People Like Us(4)

“These students have just witnessed a horrific event and Ms. Matthews is soaking wet and at risk of hypothermia. Unless you’re going to question them indoors, you will simply have to come back another time. I’ll be happy to accommodate your schedule during school hours.”

Detective Morgan smiles, again without showing teeth. “Fair enough. You girls have been through a lot. You go get a good night’s sleep, huh? Don’t let a tiny little tragedy ruin a great party.” She starts to walk away and then turns back to us. “I’ll be in touch.”

Dr. Klein ushers us back toward the dorms and darts over to the water’s edge.

I turn to Brie. “That was a bitchy thing to say.”

“Yeah,” Brie says, looking troubled. “It almost sounded like a threat.”





2


By the next morning, the news has infected the entire school. My dorm is on the other side of campus and I still wake up to the sounds of sirens outside and muffled sobbing from above. I open my eyes to see Brie perched at the edge of my bed, her face pressed to the window. She’s already showered and dressed and is sipping coffee from my I ? Bates Soccer Girls mug.

Looking at it sends a jolt of energy down my spine. We have a crucial game on Monday and I’ve scheduled a long practice this morning to prepare. I jump out of bed, pull my thick, wavy ginger hair into a tight ponytail, and throw on a pair of leggings.

“Jessica Lane,” Brie says.

A glacial frost laces over my skin, and my shoulders twitch. “What?”

“The girl in the lake.”

“Never heard of her.” I wish Brie hadn’t told me her name. It was nearly impossible to get her still, placid face out of my head last night as I lay awake next to Brie in my narrow dorm bed, and now I need to focus. I want to scrub every particle of last night from my mind. For three years I have been solid, and I will not crack and shatter over this. One snowflake.

“I did. She was in my trig class.”

I get a rotten, gnawing feeling in my stomach. “Maybe it wasn’t the greatest idea telling the police we didn’t know her.”

“Don’t overthink it.” She sits next to me and winds one of my curls around her finger. “I mean, I barely, barely know who she was. We couldn’t tell the cops everything. They’d zero in on that and completely ruin our lives.” Brie has her own, very different reasons for being wary of law enforcement. For one thing, her parents are top criminal defense attorneys, and she’s heading in that direction. She probably knows more about criminal law than most first-year law students. Everything you say can and will be used against you. Since winning debate-club regionals last year, she has made a mantra of the quote “Dance like no one is watching; email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition.” For another, Brie has experienced racial profiling firsthand. Never at Bates, she said. But even I’ve noticed how different things are off campus. Once, when an off-campus party was broken up, a cop walked right past me, a minor holding an open bottle of beer, and asked Brie to take a Breathalyzer. She had a can of soda in her hand. They still made her do it.

I sigh. “And you can’t tell Maddy anything unless you want the entire school to know.”

“That’s not fair.”

Fair is beside the point. Last year, Maddy accidentally released the names of the new soccer team recruits online before we could “kidnap” them from their rooms in the traditional initiation ceremony. That tradition cements us as a team, and besides that, it’s fun. When you take the fear out of initiation night, you take the exhilaration out of the moment you learn you have been chosen. You are good enough. But no. Maddy leaked the names I emailed her for the website and I learned Brie’s mantra the hard way. Email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition. Or posted in a school-wide community forum.

Maybe we’re not completely fair to Maddy. A few weeks ago, Tai started this new “Notorious” nickname that I honestly don’t get, but I’m not going to be the only person to admit it. Even Brie has been a little standoffish about Maddy lately, and I haven’t been able to pin down exactly why. She isn’t as witty as Tai or as studious as Brie, but she has a reputation among our group as being sort of the stupid one, while she’s actually fairly brilliant. She has the second-highest GPA in the junior class, is field hockey captain, and she designs websites for all of the athletic teams. She gains nothing from the time she puts into it, and it makes us look better. I think she just lacks a certain cynicism the rest of us share, and people tend to see that as a kind of weakness. She reminds me of my best friend back home, Megan Galloway. Megan’s whole worldview was silver linings. That kind of vision is dangerous, but I envy it.

Sometimes it feels like all I see are dark spots.

“Anyway, her body’s been identified. Parents called. All over the news.” Brie points to the ceiling and I look up, slightly disoriented. The crying seems to intensify.

I clap a hand over my mouth and gesture up. “Was that her room?”

Brie nods. “I think so. The dorm’s sectioned off with police tape and there’s been crying up there for about two hours. I can’t believe you slept through it.”

“It’s me.” I’m a notoriously efficient sleeper—if and when I manage to shut my brain off—and no one knows it better than Brie. She was my roommate for two years before we got senior single privileges, and we still have frequent sleepovers.