Cracked Up to Be (22 page)

“I’m going to bed,” I say, standing. I have had enough.

But Dad stands, too. He stands between me and my only way out of the room.

“You should just give up,” I tell him, but it comes out sounding like a plea and he looks so worried from behind his glasses I want to break something.

And then he makes his way over to me and wraps me up into this hug and I feel myself go rigid. I let my arms hang at my sides.

“Don’t say that,” he says. “Don’t even think it.”

This is unbelievable. They still have hope for me.

I have done something wrong if they still have hope.

twenty-three

I open my locker and stare at the bottle of Jack resting on the top shelf.

It feels like it’s been there forever, and every time I retrieve my books I’m always a little surprised no one’s noticed the attractive, almost demure square bottle full of pale amber liquid, half-hidden by the black label with boastful white lettering I’ve never read beyond the name. All I need to know is how hard it messes you up, and Jack Daniel’s has a tendency to do that like nothing else. I was a vodka girl before, because it was easier to hide in school and didn’t make me as sick, but Becky obviously wanted to see me fall on my face when she gave me that paper bag in the chapel.

And today I am going to make her a very happy girl.

I reach for the bottle at the same time a low rumble of sound travels through the hallway the way a ripple crosses a pond before hitting the bank and going back in on itself. I feel this disturbance—this strange interruption of peace—in the pit of my stomach when I think I hear a name.

I forget about the bottle and follow the undercurrent of sound. The people I pass look at me like they know something, but how can they know anything? It’s too early in the morning to know anything. An invisible thread leads me down the hall and around the corner where a group of people are clustered around a sobbing girl.

I get closer. It’s Becky. She’s the one crying. She’s consoled by Chris, who stands at her right side, and Jake is at her left, looking out of place and awkward.

And I walk right past them, but Chris calls me back.

“Parker.”

I backtrack slowly and face them, not just the three of them, but three plus an audience, because I don’t deserve less. I clench my hands into fists, digging my nails in, and wait for one or all of them to speak. Becky stops crying long enough to raise her head from Chris’s shoulder, and get ready for it, Parker, because this is it.

The party starts at eight, but I show up early so Chris and I can have sex. We go to his bedroom. He kisses me and I kiss him back and then, I don’t know, I kind of seize up.

He flops back on the bed.

“You should loosen the fuck up every once in a while; the world wouldn’t stop. No one would die.”

We come downstairs looking like two people who’ve spent the last thirty minutes having sex. Chris gets to work on the tunes and I wind my way through the house and spot Evan in the kitchen kissing Jenny Morse. I clear my throat.

“Parker,” Evan says nervously. He runs a hand over his prickly black hair and holds out a bottle of vodka and a shot glass. “Uh
—
shot?”

Jenny flees from the room. I take the bottle and the glass and move to the kitchen counter, pour a shot and knock it back. Then another.

Evan watches. Hesitates.

“You’re not going to tell her, are you?”

I leave him there. When I step into the foyer the music is going proper, really loud. The party has begun.

Fifty minutes later too much vodka is gone.

“There you are!” Chris yells. I turn really slowly and after a second the rest of the room turns with me. “I’ve been looking for you. Let’s go outside.”

“Go without me. I’m going to stay . . . here.”

He grins. “Come on; the fresh air will make you feel better.”

I let him drag me outside. I look up. The sun gets in my eyes.

Everything goes white.

“Oh my God, it’s true.”

“Go away.”

I’m flat on my back. Perfectly manicured blades of grass press into my legs, hands and neck.

“The sooner you make a mistake and learn to live with it, the better. You’re not responsible for everything. You can’t control the way things end up.”

“Evan’s cheating on you with Jenny Morse. They’re fucking.”

All of a sudden I’m being jerked upright. My stomach lurches. I try to tell whomever it is to stop and leave me alone, but I can’t move my mouth.

“Parker, sit up. You can’t stay on your back because if you get sick—”

“I hope she chokes.”

