All the Missing Girls(22)

“And did you leave together?”

“Everett, are you going to let me tell the story, or are you going to cross-examine me?”

He folded his hands on the table. “Sorry. Habit.”

My limbs twitched. Too much caffeine. I paced in front of the table, trying to wear it off. “No, we didn’t leave together. Daniel and I got in a fight. It was kind of chaotic after that, keeping up with who stayed and who left, exactly. But I left with someone else when Corinne was still there.” I shrugged. “That’s my part of the story. Bailey couldn’t find Corinne after, so she caught a ride home with my brother later. She assumed Corinne had made up with her ex—Jackson. But Jackson swore he never saw her that night.”

Everett took a sip of his coffee, staying silent, waiting for more.

I shrugged again. “Her mom called my house in the morning, looking for her. Then Bailey’s and Jackson’s. By the end of the night, we were already searching the woods.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” You couldn’t explain the rest to someone who wasn’t there. Who didn’t know her or us. That a story is the most simplified version of events—something to file away into a sound bite, dulled and sharpened at the same time.

“I know how these things go, Nicolette.”

I nodded, but I didn’t sit down. Didn’t get any closer. “Other than the sorry excuse of an investigation, it got ugly—people accusing each other, saying things about Corinne . . . Everyone’s secrets out in the open, everyone’s thoughts and suspicions. It was a mess. I left at the end of the summer, but nothing changed. We never found her.”

Everett paused. The light on his face shifted as his computer screen turned black from disuse. “So who did it?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, if I go sit at the bar”—he shuddered—“after I recover from last night, at least . . . If I go sit at the bar and buy people drinks and ask, ‘What happened to Corinne?’, what are they going to say? There’s always a name. Even if it never gets to an arrest or trial, there’s always a common assumption. So who’s the name?”

“Jackson,” I said. “Jackson Porter.”

“The boyfriend?”

The one who mixed your drinks last night, I wanted to tell him. But The Boyfriend, yeah, that was what the investigation made him. “Right,” I said.

Everett took another sip, went back to his work. “It usually is. Are they looking at him for this other girl?”

“Annaleise,” I said, staring back out the window. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What do you think? Did he do it?”

“I don’t know.” There was too much to explain, too much to whittle down into a testimony under cross-examination on the stand. “The thing is, Jackson and Corinne were always fighting. It was nothing new.”

They spent at least half their time breaking up and the rest getting back together. If Corinne hadn’t disappeared, I could imagine them caught in the cycle still. Her pushing him to do something he shouldn’t have done; him getting fed up and leaving; her “forgiving” him; and him coming back for her. He always came back for her.

Didn’t matter that she once sent Bailey after him when he was three drinks past drunk to see if she could get him to kiss her. Or that half the time, Corinne didn’t show up when she said she would. Or she’d show up unexpectedly, swearing you had plans, and How could you forget? and Did you have a mind-f*ck or something?

Didn’t matter that she was constantly trying to get us all to prove our loyalty to her.

“She liked to test him,” I said. “She liked to test everyone. But he still loved her.”

Everett raised an eyebrow. “This was your best friend?”

“Yes, Everett. She was also fierce and beautiful and I’d known her forever. She knew me better than anyone. That counts for a lot, you know.”

“If you say so.”

He went back to his work, calm and contained, but I was wound tight with adrenaline.

Everett had never been a teenage girl—maybe there was some equivalent in the adolescent male, something that simmers under the surface of a friendship like that. But the simple truth was that when a girl like Corinne loves you, you don’t ask why. You just hope it doesn’t change.

Tyler never understood, either. Inevitably, he was the thing that changed us. Winter break, senior year, Corinne had dragged me to a party where I didn’t want to be in the first place—mostly because my brother would be there. Don’t tell Tyler, Corinne had said. It’ll be a surprise. She told me to find a place for our jackets, and I watched from inside as she practically threw herself at Tyler, who was sitting in the back of his truck, tailgate down, legs dangling over the edge. He tossed her aside—it wasn’t a hard push, but he was firm, and Corinne remained in motion until colliding with the car beside his.

“Domestic abuse, *,” she’d said, rubbing her side as a crowd started to gather. I was already outside, had started moving the second I saw her lean in to him.

“Not interested,” Tyler said, his eyes scanning the crowd, settling on me. He pushed through the crowd, into the house, while Corinne recounted the story to everyone who would listen.

“Were you really wondering what I would do?” he’d said to me. “I’m not one of her games. Don’t play them with me, Nic.”