The Drowning Girls (16 page)

It was surprisingly easy to do—a few snips, and I’d rewritten history. I’d removed myself from the story of Virgil Zhang, and for that matter, I’d removed his story, too.

JUNE 19, 2015
6:21 P.M.

LIZ

The ambulance gone, I closed the front door behind us and leaned against it, my heart racing. Danielle and I stared at each other.

“You need to tell me,” I said. “Right now, before we get in that car, before we—”

“What do you mean? I already said—”

I grabbed her by the arm. “You’re going to tell me now.”

“I told you!”

“From the beginning.” I shook her arm and she pulled away.

“Fine. We were upstairs in my room. I was looking for a CD. And then we came back downstairs and I saw Kelsey in our pool. I had no idea she was out there. I thought—”

“What?”

Danielle was a messy crier, a trait she’d inherited from me. Her face was instantly blotchy, red patches appearing like a rash of poison ivy. “I thought it was some kind of joke. You know, something dumb, like she was pretending she’d fallen into the pool. So at first I didn’t do anything. And then I saw the blood.”

I was struck by how small she was, how young. With everything that had happened in the past few months, I’d managed to forget she was still a teenager, not even old enough for a driver’s license.

“Did you invite her here?”

“No! Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know, Danielle. I’m trying to figure out why she was in our backyard in the first place, and how she ended up unconscious in our pool with a gash on her head.”

She turned away, but I caught her words. “Maybe if you hadn’t been so drunk, you would know why.”

“Excuse me?”

“I smelled it on you, Mom! When you came downstairs.”

“I had
a
glass of wine.”

She snorted.

“There’s no messing around here, Danielle. We’re going to the hospital, and there will be all kinds of questions for us. The Jorgensens will demand answers. The police—”

“I told you. I don’t know anything!” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Anyway, she’s going to be okay, isn’t she? They said there was a pulse.”

“I don’t know.”

Danielle sobbed, “But she had a pulse!”

I reached out, touching her on the shoulder. For once she didn’t pull away. “I don’t know,” I repeated. I couldn’t shake the feeling of Kelsey’s body beneath my hands, settling like a dead weight between compressions. “Come on, we have to get going.”

Instead of moving, she pointed at my foot.

I was bleeding all over the floor.

* * *

In the master bathroom, I sat on the edge of the tub, wincing while Danielle made tentative dabs at my foot with a wet washcloth. She was still wearing her blue bikini, and when she bent over, the bony ridge of her spine was exposed.

My toenail was only attached to one side, where it hung on like a little red flag, bearing the remnants of an old strip of polish. I bit my knuckle, forcing down the pain. When Danielle got up to rinse out the washcloth I asked, “Can you find some gauze for me? I think it’s in one of the boxes in the hallway.”

She complied wordlessly, discarding several other packages—tampons, a tube of bath salts, unopened bars of soap—before coming up with a package of large gauze strips. I helped her unpeel the wrapping and she applied the strips to my foot.

I stood, testing it out. “Okay, put some clothes on and meet me at the car.”

“No ‘thanks’? I did just bandage your disgusting toe.”

“Thanks.” I pointed. “There’s blood on your shoulder.”

She rinsed the washcloth in the sink and dabbed at her shoulder, erasing the stain.

Too late I wondered if I should have said anything about the blood, if it might have been, somehow, evidence.

I limped past her and took a right turn to the closet I’d planned to pack earlier in the day, a lifetime ago. It was painful even to slip into a pair of open-toed sandals.

Danielle followed me to the doorway. “I didn’t do anything, you know. Even if she deserved for horrible things to happen to her, it had nothing to do with me.”

“Get your shoes,” I told her. “We’re following them to the hospital.”

* * *

I’d started the car before I realized that I didn’t have my cell phone. I left Danielle in the car and hobbled back into the house. I would have to call someone, once I figured out what was going on—Allie or Phil, or, God help me, the Jorgensens. My phone was resting on the table in the foyer, and when I touched the screen, I saw three missed calls from Phil, all from earlier in the afternoon. On my way back through the house, I spotted another phone on the kitchen peninsula, one in a black-and-red ladybug case. Was it Hannah’s? I brought the phone to life. There was no password screen, and I hesitated for only a second before clicking on the icon for her text messages. Her last exchange had been with Kelsey at 4:30 p.m.

* * *

I thought you were coming over.

Her mom wouldn’t let me.

