Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“What did he say?”

I pulled harder on the loose string, and a little family of threads bunched up in response. I couldn’t tell Anita the awful things Arthur said to me because then I’d have to tell her about Dean. And Liam and Peyton. Mom would kill me if she ever found out what happened that night. “He was mad because I started hanging out with Dean and Olivia and those guys.”

Anita tipped her head once, like she understood. “So he felt betrayed by you?”

I shrugged. “I guess. He didn’t like Dean.”

“Why not?”

“Because Dean was mean to him. He was mean to Ben too.” And suddenly I had the map in my hands, the one that would lead me out of this mess unscathed. I had to guide everyone in my direction with swift surety, otherwise they would dig, dig, dig. All the way back to that night in October. I said, generously, “Do you know what Dean and Peyton did to Ben?”

Curiosity simmered in Anita’s dark eyes. I gave her everything.

Anita seemed very satisfied with the information I provided her, and thanked me for being so “brave and candid.” I could go home now, if I wanted to.

“Is Dean in this hospital too?” I asked.

Anita had been collecting her things to go, but she paused when I asked this. “I think he might be. Did you want to see him?”

“No,” I said. Then, “Maybe. I don’t know. Is it bad?”

“My advice?” Anita said. “I would go home, be with your family.”

“Do I have to go to school today?”

Anita regarded me strangely. It was another important look, but I didn’t realize why until later. “The school will be shut down for some time. I’m not really sure how they are planning to finish the semester out.”

Anita hadn’t built up any traction in her new sneakers, and they squeaked on the shiny hospital floor as she walked away. Then Mom was back, this time with Dad, who looked like he would rather be anywhere else but where he was, stuck with us two crazy broads.

I was surprised how sad it made me to leave the hospital, to see the people hurrying to work, the men in their dry-cleaned suits, the women driving their kids to the public school, cursing because they missed the light at Montgomery and Morris Ave and now they were going to be late. Knowing that when you’re gone the grind will go on. No one is special enough to stop it.

Dad drove because Mom was too shaky. “Look!” She held out her bony, trembling hands as proof.

I climbed into the car, the leather cold and hard beneath my thin hospital scrubs. Those scrubs would remain in my wardrobe until college. They were my favorite thing to lounge around in when I was hungover. I only threw them out when Nell pointed out how creepy it was that I’d held on to them.

We looped around the Bryn Mawr Hospital parking lot until we found an exit. Dad rarely came out this way, and Mom pestered him the whole ride home. “No, Bob, left. Left!” “Jesus, Dina. Relax.” When the road ran away from the scenic towns, and the highlights changed from cute little boutiques and luxury car lots to McDonalds’s and no-frills strip malls, a sort of panic scooted into the elaborate labyrinth of my emotions. What if class never resumed at Bradley? There would be nothing left tethering me to the Main Line. I needed Bradley. Too much had happened to return to Mt. St. Theresa’s, to that spectacularly middlebrow life.

“Am I going back to Bradley?” The question seemed to settle heavy on Mom’s shoulders. They sagged even further down right in front of me.

“We don’t know,” Mom said at the same time Dad said, “Of course not.”

Mom’s profile was stern as she hissed, “Bob.” Mom was a good hisser, it was a gift she passed along to me. “You promised.”

I righted myself, leaving a rhombus-shaped smudge on the glass where my forehead had been sulking. That Dove bar had been no match for my shiny T-zone. “Wait. What did you promise?”

The way no one answered me, the way they both continued to stare straight ahead, made me even more nervous.

“Hello?” I said, louder. “What did you promise?”

“TifAni.” Mom pressed her fingers on either side of her nose, dulling the oncoming headache. “We don’t even know what the school is going to decide to do. What your father promised is that we will wait to hear from the administration before we make a decision.”

“And do I get a say in this decision?” I admit, I said it like a real snot. Dad swerved left and flattened the brake pedal to the floor. Mom swung forward, and the seat belt squeezed a mannish grunt out of her.

Dad turned and pointed his finger at me. His face had sprouted all sorts of mangy purple veins. He shouted at me, “No, you don’t! You don’t!”

Mom gasped, “Bob.”

I slunk into the car’s corner. “Okay,” I whispered. “Please, okay.” The skin beneath my eyes had rubbed off raw, and it felt like someone had flung rubbing alcohol in my face when I began to cry. Dad realized he was still pointing his finger at me, and, slowly, he lowered his hand and tucked it between his legs.

