Dead Wrong

by Kristi Belcamino

  In the photo, Danielle looks like she’s my older sister. I look like some little chubby kid and she looks like a model. She already fills her bathing suit top. She looks sixteen not thirteen. I can already see signs of the beauty that’s going to take her far away from me into another world — one filled with cheerleaders and football players, not nerdy, awkward, book-reading girls.

  I wonder if things had been different — if we had stayed in that Pleasanton house, if my parents hadn’t divorced, if I would have gone along for the ride with her or if — even then — I would’ve been left behind.

  But now she’s dead. A sense of panic rises in my chest and I want to run and run and never stop.

  Crouching on the floor near my desk, I continue flipping through the pictures, not even glancing at the ones with me and my mom and dad together, until I find my favorite one. We are in seventh grade. I got a camera for my birthday that year and started taking pictures of everyone and everything. I remember asking the librarian to take this one. We have our arms flung around each other. Danielle, with her sleek blond hair that I envied so much, and me, with my mousy brown hair, are smiling like idiots for the librarian. Above our heads, the ceiling drips with colorful mobiles we’d made.

  We were so proud that day. We’d spent every lunch hour for a week helping the librarian by cutting pictures out of magazines, gluing them to cardboard and stringing them together with red yarn.

  It was the happiest year of my life. My parents were still married. I had the best friend in the world. It was before everything turned to shit.

  Nothing will ever be as good as it was that day in this picture. I will never be that innocent again. I will never see my best friend again.

  A sob clogs my throat. Danielle is dead and everything is shit.

  I throw myself on the floor and sob until my rug is wet, my nose red, and my eyes hurt. I don’t know how long it lasts, but at one point I hear my mom stop in my doorway for a minute before the creak of the floor lets me know she is in her own room. When I can’t cry anymore, I carefully return the rest of the photos to the box, but keep the one from the library and the one of us in our swimsuits out. I stick the one with us at the library in my tote bag so I can have it near me. I tuck the one with us in swimsuits in a corner of my mirror. I avoid meeting my own image, only catching a glimpse of my pale face and a dark swoop of hair. I know what I see in that mirror there is not real. I’d at least learned that much from my weekly sessions with Dr. Shapiro.

  The phone rings. My mother is watching TV in her bedroom. I hear her answer as the sounds of American Idol go mute.

  “Those kids? Good God, I can’t believe that. Okay. I’ll ask her.”

  I hold my breath.

  “Emily, can you come here for a second.”

  I’m already outside her door.

  “That was Beth’s mom. It seems that Beth was at the lake the night they found Danielle’s body.”

  I wait for it. I’m busted. I’m not surprised. I’m sure Beth told on me when she got caught.

  It’s so awkward that my mom and Beth’s mom are still friends from when they were in high school. While most of my mom’s Pleasanton friends turned a cold shoulder toward her when my parent’s divorced and we moved to the north side of town, Beth’s mom has kept in touch.

  They don’t hang out, but are still part of a big get-together with other former classmates right before Thanksgiving every year and every once in a while, they speak on the phone. Too bad Beth is an ass. I wonder if I should tell my mom that when I first got my eating disorder Beth and all her friends called me Skeletor in the halls? The irony is that any dingbat knows that the real Skeletor isn’t thin like me, but is really buff. Maybe one day I’ll point that out to Beth, along with spouting some other irrelevant fact, like “Did you know ants don’t sleep?”

  I realize my mom is staring at me, waiting for me to say something.

  “Okay?” I’m not going to confess I was at the lake, too, if that is what she’s waiting for.

  “There were some other kids at the lake,” my mom says. “Apparently, Danielle has been hanging out with a rough crowd lately.”

  Beth didn’t narc on me?

  I stop myself from rolling my eyes at my mom’s old-fashioned words. Rough crowd. Lame.

  But an image of Danielle walking with the gutterpunks darts into my mind.

