They Wish They Were Us(13)

I open the text and scan the words quickly but they don’t make sense.

I know you probably never want to hear from me again, but I have to tell you something.

Graham didn’t kill Shaila. He’s innocent.

It’s all so fucked up. Can we talk?

My stomach is in my throat and Nikki’s bathroom spins around me. The walls are on the floor and the sink is flipped upside down and I think I’m going to puke. Another text appears and my heart nearly stops. I grasp my phone so hard my knuckles turn white.

It’s Rachel Calloway.





FOUR





THERE WAS NEVER going to be a trial. I knew it as soon as I saw Graham Calloway in handcuffs, his face red and puffy, blown up like a balloon. Maybe it was the shock of it all, but he didn’t look like Graham then. He looked like someone disguised as Graham in pricey basketball sneakers and a Gold Coast Prep lacrosse hoodie. But when the police led him in front of us, so close that I could see the faint little cluster of moles behind his ear, the ones I stared at all through seventh grade history, I knew it was him, that he had killed Shaila.

Graham and Rachel had both been at Gold Coast since preschool. They were lifers. All the teachers, even the ones they never had, knew their names and their parents. Graham was well-liked in middle school, not because he was kind or funny, but because he just was. His last name guaranteed him entry into everything. When he asked the other boys to come over to his indoor swimming pool or ride sand buggies on the dunes, no one said no. He had big meaty hands that felt vaguely menacing, like he could knock you over with one finger if he didn’t like what you had said. In class he’d make fart noises and blame it on whichever girl had been assigned to sit next to him. He’d knock over test tubes full of chemicals just for fun. Once he even bragged about skinning a dead seagull he found on the beach.

But all that shit seemed to disappear the summer before high school. That was when Graham and Shaila started dating. I had gotten into an all-expenses-paid science camp in Cape Cod but was feeling unbearably guilty that all I really wanted to do was be at home with Shaila. She sent me handwritten letters diligently. “It’s so much more intense than email,” she said in her first one. “Plus, what if I become famous? Then someone will want to know all about Shaila Arnold: The Early Years.” I devoured those notes like they were Mom’s triple chocolate cake.

Her letters made it seem like I was away at the exact moment when everything seemed to shift. She and Kara Sullivan, her chic family friend who spent the school year on the Upper East Side, were enrolled in a Model UN course in the Hamptons. When the Calloways found out, they threw Graham in there, too.

At first Shaila’s letters were filled with stories about Kara, how she was obsessed with artists like Yayoi Kusama, Dan Flavin, and Barbara Kruger, and how Kara showed her how to eat steamers without getting butter all over your face. She seemed impossibly cool. It didn’t help that Kara’s dad grew up with Shaila’s and Graham’s dads, too. They had all spent summers together since birth. They were the same. I was the one on the outside.

It wasn’t until July that Shaila started writing about Graham, peppering her letters with little stories of them eating lobster rolls on her parents’ dock, slipping nips of whiskey into soda cans, and sneaking into the locals bars meant for yuppies escaping summer in the city.

In one note, Shaila wrote that Kara had begun making out with some other kid named Javi from Manhattan, which basically forced Shaila’s hand. She and Graham were dating now. That was that.

By the time I got home in August, they had become inseparable. Even Nikki was shocked. It was as if Graham had become a different person. He had shed his kiddie skin like a snake. All of a sudden, he was sweet, asking me questions about the bioluminescence in Cape Cod or suggesting I tag along with him and Shaila to play mini golf. He was nicer, too, actually calling me Jill instead of the nickname he coined back in middle school, Newmania, because he once saw me cry after bombing a bio test. I hated that so much. But his good streak only lasted a year.

The morning they took Graham away, we were still at the beach outside Tina Fowler’s house. His sister, Rachel, trailed behind him. She was a horrified tornado, aware of her complicity. I remember her outstretched arms reaching toward Graham and the tears streaming down her face. Her voice alternated between a warble and a wail. I shivered when she shrieked. The police pushed Graham’s head deeper into the back seat of the car and he was gone. That was the last time I saw him.

After the car drove away, Rachel turned to us and pointed a shaking finger. “You all believe this?” she screamed. Her eyes were red and her hair was a frizzy mess. It was the one time she looked less than perfect.

No one said a word.

Rachel pleaded with Adam to come with her to the station. But Adam shook his head. He was the one who called the cops when Shaila disappeared. They found Graham half a mile down the sand, almost at the entrance to the Ocean Cliff lookout, with Shaila’s blood still sticky on his fingers and stained all over his chest. Flecks of sand clung to him like sprinkles to frosting.

“You’re a coward,” Rachel snarled, trying to pierce his skull with her eyes. “You’re a coward!” She screamed it that time. And with a quick crack of her hand, Rachel slapped Adam across his cheek, leaving a bright red patch on his pale skin. I gasped.

He blinked but said nothing.