Dangerous Girls (21 page)

Wouldn’t we all look guilty, if someone searched hard enough?

“Relax.”

I feel a hand on my arm and look over to find Gates leaning over. “You’re scowling,” he murmurs, too quiet for anyone else to hear. “He’s grasping at straws. If he had any hard evidence, he’d be presenting it, but he doesn’t. Deep breaths, remember?”

Of course I remember, they’ve only drilled it into me every day for weeks now. But Gates is watching me intently, so I inhale a short breath and force my face into something I hope resembles a relaxed expression. I can’t let the judge see that I’m angry; I can’t let her see that I feel anything at all about Dekker’s lies.

“Or what about these submissions to the school literary magazine?” Dekker is still reading aloud from the snapshots of my binder covers and English class assignments.

“Objection!” Gates rises. “Does the prosecutor have any more questions for the witness, or is he just treating us to a public poetry reading?”

“Yes, please do stick to questioning,” Judge von Koppel agrees with an icy smile. “I believe we’ve heard enough of the graffiti.”

Dekker glares, then turns back to Chelsea. “On the days
before the murder, did you notice any friction between Miss Warren and the defendant?”

“No,” Chelsea says. “They were great. Happy.”

“Are you sure? No fighting, disagreements?”

“I just said”—she glares back at him—“I don’t know why you’re even doing this. Anna loved Elise—we all did—she would never do anything to hurt her.”

She searches for me again in the courtroom. Our eyes meet, and I give her a tiny nod. It’s okay. I know she doesn’t want to be here, that Dekker’s forcing her up there, to try to slander me. She can’t help it any more than I can help the things he’s saying about me.

“So you never noticed any jealousy from the defendant?”

“No.”

“Never saw her act in any violent or uncontrollable ways?”

“No, nev—” Chelsea suddenly stops. She looks over at me, panicked. Dekker catches the gaze. He brightens.

“You did?”

“I . . .” Chelsea’s expression is conflicted.

Gates tugs my sleeve again.

“What’s going on?” he whispers.

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

Dekker clears his throat. “Miss Day? Did you ever see the defendant have any violent or angry outbursts?”

Chelsea hesitates again, then nods.

“What happened?” Dekker’s whole body is alert, his face expectant.

“I . . .” Chelsea swallows, looking nervous. “It was during art class, at school. I went to get something from my locker, and I saw her in the hallway, with Elise.”

“With the victim?” Dekker’s voice is so gleeful, it turns my stomach.

She nods again. “Anna was . . . She was screaming, and yelling. Elise tried to calm her down, but Anna . . . She grabbed the display—I think it was something for Environment Week—she just grabbed the whole thing and began tearing it apart.”

I exhale. Now I know what this is about. I start scribbling a note to Gates as Dekker continues his victorious questions.

“Did you hear what they were saying, why they were fighting?”

“No, I didn’t think I should go over,” Chelsea looks awkward. “I mean, she was so mad.”

“In a violent rage.” Dekker draws the words out with satisfaction.

“I . . . Yes.”

“And what happened next?”

Chelsea shrugs. “Elise tried to calm her down, but Anna threw her off—”

“The defendant physically assaulted the victim?”

“No.” Chelsea stops. “I mean, it wasn’t like that. She just, pushed her away and took off.”

Dekker beams. “No further questions.”

He steps back to his table, and I pass the note to Gates. He glances over it, then nods, rising to approach the witness stand with a confident saunter.

“Miss Day, when was this altercation you witnessed?”

She pauses, thinking. “Um, before Christmas break.”

“Does December tenth sound about right?” Gates suggests.

“Yeah. I mean, I think so.

“Did you know about Anna’s mother?” he asks.

“You mean, that she was sick?” Chelsea nods. “She didn’t like to talk about it, but, yeah. Elise filled us in, so we wouldn’t say the wrong thing.”

“Objection, relevance?” Dekker yells.

Gates turns to the judge. “The defendant’s mother had breast cancer,” he explains, “that recurred in the fall of last year.”

She nods. “Continue.”

Gates turns back to Chelsea. “So you weren’t aware of the state of her mother’s disease or how Anna was coping.”

“No, not really.” Chelsea sends me a look. “She was pretty tough about that stuff. She didn’t like to bring us down.”