“TifAni!” Mom twisted half out of her seat to get her hand on my knee. “Oh my God, you are white. Sweetheart, are you okay? Daddy didn’t mean to scare you. He is just so upset right now.” I always thought of Mom as beautiful, but suffering made her ugly and unrecognizable. She sobbed a few times, her lips searching for something to say to comfort me. Eventually, she managed, “We are all just so upset right now!” We sat there for a while, waiting for Mom to stop crying, the car rocking like a cradle as the traffic thundered past.

There was another standoff when we got home. Mom wanted me to rest in my room. She had a bottle of pills from Anita in case I had a breakdown, and she would bring me whatever I needed—food, tissues, magazines, nail polish if I felt like giving myself a manicure. But I needed TV. I needed to be reminded that the world was still here, normal and stupid as ever with their talk shows and campy soap operas. Magazines could do that too, transport you to a silly world, but once you completed the quiz on the last page and found out that yes, you are a control freak and it’s driving men away, the spell was broken. I required a permanent passport to Fluff City.

Dad headed straight for the master bedroom. Twenty minutes later he emerged, shaved and wearing khakis and that ugly yellow button-down I worried about on the rare day he came to pick me up from school.

“What are you doing?” Mom asked.

“I’m going in to the office, Dina.” Dad opened the refrigerator and grabbed an apple. He bit into it, his teeth peeling back the flesh the way that knife had in Arthur’s back. I looked away. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“I just thought we should be together today,” Mom said, a little too brightly, and I suddenly ached for a storied Main Line family with brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles nearby, for the house to be alive with generations of our great name.

“I would if I could.” Dad held the apple between his teeth as he pulled his coat out of the hall closet and shrugged it on. “I’ll try to be home early.” Before he left he told me to feel better. Thanks, Dad.

Our thin house rocked on its foundation when Dad slammed the door. Mom waited for it to right itself before she said, “Okay, if you’d prefer to lie on the couch that’s fine. But I’d prefer that you didn’t watch the news.”

The news. It hadn’t even occurred to me to tune in to it before Mom brought it up, and now it was all I wanted to watch. I focused my eyes on her, challenging. “Why not?”

“Because it will be very disturbing for you,” Mom said. “They’re showing images of—” She stopped and pressed her lips together firmly. “You don’t need to see that.”

“Images of what?” I pushed.

“Please, TifAni,” Mom begged. “Just respect my wishes.”

I said I would even though I didn’t, and went upstairs to shower and change into clean clothes. Then I came right back downstairs, intending to put the news on, but Mom was rummaging through the refrigerator. The house was designed with a large window in the middle of the kitchen, so that you could sit at the table and watch the TV in the living room. I didn’t feel like hearing it from Mom about how I disrespected her wishes, so I turned the channel to MTV.

A few minutes later, I heard Mom padding around in the kitchen, muttering something about how we had no food in the house. “TifAni,” she said, “I’m going to make a run to the grocery store. Is there anything you want?”

“That tomato soup,” I said. “And Cheez-Its.”

“What about drinks? Soda?”

She knew I stopped drinking that stuff when I started running. Mr. Larson said anything but water would dehydrate us. I rolled my eyes and gave her a barely audible “No.”

Mom came around to the front of the couch, looking down at me like I was a body in a casket. She found a blanket and shook it in the air. It landed on me, the perfect trap. “I hate the idea of leaving you alone.”

“I’m fine,” I groaned.

“Please don’t watch the news when I go,” she pleaded.

“I won’t.”

“I know you’re going to,” Mom said.

“Then why did you even tell me not to?”

Mom sighed and sat down on the smaller couch across from me, the cushions exhaling with her weight. She picked up the controller and said, “If you’re going to do it, I’d rather you do it with me.” Like it was my first time smoking a cigarette or something. “In case you have any questions,” she added.

Mom switched the channel from MTV to NBC, and, sure enough, even though it was the time of day the Today show should have been testing the newest vacuum cleaners, the segment was dedicated to “Another School Shooting Tragedy.” Matt Lauer was actually standing on the sidewalk in front of the old mansion, the part that had been charred by the fire in the cafeteria.

“The Main Line is one of the most affluent areas in the country,” Matt was saying. “I’ve heard numerous times this morning that no one can believe it’s happened here, and, for once, it’s really true.” The camera cut away from him to reveal an aerial shot of the school while Matt listed the grim body count. “Seven are dead, two of them the shooters, five victims of the shooters. One of the victims died in the blast in the cafeteria, the result of a homemade pipe bomb placed inside a backpack and left near what officials have confirmed was the table favored by the school’s most popular students. Only one of the bombs detonated, while police believe there were at least five, and, had they all gone off, the carnage would have been much worse. Nine students are in the hospital with severe but not life-threatening injuries. Some are believed to have lost limbs.”

