by Andrea Bartz
And then Ted had walked in, cherry-nosed, and explained that the snowblower’s shear pins had needed replacing mid-job, but luckily his dad had a set back in their garage, which was all to say that their drive was snow-free and the snowblower was in better condition than when he’d taken it out of the Walshes’ garage. They’d listened blankly and then murmured their thanks, and Ted had noticed my save-me glance.
“Ted, I was actually hoping you could show me how to do something on my laptop,” I said, “for an interactive story I’m writing? I could use your help.”
I’d started to rise and Gary picked up the cue, announcing he was going to head to the basement to watch the Patriots game. Exchanging looks, we’d all left Karen with her back to us, staring out at the darkening patio. One sconce was like a spotlight on the snow-covered pool.
It was a bit of a blur after that—in the den, Ted had remarked, “Oh, I love this room,” and I’d pushed the door closed without really thinking, and then I’d sat on the foldout bed and asked how he was doing, and he said he’d been unable to sleep last night, thinking about Eleanor, and I agreed and started to cry and said we never should have come, never should have imposed on Gary and Karen, and he’d gently wiped a tear from my cheek and said that he, for one, was glad I was there, and then he let his hand rest against my jaw and then my palm went to his chest and then, and then, and then.
And then Hana burst in, and now she was gone, and the room had that dizzying, whiplash quality, gears switched so suddenly and so entirely. Right when things were about to get good, to be honest. When Ted and I had probably both been wondering who was going to float the idea of obtaining a condom first.
Now I just felt confused. Something had happened, something had nudged Hana out of her fury storm and back into speaking-with-me territory.
“I’m gonna try calling Hana. We were fighting, like, two seconds ago, so she must’ve come in here for a reason.” I patted at the bedding around me in search of my phone. “Siblings are the worst.”
“They are.” He leaned against the sofa’s back and rubbed his beard. “They’re like, the only people you can take your stress out on. And we’re all pretty upset right now. Cameron was just yelling at me about me not paying off a parking ticket in person for him or something.”
“A parking ticket? Definitely not your problem. Anyway, this is different. Hana’s right—I did something pretty shitty. Oh, here it is.” Finally I spotted the screen’s glossy blackness on the hardwood floor. I called her, then dropped the phone back onto my lap. “Straight to voicemail. I hope she’s okay.” I gazed out the window, where old-fashioned streetlamps cast golden, bell jar–shaped glows. “I wonder why she’s going to see Cameron. She probably wasn’t getting any attention here.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Getting any attention?”
“You saw how Gary and Karen were being.”
He nodded. “What were you two fighting about?”
I took a deep breath. “Like I said, it was my fault, she wasn’t being … overbearing, or anything.” And then I told him, how I’d been grabbing furiously for something else to write about. I recounted how panicked I’d felt, how I would’ve said anything to make the nightmare end—the furious agent, the advance I couldn’t repay—and it was only after the words had left my lips that I realized what I’d done. How a book was all I’d ever wanted, ever since I was a little girl in Michigan, filling notebooks with stories and using markers to make fake picture books, writing “author” on every line that asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. And how it’d all fallen apart now—how my idiotic agent had told the wrong person, turned Eleanor’s death into a public spectacle. I stared at my hands as I spoke, methodically dragging my thumbnail across each cuticle, and when I finished speaking and looked up, Ted had uncrossed his legs. Subtly, like a wilting flower, he was leaning away now.
“Why couldn’t you just write the book about the fake-news people?”
It was the same question Erin had asked a couple weeks ago, and even she had sounded less judgmental, more curious. What a mess I’d made.
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
He frowned, nodded slowly. “But, like … was it worth it? Selling out your friend so you could keep the book deal?”
My whole face contorted around my eyebrows: “I just said it was shitty. I feel awful.”
“Right. I just … Eleanor was probably going through a lot and didn’t need her friend sticking her under a microscope. I bet she could tell, and that it sucked.”