“Nice, Evan. Would you just leave?”

“Not until you talk to me about this.”

“If I talk to you about this now, I’ll just say something that you really won’t like—”

When I wake up, I’m still drunk.

I stumble through the kitchen, head outside and throw up in some bushes until there’s nothing left in my stomach to throw up. When it’s over, I spot Jessie by the pool, laughing it up with some guy I don’t know. He looks older than us and she’s in full party mode, probably buzzed, and the way she leans into him is wrong because it’s how she leans into a guy when she wants to fuck him.

I blink. I’m on the lawn. I blink again and Jessie is making out with a new mystery guy, different from the last one. I blink again and Evan’s screaming at both of them.

I blink again and I’m in front of the drinks table set out on the lawn. I go straight for the bowl of punch, fill a cup with shaking hands, drink it, then another.

Then, a voice behind me:

“Someone spiked that, like, an hour ago.”

I drop the cup and moan.

“Where’s Jessie?”

“She was crying her eyes out. She said she was going to run away.” Becky looks up at me and smiles. “Nice going, Parker.”

“Where did she go?”

Becky points in the direction of the woods.

I can’t feel my feet, but I soldier on. The farther I get from the house, the louder the music sounds.

Chris’s parties are the best except when they’re not.

Twenty-five steps into the woods, and my head is barely attached to my neck, but there’s something I have to fix, so I keep moving.

A few more steps. I hear something and I stop.

I can make out two shapes in the darkness, on the ground. On a bed of pine needles. My heart sinks. I inch forward and hold my breath.

Jessie’s fucking him.

Except that’s not what it is at all.

I breathe in. The air is stagnant from all the people wandering around the property dancing, drinking, smoking. These dirty scents mingle with the damp summer air and fresh-cut grass and there’s Jessie and that guy, this clean-cut frat boy with an ugly mouth and dead eyes, and she’s crying and it’s not sex; it’s a rape. He forces her to her feet and drags her away and I’m alone and then Chris is taking me back inside. And the next night I’m sick and Mrs. Wellington calls and asks us if we’ve seen Jessie, if she’s with us, and I don’t say anything and when
she becomes a missing person and the police start asking questions I tell them I don’t know anything and everyone vouches for me because I was drunk and stupid and when I find her bracelet in the woods two weeks later I think it’s there for me because I killed her and I take it and I wear it so I never forget even though I’ll never forget and I never say a word to anyone because if I hadn’t said anything in the first place none of this would have—

JESSICA WELLINGTON. MISSING.

I rip the poster off the wall.

twenty-four

“I’m sorry,” Jake says.

I crumple the poster, walk over to the garbage and get rid of it. If I don’t get rid of it, no one will, and if no one gets rid of it—

Once my hands are empty, I don’t know what to do with them, so I snap. My fingers.

“Chris said she was your—your best . . .” He trails off like the gravity of the situation has hit him full on, like he knew Jessie, and it’s funny watching that happen on his face. Better his than mine. “I’m so sorry.”

I tilt my chin defiantly, still snapping.

“I bet you—” I have to wait three finger snaps before I can speak. “I—”

And then I’m walking down the hall, away from him, walking down the hall as fast as I can, as close as I can get to running without actually doing it. People pass me on their way to classes or to Becky, who’s always been a kind of celebrity because everyone thinks she’s the last person who saw Jessie alive and Jessie told her she was running away and everything and Chris is probably holding her through it, because that’s traumatizing, you know, and I feel like I’m going to throw up.

I’m really going to throw up.

I push through the back doors, outside, at the same time Henley announces a special assembly in the auditorium. I gag on the fresh air and let the thought take over: Jessie’s dead Jessie’s dead she’s dead she’s dead. I end up on my knees, but I don’t vomit. I dig my fingers into the pavement until the fingernail on the index finger of my right hand snaps back and there’s red.

“Shit.”