Gates nods. “So you had no way of knowing that on December tenth, the day you witnessed Anna having an emotional breakdown, she’d just been informed that her mother
was refusing all further treatment, and was, in fact, preparing to die?”

Chelsea’s eyes widen, and I hear the intake of breath in the courtroom. “No. No, I had no idea.”

Gates turns back to Judge von Koppel with a frown. “Far from being a violent fight between Miss Chevalier and the victim—as Detective Dekker would have you believe—what Miss Day witnessed was the perfectly natural reaction of a girl facing the devastating loss of a parent. Any outburst was a result of grief, not violent rage.”

The judge nods. “Noted.”

I feel her eyes on me, all of the rest of them too. Watching, judging, speculating. Wondering what I felt and how I took the news. The truth is, I can’t remember, not clearly—it’s smudged with grief and rage and pure, dark disappointment, as if I’m staring at an out-of-focus photograph taken on a gray, rainy afternoon. There are only glimpses left now: the way my mother didn’t even have the courage to tell me; my father’s gaze sliding to look at the wall behind me when he broke the news.

She’d given up. On herself, on me.

It would have been different if she’d been terminal, even late-stage, but the doctors said there was a 40 percent chance that another round of chemo would work. Forty percent. That was almost half. A half-chance of beating it again, a
half-chance at life. With me. And instead, she gave up. Said it was unnatural, that she didn’t want the chemicals in her body over and over again. Said that it might work this time, but it would only come back again. Said that this was her time, and that she wanted to go gracefully, with dignity and love.

Except there was nothing graceful about the way she wasted away, a thin skeleton dwarfed by covers and cushions and bathrobes, sitting propped and delicate in bed. Nothing dignified about catheters and bags full of urine, and yellowed skin, and choking pain.

Nothing loving about choosing to leave me.

I sit, silent, as they discuss my dead mother, my grief, my desperation. I dig my fingernails into my palms, and wonder when this will ever end.

They put me back in
isolation, saying it’s for my own safety, but I know—this is for their sake, not mine. They don’t care that I got hurt in here, only that it makes them look bad, makes me more sympathetic to the outside world, maybe. So they take away what little freedom I could pretend I still had, and condemn me to silence, and dark nights, and long days with nothing to do but think. Slowly, my strength drains away, my earlier resolve and determination waning under the brutal onslaught of day after day of loneliness. Those bleak thoughts I’ve pushed away come creeping back, whispering in the night, slipping their cold arms around my body and their slim fingers around my throat, until the panic is so fierce I double over where I stand, hardly breathing.

I never realized what a privilege it was to get up and leave my cell in the mornings. Now they bring me all my meals, delivered on hard plastic trays, and take me to use the showers late in the morning once everyone else has already had their turn. I still get my few hours in the exercise yard—Gates and my father saw to that—but now I’m escorted out by two guards to a thin strip of land on the far side of the prison, divided from the others by barbed wire and barricades, away from the entertainment of the pickup basketball games and slouching, sullen cliques.

The guy from the American Embassy, Lee, is my only friend. He visits almost every day, bringing me mindless magazines and books to fill the empty hours, a new pillow to try to cheer me, and an old iPod loaded with songs he thinks I’d like, to drown the dark silence and screaming of my bad dreams. He gives me updates on the case, and Gates’s new ideas for trial strategy, going over my statements with me for hours and comparing them to the official police transcripts he managed to obtain from his new contact at the precinct. He listens patiently, taking notes, creasing his forehead in a thoughtful frown as he looks for any new angle or possibility to prove my innocence.

Could Tate have left the bedroom while I was in the shower? Did I mention to anyone else about Juan following us back to the house? What about Niklas—did he make any
threatening comments, or jokes that could be seen as creepy and aggressive?

“Sometimes it’s not about proving you didn’t do it,” he tells me when I throw the pages down, frustrated after poring over Chelsea’s and Max’s and AK’s interrogation transcripts all week. “Sometimes, you just have to create reasonable doubt. They don’t have hard evidence,” he reminds me. “They just have circumstantial things, and Dekker’s wild theories.
Beyond
a reasonable doubt, that’s what they have to prove. But we won’t let them.”

I lean back in my seat, exhausted. I’m sleeping even worse now, every click and rattle echoing through the isolation wing. “How can you be so sure?”