I stared at him, my eyes and mouth both o’s. He looked around the room, anywhere but at me, and shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
Tears surged down my cheeks. “Are you saying it’s my fault she tried to leave? That she got killed?”
He reared away from me, like I was an unexploded grenade. “No. Shit, don’t cry. I’m just, I dunno. I feel bad for Eleanor. She was my friend. Hey.” He pulled me into a hug and I cried on his shoulder for a moment. “We’re all tense. Let’s breathe.”
“I’m gonna try calling Hana again,” I announced, turning away. I accidentally opened my phone’s photos app, and it gave me an idea. “Hey, have you seen this before?”
He grabbed it and looked close, the image I’d copied from the Antiherd, tween Eleanor in her low-slung jeans and corset top. “Ha, where did you find this?” He grinned. “It’s in one of our photo albums at home. Cameron used to tease her about it.”
Cameron. The air in the room felt different, quivering, a sudden drop in cabin pressure. I fished around for a red herring: “It showed up on a memorial site today. I’ve been seeing what fans are posting online.”
“Yeah, that was probably him.” A wistful chuckle. “She was a firecracker.”
I grabbed my phone back and gazed at it. This little Eleanor—Ted had known her as a tiny thing, had probably biked around the neighborhood with her, played night games in the dark. I’d met her when she was just a teenager and she’d awed me then, brilliance blazing like a blast of heat. And if Ted was right, I’d played a part in snuffing it out. I’d made her feel like she was in a fishbowl, turned the Herd into a crucible. Suddenly I was crying again, wet lines streaming from my eyes and nose.
“I think I wanna be alone,” I managed.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He pulled the door closed behind him and it didn’t latch, swung open a second later, so I could hear him clomp down the hallway, rustle for his bag and coat, and slip out into the night. I lay still for a while, humiliation and fury beating around me like a huge heart. Because he was right: I’d tried to sell out Eleanor, one of my best friends, to save my own ass. Chasing wildly after prestige, after my Big Fancy Publishing Deal, somehow caring more about impressing my agent than about my actual friends. All because I was a fucking unethical moron during my year in Michigan.
For a moment, it’d all seemed too good to be true: After a few weeks of playing nurse to Mom, feeling lonely and useless, I’d spun my sad move to Kalamazoo into gold. My article on nearby Northern Sky Labs, pitched on a whim after someone from high school mentioned she knew the CEO, had gone viral; Erin wanted to represent me, a bona fide publisher wanted to make me an author. Now, finally, I had something new to focus on, something to give my life structure and meaning, something solid and impressive to tell my former high school classmates when I bumped into them at the drugstore. It would be great, because it had to be.
And at first, it was. The CEO, a charismatic fortysomething named Bill, was an ideal antihero: witty, outrageous, totally unapologetic in his pursuit of profit. His little brother, Ben, was CTO, and though he lacked Bill’s charm, he seemed to be the more sympathetic of the two, glad to be making Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth for the first time in his life, but tormented by the implications of their creation. Bill’s taciturn wife handled the bookkeeping, and she made my life easy—scheduling interviews, ushering me into investor meetings, inviting me along on extracurricular ac
tivities, fishing trips and boating days and picnics and ATV outings, the kind of scenes she correctly assumed I’d need to add some color to the narrative. She was small and striking, brilliant in an unsung, under-the-radar way, married to her high school sweetheart and quietly fulfilling about four hundred roles.
And we became friends. How could we not? I was so lonely, not eager to leave their small headquarters and see Mom in her frailty, and so she and I stayed late some nights, or even drove together to her pinewood home, sipping beer and chatting. She wanted to know everything about New York, every detail, and then in gummy tones I told her how good she had it—this husband, this house, this unexpected windfall, making money from the social-media scramble without having to compete in the twenty-four-hour beauty pageant herself.
