The Darkest Corners (5 page)

By the time the Greenwoods' house is within view, the back of my shirt is soaked with sweat and the bridge of my nose is sunburned. I ran most of the way here, because I can't wait to find out if it's true.

I hear a screen door slam; Callie barrels down the Greenwoods' porch steps, not noticing me on the sidewalk. She makes it halfway down the driveway before she stops; she buries her face in her hands, and my stomach sinks.

It's true, and Callie found out in the fifteen minutes it took me to get here.

Callie turns and heads for the backyard before I can call out to her. I lean against the mailbox and catch my breath; it feels like there are a million pinpricks in my lungs.

Everyone at the party last night thought Ariel had run away. She could have been dying while we sat around the bonfire.

When my breathing evens out, I follow the fence around the side of the house. Callie left the gate open.

She's sitting on the grass, her palms pressed to her face. I have to cough to get her to look up. Her cheeks fill with color when she sees me. “What do you want?”

“Is Ariel dead?”

Callie tears out a fistful of grass in a single, violent motion and lets the blades fall through her fingers. “They have to ID the body, but yeah, it's her.”

Body.
I picture Ariel, discarded by a highway guardrail. Ariel, with her scraped-up elbows and legs from falling off her bike, and her pink mouth smelling of fake strawberries, from the Lip Smacker lip balm she carried in her pocket everywhere so her sister couldn't steal it.

I realize I'm picturing Ariel as she was ten years ago. My stomach clenches. “How did she die?”

“Don't know,” Callie says. Her face is still beet red. I think she's going to lose it, cry, do
something,
but instead, she takes a deep breath. And looks straight at me. “There's a vigil tonight at the high school. If you want to come or whatever.”

Terrible Tessa wants to say no. Whenever someone young dies, lots of people congregate, and as a general rule, I like to avoid places where lots of people congregate. In those situations everyone is either devastated or morbidly curious, and I don't know which side I come down on. I haven't even spoken to Ari in years.

But she was my friend, and Maggie will be disappointed in me if I don't go. For some reason, that matters. Maybe because I don't have many people left to disappoint.

We get stuck in a line of cars waiting to enter the parking lot. Fayette High is small; my elementary school class had fewer than a hundred kids. Around the time I left, people started panicking about the dropout rate and started campaigning to reinstall vocational programs.

In the front seat, Maggie stares ahead, a pan of zucchini bread in her lap. “Maybe we'll drop you girls off. Daddy and I can go sit with Ruth for a bit and pick you up later.”

Callie takes off her seat belt and gets out of the car without a word. Maggie tosses me a helpless glance over her shoulder. If Rick weren't here, I'd tell her what's on my mind, that I think I may have found where my sister is staying, and I need a few more days in Pennsylvania to figure it out.

Instead, I thank her for the ride and follow Callie, who is already several strides ahead of me.

“Hey,” I say. “You're pretty shitty to your mom.”

Callie's shoulders tense, but she doesn't stop walking. I catch up to her, smelling something acrid when she sighs.

“Does she know you have a drinking problem?” I ask.

“You sound like a pamphlet.”

She stops short of the gymnasium doors, something dark eclipsing her businesslike expression. “I can't go in yet.”

“Okay.” We step to the side, letting the people behind us go in. I tug at the sleeves of my sweatshirt; it still smells like smoke from the bonfire.

Callie takes off around the corner of the gym, toward the auditorium, where the buses line up at the end of the day. She doesn't object when I follow her.

There's an oak tree at the back of the bus lot; beneath it are three guys. I can see the tendrils of smoke coming out of their noses from here. As Callie and I get closer, I spot Nick, Steelers-hat guy from last night. The moon gives his face a ghastly whiteness. His eyes are bloodshot.

“Fuck this, man,” he says, offering Callie his joint.

She shakes her head and wraps her arms around her chest. “What else you got?”

Nick reaches into his pocket and produces an unlabeled bottle of something amber. Callie grabs it before I can voice my feelings on accepting untrustworthy-looking liquids from people. They're pretty similar to my feelings about meeting people in dark parking lots.

Callie unscrews the cap and takes a whiff. “What is this?”

“Stronger than whatever you have,” Nick says. Callie tosses back half the bottle. He reaches and pulls it out of her mouth.

“Whoa, easy,” he says.

Callie wipes her lips with the back of her hand. “You brought the good stuff.”

“Yeah, well, not every day your ex gets killed,” he mutters. The bitterness in his voice unnerves me. Nick winds up and kicks the oak tree.
“Fuck.”

Callie flinches. The two other guys—one I recognize from the bonfire last night—glance at each other and mumble something about getting inside. Callie hangs back with Nick. “I need a minute,” she says.

I wait for her, stiffly, instead of going into the gym alone. A minute or so later she trots up to me. Her body seems looser. I catch her popping a piece of Trident into her mouth as we wade through the throng of people in the entrance.

At the gym doors, someone has set up an easel with an oak tag poster. It's covered in several pictures of Ariel—I'm surprised to see that I'm in a couple of the old ones. My fingers itch to tear them down and slip them into my pocket. We never owned a camera, and any family photos we'd managed to scrounge up were thrown out when my mother and I were evicted.