  “It looks like she was with these kids on the night she drowned. They brought three of them in for questioning.”

  “Okaaay?” Yeah, so I saw that myself, but I couldn’t tell my mom that. She obviously doesn’t know I was there. What is she trying to say?

  She ignores my attitude and continues.

  “It looks like the police may not be convinced that ... Danielle simply drowned.”

  My scalp begins to tingle. I remember this morning she’d said that the police were “investigating.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The message that Danielle left on my voice mail comes back to me.

  My mom pats her bed and I slump down on it. “Honey, they want to make sure nobody did something to Danielle to . . . make her drown.”

  Someone made Danielle drown? Why would someone do that? She was just a dumb high school kid like me. A teenager. Teenagers don’t usually do things that made people want to kill us.

  But I also know that Danielle was a good swimmer. However, in Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes, the number of drownings always baffles me.

  Every summer, the TV has stories about teenagers who jump off a raft in the middle of some lake and never come up again. It’s never made sense to me. When I jump in the lake, I come back up. How could I not?

  Do they hit their heads on something underwater or get tangled up in the weeds that keep them trapped below the surface? Or maybe when they jumped their feet went so far down into the muck at the bottom that it acted like quicksand and trapped them?

  Danielle and I had spent every summer of elementary and middle school at beaches on Twin Cities lakes. Her drowning seems just as improbable as the other drowning deaths I hear about on the news. Danielle knows how to swim — knew how to swim. Realizing that she will forever be referred to in the past tense makes my head feel fuzzy.

  In quick succession, a series of snapshots flash through my mind — Danielle laughing, face obscured by blinding rays of sunshine as she whoops and jumps off a raft into the water, but never comes back up. The snapshot of her bobbing in the waves under the helicopter searchlight pops into my mind. I close my eyes to get rid of the nightmarish images.

  My mom hugs me and I sink into her arms, feeling guilty for making fun of her language a few seconds ago. What would I do without my mom?

  BACK IN MY ROOM, I retrieve Danielle’s voice mail and listen to it once again. There it is — something in her voice. I grab my ear buds and plug them into my phone and strain, listening.

  This time I hear it.

  She’s afraid.

  I thought she was calling me to make amends and renew our friendship because that’s what I’d wanted her to do and say for so long. But that wasn’t why she called me that night.

  I wonder if it has something to do with those gutterpunks?

  CHAPTER NINE

  At school the next day, I eat lunch again with Curtis and his friends and then hide in the gym locker room during math. I just need some time to think, to be alone. To breathe.

  Earlier, my first period teacher handed me a slip saying the guidance counselor wanted to talk to me at the end of the day.

  I am crouched in the far corner of the locker room with my sketchpad open and blank, holding the picture of Danielle and me. I thought I could sketch her, but every time my pencil touches the paper, the image of her body bobbing in the water appears.

  I’m frustrated and erasing my attempts to draw her when people noisily tromp into the locker room. I hear Beth’s voice. She’s on the other side of the bank of lockers I’m sitting against and is in the middle of a conversation.
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  “I told my dad that I don’t know who those street rats are. I told him me and Danielle were in a big fight over it.” She sniffles.

  “You did everything you could.” Another voice. One I don’t recognize.

  “I should’ve known she was in trouble,” Beth says and blows her nose loudly. “I should’ve known.”

  “You couldn’t have, sweetie.” The other girl says soothingly.

  “I guess.” Sniffle. Sniffle. “My dad says those punks are bad news. That’s why I didn’t want her around them. I knew something bad would happen.”

  I feel a little sorry for Beth. I don’t realize until a drop splashes on the concrete floor that I’m crying.

  “They asked me if maybe she was ... doing drugs or something,” Beth sniffles loudly.

  I sit up straighter, craning my head to hear. Danielle would never do drugs. Her favorite older cousin, Alex, had overdosed on coke when we were twelve. He was sixteen. After our mothers had taken us to the funeral, Danielle and I made a pact to never do drugs.

