Big Summer(103)

And then it hit me. I stopped, so fast that the woman with three Whole Foods grocery bags who’d been walking behind me almost slammed into my back. “Jeez, lady!” she huffed. I couldn’t even draw enough breath to mutter an apology. Thoughts, remembered sentences and phrases, firefly flickers of half-remembered conversations were zipping through my mind like the patterns of a kaleidoscope, forming and re-forming themselves until they aligned in a conclusion that I probably should have seen long ago.

There’s probably about a million girls she’d hurt who would want her dead. Corina.

To kill a young woman on her wedding day? That doesn’t feel like business to me. That feels personal. Abigay.

She told me that the girl had been a scholarship student, and that had been her big chance. Drue wasn’t sure if she’d ever gone to college at all. Aditya.

And, finally, a familiar voice saying something I should have remembered much sooner: High school was kind of a shit show. You know, the mean girls. It took me a while to pull it together, but I made it out alive.

“Oh my God,” I said, my voice a squeaky quiver. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God.” I grabbed my phone out of the bag, scrolling through my recent calls until I found one with a 508 prefix. I held my breath until Barbara Vincent picked up, saying, “Hello? Hello, Daphne, is that you?”

I told her what I needed, talking her through it, step by step. “Just take a picture, then open it up in the Photos app. On the left-hand side, at the bottom of the frame, there’s a little box with an arrow coming out of the top,” I said. “Click on that and type my phone number.”

Ten seconds later, my phone buzzed. My heart felt like it had stopped beating. My ears were humming, like I was deep underwater. I opened up the text Barbara had sent, clicking on the attachment, which showed a photograph of the Croft School’s graduating class from 2011. Barbara had taken the picture from the yearbook that Emma had purchased, to keep tabs on the half sister who hadn’t even known that she existed, the rich girl who’d gotten everything Emma thought she’d ever wanted, all the prizes and the plums. At Aditya’s apartment, Nick and Darshi and I had gone through the list of names. Now here were the faces: sixteen girls in white dresses, each holding a single white rose; an equal number of boys in blue blazers and khakis. They must have taken the picture before graduation, before they’d learned that Drue had cheated on the SATs, before they’d buried the bad news and kicked out the cheater and sent Drue on to Harvard. My old best friend stood in the very center of the front row. Her hair was long and straight, her smile was bright and confident. She wore the look of a world-beater, a girl who could do anything and be anything she wanted. Beside her was Stuart Lloyd Lowe. His hair was a little longer, and he was a little less muscular than he’d been on TV, but he had that same aura of privilege and a life spent on smoothed paths; the same lucky-penny glow. In the back row, right behind Drue, standing close enough to touch, with bangs that almost covered her eyes, long, dark hair, thick eyebrows, and a shy smile on her round face, was a girl identified as Kamon Charoenthammawat. A girl who, at some point, had changed her name, lost twenty pounds, pierced her nose, dyed her hair in shades of silver and lavender, and transformed herself into the woman I’d known as Leela Thakoon.

I called Darshi. When she didn’t pick up, I called Nick. When he didn’t answer, I left him a message. I used the editing feature to circle Kamon in red and forwarded the snapshot to both of them with a note: THIS GIRL IS LEELA THAKOON, THE DESIGNER WHO’S BEEN PAYING ME TO WEAR HER CLOTHES. SHE WENT TO CROFT WITH DRUE. I’LL BET SHE’S THE ONE WHO GOT EXPELLED. I THINK SHE’S THE KILLER. There. Now, if I got hit by a bus, or arrested on my way home, there’d be evidence pointing the police in Leela’s direction.

I texted McMichaels a version of the same message, adding some context about Drue going to Croft and paying someone to take the SATs for her. My phone was giving its death beeps, so I shoved it into my pocket again and walked, faster and faster, thinking through what I’d learned. Already, I was second-guessing myself, wondering if it was all too tenuous, a handful of dots that only the most wishful thinking could connect. And what if I was wrong? What if someone else had gotten in trouble for taking the SATs for Drue? Or what if Leela had been the test-taker, and she had been expelled from Croft, but the killer was someone else entirely? Should I call 911? Not yet, I decided. Not until I had some actual proof. Not unless I was sure.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket, saw there was only two percent of my battery life remaining, and put it back in. I wanted to silence my brain, to stop thinking about Drue, to stop thinking at all. But the city felt haunted, every inch of every block painted with memories. Here was the Zara where I’d shoplifted a Bump It, at Drue’s direction; there was the bakery where I would treat myself to a pillow-soft cinnamon roll if Drue had been especially awful to me that week.

I decided that, instead of going straight to my parents’ place, I’d go to my apartment first. I’d charge my phone, walk my dog, then bring Bingo with me. Nick and Darshi, if she was still willing to help, could regroup there and help me figure out what to do next.

As I walked, I found myself imagining Drue at a tutoring center in some public high school in Boston, a place with worn textbooks and scuffed tile floors. I pictured her bending over some kid’s book, or demonstrating how to diagram a sentence or solve a quadratic equation. I pictured Drue with Aditya in some hole-in-the-wall restaurant, the kind I’d gone to with my father, eating galbi or tea-leaf salad and pumpkin-pork stew. I saw her peeling ginger root and sweet potatoes or mashing garlic and rinsing rice, shoulder to shoulder with Aditya in his kitchen, with its brown linoleum floor and the chipped Formica counters. I saw them sharing a beer in the cheap seats at Fenway Park or holding hands in the hush of a museum’s gallery on a pay-what-you-can Wednesday. The person she could have been, should have been, a smiling young woman, dressed down in a ponytail and a baseball cap, not the glossy, polished corporate creature in the Cavanaugh Corporation’s brochure. I’d chased after her, and she’d chased after her father, craving his love and attention, never getting what she needed. All that effort, trying to shore up the business and prove her worth and get her father to love her; never knowing that none of his children held his interest for very long. I wondered if she’d ever been tempted to give up, to stay with Aditya, who clearly adored her. They could have moved to Boston, and reclaimed Cape Cod and gone back there every year in the summertime. They could have been happy together.