And we were deep into one such conversation early in the fall, sitting on her plump, floral-patterned sofa, on a Monday night when her husband, Bill, and brother-in-law, Ben, were down in Chicago for an expo. I’d brought over some brandy and we were talking about high school, comparing our experiences—her with twenty-eight other kids in her graduating class, Bill among them, and me just an hour away with close to two hundred classmates. And how we’d both found others to serve as armor: her BMOC boyfriend, now husband. And my sister and her cool friends at Harvard, the ones who loved when I visited, who saw past my bad skin and braces and made me feel less invisible.
“But everyone who meets you sees you,” Chris said, slurring a bit. “You can’t … you’re unmissable.”
I smiled, then looked away. “Except I feel like nobody really misses me right now.” I finished my glass, the golden liquid no longer burning. “I miss other people, but they don’t miss me.”
Half the brandy was gone. Chris topped off our glasses.
I took another swallow. “There’s no way I can drive home now,” I said, my concern like something scampering off into the woods.
She looked at me a long time. She had the widest brown eyes, a smattering of freckles. The thickest, most beautiful hair.
Her voice a whisper: “That’s okay.”
She took my glass and set it on the coffee table. The world had that wobbling, churning quality, a vortex tugging at the corners of my vision. I reached forward and watched, heart pounding, as my fingertips slid up her thigh, around her hip, slowing at her waist just as the other hand reached her cheek.
When I woke up the next morning, I was in love with her. I stared at her hair, wheat-colored in the window’s winter light, and tried not to audibly giggle. That’s what that feeling had been, all along. When I kept thinking of her, whatever quiet but hilarious comment she’d make about a situation. How I kept relating things to her, to things she’d said, so that more than once, Mom had said, “Wow, you two certainly have grown close.” It hadn’t even occurred to me to touch her, and now that I had, it was all I wanted to do.
So I did. Twice more that day, neither of us sure what we were doing, kissing and giggling—her sweet-smelling hair, her soft neck, her knees. A dreamy week of work, every glance between us like a cymbal crash, smiling into the oatmeal I cooked for Mom in bulk. Then Bill went hunting again, set up camp in the woods, and I drove the hour to Chris’s home after Mom went to sleep, heat building in my hips as I wove through country roads. I fell asleep in her arms, and in the morning she roused me with the subtlest strokes, her fingers skimming inside my elbows, my wrists, my palms, my hip crease.
“I like all your inner corners,” she whispered, and I’d reached for her jaw and kissed her, hard.
I can see it exactly as Bill saw it: a few feet above and away from my body, as if our consciousnesses melded. Sheets tangled at the foot of the bed. Knotted limbs, subtle movement, knees like pyramids and a round flash of buttocks. Chris’s voice like a whimper, as if she were in pain. It’s odd, how similar the sounds we make are when we’re hurt or turned on. Vulnerable, in both cases.
It was a moment before Chris noticed Bill glowering at the door, and she gasped and stiffened, then pushed me away with both hands. He flicked on the lights and leaned against the door.
“What are you … what the … how could …” His hand found his left shoulder, then his eyes followed, confused, as if something odd were happening there. And then, with the sudden jolt of someone in a dunk tank, he collapsed.
Oh God—just remembering it sent fresh horror through me. I’d moved quickly, sprinting across the room and checking for a pulse, screaming for Chris to call 911 as I lined up my palms on his rib cage and pushed, rhythmically, everything I’d learned years before in a training course flooding back to me. Chris rushed back in, shrieking her address into the phone, and draped a blanket over me as I beat, beat, beat his heart from the outside in. Chris asked if I was getting tired but I ignored her—I was afraid that if I stopped, his death would be my fault, and so I didn’t let up, not even to dress. I remember the wail of distant sirens, red and blue flares silhouetting the trees, all of it growing, intensifying along with the mounting knowledge that they’d be here soon, that my metronomic compressions were a countdown, my ticking death clock. Bangs at the front door and Chris, bawling, took off in her robe, and then a bright, flapping wave of humiliation as the EMTs burst into the room. It was like being in a dream, that moment when you look down and realize you’re not wearing anything.
