People Like Us(60)

I hear a muffled laugh behind me and whirl around so fast, I almost lose my balance. The congestion from the cold has given me vertigo and sudden movements yank the earth out from under me. But a door slams across the hall before I have time to see who’s behind it, and I’m so disoriented that I can’t tell which one it was. The one straight across, or two down, or even echoing all the way from the end? Maybe it’s good that I’m still a person of interest in a murder. At least they’re too afraid to say all of this to my face.

I escape into my room and crawl under the covers still dressed, shivering from fever and cold and being completely alone. I don’t want to call Nola. I can’t help feeling like this is partly her fault, even though I asked her to be a part of it. I bribed her to unlock that first password.

I roll over in bed, kick my shoes off, and then blow my nose until the skin around my nostrils is tender. My instinct, as always, is to call Brie, but there’s nothing to say. I can’t apologize and I can’t demand an apology. What she did was unforgivable and it also put me on notice that I’m not forgiven. I check my email to find a slew of last-minute reminders about the pre-Thanksgiving exams coming up this week. One good thing about Bates is that they break up the first semester midterms and give you half of them before Thanksgiving break and the other half just before winter break, so you don’t have to spend the entire week ignoring your family and studying.

Of course, I don’t spend Thanksgiving with my family. The year Todd died, we spent it in Mom’s hospital, which was sad and gross and gave me slimy-turkey-and-cranberry-flavored-hoof-treat-related food poisoning. I stayed with Aunt Tracy for the rest of the weekend while Mom and Dad did intensive couples grief therapy. We watched Days of Our Lives while drinking pumpkin spice coffee and eating low-calorie vanilla ice cream in quantities sufficient to cancel out the benefit of the calorie count.

Since I enrolled at Bates, I have spent every Thanksgiving with Brie’s family in their Cape Cod mansion pretending to be an equally perfect, beloved second daughter. They do things like yearly family football matches on the enormous back lawn overlooking the ocean as the sun melts down into the evening sky, ghost stories next to a fireplace that takes up an entire gigantic wall, and family movie nights with stove-popped caramel corn and homemade hot chocolate. For dinner the cook prepares enormous fresh-caught lobsters swimming in butter, roasted chestnuts, acorn squash with a hard little crust of burnt sugar like crème br?lée, almond asparagus, and garlic smashed potatoes. It’s the same every year, and it’s delicious.

Being there makes me feel better than I am. More important, more worthy. They are a real family. I feel separate from my parents when I sit on the sofa between Brie and her mother under the enormous cathedral ceiling watching classic comedies. At home, even if my parents were around, we would be eating something like cold turkey sandwiches in the darkened living room in front of a football game none of us cared about. I would be texting or pretending to text so that it wouldn’t be too awkward not to talk to them. Dad would be asleep or pretending to sleep for the same reason, and Mom would be digging through her purse for a sedative, because that game on the television that none of us cared about? It would be Todd’s favorite team. And they’d probably be losing.

This will be the first year I won’t be invited to Brie’s. I don’t want to know what she’s going to tell them. For some reason, I feel ashamed, like I’ve let her family down. Like they took a chance on me, they took the abandoned puppy in, the dangerous breed everyone knows is predisposed to attack babies and harmless old ladies, and I repaid them by biting their daughter.

I decide not to tell my parents at all. It’s too late to tell the school I have nowhere to go, but I’ll figure something out. I scroll past the exam notifications and see that I have an email from Justine. I open it reluctantly.

Stay away from my girlfriend, bitch.

Lovely.

I forward it to Brie, with the following message:

Let your girlfriend know I have no intention of speaking to her girlfriend ever again.

I click send.

Then I can’t help adding an addendum.

Thanks for the décor.

I snap the light off and slide under the covers and open my Facebook page. I have forty-three notifications. My wall has been plastered with notes and my inbox is full of messages similar to the ones scrawled on my door. At least these aren’t anonymous. My eyes mist and I blink hard as I read every word, study every name and face, and mentally add them to the growing list of people who may have wanted to screw me over. This was much simpler when it was just a question of who might have wanted to hurt Jessica. There are so many names here. Tai. Tricia. Cori. Justine. Holly. Elizabeth. Brie’s name isn’t there. Thank God for that. I see that most of the comments have several likes and strings of their own comments, and, cringing, I click on one of them to reveal the threads. My throat closes up.

Justine wrote, “Watch your back, bitch.”

Under it, Nola replied, “Got it. Who’s got yours?”

I click on the others. Nola has responded to nearly every single one, jumping to my defense.

I check my phone. She hasn’t sent me a text or called. She’s just quietly run damage control on each of these comments as they’ve been posted. As I’m reviewing the page, a new comment pops up at the bottom from Kelli, and Nola replies within seconds. I turn my phone off, sighing. I’m going to have to take a break from people—online, in person, and even in my memory—if I’m going to pass my exams.