expecting her to reciprocate with her own horror story about being questioned. She stared at me, eyes wide. “Nobody came for me.”
“I wonder why they asked me and not you,” I said. “I mean, he knew we were both at Dartmouth that night. Hey, at least this way I can tell you what I told him. So when they question you, we can stick to the same story.”
She listened as I combed over the whole exchange with Felty, but I could tell her attention was somewhere else. On her ragged cuticles and the dry ends of her hair. There was a moment when I kept talking but thought, She doesn’t care about any of this.
By the time I was done, she had crafted her hair into a messy bun, the wisps framing her face. I expected a hug, an Everything will be okay. Instead, she said something I really didn’t want to hear.
“You’re being paranoid, Amb. Nobody’s going to arrest you. They can’t prove you had Kevin’s phone. They’re just trying to intimidate you to get you to talk. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.”
I nodded, but my stomach twisted like a tangled bedsheet. All I heard was you. You you you. Not we. Not us. Even though she was the one who’d set the events in motion. If she hadn’t taken the phone, I never would have sent those messages. I never would have slept with Kevin and Flora would be alive.
“Let’s go out,” she said. “We’ll find a party somewhere.” She had already complained that everyone had become boring in their dogged pursuit of finals, permanent fixtures at Olin, disciples of caffeine and Adderall and candy from Weshop.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have a bunch of work to do.”
“So take a break. I know what we can do.” She stood up and grabbed something from the mess of her desk. A silver cell phone. “I took it from a guy who sat next to me at Olin. I think his name’s Todd and I’m pretty sure he fucked Lily once. Want to mess with him?”
I gaped at her smirk and the phone, small and innocuous in her hand. “You’re kidding me, right?”
She clenched her fingers around the phone. “Why would I be kidding? It would be hilarious to try and hook him up with Lily again or something.”
Her expression was almost innocent. It wouldn’t be hilarious. I wondered how many people’s lives we had affected in our quest for entertainment.
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to do that anymore.”
She pursed her lips. “You know, you’re getting to be pretty boring. Like everyone else.”
“I’m sorry. I promise, I’ll be back to normal soon.”
“You’ve promised that before.”
I wanted to argue that before was a different playing field, one where Flora was alive and it was us against her. I didn’t know what normal was anymore. I was scared that Sully and I only worked when we had a common enemy to disarm, and we wouldn’t survive without the absence of one.
A few days later, Kevin made a statement to the press. He had been back at his parents’ house in Fairfield. Maybe his parents hated him, if it was possible to hate your own children. Or maybe they believed him when he said he didn’t send the messages, even though he had no explanation for how they came from his phone.
“I want to apologize to Flora’s family,” he said, staring into the camera. “I’ve hurt so many people in ways I’ll never fully understand. I’m sorry for my involvement in what happened to Flora. I’m working to find out how those messages were sent from my phone, and I maintain my innocence.”
I couldn’t sense, through a TV screen, if he was defiant or defeated. His eyes met mine, like I was the only one watching. He could easily tell the police he was with me and that I’d had the best chance of stealing his phone and returning it without his noticing. I didn’t sleep for days.
Sully managed to drag me out to a party before winter break, where I had drunken sex with a guy named Jeremy from the lacrosse team. I felt like the sex was necessary to maintain not my own desirability but my friendship with Sully. She hooked up with his friend, and when it was just the two of us walking back to the Butts, she put her head on my shoulder, just like Flora had done on Halloween.
I had never been so grateful to be going back to Pennington.
Over winter break, my mom wanted to talk. She kept cornering me with a cup of tea, asking how I was doing.
“I’m fine,” I repeated. “I wasn’t the one who found her.”
Sometimes, I was. The mental picture was so panoramic that it seemed like I had to have been there. A nightmare, the type that left you wrapped in a cocoon of sweaty sheets. I felt my legs carrying me from Butts C, just like the phantom girl starring in the rumors that had recently started up. I saw Flora on her bed. Head back, eyes staring at the ceiling. Wrists ripped apart, red highway lines down the middle. Red comforter. Red walls. Red ceiling. A girl who was never angry in life was furious in death.
“You don’t seem fine,” Mom said, her arm warm across my shoulders. “We barely hear from you anymore. And you seem distracted, sweetie. You didn’t smile once at the tree lighting, and you usually
love Christmas.”
“I’m just busy. I promise when school starts again, I’ll call more often.” I hugged her tight, wondering if she would love me if she knew the truth.
Billie wanted us to get drunk and have a sleepover, like we had in high school. It wasn’t the same. Flora’s ghost loomed large with Billie’s barrage of questions. “What was she actually like? Did you have any idea she was depressed? Was her boyfriend a total prick?” I sidestepped carefully, saying I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Okay,” she said. “Fair enough. It’s kind of morbid. Hey, can you at least tell me what happened with your guy? You were so into him, then nothing. Did he turn into an asshole?”
“Something like that,” I said. “I was wrong about him.”
She took a sip of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. “I’m sorry. That sucks. You know, I always thought it was strange that you never told me his name.”
I didn’t hesitate. “I did tell you. His name is Buddy.”
* * *
When I went back to Wesleyan for the spring semester, I made a point of calling home once a week. I understood it was my new role, keeping other people happy. Maybe that was why most of the girls I knew were miserable. We prioritized everyone else’s happiness over our own.
I purposely skipped the Theater Department’s auditions for the spring season. The last thing I needed was my own personal spotlight. Besides, I was exhausted from performing every day, for an audience that was about to get bigger and a lot less sympathetic.
I could have handled the misery if Sully had been there too. We were a unit, two batteries recharging each other. But the Sully who had sucked me into her star-dazzled orbit never came back to Wesleyan. The girl who came back in her place was an entirely different person.
NOW
To: “Ambrosia Wellington” [email protected]
From: “Wesleyan Alumni Committee” [email protected]
Subject: Class of 2007 Reunion
Dear Ambrosia Wellington,
We hope you’ve worked up an appetite, because a lot of preparation has gone into tonight’s special dinner. Stick around after the plates have been cleared, because there just might be some surprises in store!
The Girls Are All So Nice Here Page 23