Little Pretty Things (36 page)

His Olympic bronze medal was kept in the school case, and yet his award for high-school coaching was too precious to make it there. And now here he was in the matching medallion, a show of honor because Maddy had earned it for him. Not me.

The weight of the purse strap on my shoulder grew heavy.

The trophy Maddy had earned for him, then broken into his office to deface.

The faces in the crowd had gone still and concerned.

I looked around. On a small table, a beautiful silver urn sat amidst a festoon of flowers. I might have made a noise of surprise.

There would be no beautiful corpse. This was Maddy. Maddy’s ashes, packaged in a way that she could never be in real life. Contained, at last, and unable to say the things she’d so desperately wanted to say.

And they’d put her in a
trophy
.

My hands shook as I unzipped my purse, drew out the silver running man from Maddy’s room, and placed him against the urn. A few gasps in the room cut the silence.

When I gazed out again, the crowd had broken into two camps: those who were worried about me, and those who were worried what I would say.

Courtney stared past me to the runner on the table, then pulled out her phone and began thumbing at it. It wouldn’t take her any time to remind herself what might have been missing from Maddy’s old room.

But maybe she would let me finish my speech before the handcuffs came out.

“Maddy Bell was my best friend,” I said. The room went silent again, so that even those in the back of the room must have heard my voice waver. I took a deep breath to calm myself. “She was my best friend a long time ago, though, at a time that I can barely remember. But she will always mean everything to me, because she was real, she was whole. She was beautiful, and not just on the outside. And she was all these things in the face of a reality that she kept to herself, a reality that most of us couldn’t begin to understand, let alone survive.” I met eyes with Fitz, then Coach, then Beck. Beck’s mouth hung open; he looked nervous. Then Gretchen, who had started to cry. Her eyes darted around, confused. I found Vincent, at last, at the side of the room, watching the crowd. Now I really understood why he’d agreed to this freak-show memorial. He wanted a chance to take a long, hard look at all of us.

“She didn’t want us to know what she was going through, or she would have told someone,” I said. “She wanted to fix it for herself, once and for all. No—that’s not entirely true. She wanted to fix it for everyone. She wanted to—to save them all.” I thought of all the girls at Midway High, how insecure, how preyed-upon—not just by men, but by people like Mrs. Haggerty, people who liked to tell other people what was proper. And by each other. That was the worst part. It would take them so many wasted years to know how to be on a team. People in the front rows started to shift in their seats and glance at one another.

“The girls,” said a voice in the back.

I raised my head. The woman in the protective curve of Fitz’s arm raised her small hand and pulled at her necklace as though she were being strangled.

Teeny. Teeny, all cleaned up and wearing a choker of pretend pearls. “The girls,” I said, not quite believing my own eyes. And Teeny, how normal, how young. “I—” Everyone who had turned to see who had spoken up spun back to see what I had to add. What was Teeny doing here, and with Fitz? I looked between them, and then across the room for anyone who might leap in and help me. “Maybe . . . someone?”

They all stared, though some had begun awful signals to each other with their eyes, looking at their watches, shaking the ice in their empty drinks. “Would anyone else like to say a few words?” I pleaded.

The silence dragged.

Finally Gretchen stood and sniffed. “Well, I don’t think she’d want me to say much,” she said, lifting her chin. “But I loved that awful girl.” She put a fist to her mouth, and then talked around it, her voice husky. “I just loved her.”

“I did, too,” Vincent said, coming forward a step. “It’s the only thing I think is true anymore. It’s the only thing I know.”

Courtney’s eyes shifted from one to the other, then to Beck, who had cleared his throat. “I’m with Juliet. It was a long time ago,” he said, blushing. “And maybe—we were just kids. But she was important to me.”

A few people in the room who hadn’t known her had the decency to look embarrassed to be there.

From the corner, Coach stepped forward. “Maddy was a very special person. This has been very difficult to understand . . . I’ll just—” He came up the aisle, easing past crossed legs, to stand next to me. He raised the Coach of the Year medal off his chest. In the overhead light, it winked gold to a bright white, sunlit glare.

I cringed away—hot, suddenly, and heavy with memory.

