People Like Us(85)

The march across the dark and deserted parking lot, away from the field where people were laughing and celebrating, was endless.

My brother put his arm around me and ruffled my hair and called me kiddo, and my stomach tightened slowly until it was the size of a bullet. When we reached the playground, I stood by my bike and waited. But only for a moment.

Because as Todd and I stood there in the dark, someone shouted, “Move, kid!” and headlights suddenly beamed at us from the side of the playground. Rob’s truck shot out from the darkness and smashed into Todd, and my world exploded into infinite microscopic pieces.

I tried to scream, tried to look for Todd, but Hayden tossed my bike into the truckbed and grabbed me, and then we were skidding down the street. I shook violently on his lap, unable to pry my gaze away from the sharp beams of the headlights as they swung over the dirt roads, the back roads, crunching twigs and bark and maybe bones.

Rob spoke calm and low and dangerously. “Listen to me. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies.”

A truth is only a truth because people say it, and continue to say it.

I’d left the game right at the end and rode my bike to Megan’s house to help her mom make chocolate chip cookies, Megan’s favorite. Her brother, Rob, and his friend Hayden were there, eating pizza and playing Dungeons & Dragons. They were about six hours into a ten-hour campaign when I arrived. A half hour later I got the call that stopped my world on its axis for the second time. Todd was dead, had been killed by a hit-and-run.



* * *



? ? ?

I STRIP THE rest of my clothes off and stare down at the water. When I dove into the lake my first year, I was Katie, the girl who failed to stop her best friend’s suicide and then killed her own brother. I emerged Kay, the social powerhouse who fought her way to being within inches of having everything she ever wanted. The girl, and then the guy of my dreams, more friends than I needed, a college scholarship, the illusion of a perfect life.

I wade in knee deep, the cold scraping my skin raw. Now I enter the water as a person with essentially nothing and no one. Brie and Spencer, and even Greg I think, will be there when I need them. But they don’t know me. They don’t know what I’ve done. What I’m capable of. And for all Spencer’s pretty words, he has no idea what it takes to love a person who does bad things. It changes you.

A cloud passes over the moon, and the water seems to deepen.

Who will I be when I emerge this time?

In Tranquility, I was Katherine. Nola named me.

I only have one more half year to ride out at Bates, and if I can manage to bring up my grades and get back in the game, I might still have an outside shot at a scholarship, though it won’t be to the kind of school my parents envisioned for me. Maybe I’ll take up the Kents on their offer to visit. Of course I could never replace their daughter. But their house will be empty for a very long time, and despite what my father says, he sent me away for a reason. He doesn’t know I helped Rob, but he knows I know more than I say I do. And he will never forgive me. I don’t blame him.

I killed his son.

You never find closure for that sort of thing, even if it wasn’t what you intended. It settles into you and absorbs through your skin and worms its way in until it’s in your marrow, deep in your bones. It moves when you move, it’s still when you are still, but never, for a single, solitary instant, does it sleep.

Nola and I aren’t the same, exactly, but she wasn’t entirely wrong about me either. I didn’t make her kill Jessica and I didn’t make Todd or Rob do what they did, but I played a role. I spoke.

What if I’d spoken different words to Megan?

Refused to lie for Todd?

Written no valentines?

If I could talk to any of them right now?

I like to believe I’d know what to say. But I think I’m done lying. Maybe that’s the kind of person Katherine will be.

I don’t feel cold anymore. I take a deep breath, prepare for a long submersion, and plunge into oblivion.