  We were sitting on her front porch in the dark, swinging our legs, not talking. It was a rare dark night in the city. We could see the stars dotting the sky like we were up north at Danielle’s family cabin, not a few miles from downtown Minneapolis. Kids on the next block over were still awake, shrieking with laughter and playing, but on our street it was silent except for the distant sound of crickets. Every once in a while, we could hear the clink of ice hitting glasses inside the house.

  Danielle was crying and swiping at her eyes. I felt so bad for her. She had collapsed at the funeral, crumbling in a heap. Her mother had taken her outside. My strong friend who was always happy and outgoing and confident seemed so small and sad. I just wanted to protect her.

  “Em,” she said, staring up at the night sky, her voice wavering. “Will you promise me something?”

  “Anything.” I said it firmly and I meant it. At that moment, I would’ve promised her the world.

  “Promise me. Swear right now. Swear that you’ll never do drugs?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Let’s make a pact right now,” she turned to look at me, stopping the swing and her voice was suddenly fierce. “You and me — let’s promise each other that we’ll never do drugs. No matter what.”

  “No matter what.”

  “Swear it, Em. Right now.” Her eyes were frantic in the dim light of the porch, glistening with unshed tears.

  “I swear.”

  “You do?” She seemed relieved.

  “Yes!”

  “If I’m ever tempted, I want you to stop me and remind me of this night. You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  As Beth and her friends leave the locker room, the memory fades. Is that what Danielle’s call to me was about? Were those kids pressuring her to do drugs? It would make sense for her to call me, to turn to me for support instead of her other friends, since we’d made that pact. Her voice message on my phone comes back to me: I don’t know who else to call. You’re the only one who will understand.

  If those street rats, those gutterpunks, had done something to Danielle, got her hooked on drugs or hurt her in any way, I want them punished. My fingers clutch the pages of my sketchbook and my knuckles turn white.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sitting in Dr. Shapiro’s office, I stare at a poster of a tropical island with its white beach and turquoise waters. My mom told me to keep my Friday therapy appointment, even though I had an “emergency” one Monday. The school guidance counselor made me go to her office twice this week, but each time I refused to talk to her, saying I had a therapist. The guidance counselor seemed relieved. I don’t blame her.

  “Let’s talk about your guilt in not returning Danielle’s phone call,” Dr. Shapiro says after we painstakingly rehash my week.

  I pick at a string on my sneaker.

  “I think she was in trouble.” I glance at the clock. Three more minutes.

  Dr. Shapiro’s forehead scrunches.

  “In what way?”

  I look up and shrug. “Maybe drugs. I don’t know.” I don’t say I have guilt about everything when it comes to Danielle, as if somehow or in some way her death was my fault. That I can’t escape the feeling that if I had called her back, she’d be alive.

  We both glance at the time. The session is over. She shuffles some papers she has propped on her crossed leg and clears her throat.

  “For a long time, you thought your parent’s divorce was your fault, didn’t you?”

  “It’s not the same thing.” I say, wishing I could roll my eyes.

  “Oh, but it is. Exactly the same thing. Why don’t you think about that until I see you next time?” She stands and holds the door open, not giving me a chance to argue.

  THE DAYS ARE GROWING longer so it’s still light when I get on the bus. It’s Friday night so the streets are packed with people going to bars and restaurants and shops.

  I adjust the straps of my tote bag on my shoulder. The strap is frayed and I’m worried it will give out. I love this tote bag, a giant black and white composition book with straps. It’s from the Strand Bookstore in New York City, which is pretty much the best bookstore in the universe. I remember buying it during a trip to New York with my mom and dad. We stayed at a fancy hotel with bathrobes hanging on the back of the bathroom door and had lunch at the Tavern on the Green.