I gasped. “Lost limbs?”

Mom’s eyes looked bigger with tears in them. “This is what I was talking about.”

“Who? Who did that happen to?”

Mom brought a shaky hand to her forehead. “I didn’t recognize some of the names so I forgot them. But there was one. Your friend Hilary.”

I kicked at the blanket. It tangled in my legs, and I wanted to tear that fucking thing thread from thread. The orange juice felt like a citrus boil in my stomach. “What happened to her?”

“I’m not sure,” Mom whimpered. “But I think it was her foot.”

I tried to make it to the bathroom before I spewed that putrid green bile everywhere, I really did. Mom said it was fine, she could get the stain out with spot remover, no problem. The important thing was that I just rest. She gave me an Anita pill. Just rest.

I came to a few times to hear Mom on the phone. I heard her say, “That’s very sweet. But she’s resting at the moment.”

I fell into black muck after that, so dense it took physical effort to wade out of it. I tried a few times before giving up, falling under again. It was nighttime when I finally punctured the murky glaze, when I could form the words to ask Mom who she had been talking to earlier.

“A few people,” Mom said. “Your old English teacher called to see how you were doing—”

“Mr. Larson?”

“Uh-huh, and also another mother. They activated that call chain thing.”

School was suspended indefinitely. Mom said I was lucky I wasn’t a senior. “Just imagine, trying to send out your college applications in this mess?” She clucked her sympathy.

“Did Mr. Larson leave a number?”

“He didn’t,” Mom said. “But he said he would call back later.”

The phone didn’t ring again for the rest of the evening, and I spent the first night on the couch, blank faced in front of the TV screen, listening to Beverly, mother of four, rave that the ABtastic DVD was the only thing that had given her her body back, and she had tried everything. The lights stayed on too. Another thing about our house is that the second-floor hallway is completely open, so that you can come out of any of the four bedrooms and look over the railing, see me, a lump beneath a pastel acrylic throw. Dad stormed out of the bedroom a few times, raging about how the sliver of light beneath his door was keeping him awake. Finally I told him I’d take that petty torment over the grisly scene on repeat in my mind, and he didn’t come out of his room again.

I dozed off just as the sun came up, and, when I came to again, the TV was off and I couldn’t find the remote control anywhere.

“Daddy took it,” Mom called from the kitchen, when she heard me flailing around. “He went out and bought you a bunch of magazines before he went to work though.”

Usually, Mom would monitor the magazines I read. But she gave a long list to Dad and told him to buy them all, even the ones that promised to teach me how to “Set His Thighs on Fire.” It was a small peace offering, I knew, because they’d banned TV. I cherished those magazines, still have them in a box underneath my childhood bed to this day. They made me want to move to a city—any city—wear heels, and live a fabulous life. In their world, everything was fabulous.

It was some lazy time in the afternoon, Mom napping on the short couch, me stretched out on the long couch, studying a smoky eye tutorial, when the doorbell rang.

Mom sprung up and looked at me accusingly, like I’d made the noise that woke her. We stared at each other silently until the doorbell rang again.

Mom ran her fingers through her hair, fluffing it at the dark roots, and patted her fingers under her eyes, clearing out the mascara smudges. “Damnit.” She shook her foot as she stood, trying to knock the sleep out of it. It didn’t work. She hobbled all the way to the front door.

I heard the low murmur of voices. Mom saying, “Why, of course.” When she returned to the living room, there were two frowning men in suits, that basement-couch kind of brown, by her side.

“TifAni.” Mom was using her hostess voice. “This is Detective . . .” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “I’m so sorry, Detectives. I’ve already forgotten your names.” Her voice dropped its pleasant tenor and she looked like she was going to cry again. “It’s just been such a time.”

“Of course it has,” the younger, skinnier one said. “I’m Detective Dixon.” He nodded at his partner. “This is Detective Vencino.” Detective Vencino had that same complexion so many of my relatives sport for most of the calendar year. Without a summer tan, we take on a sickly shade of green.

Mom addressed me. “TifAni, can you stand please?”

I folded the page to my smoky eye tutorial and did as I was told. “Did someone else die?”

Detective Dixon’s blond-white eyebrows clustered together. If they didn’t bristle off his face haphazardly, it would be easy to mistake them for not being there at all. “No one has died.”