Well, you need to come over. We have a surprise for you.

I’m supposed to stay home.

Yeah, and you always do what yr supposed to, right?

I’ll come around the back.

I dropped her phone, and it clattered onto the counter.

NOVEMBER 2014
LIZ

By the Sunday after Thanksgiving, our laundry done and the house relatively clean, I felt antsy. Danielle had two chapters to outline for her history class and had left them until the last minute. Phil had spent the day on his laptop, looking at the new video surveillance software that had been installed there.

I couldn’t get my mind off Virgil Zhang or the tearful panic of his owners. Earlier that day, I’d joined a search party to walk the golf course, even though Phil insisted it was a futile exercise.

“They probably left the gate open and he wandered away,” he protested. “It was days ago. He could be miles from here by now.”

“But wouldn’t he have shown up on a camera?”

He shook his head. “Not necessarily. I’ve gone over and over that footage.”

“Dogs don’t just vanish,” Helen had wailed, making me wonder what kind of world she lived in. Had she never seen the classified section of a newspaper before? Vanishing was one of the things dogs did best. She had upped the reward to $5,000 by Sunday night, and I wondered if I should take a day off work to continue the search myself. We could use the money.

* * *

On Monday, there were the typical after-holiday tasks to attend to at work—wilting plants to be watered and a dried-out piece of pumpkin pie to be split with Jenn while we contemplated an impressive stack of mail.

“How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked, forking a bite of stale crust.

She made a little seesawing motion with her head. “Oh, it was great. Ate too much, of course, vowed to go to the gym in the morning, but then I ended up getting sucked into one of those Black Friday sales...”

I only half listened, smiling. It was good to be back at work, good to slip again into the routine of things. I stabbed at the last of the pie crumbs with my fork.

“...and the best part,” Jenn was saying, “is that Christmas is right around the corner. Two weeks of class, a week of finals and then,
bliss.
”

“Can’t wait,” I said.

“Oh, that’s right. Your sister’s coming, isn’t she?”

“Yep.” I grinned. “My mom, too. For a week.”

“Hey—” Aaron stuck his head into the break room. “Got a minute, Liz?”

“Sure.” I tossed the paper plate in the trash and the fork in the sink and joined Aaron in his office. He was at his computer, his face grim. I closed the door behind me. “What’s up?”

“Our little friend is back,” he said, adjusting the monitor so I could read the screen over his shoulder. His browser was open to a Twitter account called MLHS Stories.

“Shit,” I said.

“Yeah. Looks like it went live again over the weekend, so I spent most of yesterday reading this junk.” He shifted to one side so I could get a better look.

MLHS Stories was a gossip account that had first flared up a year ago to report on the more salacious exploits of Miles Landers students—and occasionally, staff members. Like most things that fell under the category of trolling or cyberbullying, the account worked on a basis of anonymous reporting. People sent in private messages, which the account owner would then post verbatim. It wasn’t exactly a fact-based reporting system, although many regarded it that way. A year ago, the account had accused an unnamed teacher of having a relationship with a student, and the rumor mill had gone wild for a few weeks, until the feed had suddenly disappeared. Without fuel to add to the fire, the rumors had eventually died down as well, but not before several teachers had been hauled before administrators.

“Here’s everything since it went live,” he said, scrolling up from the bottom.

“I hate this junk,” I complained. It was the exact way I didn’t want to see our students—as sex-and drug-obsessed, petty and vicious. I would rather exist in a state of blissful ignorance where students’ out-of-school lives were concerned, except that what happened online had a way of spilling over into our actual lives, producing a stream of crying, hysterical students, their worried/angry/clueless parents and occasional verbal exchanges that culminated in pulled hair or thrown punches. Last spring, an incident of cyberbullying had led a fifteen-year-old in a neighboring district to commit suicide, and our counseling staff had been told, in no uncertain terms, that monitoring social media sites was in fact our business. The senior counselor on staff, Dale Streeter, claimed he couldn’t navigate the internet. I was officially in charge of the beast that was state testing; and that left Aaron to the more unsavory side of student life.

“The first ones are just the usual crap,” Aaron said.

MLHS Stories
@ Miles Stories—39d

Where all of ur friends turn on you for ur mistakes.

MLHS Stories
@ Miles Stories—3d

Where the Asian girls disappoint their fathers.

