People Like Us(59)

The second, a lock of my hair, again, with one of the blooms.

The third, a smear of blood on an index card. With every note, we sent another orchid bloom.

On the fourth day we sent a carefully scrubbed rib bone from the dining hall with the note All of me.

That night, Tricia said the Dear Valentine delivery girl showed up at her door, looking nervous. She said the sender was pretty upset and asked us to please stop delivering the notes. But by then we had so many ideas, Tricia happily bankrolled the rest of the project, and the delivery girl agreed to take the money, no questions asked. I guess now I know that’s not the whole truth. Nola was the delivery girl, and Tricia didn’t pay her in money. She paid her in promises and lies. It was just as cruel as the actual prank.

We’d had so much fun on the Dear Valentine project, hunting for “body parts” online, in village shops, even in the woods. Only Brie wouldn’t be a part of it. She completely dropped off the radar during that whole period. On the day I burst into her room with a weirdly realistic candy brain we’d ordered off the internet, she looked at me and just pointed to the door without saying a word.

That just made me throw myself into the project with more determination. If Brie didn’t get it, Tai and Tricia did. It was a joke.

At the end, the orchid plant was just two skeletal stems wired to fake plastic twigs, and I felt a little better. I tossed the stems, scrubbed the vase, and filled it with chocolate kisses, which Brie had given me a bag of, with no card and no real kiss. It served Dear Valentine girl right. She was mocking me with her gift, and if she had anything to say to me, she could say it to my face.

I thought that was the end of it.

But when I texted Brie asking her to the Spring Gala, she turned me down again, with no explanation. I wrote back with my heart pounding, Someone else? And she wrote, Dear Valentine Girl. She didn’t show up at the dance at all.

We never talked about it again.

That was my first and last prank. Initiation and hazing, yes. But nothing like Dear Valentine.

I finally look up at Greg. “I did that to Jessica. My friends, too. She probably thought Brie was involved, but Brie refused. That’s probably the unspeakably mean thing Jessica was referring to.”

“Jesus, Kay, it didn’t even occur to you that she might have actually liked you?”

“You tell me. I was hanging out with Brie at the time. All the time. They weren’t mean; I just took them that way.”

He sighs heavily. “She never told me, so there’s no way to know. She still retaliated against Brie, so Brie had a motive to get back at her.”

“She didn’t do it. She wouldn’t even send a shitty valentine.”

“It all depends on what happened afterward,” Greg says. “Did they or did they not run into each other the night of the murder? Is it possible?”

I think back to the night of the murder. I had drained half the bottle of prosecco when the headlights swept over the dark water. The details of my thinking were fuzzy, like scribbles on torn notepaper, but the ideas were bold and urgent and strong. I didn’t stand up when Spencer got out of his car and slammed the door, because I knew I might sway and crash, and I needed him to understand how serious this was.

He looked down at me, shocked. “Katie?”

“Who the fuck is Jess?”

He checked his phone. “Oh shit. I’m so sorry. I got two calls in a row. I just assumed.”

“You said everything was going to be okay.”

“I wanted it to be. I still do.”

“After what you did?”

“I don’t know what to do anymore.” He took a sip from my bottle and made a face. “God, Katie.”

“Make it okay.” I pulled him close and kissed him. I was still sweaty from the dance and cold from the chilled night air and the combination made me shiver against his warm skin.

“I don’t know how anymore,” he whispered into my mouth.

“End it. Whoever she is, get rid of her. I don’t want to hear her name again. I never want to see her face.” I edged back into the shadows, pulling him by the hand.

“Will I still hear Brie’s name?”

“She’s gone.” I kissed him again, slower, dancing my body against his, guiding his hand around my waist, the other on my shoulder, his fingers entwined in the strap of my dress. “Get rid of this girl.”



* * *



? ? ?

NOW GREG LOOKS at me expectantly. “Is it possible Brie could have fought with Jessica that night?”

I shake my head. “I doubt it.”





19


When I get back to my room, I find a piece of masking tape over my nameplate with the word KILLER printed on it in thick red letters. The door is plastered with messages scrawled in black and red permanent markers, along with a few newspaper clippings about the recent murders. Someone has drawn a grotesque cartoon of a hangman with a cat’s body dangling from the gallows with the letters K-A-Y in the blanks. The phrase You might as well be dead, too is repeated several times in a variety of colors and handwriting. There are subtle references to at least a dozen girls I’ve pissed off over the past three and a half years, funneled into a general hostility and summed up by the cartoon of the hanging cat, the corpse I handled, but whose death I played no part in.