“Oh.” I examined my nails. The article I’d been reading prior to the smoky eye how-to had said that white spots on the nails were signs of iron deficiency, and iron is what gives you thick, shiny hair, so you didn’t want to be iron deficient. No white spots. “My parents won’t let me watch the news so I have no idea what’s going on.” I shot the detectives a look like, Can you believe it?

“That’s probably for the best,” Detective Dixon said, and Mom gave me this smug little smile that made me want to throw the magazine at her head.

“Is there someplace where we can all sit and talk?” Detective Dixon asked.

“Is everything okay?” Mom brought her hand to her mouth, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I meant has something else happened?”

“Nothing else, Mrs. FaNelli.” Detective Vencino cleared his throat, and the loose green skin on his neck wobbled. “We just want to ask TifAni a few questions.”

“I already talked to the police at the hospital,” I said. “And that psychiatrist.”

“Psychologist,” Detective Dixon corrected. “And we know. We just want to clear up a few things. We were hoping you could help.” He arched his spiky eyebrows pleadingly. So many people who needed my help.

I looked at Mom, who nodded. “Okay.”

Mom asked the detectives if they wanted anything—coffee, tea, a snack? Detective Dixon asked for coffee, but Detective Vencino shook his head. “No, thank you, Mrs. FaNelli.”

“You can call me Dina,” Mom said, and Detective Vencino didn’t smile at her, the way most men do.

The three of us sat at the table while Mom poured coffee beans into the top of the coffee machine. We all had to raise our voices above the whirring grind.

“So, TifAni,” Detective Dixon began. “We know about your relationship with Arthur. That you two were in a fight. At the time of the . . . incident.”

I bobbed my head up and down: yup, yup, yup. “He was mad at me. I took this picture from his room. I still have it if you—”

Detective Dixon held up his hand. “We are actually not here to talk about Arthur.”

I blinked, dumbly. “What are you here to talk about then?”

“Dean.” Detective Dixon watched for any effect the name might have on me. “Were you and Dean friends?”

I traced my naked toe on the kitchen’s hardwood floor. I used to slide across these floors in my socks, arms flung out, pretending to surf. Then one day a three-inch-long splinter punctured the fabric of my socks, lodged itself neatly into the arch of my foot, and that was the end of that game. “Not exactly.”

“But you were,” Detective Vencino jumped in. It was the first time he’d spoken to me, and up close I noticed his crooked nose, skewed left, like a lump of wet clay someone had pushed to the side before it dried. “At one point?”

“I guess you could say that,” I allowed.

Detective Dixon glanced at Detective Vencino. “Were you upset with Dean recently?”

I glanced at Mom, straining to hear my answer above the blade’s whine. “A little, yeah. I guess.”

“Can you tell us why?”

I examined my hands, my healthy nails. Olivia would never have to worry about being iron deficient again. I suddenly remembered that she’d been wearing green nail polish when I’d seen her last, in Chem, hunched over her desk, furiously scribbling notes. Hilary had been wearing it too, must have convinced Olivia to try it, because Olivia wasn’t the type to experiment with makeup. Or maybe it was to show their support for the soccer team. I dazed off, wondering, if you die with green nails, if you’re not going through life bumping into things and washing your hair—all those everyday things that chisel away at the veneer—will the Sally Hansen persevere? The way your teeth and bones remain when the rest of you decays? Here is Olivia, her green fingernails all that’s left. Detective Dixon repeated his question.

“TifAni,” Mom called. The machine’s motor shut off with a click, and the next thing she said came out loudly, with accidental emphasis. “Answer the detectives, please.”

Like one of those bath toys that swells to four times its size in a warm tub, I fattened up with tears. I wasn’t going to be able to hide what happened that night. Why did I think I could? I jammed a fist into an eye and rubbed. “There were a lot of reasons,” I sighed.

“Maybe you’d be more comfortable talking about them if Mom weren’t here?” Detective Dixon asked, kindly.

“I’m sorry.” Mom placed Detective Dixon’s coffee cup by his elbow. “Be more comfortable talking about what? What is going on?”

The windows at the Ardmore police station were opaque inky squares by the time the lawyer arrived, introduced himself as Dan under the sallow hallway lights. Detective Dixon insisted we didn’t need a lawyer, and he was so nice Mom almost believed him, but she changed her tune after she called Dad at the office. The lawyer came recommended by Dad’s co-worker whose daughter had been arrested for a DUI over the summer. Neither Mom nor I was impressed. He was a schlubby guy in a suit with pant hems that collected in bunches around his ankles like the bulky neck of a bulldog.