Lee gives me a quiet smile, his brown eyes soft but resolute. “I just am.”

But I can’t accept that, not when it feels like everyone in my life has turned out to have some other agenda, a hidden reason for making me say or do what they want. “No, I mean it,” I tell him. “Why are you here? You said it yourself, the embassy doesn’t want anything to do with me. Aren’t you risking a lot, going against them?”

Lee looks down. “I guess I just want to help. You’re stuck in here alone, and what they’re saying about you . . .”

“Why don’t you believe them?” I ask, insistent. “Everyone else does, even people I thought were my friends. You
don’t even know me, and you’re saying you believe me for sure.”

Lee pauses. He’s weighing something, I can tell, and when he looks up, there’s something tired in his expression. “My sister, this happened to her. Not murder,” he adds quickly. “Drugs.”

I wait, and after another moment, he explains. “She was backpacking down in South America after college,” he explains. “It was eight years ago. She wanted to see the beaches, and the jungle, Aztec ruins, you know?” He smiles faintly, and I can see how close they are, that affectionate sibling bond born of shared bedrooms and childhood fighting and all those other tiny moments that add up to something solid and unbreakable. “She was staying in youth hostels, met all kinds of people. They traveled together,” he continued. “And I guess someone slipped something in her bag, because they pulled her out of line in customs in Brazil, found close to half a pound of cocaine rolled up in one of her shirts. She never touched drugs,” he says, looking up at me, emphatic. “Barely even had a beer. I used to tease her, you know, because she was so straight-edge.” He stops, a shadow slipping over his face.

“What happened?” I ask, even though I already know it can’t be anything good.

He looks at the floor. “They charged her, locked her up in some hellhole prison. She didn’t speak any Portuguese,
and my parents . . . It took them weeks before anyone let us in to see her. We got a lawyer, but the trial was a sham, and that much cocaine . . . They found her guilty of trafficking.” Lee says quietly. “Ten year sentence.”

My heart clutches in my chest.

“She was stuck down there for three years before we managed to get her out on appeal.” Lee meets my eyes, pained. “Three years in that place.” He shakes his head. “She’s back home now—she got married, had a kid. But, it changed her. She’ll never get those years back, all because they just washed their hands of her. Like she didn’t matter. Nobody fought for her.” He stops and looks away, embarrassed. “I guess, I figure if I can help stop that from happening to you . . .”

I swallow, chilled. “Thank you,” I say, my voice coming out a broken whisper. “For trying, for believing in me . . .”

Lee manages a smile, reaching again for the files. “Back to work,” he says, as if embarrassed by his confession. “I was thinking, we should try to do something about all these biased reports on the news shows. I know your old lawyer didn’t want you making any comment, but right now, you’re getting slammed, and I don’t like how it might look to a judge. Maybe we should do an interview,” he suggests, “here in prison. Pick an American network, let you tell your side of the story.”

I hear his words but they barely register. Instead, I’m still caught in the horror of his sister’s story. A girl like me, a case
like mine—far from home, adrift in a foreign legal system—and she was found guilty. Abandoned. Left to rot.

Ten years.

Even six months in this place has been unbearable, but year after year after year stretching into the distant black future . . . ?

Now, for the first time, I wonder if this is how my mother felt. If cancer was her prison; the chemo treatments, torture.

I understand it.

I would rather die.

“Just lift your head, just
a little more . . . okay, perfect.”

A bright bulb flashes in my face, blinding me, and the woman holding a gadget near my face takes another reading. “Less on the blues,” she yells across the room at the guy fixing the lighting rig. “Let’s try it again.”

Another light flashes, this time leaving dark circles hovering in the air in front of my eyes. I blink, disoriented. The woman clicks again and then nods briskly. “Okay, we’ve got it! Don’t move.” She directs that last part to me, before hurrying away.

I look around. Where would I even go? I’m sitting in the prison cafeteria, except the plastic tables and mealtime madness
is gone, replaced with chaos of a different kind. Spotlights, sound cables, boom mikes and cameras: the room is a flurry of noise and activity, and it’s all I can do after so many silent, still days just to watch, drinking it all in. People, regular people, chatting brightly, checking clipboards, scurrying around with papers and coffee cups and reels of cable. I feel like my mind just got an electric shock, jolted awake after so many weeks spent numb and drifting, asleep.