“It’s the grammar that offends me most,” I murmured—although that wasn’t true. It offended me that this site existed, that someone spent their time spreading such useless and hurtful things.

“So, it goes on...” Aaron scrolled through the posts, about five a day. “Oh, yeah, and there’s this one.”

MLHS Stories
@ Miles Stories—9h

Where a girl gets fingered at lunch everyday and thinks no one sees.

“That’s it,” I told Aaron, over his shoulder. “We’re never eating in that cafeteria again. Promise me.”

“Keep reading,” he said grimly.

MLHS Stories
@ Miles Stories—9h

Where a freshman “accidentally” sends a nude pic to her brother.

MLHS Stories
@ Miles Stories—8h

Where the hottest girls have the most messed-up teeth.

MLHS Stories
@ Miles Stories—8h

Where the seniors smoke pot in their cars and spray this nasty-ass lemon scent to cover it but everybody knows.

I kept reading, wincing. It was like verbal diarrhea, a constant spewing of hate and gossip. And then I came to the one he’d wanted me to see.

MLHS Stories
@ Miles Stories—7h

Where a sophomore hottie has sex with her 37yo neighbor and wants more.

I steadied myself with a hand on Aaron’s desk.

“Yeah, so there’s that little gem to worry about,” Aaron said, tilting the screen away from me. “That’s really the highlight. Or—lowlight, I guess.”

I cleared my throat, which was suddenly parched, my tongue coated with pumpkin pie. “What are you going to do?”

Aaron said he had already emailed Sanjay Gopal, the assistant principal in charge of discipline, and Gopal had told the other APs by now. Dick Blaine, our principal, had been briefed via email. “’Course, I don’t know what we can do about any of it. Twitter isn’t going to shut down the account over a few anonymous rumors, and whoever this yahoo account owner is, he’s probably protected by the press shield act or something.”

I nodded, trying to recover. It felt as if I’d been punched in the face. “Any idea who it’s talking about? The sophomore, I mean.”

Aaron shook his head. “Please. As much as I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of this place...it’s pretty vague. Disturbing as hell, but vague. Plus there are plenty of hot sophomores.”

I mock-punched his shoulder.

He laughed. “Well—seriously. I bet ninety percent of this stuff is just posturing, anyway. At least, that’s what I tell myself. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to keep my faith in humanity.”

I stood up, heading for the door.

“Hey,” he called after me. “You’re sticking around for that AP Bio meeting after school, right?”

“Yeah. Unless Streeter volunteers to go in my place.”

“Are you kidding me? He’s in the home stretch now. Probably planning to hibernate until May 22.”

I gave him a weak smile. Dale Streeter had been threatening to retire every fall for years, but by spring he always backed out. Somehow, this entitled him to “mailing it in” for as long as I could remember.

I paused in the lobby, steadying myself. Near my office door, a senior was hovering, binder clutched to her chest.

“Mrs. McGinnis?” she asked, the final syllable of my name rising into a question. “I heard there was a new Ag department scholarship?”

I summoned a smile, ushering her inside my office. I had the scholarship form on my desk, and while we chatted about the qualifications, I tried to force down my thoughts, the
nononono
racing through my brain.
The sophomore hottie
,
the 37yo neighbor.

All day, beneath the in and out, the rush and flow, there was a heaviness in my stomach, as solid as a mass. Aaron was right—there were other hot sophomores. There were surely other neighbors. But we’d celebrated Phil’s thirty-seventh birthday the week of our move to The Palms, and the specificity was unnerving. A
neighbor
.

He’d denied knowing anything about the underwear. He’d told me that I’d misunderstood what I’d heard outside his office door. Those things were both plausible. Yet it had been weeks since Kelsey had been in our house, and my suspicions had never fully disappeared. The mere suggestion had proved too strong.

It was like that old party game:
try not to think about the pink elephant. Think about anything except a pink elephant. Don’t even concern yourself with the pink elephant.
And then inevitably all you could think about was the pink elephant.

I couldn’t
not
think of my husband and Kelsey Jorgensen.

Phil had stayed home over Thanksgiving, the house to himself. He’d been surly with me over the weekend, withdrawn and moody. Something must have happened.

Had Kelsey been around for Thanksgiving, too? Had she been in our house, in my bed? A picture came, unbidden—Kelsey’s fingers spreading through his chest hair, Phil’s grunts in her ear. If she’d been in my bed, she’d been in my bathroom, too. She’d sat on my toilet, bathed in my tub, dried herself off with my towels. She’d pawed through the odds and ends of my makeup drawer. She’d used my hand lotion, laughed at the jar of my wrinkle cream.

