Nice Girls(68)

Before I closed my eyes, I felt something else simmering through me, as comforting as a blanket wrapped over my shoulders.

Satisfaction.



I later found out that Carly’s father was a congressman.

I didn’t even have the pleasure of speaking to him. I woke up the next morning and found a woman watching me on the other side of the bars. She was Carly’s lawyer, most likely a friend of a friend of a friend of her father’s. My lawyer, a bored public defender, showed up only a few minutes later.

In a meeting room, Carly’s lawyer asked me how I would feel about being locked up for three years for fourth-degree assault against a helpless eighteen-year-old girl.

I tried to say something about how it wasn’t my fault, she had touched me first, there was marijuana in her dorm room, she hadn’t listened to me, I was sorry.

But I could tell that no one in the room was listening. Everything I said was futile.

Instead, I started to weep.

I hadn’t bawled like that since I was a child.

Carly’s lawyer read me a memo from her father. He was upset, but he believed in mercy. The congressman was willing to drop charges on two conditions: first, I had to recant my statement about the weed in Carly’s room; second, I had to leave the university permanently, away from his daughter.

If I didn’t follow through, they would take me to court.

I balked. There was only one clear choice.

But I could only think of campus and the brick buildings and the parties and the late nights I’d spent studying. The joy four years ago when I had gotten my acceptance. I thought of Ivy League Mary, who was thin and pretty and destined for bigger things in her life. I wasn’t willing to give her up.

In the end, I didn’t have to decide—the school did it for me. I was expelled within an hour of our conversation. Carly’s father had clout with the administration, that much was clear.

My time at school was over.

Relieved, my lawyer told me that Carly’s father was dropping any further legal action. He and Carly hoped that this would be a “proper learning experience” for me. They were praying for me to work out my behavioral issues.

I called Dad right after. I rambled through the events. He listened quietly until I told him about my expulsion. His first words were low and gruff: “I thought you were on medication, Mary.”

I heard the disappointment, the disbelief, the anger. He thought my medication made everything okay. It held back the anxiety, the dread. But it didn’t solve everything. It didn’t account for my stupidity, my recklessness. It didn’t account for Carly, her father, his influence. It didn’t account for my mistakes.

Dad then told me to pack up. He said the car ride would take about seventeen hours.

When my lawyer left, I took a taxi service back to campus. I raced up to my room, staring at the ground. I knew that people were gawking at me, the RA with the bandages on her arms. Word was spreading.

I hid out in my room until Dad arrived Saturday morning. I ate the last of my granola bars and snuck out late at night to use the bathroom. And then Dad helped me move out of the dorm. I came back to Liberty Lake.

In the span of a day, I had lost it all. I was now the crazy bitch who had tried to attack a congressman’s daughter. Carly had won.



I deleted the email in the church hallway. My heart was pounding.

The email had been delivered to numerous people, and that could have included anyone at the funeral: our old classmates from high school, Kevin, the Willands.

I couldn’t bear to face them. I didn’t want to know what they thought of me after everything—the expulsion, the assault, the audacity I had to show up to a dead girl’s funeral. I could already see the disgust on their faces and the humiliation on mine.

I walked out of church into the cold, and I kept walking until I found my thirteen-dollar Uber. When I was back at home, I sent Dad a text, telling him that I had gotten sick. He needed to attend the funeral procession without me.

Then I crawled under the bedsheets. I even half prayed that it was all a nightmare—Carly, the expulsion, the murders.

But I knew fully well it wasn’t.





33




Dad woke me up early on Sunday morning. He tossed my work uniform onto my bed. He was already dressed for church.

“You’re working today, Mary,” he said. “You should be getting ready.”

I was ushered into the bathroom. I felt filthy, my skin encased in a layer of sweat. In the mirror, my face looked puffy and sallow—after I’d left St. Rita’s, I slept through the rest of Saturday afternoon. Dad checked on me after the funeral, but I told him I was skipping dinner. I never even asked about what happened. I took my medication and tripled the dosage. I wanted to be so drowsy that I could sleep in peace.

But my sleep was restless—I flickered between memory and nightmare:

I was back in a jail cell with Carly in front of me, my hand pulling at her hair, her hand clawing at my skin. And I was back in bed, listening to the TV downstairs. And I was looking at my mug shot, hundreds of copies of it scattered in front of me. And then I was drowning in the lake, my body back to its old, big shape. And my body began to burst apart, the limbs floating away from each other, into the darkness . . .

In the bathroom, I stayed on the toilet for a long time, my head in my hands. I was exhausted, as if my bones had doubled in mass. I only got up to shower when Dad started knocking on the door. He was listening in, making sure that I didn’t try anything.