Chris vaulted into the ambulance and they left me behind. I sat at the kitchen table and stared out at the woods outside. There were a few deer out there, a clump of does and fawns, clomping around majestically. A pack of coyotes had been picking them off one by one that season; hunters were complaining that their weekend excursions had been fruitless. A doe swung her head my way and stared. Judgmentally, I thought. Finally I gathered my things and drove home, careful not to wake Mom in the early-morning light.
Bill was fine after triple bypass surgery. I knew this because Chris texted me back exactly once, before my texts stopped going through, before calls went straight to voicemail, before Chris disappeared from my social networks and my life, one big Block. “Bill is okay. I’m sorry but I can’t talk.”
Bill didn’t contact my editor or the nearest major newspaper or threaten me or do any of the things I’d envisioned as I cried in my childhood bedroom; instead, he, his brother, and all other Northern Sky Labs employees just refused to speak to me from that day forward. It was a brilliant, passive checkmate: The book was ruined. Chris was cut off from me like a limb. And it hurt like a sickness: all the nerve endings in my head and neck and chest, crying out like a choir, ow, ow, ow. I didn’t have enough material to write the book, and even thinking of trying made me nauseous. I stayed cooped up inside for my last six weeks at Mom’s, watching movies with her at night. She didn’t ask about the book, why I was no longer out reporting, and I was grateful I didn’t have to lie.
I cried for a few minutes, gazing out the window onto the Walshes’ snowy street. I thought about the deer again. The coyotes too—all social creatures, like us. But a herd’s primary purpose is to keep the highest percentage of its members alive. Evolution doesn’t care about the individual, about survival of the least-fit. We team up for the most selfish reason possible: self-preservation.
Ted had said something odd, earlier, something that was bothering me, and I waited for my pulse to slow enough that I could search for it. Something about a ticket that for some reason was Ted’s problem … even though they lived in different cities. Cameron here in Beverly, Ted in New York.
I’d dealt with a parking ticket once, when a meter in the Bronx expired on my rental car. So I knew that you could go to New York State’s janky website and pay it online. All you need is a license plate number, which I had thanks to Cameron’s profile picture: tailgating at a Patriots game from the back of his SUV. I typed it into the online portal, and there it was: recorded at 11:56 p.m. on Monday, December 16. The night before the Herd’s big announcement, hours after Monday Mocktails, after the last known sighting of Eleanor, a traffic cop had tucked a ticket under the windsh
ield wiper of Cameron’s black SUV. It was illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant near Watts and Varick.
A block and a half from the Herd’s front entrance.
The revelation lit my body like a Lite-Brite—suddenly everything was alive, thrumming, blazing from the inside out.
“Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay, okay, okay.”
It took longer than I would’ve liked for my thoughts to organize themselves into something coherent. I whispered them aloud, as if setting them on a mental workspace:
Cameron was in town the night of the murder.
Cameron’s car was found within a few hundred feet of the murder site.
Cameron had that photo of Eleanor, the one that ended up in a chatroom devoted to people’s hatred for her.
I tried calling Ratliff and hung up with a groan when her voicemail clicked on. I called Hana, then Mikki, feeling the precious seconds pass as both went straight to voicemail.
Whoever was behind this—they’d done what every smart predator would do. They’d separated us from the pack, nudged us into our own corners. I stood and gazed out the window toward the Corrigan house, the white columned one Mikki had pointed out on the drive here. But condensation coated the window, and impulsively I reached for the old-fashioned latch and the pane swung toward me with a little snap.
Silent night, dark and dampened with snow still swirling off of trees and bushes and onto the street. So quiet, peaceful even, until—
A scream. Unmistakable. Before I could think, I’d yanked on my boots and was sprinting down the driveway, the wind jabbing me through my sweater, cold lunging at my scalp and throat. I barely noticed, didn’t care, as I slid on a slash of snow, skidding to my knees and then taking off again, wet moons stamped across the top of my shins.