Never Have I Ever(25)

“My job is to sit here and ask questions until I get a thorough statement,” the detective said, firm.

“I’m sure that suits Mitch. He bills by the hour,” my father said, and my lawyer chuckled, holding up a calming hand.

“We all know who caused the accident,” my mother snapped, uncalmed.

We did. Tig had been driving. My parents and my lawyer said so. The police said so, and it made sense. It was his car. He always drove.

Except the once, earlier that same night. But I hadn’t mentioned that.

I’d left that out. But not on purpose. Not like the kiss. I had just . . . left it out.

My lawyer said, “You arrested the boy for it already.”

I’d known it was coming, but still. My gaze flew to the detective’s face for confirmation, and I found it there. My mother put her free hand on my thigh, a hard, grounding grasp that dumped me into my body. All at once I felt my bulk taking up more than my fair share of the sofa.

When I glanced up, the detective’s eyes on me seemed so kind. He seemed to see my misery, my fear. He looked at me as if the lawyers and my parents and his junior cop were more pieces of expensive furniture. As if I were the one who mattered in this room.

He said, right to me, “Sometimes people don’t remember things because they don’t want to. Because it’s hard. Now, your friend made a bad decision, and he has to pay for that. But he’s a kid, and I want him to get treated like one. You should know the D.A. is willing to deal. Tighler will have to serve a little time, no way around that, but hopefully in a juvenile facility. If it goes to trial, though, the D.A. will push to try him as an adult. He could be looking at fifteen years. Inside a real grown-up prison. Your statement could be the lever he needs to take this plea. You’d be helping him, Amy.”

My mother’s hand clamped harder, pulling my gaze down to her slender fingers digging into the meat of my thigh. She wanted me to say that I remembered Tig driving. She wanted it maybe more than the cop did. I heard her draw breath, breath to make words, and my lawyer cut her off so smoothly he did not even seem rushed.

“But Amy does not remember the accident. She shouldn’t lie and say she does”—he paused, nostrils flaring, and his next words came out dripping with sarcasm—“even to help her friend.”

“It could help her as well,” the detective said, unfazed. “When he heard all the charges, Tighler Simms finally gave us his statement. He says she was driving.”

Beside me my mother gasped, and I heard my father’s sharp inhale as well. In my lap my hands went cold. My fingers felt like my tongue after the emergency-room doctor had injected it with the local. Dead flesh, not my own. My bruises pulsed in tandem with my heart.

At that same moment, three memories bloomed whole in my brain, perfectly captured in vivid Technicolor.

Me, fishing Tig’s car keys out of my skirt pocket.

Me, sliding behind the wheel.

Me, stabbing once, twice, three times at the ignition and finally feeling the click and twist of the key sliding home.

My whole body thickened into a solid. No breath, no flowing blood. My gaze flew to the detective’s eyes, and he was looking back, watching my reaction.

“But she wasn’t,” my lawyer said in a bored tone. “So what’s the point?”

“She sees the point,” the detective said. He looked at me with deep empathy, as if he were sorry to be saying these hard things. “Whatever loyalty you’re feeling, Amy, it’s not reciprocated.”

“That little shit!” my father exploded. “How dare he! How dare he!”

“Jim,” my lawyer said, a warning tone.

“No, Mitch, that delinquent is slandering my family!” my mother said. She bent toward the cop now, her tone demanding. “When did he come up with this fabrication?”

The cop was still looking mostly at me, but he answered her.

“Earlier today. He was arrested for possession at the scene, but we had to wait for his mother before we could question him. She refused to let him give a statement then. Asked for a lawyer.” I felt my head shaking, back and forth. Tig’s mom had probably been high, because she was almost always high, and she hated the police. “We got him a public defender, but those guys are overworked. Not like this guy you’ve got,” the cop went on, jerking a folksy thumb at my lawyer, like he and I were together on this.

I stared at him, still frozen. He was coming at me, just like those memories had come at me, rushing in and hitting me dead-on, so that I was still shaking with the impact.

I closed my eyes. Nothing in the room mattered. Only that night, that road, that lost time.

I concentrated inward, peering down into the well of memory, but I saw nothing more. It was still true that I did not remember driving, only the brutal kiss of steel rending Mrs. Shipley’s sporty little tin can of a car. I did not remember getting out of the Ambassador. I only remembered standing in the road, after. But oh, I had remembered enough—I’d had the keys. I’d slid in behind the wheel. I’d started the car.

My lawyer was talking now, but his calm voice sounded so far away. “Don’t make this about loyalty or her feelings for this boy. It’s almost as if you want her to lie for him. This is about the truth, and the truth is, my client was traumatized by Mr. Simms’s actions. She watched her neighbor die. Let’s not forget, this boy gave her drugs and got her so drunk she had to be treated for alcohol poisoning. The crash itself was traumatic. She simply doesn’t remember.”