Dan (“No competent lawyer can be named Dan,” Mom hissed) wanted to hear the entire story from me first, before the detectives joined us in the frigid interrogation room. They really do lower the temperature, try to make you feel as uncomfortable as possible so you would confess sooner, the detectives home in time for dinner.

“No detail is unimportant.” Dan rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt, a royal blue eyesore that seemed the product of a buy two, get one free sale at Jos. A. Bank. He’d taken off his coat and hung it on the back of the chair, not noticing when the left shoulder slipped, the right shoulder clinging on with all its might. “Everything from the beginning of the school year. Every connection you had to everyone involved in this. Everything.”

Even I couldn’t believe how well it had all started out for me, that I was ever sought after by the likes of Dean or Olivia, how badly and how swiftly my good fortune had spoiled. I rushed through the details of the night at Dean’s, burning bright as I recounted how I’d come to with Peyton, doing, you know, to me. “Performing oral sex?” Dan asked, and under the unrelenting fluorescent lights I must have looked sunburned. “Yes,” I mumbled. I went through the list, the way I’d drifted through the night, coming to at various points with Peyton first, the others who followed. I told him what happened afterward, the night at Olivia’s, the cut on my face that wasn’t from her dog. I was wary of involving Mr. Larson in the whole thing, but Dan said no detail was unimportant.

“Did Mr. Larson . . .” Dan cleared his throat. He looked as embarrassed as I did. “That night in his apartment?”

I stared at him for a second before I understood what he meant. “No,” I said. “Mr. Larson would never do something . . . like that.” I shivered to show my disgust.

“But Mr. Larson knew about the rapes? He could corroborate this story?”

That was the first time anyone had ever referred to what happened to me in the plural. The rape(s). I didn’t know those other things could be considered rape. “Yes.”

Dan made a note in his little notebook. His pen stilled. “Now, Arthur.”

Was he depressed, was he on drugs? (“No,” I said. “I mean, yeah, but just pot.” “Pot is a drug, TifAni.”) Did he ever say anything that, looking back, could have been his way of warning me about what he was planning to do?

“I mean”—I shrugged—“I knew he had that gun. The one he had in the cafeteria.”

Dan didn’t blink for so long I almost waved my hand in front of his face and yodeled “yoo-hoo” like in the commercials. “How do you know that?”

“He showed it to me. In his basement. It was his dad’s.” Dan still hadn’t blinked. “It wasn’t loaded or anything,” I stressed.

“How do you know?” Dan asked.

“He pointed it at me. As a joke.”

“He pointed it at you?”

“He let me hold it too,” I bit back. “He wouldn’t be dumb enough to let me hold it and not tell me it was loaded. What if I . . .” I stopped talking, because Dan’s head dropped to his chest, like he had fallen asleep on an airplane. “What?”

Dan’s chest muffled his voice. “You touched the gun?”

“For, like, two seconds,” I said, quickly, trying to fix whatever it was I’d broken. “Then I gave it back.” Dan still didn’t look at me. “Why? Is that bad?”

Dan jammed his hands on either side of his nose, supporting the weight of his head. “It could be.”

“Why?”

“Because if they find your prints on the gun, it could be very, very bad.”

The overhead light shuddered and crackled, like it had sizzled a bug on a swampy summer night, and I realized what Dan meant. Had Mom known this too? Did Dad? “Do they think I’m involved in this?”

“TifAni,” Dan said, his voice high and astonished. “What, exactly, do you think you’re doing here?”

After Dan and I had our “powwow,” as Detective Dixon put it, like he was my football coach and I was the quarterback with the entire town’s expectations on my burly shoulders, I was allowed to use the restroom and see Mom and Dad. They were sitting on a bench, outside the interrogation room. Dad had his head in his hands, like he couldn’t believe this was his life. Like if he could just fall asleep he might wake up somewhere else. Mom’s legs were crossed, her stockinged foot half out of one of her flirty heels. I’d told her not to wear them here, but she’d insisted. She’d tried to make me put makeup on (“Maybe a little mascara before we go?”). I’d turned the lights off in the kitchen and gone and waited in the car, leaving her alone, blinking into the dark.

Dad stood to shake Dan’s hand as we approached.

To Mom I said, “Do you know they think I had something to do with this?”

“Of course they don’t think that, TifAni,” she said, her voice shrill and unconvincing. “They’re just covering all their bases.”

“Dan says they have my fingerprints on the gun.”