  I think about my dad living there now — somewhere by Central Park. At least that’s what he says in his monthly phone calls. He’s never invited me to come visit. Not in four years. He says he doesn’t have enough money, but that if I’m patient, if this one deal goes through—according to him his big break is always right around the corner — he’ll be rolling in the money and will take me to Paris or London. I’m not holding my breath. I’d be happy if he could just send my mom enough money to erase the worry lines that crease her brow every time she pays bills.

  Every once in a while, my dad comes back to Minneapolis for business and takes me to lunch. Usually at some restaurant at the top of a skyscraper. I wish I was brave enough to tell him to take me to McDonald’s and give my mom the money he’s spending on the meal and the fancy rental car and the huge tips he gives everyone from the doorman to the shoe shine guy in the skyways.

  Then, during our meal, he ignores the fact that I don’t eat and usually spends the entire lunch drinking his Jameson on the rocks and talking endlessly about how great it is to live in New York City. All the famous people he runs into. All the great art he sees. Blah, blah, blah. Like I care.

  The bus jolts me back to reality when it comes to a sudden stop. I look out the window and see a funeral home.

  Danielle’s funeral is tomorrow.

  I can’t believe she drowned.

  My mom said that’s what happened. That’s what the police “investigation” determined, that she was drinking and drowned. Accidental death.

  Thinking of all this, I slump deeper into my bus seat and press my nose to the glass, looking out at the sidewalks of Uptown full of people. That is one thing I love about living in Minneapolis. When the weather warms on a spring day like today, people flock to the streets.

  As the bus passes Tall Tales bookstore, I think about getting off at the next stop. My mother had texted me earlier saying that because Sam was spending the night at his apartment, she’d picked up an extra shift at the restaurant and wouldn’t be home until late. I had nothing to go home to except an empty house and probably some elaborate dinner my mother had left for me with a detailed note telling me how to heat it up.

  I want to go Curtis’s party, but I’m not sure I can handle going back into my neighborhood, at a house a few doors down from my old house and Danielle’s house. I decide to go to the bookstore instead of going home.

  The bus passes the Uptown movie theater. A kid is standing alone on the sidewalk near the front window with his hands in his pocket. It’s that guy with the newsboy cap. My hand freezes on the cord to stop the bus as I watch hi
m, but someone else must have yanked it because the bus pulls over to the curb with a shudder. People file by me and out the bus, but I remain frozen, arm up, staring at that boy.

  The police said she was with those gutterpunks the night she drowned. I would bet anything that she was with him the night she died. I saw the way she looked up at him that day. Maybe he knows how she died. Because I know I’m right — Danielle didn’t accidentally drown. Not on her own, at least. I don’t believe it. I refuse to believe it.

  I can’t shake the memory of Danielle dipping her head under the waves like a seal and coming up spitting water out of her mouth like a fountain.

  What if someone helped killed her? Even so, I don’t owe her anything. We weren’t technically even friends anymore. She’s the one who ditched me. She’s the one who left me alone to battle my first day at high school as a pariah — an outcast. She was the reason I spent ninth grade hiding in an empty classroom eating my lunch. She didn’t push me in the halls. But she did sit and watch while her friends did that without telling them to stop. I don’t owe her, or her memory, anything.

  Or do I?

  I didn’t return her call. What if she had wanted me to stop her from doing drugs? I let her down.

  Right before the bus driver closes the doors, I leap out of my seat and hurtle down the stairs onto the sidewalk.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  By the time the bus pulls away from the curb, I’ve lost him. I search the bodies across the street. Several people are gathered in front of the theater, but the guy is gone.

  He can’t have gone far.

  As soon as the light turns green, I cross the street, looking for him. I take a step into the road and that’s when I spot him right before he turns onto Lake Street. I shift my bag onto my shoulder and take off, weaving my way through the people on the sidewalk, brushing shoulders and causing a woman to exclaim “Hey!” when I accidentally cut her off in front of the Aveda salon. “Sorry!” I yell over my shoulder but don’t slow my pace.