I’d seen her getting out of Tim’s car this morning, just before the tardy bell, wearing her standard tiny skirt over black leggings. I hadn’t thought to ask her if she’d had a nice Thanksgiving, if she’d had a good time fucking my husband.

It was like an itch that needed to be scratched, a facial tic I couldn’t control. Spend five minutes helping a student, check the Twitter feed. Answer a phone call, pop back on to Twitter. Reply to an email... MLHS Stories hadn’t posted anything new, but more and more users had favorited and retweeted the post, presumably students from their classrooms, the bathroom, the lunch line, the hallways. MLHS loved its scandals. The replies were typically callous.
Haha your mom
, one said. Another read
kiss my 37yo ass
. The most popular comment had been retweeted a dozen times:
Did you slip him a Viagra first? Lol
.
The words burned in my brain, an endless loop. The
sophomore hottie
. The
37yo neighbor
.

I decided to leave as soon as school was over. Phil was in San Jose for a meeting at Parker-Lane, and I could search the house without him there, looking for evidence. That was what I needed—proof. A stain on the sheets, another piece of clothing left behind. Without proof I would look as stupid as I had the night of our fight by the pool, my accusations easily dismissed and defended.
I don’t understand
, Phil would say, looking at the Twitter feed.
This is supposed to be me? Where does it say my name?

Jenn spotted me packing up my tote bag and poked her head into my office. “Did you forget about the AP Bio meeting? It’s starting in five minutes.”

I groaned, dropping my bag. With my thoughts in such a jumble, I had forgotten my promise to Aaron. “No, I’ll be right there.”

* * *

The meeting ran long—AP teachers tended to be long-winded, and AP parents vocal complainers. For the next hour, I sneaked glances at the overhead clock, a sturdy, industrial piece of equipment that was nonetheless an hour off six months out of the year. Danielle was waiting in my office when I returned, and I hurried her out to the car. Traffic on 580 was backed up, a nightmare of commuters all trying to get home to their families. As we inched along, I kept thinking about how this would go, what it would mean if it were true.

For one, Danielle and I couldn’t stay at The Palms. We couldn’t stay with Phil. It would be back to the single life—a condo, if we were lucky something with a patch of grass. We’d done it before. It was our normal, actually—The Palms and everything that came with it had been an aberration. But Danielle and I would be okay. We’d been here before. We’d squeak by financially. I’d make sure she kept her grades up, applied for every scholarship.

“Mom!” Danielle squawked, snapping me back to reality. I’d nearly missed our exit. I braked, my blinker on, waiting to merge into an oncoming stream of traffic.

“What is up with you?” Danielle demanded.

“Nothing,” I croaked.

“So you’re just acting crazy for no reason?”

I didn’t answer.

“Fantastic,” she muttered.

We made it home by six—not enough time for a thorough search. Danielle closed her bedroom door, and I preheated the oven for a frozen lasagna before racing upstairs. I pulled back the covers to study the sheets, then got on my knees to peer under the bed.
Nothing.
There was nothing out of place in the bathroom, but then there wouldn’t be—I’d given it a good scrubbing yesterday, wiping away all signs of Phil’s bachelor life, and all evidence, if there was any.

Maybe downstairs, then. I studied the couch cushions, the rug in front of the fireplace we’d never used. What was this,
CSI
? I had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it, of
me
on my hands and knees, searching for a blond hair that might have been left anytime during the summer. Then, as if pulled by a magnet, I approached the dining room. Phil had been using it as his makeshift office, since we ate all our meals in the informal nook off the kitchen or at the peninsula itself, our elbows on the granite. Back in July, I’d scoured the internet for something the right scale (seating eight to ten people) at a decent price (impossible), and we’d ended up putting a folding table from Costco in there instead. That table was spread with papers, which I thumbed through now—a report from a contractor, a bill for a cement mixer. There was a map of The Palms, marked precisely with little red Xs at the locations of the security cameras. He’d been monitoring those cameras ever since Danielle and I returned, as if he were a prison guard watching for unusual activity from the inmates. Then I spotted his laptop, slim and silver, in the middle of the desk. Why hadn’t he taken it with him? It seemed like the sort of thing that would be needed for an all-day meeting.