I suck on my finger and taste my own blood. It hurts. I want to scream.

Instead, I get calm.

Like, leaving-my-body calm.

I stand and brush bits of gravel and dirt off my skirt and knees at the same time the doors behind me open. It’s Evan. His mouth is a terrible
O
and he makes these gasping noises, fish-out-of-water sounds. He’s heard.

“Jessie’s dead,” I tell him.

He lets out this groan, curls his hands into fists and presses them into his eyes and sobs. The calm that’s enveloped me never falters. I wonder if I should be worried about this.

I should be worried about this.

“I can’t believe it.” He wipes his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “I can’t. I—”

“You didn’t actually think she was coming back?” I always make it worse. “I called it ages ago. Dead.”

He chokes. “Bitch.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you.” His neck and face turn red. “Show a little respect. She did more for you than you ever did for her.”

“Fuck you.”

We could probably do this all day. And Jessie’s dead. I pinch my arm.

“I should get back in,” he finally mutters, sniffing. His eyes well up again. The closer he gets to crying, the further I feel from it myself. “Chris will be looking for me. I should go back. . . .”

“What’s stopping you?”

“Becky.”

“What?”

“I can’t stand being around her. She—” The tears spill over. He buries his head in his hands, and if it was anyone but me next to him he’d be comforted. “I mean, I don’t like you, but if you told me you were running away, I’d stop you. I’d talk you out of it. Becky didn’t even . . . I mean—”

“Bullshit,” I mutter. “You would’ve driven me home, helped me pack and given me enough bus fare to get out of town.”

“So that’s what you think of me. You really think I—”

He stops. He cheats on his girlfriends. He knows what I think of him.

“Why did you come back?” I ask. “Why would you come back to this when everyone thinks it’s you—that you made her run—”

“Because,” he says. “It’s what I deserve.”

I swallow. “What did she say to you?”

“What are you talking about?” He stares at me. But he knows what I’m talking about. “Why are you asking me all these—I have to . . . I have to go inside.”

He brushes past me.

“At the party,” I say at his back. “She said something—she said she was going to say something you wouldn’t like.”

“You said you didn’t remember the party,” he says slowly.

“Like I’d tell you otherwise.” I wrap my arms around myself. “I remember.”

The parts I’d like to forget.

He faces me.

“She said she’d never forgive me and that she—” He chokes on the words. “That she hoped I was guilty for the rest of my life, but I didn’t know she was planning to—I didn’t—”

And he’s crying again.

“Oh, give me a break, Evan,” I snap, because I’m annoyed by the sound of it, the idea that he would make himself guilty because Jessie said she hoped he would be. She wasn’t like that. “She wasn’t that type of person and you know it. She would’ve forgiven you.”

“But that’s what she said and then she ran away so I would—”

“She was a good person.”

“No,” Evan says, crying even harder. “She said she would run away and she did it to get back at me—”
Shut up.
Shut up. Shut up. “But she wasn’t supposed to—she said she was going to run away and now she’s—”

“She didn’t run away!”

His tears stop and my heart is going crazy in my chest because it wants out of me and I want out of me and I hate him, I hate Evan, I’ve always hated him because it’s my fault he’s ruined and it’s all I think when I see him, it’s my fault and I could fix him, but I don’t want to give that to him because if I do, I have to tell and I’ve never told anyone
it’s my fault.

“She ran away,” he says.

“She was in the woods. She was with—” I shake my head. I want it out of my head, but I don’t want to say it. “No, you’re right. She ran away—”

I start walking, put some distance between us. I don’t even know where I’m going. He grabs me by the arm and pulls me back.

“Parker, who was she with?”

I shrug him off.

“Some guy. Leave me alone, Evan, I have to—”

“This was after Becky saw her? After she told Becky she was running away?”

“I have to go,” I say, moving again, and he grabs me again. “I have things I need to—I have—”

“Parker.”

I close my eyes.