The Cheerleaders(67)

“Who is she?” I ask. I’ve never seen her before.

“A member of the International Honor Society of Nursing.” Ginny flushes. “I don’t know who the woman in the photo is. I found it on Google.”

Ginny moves so I can check out Elizabeth Lewis’s news feed. Elizabeth likes to post humorous photos about nursing school, various slow cooker recipes, and photos of her chocolate Lab, Luke.

I look up at Ginny. “Wait. You made all of this up?”

Her face is sheepish. “I had to make it convincing so Carly would accept my friend request.”

“No, it’s impressive. How did you do all this today?”

“I didn’t. After we went to the library, I checked Carly’s page again. She made it private. I wanted to look through her pictures and see what else I could find out about her.”

Ginny gets up so I can check out the profile. I scroll up to Elizabeth’s friend list; she has forty-nine friends, one of whom is Carly Amato.

I stare at Ginny. “You’re a genius. How’d you get all these people to add you?”

“I just added a ton of random people who have nursing listed as their major. I made sure to get a bunch from OCCC. Most people just click accept.”

Ginny drags a free chair over to Mrs. Goldberg’s computer. She rotates the monitor so we both have a full view of the screen. “Anyway, I didn’t find anything in her pictures that seemed important and I forgot about Elizabeth’s profile until this morning when you told me Carly blocked you.”

Ginny pulls up Carly Amato’s page. She loads Carly’s album of profile pictures. “I had study hall last period, so I went to the library to look through these again.”

The buzzing in my ears has reached a crescendo. “What did you find?”

Ginny silently enlarges a photo of Carly in ripped denim cutoffs and a white tank top. She’s holding a Corona bottle, a slice of lime stuffed down the neck. The sky behind her is black, starless.

She’s standing in the bed of a black pickup truck.

Ginny’s voice is in my ear, pulling me back. “I looked through all her other pictures. This is the only one with the truck in it.”

I deflate. “So no license plate or anything.”

“I also looked for any pictures from the same night to see who she may have been with, but there aren’t any.”

I rub my eyes. “Goddamn it. We can’t even message her and ask her whose truck that is, because she’ll get suspicious and block Elizabeth.”

“I thought of that,” Ginny says. “But she has a lot of other pictures. If we can figure out who else she was friends with at Sunnybrook…There’s got to be someone who knows who drove that truck.”

I cycle through Carly’s profile pictures again, starting with her oldest ones. Carly at prom, in a black satin dress, a slit up to her thigh. I pause and point at the black girl standing next to Carly in the prom photo. She’s wearing a white gown with a beaded sweetheart neckline, her silky hair loose and wavy over her shoulders. “I recognize her—I’m pretty sure she was a cheerleader.”

Ginny leans in to get a look at the girl’s face.

A rap on the door makes us both jump in our seats. Then, a woman’s voice: “Who’s in here?”

Ginny winces. “I left the classroom light on.”

My stomach plummets as Mrs. Goldberg’s office door opens. Mrs. Coughlin looks around the room, her gaze finally resting on Ginny. “What are you doing in here?”

Ginny looks like she’s going to throw up. “Yearbook stuff.”

“Oh really.” Mrs. Coughlin clutches the lanyard around her neck. She peeks around Ginny, her beady eyes lasering in on me. “You’re not on yearbook.”

“I’m helping,” I say stupidly.

“Mrs. Goldberg is out today,” Mrs. Coughlin says. “I’m covering her class next period. There is absolutely no reason for you to be in here unsupervised.”

“We have permission,” I say, when Ginny doesn’t speak up.

“Monica, do not pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Mrs. Coughlin tears out a referral sheet from her attendance ledger and nods to Ginny. “What’s your name?”

Ginny stares at Mrs. Coughlin like she’s just undergone a lobotomy.

“This isn’t fair.” My voice is quaking; Mrs. Coughlin is just being spiteful because I didn’t help with the memorial.

Mrs. Coughlin tears out another referral sheet, violently. The ripping sound shuts me up. “Would you like detention for two afternoons, Monica?”

Something in Ginny seems to have come unglued. Her eyes are blazing as she stares at Mrs. Coughlin. “I told Monica it was okay for us to be in here. I deserve detention. Not her.”

“By all means, be a martyr.” Mrs. Coughlin scrawls something on the referral and hands it to Ginny. “You can keep each other company in detention tomorrow.”



* * *



—

A parent has to sign your detention slip, just so they know that they raised a fuckup. I could forge my mother’s or Tom’s signature, but I wouldn’t put it past Mrs. Coughlin to call her.

Mom’s sitting at the kitchen island when I get home from practice, bent over a booster form. I watch her for a moment, absorbing her idiosyncrasies—she taps her pen to her chin when she’s thinking, sighs through her nose when the thought is unpleasant. She shakes her head and crosses something out on the paper, not noticing me standing across the island from her.