Nice Girls(56)

“I couldn’t exactly say no to him,” Dad murmured.

I heard the pity in his voice. It could’ve easily been him making the phone call. And it could’ve been me at the lakeshore.

As we waited in traffic, Dad kept glancing at me. He seemed to be expecting tears or a show of histrionics. I didn’t blame him—I would have expected that, too.

But my eyes were dry. I felt like I’d been cast in the wrong part, a comedian being forced to play the melancholy man. I knew what I was supposed to do—cry, pray, be openly distressed. But I only felt hollow.

Because in my mind, Olivia was too real to die. Her eyes had too much of a spark in them.

When we were kids, they lit up whenever we caught bugs together or tried climbing some of the trees in Littlewood Park Reserve. They burned when she told her nanny that we would be getting ice cream. And they glowed when she greeted her parents’ friends by their first names—Chuck, Bob, Kelly—as if she, too, were an adult woman.

When she was older, Olivia looked people straight in the eye when she spoke to them. She knew her magnetism, the way others would fawn over her. And though she was cruel, Olivia never shied away from a challenge.

Olivia Willand, whose eyes said so much yet so little about her, was dead.

As we started inching forward on the highway, I noticed a little girl sitting in the minivan next to us. I knew she was staring at me, waiting for me to look back at her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t play the part.



We took an exit and drove past the noise barriers that blocked off West End Park from the highway. The park had two massive brick pavilions and a view of the lake.

But the area was already blocked off by yellow police tape. We followed a line of cars down one road until a police officer told us to turn around. Eventually we parked the truck a few blocks away and hurried over.

There was a crowd gathered behind the yellow tape, competing with the news vans for a view. A police officer was making pushing motions, but no one moved. People whipped out their phones to record the scene. Others had brought binoculars. One person even used a selfie stick to film above the crowd.

Dad went to find a supervisor. But I doubted the police would tell him anything, even if he was there on behalf of Mr. Willand.

I entered the crowd, but no one moved. I began to push my way through it as if I were at a concert. The only ones who ever made it to the front were presumptuous, violent, unafraid. It didn’t matter how hard anyone pushed back—those people believed that it was their goddamn right to be up front.

For once in my life, I was one of those people. I was shoving aside grown men and women. I deserved to be up there—I had seen DeMaria’s arm in person, I had known Olivia in life, I was just trying to do something—

A man elbowed me. He hit me right in the stomach. I fell back a few steps, surprised. The man had a thick goatee. Furious, I shoved him right back, my energy propelled into my shoulder. I collided into the small of his back.

“Fucking cunt,” he hissed.

But I was already pushing past him.

And then I felt my ponytail getting yanked back, pulling at my skull, and I started screaming at him, tears pooling in my eyes.

“Don’t touch me! Don’t you fucking touch me!”

People turned to look at us, and I strained even harder, pieces of hair already dislodged from my head. The man immediately let go. And just like that, people moved aside from me as if I were sick. I was in front of the crowd, right behind the yellow tape. The back of my head was throbbing, but I had an idea.

I waved down the nearest police officer, hoping that my hair looked awful.

“Sir, a man just attacked me,” I told the cop, and I pointed back toward the crowd. “The guy in the green hat with the brown goatee. He was hurting me.”

The cop surveyed the crowd. He suddenly ducked under the yellow tape, muttering into his walkie-talkie. If I was lucky, the man with the goatee would run, and the cops would chase him.

When another cop entered the crowd, I took my chance. I slipped under the yellow tape, running past the pavilion. I could feel eyes following me as I disappeared into the woods, but there were no footsteps behind me. The cops were most likely stationed near the news vans and the crime scene. If I cut through the trees, I would arrive at the beach undetected.

The trees at West End Park were dense and spiky, not like the ones at Littlewood Park Reserve. There were a few scattered flecks of light from above; the rest of the forest was soaked in shadow.

But I wasn’t afraid. I knew where to go, even though I could hardly see ahead of me.

All those days with Olivia had paid off: our summers spent trekking inside Littlewood Park Reserve; those bouts of panic when she led us off-trail into a maze of trees; the time Olivia backhanded me across the forehead and told me that she’d killed a mosquito.

Perhaps it all led up to the present.

Or it was dumb coincidence, and I was giving meaning to nothing.

Eventually I saw the light past the trees. Peering out, I could see the beach ahead of me, the sand like brown sugar, the water looming just beyond it. Police officers roamed the beach. The ambulance and other vehicles were parked farther back. I could see two groups of people clumped together on the beach.

I pulled out my phone, turned on the camera, and zoomed in. The image was grainy, but I could see three teenagers sitting in the back of the ambulance, a blanket draped over them. None of them spoke to each other. One truant day at the beach had been turned upside down—the kids were now part of a murder investigation.