In the split second the medal turned in the light and blinded me, I was no longer standing in front of the silver cup of ashes but standing under a wide, white sky, the sun low over our heads and wicked. A heavy trophy with a ponytailed girl runner at its zenith lay in my arms, burning and sliding against my sweaty skin. Maddy cradled hers. But she was not celebrating. She was shaking and sick, and not sick but mad, and she wouldn’t say what was wrong. Fitz put his hand on her shoulder—
steady now
—while the blue ribbon was placed over Coach’s bowed head like a priest receiving communion. When he looked up, the coach’s medal glinted gold to white into my eyes. And Maddy was crying, but not because the girl from Southtown had called her a slut under her breath, and not because of anything I’d done, I hoped. Maddy cradled the trophy in her arms like a baby and cried with fury, and then shook Fitz’s hand off—

I looked out to find Fitz, but he’d gone, along with Teeny.

“—special runner, special girl,” Coach was saying. “Every coach hopes to find a talented athlete in their lineup, and I’ve had more luck than most.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. Just as he had with Maddy, as he had with his star for as long as I could remember. His stars, and he was finally including me in that list, but I couldn’t shake that wonderful, awful day, Fitz’s hand on and then flying away from Maddy’s shoulder, or the look of pure, rotten hatred in Maddy’s eyes as she flung us all off.

But I understood it now, because Coach’s hand was leaden, too warm, too much.

“—just want to say what an honor it was to work with such a talent.” I took a step backward, forcing Coach’s grip loose. “What is it, Jules?”

There was a commotion at the door. “Help,” a man’s breathless voice said. Fitz bolted into the room, frantic. “Please, someone. Help her.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Courtney hurried out after Fitz, most of the room at her heels. I was a step toward the door when Coach grabbed my arm. “Are you doing OK, Jules?” he said. “Are you talking to anyone about this? It’s a lot to handle.”

“Talking . . . ? You mean, like a shrink?” I slid my arm away from him, but then missed the strange warmth of his touch. I probably needed to talk to someone years ago. “No, I—well, no.” I didn’t want to say that I couldn’t afford it. “Shouldn’t we—”

“Just take care of yourself, OK?” The hand was back on my shoulder, squeezing. It hurt.

I stumbled away from him and through the chairs, now scattered and empty.

In the lobby, everyone’s head had tilted up in the same direction. High above, Teeny clung to the outside of the rail, the pointy, unnatural shoes discarded, and her toes pointing out over the edge of the stairs. Courtney had ascended the first few stairs behind her, slipping up another riser when she thought Teeny wouldn’t notice.

Teeny noticed, jerking away and letting one foot slip off the stairs. A collective gasp went up in the crowd. At the same time, the choker at Teeny’s throat popped off. It dropped the thirty feet to the marble floor and exploded. The plastic baubles pinged fantastically in all directions against the floor, the wall, the stairs.

A pearl bounced and rolled against my foot. Above, Teeny recovered her purchase, holding a hand out to warn Courtney back.

“Kristina,” Fitz said, moving into place below her. “Please let us help you down.”

I staggered between classmates to the foot of the stairs and let the cold steel newel post catch me. Kristina.

I’d never thought of Teeny as a person with a past, a person with an age, or with a life she might have imagined for herself. I’d never thought of her as a
person
before.

She wasn’t Fitz’s date. She was Maddy’s friend, somehow, and far from dead. I looked around for Yvonne and then Vincent.
Or are you Kristina
? I was, though, wasn’t I? We were the same. Teeny and I had stayed, and nothing we ever stole was enough to make up for what we’d had taken from us. But what did Maddy and Teeny have in common? How had they known each other?

For a moment I wondered if Teeny could have hurt Maddy. But she couldn’t have done it, physically. Maddy would have overpowered the smaller woman. Even strangled, she could only have been dragged into place and hanged by someone strong.

Above, Teeny murmured to herself.
The girls, the girls
.

The girls. Like the girl who’d dropped out of school instead of finishing, who’d disappeared into plain sight, disappeared so well that people thought she had died. She was a ghost now, but she’d been a star, Coach and Fitz’s first success.

Their first love.

“Teeny,” I said. The people nearest me jumped in surprise. “Do you want me to help you pick up your beads? I can fix this for you.”

