People Like Us(51)

I hear my ringtone from within the wet pile of rags and dive for it. Nola watches me, chewing on her thumbnail, with something like jealousy in her eyes. Or maybe I’m delirious. It’s Brie. “Hello?” I rasp.

“Oh my God. Are you okay?”

In one instant, all of my anger evaporates and I want her to be home again. I’m sick and falling to pieces and I just want to be close to her.

“I’m sick.”

“I mean, did you hear?”

“I found her.”

A shocked silence follows, and then her voice tightens. “I’m so sorry I’m not there, sweetie.”

An icy chill runs down my spine. That means she hasn’t seen the horrible, bitchy, heartless note I left on her door. “Don’t be,” I say queasily. I stand up, but the room swirls around me and I need to cling to the bedpost to keep from face-planting on the floor.

“I’m coming home right after breakfast.”

“Don’t.” Brie and Justine had been planning the New York trip for months. They even had Hamilton tickets. It was no small thing. I was a Class A narcissist to blame her for wanting to spend her anniversary with her girlfriend.

“Maddy’s dead.”

The words fall out of the phone like bricks from a crumbling building, and I don’t know how to respond. Maddy is dead. It sounds new every time I think it or hear it. It sounds like funeral bells. There is no way to keep the world going forward anymore. Not by myself. Brie has to find out, just like Mom did, like Jessica’s family will, and Dr. Klein, like everybody does, that death is just a skip in the record. After Megan and Todd died, I became convinced for a very short time that I had a heart defect and was dying, but was reassured in the emergency room that I was very healthy and experiencing something called PVCs brought on by anxiety, trauma, and extreme stress. A PVC is a premature ventricular contraction. It feels like your heart isn’t beating anymore, like it’s skipping, but really it’s just that the rhythm’s been thrown for a loop, and it almost always jumps right back into routine immediately afterward. No matter how convinced you are that everything is falling apart, it’s actually working exactly as it should. I briefly saw a behavioral psychologist for my anxiety disorder, and she put it to me this way: “You go to sleep at night, and you wake up in the morning, and all that time you’ve relinquished control of your body to your body, and it does everything it’s supposed to.”

I walked out of her office and stepped on a dead bird that had not been dead long enough to attract scavengers or to look very dead, and it occurred to me: Death is the PVC. It feels like the end of all that has been done and known. It seemed like the street should be quiet without the bird, but there were plenty of birds singing and chipmunks chattering to each other. I somehow thought the school would board up the locker room after Megan died in it, but they just cleaned out her locker, and I started changing in the bathroom down the hall. It felt like the football team should have stopped playing after Todd died, but . . . playoffs. Mom went off to the hospital, but Dad kept going to work. I went to school, and at first I got away with not doing any work, but then I failed a test. My best friend was gone and my brother was gone. Some girl wrote on my locker, “I heart perverts.” Some other girl crossed that out and wrote, “I heart dead perverts.” I got high and hooked up with Trevor McGrew behind the school and started having PVCs. And things just kept going and going and going.

“You still there?” Brie sounds far away. My brain feels cloudy and I’m having a hard time making myself focus.

“Yeah. I’m in Nola’s room. I slept over.”

There’s a pause. “Why?”

“Because I was alone and fucking scared, Brie.”

Nola raises her eyebrows at me and mouths, Should I leave? I shake my head.

“Call me when you get back, okay?”

“Okay.” She draws the word out, sounds like she wants to ask me something else. “Do you want me to pick anything up on my way back to campus?”

“Nyquil. And orange juice.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” she repeats in a softer voice.

“You didn’t know. None of us did.”

“Don’t die, Kay.”

I smile and blow a kiss into the phone. Nola isn’t smiling when I look up.

“Can we focus, please?”

My nose is stuffed, my head aches, and my throat feels like there are razors scraping up and down when I speak. The only thing I want to do is rest.

I lie back on the bed and close my eyes. “On what?”

“Spencer.”

“The eminently unfaithful.”

“The eminently homicidal.” She shows me the pictures of Spencer and Maddy again.

I throw her phone back at her, my eyes stinging. “Maddy is dead. I have some kind of plague, and my head feels like it’s stuffed with explosives. I can’t talk about this anymore.”

She bites her lip. “Fine. But someone killed Maddy, and Jessica, too. Your best bet at clearing your name is recording a confession.” She produces a small recording device from her desk, seals it in a ziplock bag, and places it in my jacket pocket. “I use this when I’m rehearsing for plays. It’s ancient, but it works. We’ll need a better one to record an actual conversation in a public place with background noises, but this is better than nothing.”