In the middle of Ariel's poster, someone's written a quote in silver Sharpie.
It's better to burn out than to fade away. —Kurt Cobain.
Next to me, Callie stares at it, silent.

I touch the edge of the poster. “Actually, that's from a Neil Young song,” I say. “Kurt Cobain just borrowed it in his suicide note.”

“God, what does it matter who the hell said it?” Callie snaps. She stalks off, and I'm reminded why I don't talk much. People don't seem to like what I have to say.

Someone nudges my shoulder, and I move so the girls behind me can get a look at the poster. There's already a collection of dollar-store teddy bears and flameless candles in votive jars at my feet. I step to the side of the gym and scan the crowd for Callie, but it seems she's disappeared.

I expected more of the people here to notice me, because I guess I'm a narcissistic little sociopath. But instead, I'm a ghost hanging in the corner, pretending I don't notice the occasional confused glance thrown my way.

I was always good at blending into the social strata of Fayette. My grades were high enough that I didn't get any notes sent home, and low enough that I was never singled out. I wore Jos's hand-me-downs, but almost all the kids at school with older siblings wore hand-me-downs. One girl in our class even wore things that had belonged to her brother.

I dig the stubs of my nails into my palms. If I don't stop biting them, the skin underneath will split and bleed. As I'm looking down at my fist, a thin, gnarled, hand covers it.

“It
is
you!” Watery blue eyes meet mine. “RAY. Come over here. It's her!”

I snatch my hand away.
Who the hell is this old woman, and why is she touching me?

“It's you,” the woman wheezes again as a thin old man with a cane hobbles over to us. There's powdered sugar at the corner of his mouth. Cookies from the table stuffed into his pocket, probably.

“It's me.” I give the woman a thin-lipped smile.

“Well, don't this beat all. Tessa Lowell, in Fayette!” She peers at me. “You don't remember us, do you? It's me, Marie Durels. Marie and Ray. Your old neighbors.”

“Oh.” I force out the pleasantries—“Yes, how are you?…Rheumatoid arthritis? That sounds awful….Going to college in the fall”—but my mind is elsewhere. It's on Sycamore Street, on the lawn of my old house. I'm six, in my Little Mermaid bikini, drinking water out of the hose Joslin sprayed in my face as if I were a golden retriever. Marie Durels, watching from her porch, disapproving.

“It's terrible, isn't it?” Marie clutches my shoulder and nods to the group of crying girls by the makeshift memorial for Ariel.

I nod. “I hope they find who did this to her.”

“Oh, they will.” Marie's grip on me tightens. “They'll find him, and they'll put him down like that animal who hurt all those other girls.”

Ray bobs his head in agreement, oblivious to the smear of sugar on his face. I have to look away. I have to
get
away—out of this stifling hot gym filled with grief I have no business being a part of. Away from these people with the power to send me straight back to the brown house with the broken porch steps on Sycamore Street.

Marie bends her head to mine. Her breath is hot on my neck and smells like garlic and marinara sauce. I bet she and her husband ate at the new Italian place before coming here for the free dessert. I clench my fist as she crows into my ear: “My heart just breaks for Ruth Kouchinsky. Folks are saying Ariel was up in Mason
working,
if you know what I mean.”

Mason is as far as my mother and I made it when she decided we needed to leave Fayette before people noticed we'd been living out of her car for two weeks. Not even Callie knew. Jos had been gone for four months, and Lori had been dead for eleven.

That night, when we got to a gas station, my mother left me in the car while she used the bathroom. I opened the glove compartment, searching for my favorite toy—one of those sticky hands you throw up at the ceiling and wait for it to fall back down. I found a handgun.

I ran across the highway, toward the lights of the truck stop. In the store, I asked to use the phone so I could call Maggie. I told her everything—that we'd been living out of the car, that my mother was scaring me—everything except the gun.

She and Rick were there in half an hour. I waited in the store and read an issue of
TV Guide,
praying that my mother hadn't already called the cops when she'd found me missing.

Maggie went over to the gas station alone. I don't know what happened, but she came back with Gram's phone number. I haven't seen my mother since.

Rick waited with me in the rest stop while Maggie sat on the curb outside, on the phone with her best friend, Angela. “We want to handle this without calling social services.”

While Rick and I split a bag of Doritos and talked about the comet that was supposed to pass through, because I was always into that stuff, two girls came into the store. They couldn't have been much older than my sister. One bought a phone card while the other fiddled with the hem of her jeans skirt, trying to avoid looking at me and Rick. I was nine, and I knew exactly what they were doing at the truck stop.

Like most unpleasant things, I'd learned about the girls from my father. He used to talk about the girls who approached him at the stops along I-95, back in the eighties when he'd drifted, looking for work before settling at the steel mill. After the Monster murders, the government passed an initiative to crack down on prostitution at the rest stops; they knocked down the greasy convenience stores that sold beef jerky and porn magazines and put up McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts.

I can picture Ariel working behind the counter of a Burger King. Not in some trucker's backseat. And Marie Durels is a real piece of crap for suggesting it now when people are here to mourn Ari.

I look over Marie's shoulder for an escape route. I spot Ryan Elwood coming through the hallway double doors, holding a can of soda. He walks over to the bleachers where Callie is sitting. She looks like she's going to vomit. I think of the booze in her purse and wonder if she snuck into the bathroom and finished it.