“Could have, could.” Dan’s shoulders jumped a little as Mom shrieked “What?”

“Dina!” Dad barked. “Lower your voice.”

Mom pointed her finger at Dad, her acrylic nail shaking in rage. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do, Bobby.” She drew her hand back, making a fist and sinking her teeth into her knuckles. “This is all your fault,” she whimpered, squeezing her eyes shut, tears worming paths through the thick layer of foundation on her face. “I told you! TifAni needed those clothes. So they wouldn’t single her out, and look, that’s exactly what they did!”

“This is my fault because I wouldn’t pay for clothes?” Dad’s mouth was open, his molars black. Dad hated the dentist.

“Please!” Dan whispered, loudly. “This is not the place to make a scene.”

“You are unbelievable,” Dad muttered. Mom only tossed her stiff, hair-sprayed hair back, settling into herself again.

“I don’t know if they have her prints,” Dan said. “But TifAni shared with me that Arthur showed her one of the guns that we think”—he held up his hands like a cop in traffic telling the southbound lane to stop—“was used in the crime. And that he let her hold it.”

The way Mom looked at me, sometimes you just have to feel bad for parents. For all the ways they think they know you. The mockery their kids make out of them when they find out otherwise. Before I’d told Dan about that night at Dean’s, I asked if he was going to have to share this with my parents. “Not if you don’t want me to,” Dan said. “This is privileged client information. But, TifAni, the way this thing is going. It will come out. And it’s better they hear it from you first.”

I shook my head. “I can’t ever tell them this.”

Dan said, “I can, if you want me to.”

Heels clicking against the speckled linoleum floor announced Detective Dixon’s arrival, and we all waited for him to speak. “How you folks doing?” He glanced at his wrist, even though he wasn’t wearing a watch. “Let’s get going on this, huh?”

I didn’t know what time it was, but when I sat down next to Dan, Detective Dixon in the seat across from us and Detective Vencino tucked into the corner, my stomach moaned impatiently.

The table, smudged like Arthur’s glasses always were, was empty save for a cup of water (mine) and a recording device occupying the center spot. Detective Dixon pressed a button and said, “November fourteenth, 2001.”

“It’s actually November fifteenth.” Detective Vencino tapped the face of the watch he was wearing. “Twelve oh six.”

Detective Dixon corrected himself and added, “This is Detective Dixon, Detective Vencino, TifAni FaNelli, and her lawyer, Daniel Rosenberg.” The discovery of Dan’s full name gave me a lot more confidence in him.

With the formalities out of the way, I told my story again. Every last vulgar detail. It’s a certain kind of hell, confessing your most humiliating sexual secrets to a room full of hairy middle-aged men.

Unlike Dan, Detective Dixon and Detective Vencino didn’t interrupt me with questions. Which made me think it might be okay to leave out certain parts, but when I tried, Dan gently prodded me. “And it was Mr. Larson you ran into at the Wawa that night, remember?”

When I finished, Detective Dixon stretched in his chair with a loud yawn. He stayed like that, legs splayed apart, arms behind his head, staring at me for a long while. “So,” he said, finally, “your story is that Dean, Liam, and Peyton assaulted you that night at Dean’s house? And that Dean did again, that night at Olivia’s house?”

I looked at Dan, who nodded, before answering him. “Yes,” I said.

“See, TifAni, I’m not following.” The way he was slumped into the wall, Detective Vencino’s chest curled over his little potbelly. There wasn’t one part of him that wasn’t covered in itchy-looking black hair. “I guess what I’m not understanding is if Dean, assaulted you”—there was his rude laugh—“why would you even want to save him from Arthur?”

“I was trying to save myself.”

“But Arthur was your friend,” Detective Vencino said, condescendingly, as though I’d forgotten. “He wouldn’t try to hurt you.”

“He was my friend.” I stared at the table so hard it blurred. “But I was afraid of him. He was mad at me. I’d taken that picture of his dad . . . I don’t think you understand how mad he was about that. I told you. He chased me out of his house.”

“Let’s back up a second.” Detective Dixon shot Detective Vencino a warning look over his shoulder. “Tell me what you know about Dean and Arthur’s relationship.”

I thought of that yearbook in Arthur’s room. Their smiling, earnest faces. Not a clue in the world how it would all turn out. “They were friends in middle school,” I said. “Arthur told me that.”

“And when did they stop being friends?” Dixon asked.

“Arthur said it was when Dean got popular.” I shrugged. Story old as time.

“Did Arthur ever talk about wanting to hurt Dean?”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”