I waved to everyone around me and knelt to pick up the beads at my feet. The others began to join in, uncertainly at first, then with the gusto of a scavenger hunt. Even Shelly dipped to retrieve a bead and appraise it.

Above us, Teeny shifted her weight to watch us.

“Come on down,” I said. “Courtney, maybe you could help her.”

Courtney inched out toward Teeny and offered her a hand. Teeny accepted the help, stepping down with care. She looked like royalty, except for her bare toes gripping the steps.

Fitz rushed to meet her. He glanced uneasily in my direction, not quite meeting my eyes. “That was impressive. Not everyone is so good with her.”

“Are you her caregiver?”

“No,” he said, watching the duo approaching. “Nothing like that. She was on the team. A good kid, and someone had to—I took an interest, I guess. Thought I had a plan to get her out of that place she’s in now, into a new, nicer facility, someplace with better security, but—I just check in once in a while, that’s all, lift her spirits if I can.”

“Meet her in the park, that sort of thing,” I said.

I didn’t need a confirmation and didn’t receive one.

“Why did you bring her, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I didn’t,” he said, leaning in to speak quietly. “I never would have brought her here—that Vincent arranged it. Said she and Maddy were
friends
. They never—How could that be? Anyway, Vincent doesn’t understand how delicate she is.” He let Courtney hand Teeny down to him, and then escorted her into the crowd where people were scooping pearls into her open hands. She was as happy as I’d ever seen her, as happy as I’d seen anyone in years.

Courtney stood at my elbow. “Well, does Shelly know how to throw a party, or what?”

I searched the crowd for Coach, but he was gone. “I need to talk to you,” I said.

“Yeah, I think you might have something to tell me,” she said. “About a certain shiny object, probably missing from a certain best friend’s room?”

Over Courtney’s shoulder, through the broad, rotating door of the hotel, police lights rolled.

“I took it when I went to Gretchen’s house the first day,” I said. “Someone else broke in, but they might have been looking for what I had already stolen.”

Courtney’s lips twisted into doubt. “We’re still talking about that trophy runner, right? OK, explain it to me. Why does everyone want it? Is it platinum? Is it the Maltese falcon? I don’t get it.”

“It’s a
guy
,” I said. “It’s not from one of Maddy’s trophies. Don’t you see? She’s the one who stole it first. It’s from an award Coach Trenton received our senior year. We didn’t get to run our top race, but he did, in a way. He won that award on her back—” I looked away. “Very literally, actually.”

Courtney sucked in a breath. “That guy? Are you saying—he’s the
dad
? Oh, my God, he’s the dad,” she said, then looked around and pulled me farther from our classmates. “And then he took her to get—taken care of? I haven’t been able to find the place, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t here ten years ago. Oh, wow, this is gross. I mean, maybe not as gross as what we thought before—”

“Courtney, he killed her.”

She froze. After a long moment, she surveyed the room, eyes once again keen. “To keep her quiet? But why, after all these years?”

“I think it had something to do with . . . the girls,” I said, unable to get Teeny’s reedy refrain out of my head. “She wanted to get him out of there, to get him away from the girls on his team now. From Mickie, from—the next girl and the next.”

“Mickie’s the, uh, young lady from the hotel room?”

“No, Mickie’s the
star
.” I waved my arm toward the staircase. “And she’s cracking up, right on schedule. Teeny was his star, then Maddy, now Mickie, don’t you see?”

We stared at each other.

“I’m sorry to say I do. I finally do.” She reached for her phone and, checking the room again, thumbed madly at the screen. “I thought all that stuff in yearbook was . . . well, I didn’t think it was
true
.”

“Did you write it?”

“Some of it, but not all, I swear. Shelly used to stop by, give us funny things to write—but it was a joke. I never thought—I thought it was just kid stuff, you know?”

I thought darkly of Shelly’s gossip trade at the bank. If I ever got any money at all, I’d move accounts somewhere else. “Some of us weren’t given the choice to think it was kid stuff.” I was thinking of what Maddy must have felt when she saw those comments, the photo of her with Coach’s hand on her shoulder, forever. It made sense now, how forbidden the book became.

“I’m sorry,” Courtney said. “For then, and for now. Are you OK?”