I pull out the ID my friend Calvin and I trade back and forth for emergencies and buy a beer. I’ve held on to this ID for most of senior year. My mom won’t let me drink, whereas Calvin can take a beer out of the refrigerator in his kitchen. Calvin is the only person I talk to about Don. His older brother, Gerhard—the guy with the legitimate claim to the twenty-one-year-old ID—goes to MIT.
I want to call Calvin up, but how would that conversation go? First I’d listen to him moan about how his girlfriend, Monica, might leave him when he takes off for Caltech in August, then he’d listen to me explain how I’m supposed to kill somebody?
Not with a whimper but a bang.
What’s wrong with me? Don’t say genetic predisposition, I already know that. On one side, we have Art Manx, whose family crest might as well say, Live by the sword, die by the sword. On the other side, meet Isabella Rossi Manx, the sweetest insanely strict mother alive, but weak as jelly at the center.
You learn from the Killers-’R’-Us side of the family that weak-as-jelly has its pitfalls. You are never weak as jelly. Then you take the envelope, and you want to bang your head on the bar you shouldn’t legally be sitting at.
Don thinks this is happening.
I sit there eating old peanuts, making myself visualize this Nicolette creeping up behind Connie Marino. I imagine the soft skin of Connie’s neck peeling open, gaping like a thin-lipped mouth, drooling blood. I picture Connie lying on a linoleum floor, bleeding out while this twisted little cheerleader, this tiny evil Nicolette (5' 2'' according to her license) stands over her, laughing.
But the image that keeps interrupting is a cheerleading Nicolette bouncing around with pom-poms, so compact, so deceptively delicate, doing cartwheels in a lit-up stadium during a night game.
I make myself see her kneeling on the linoleum floor next to Connie’s corpse, swishing her crazy hands in Connie’s blood and laughing, getting blood on her pom-poms. I stalk her, catch her from behind, drag her away.
Shit.
I can’t do this. I can’t pretend I’m going to do this or let Don think for five more minutes that I’m doing this.
7
Cat
I’m bolt upright on a broken-down lounge chair, with a death grip on a pointy stick. Concealed between old, disgusting mattresses and bloated garbage bags in a vacant lot rimmed with trees.
The stick is for rats (saw them) and snakes (didn’t). But it feels like a hundred degrees, and it’s Texas, and don’t rattlesnakes crawl out of the ground to cool off and bite people in weather like this?
I would.
If Olivia were here, she’d be weaving together strips of plastic bag. Making us a tent and matching shoulder bags. She’d be distracting me with ghost stories. I might be the bouncy one with the pom-poms, but she was the one who was with me 24/7 when my mom died. The picture she drew of my mom with a sparkle-marker halo and wings, sitting on a cloud, looking down at me and waving, had a permanent place under my pillow. Until Steve steamed out the wrinkles and framed it.
I want my friend.
I want my picture.
I want to be home, where I can never go again.
If I were in Cotter’s Mill right now, I’d be at Olivia’s house, listening to Katy Perry. We’d be copying each other’s math.
At twilight, I’d run home along the lake. Yellow light would be pouring out of my house like the steady beam that glows from a lighthouse. Rosalba, who cooks for us, would pile food onto my plate, complaining that I’m too skinny. And when Steve got home late, I’d cut myself a thin, tiny slice of the tres leches cake Rosalba and I baked. Sit with him. Feed Gertie tiny scraps of meat off his plate while Steve pretended not to notice.
I force myself not to let images of home eclipse the landscape where I actually am. This works for about thirty seconds.
Then I start torturing myself with mental tours of Cotter’s Mill Unified.
These are the trophies from when cheer squad took second at State twice in a row.
That’s the dark stairwell where my first kiss with Connor happened. And happened. And happened.
Here’s the principal’s office where Steve had to show up and use the phrases “harmless prank” and “Of course I take this very seriously” more than once. While I pretended to be contrite, also more than once.
After we made over Maura Brennan in the locker room and her mom had conniptions that I dyed her hair blue-black and pierced her ears twice each. (“Stop saying how good she looks!” Steve said. “What were you thinking?”)
After we cut and went ice-skating on the lake all day. (“So if this Connor does something, anything, you do it too?”)
And when Mr. Kirkbride decided that doing our math homework together was plagiarism??? (“There’s going to come a time when I can’t fix things for you.”)
It’s like some part of my mind is stuck, acting as if the worst thing I ever did is make Maura Brennan look good.
As if it didn’t happen.
But this is now. It happened. My hair is caked with blood, my stomach screaming for me to put something in it now.