The Girl in the Park (5 page)

I’m losing her.

Quickly, I go to her Facebook page. I see she has a new photo since the last time I visited. Her picture used to be a close-up of her and her cat, curled up on her bed. Now it’s some shot taken in a crowded restaurant. She’s dressed in a short, spangled thing, wearing tons of makeup and laughing her head off.

I think, Personally, I liked the cat picture, Wen.

Already, the front page is filled with sympathy messages. All the stale, overused phrases people use when they don’t know what to say:
My condolences to the family. So sad! Always in our hearts
. I think of writing something.

I miss you, Wendy. I’ll always miss you. You were so …

I can’t think of the right word. So … what? Sweet? Great? Amazing? I imagine people reading it and thinking, God, she couldn’t come up with anything better than that?

Then I notice Videos. There are seven, which means I can actually see Wendy, hear her talk again. I click on the link, hit the first one in the row.

Wendy’s face fills the screen. Then she pulls the phone back from her face and I can see she’s in her bedroom. I hear something muffled from offscreen. Wendy turns and says, “I am, I swear to God!” The person off camera—a girl—laughs.

Then Wendy looks straight at the camera, composes herself. “Okay, here we go. Ready? Ready? Okay.”

Clearing her throat, she says, “This is a message from Wendy Geller to Nico Phelps. Nico, you best be listening. Because two days from now at Karina Burroughs’s party, I am going to get you. I am going to get you and you are going to love every moment.”

She draws out the word
m-o-o-ment
, then does a big kiss to the camera. The person off camera shrieks, “Oh my God!” and starts clapping. Giggling, Wendy says, “Stay tuned for further details!”

Then black.

Further details, I think numbly. There are a lot of further details I would like to know, Wendy.

It’s Monday. The blast of coffee commercial on the radio tells me Get up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head. I smack at it and it goes quiet.

I pull the covers over my head, hide in the warm dark.

Ten minutes later, the radio blares back to life. Sound pummels me through the quilt. “Police identified the body of a young girl found in Central Park …”

I burrow deeper.

“… strangled …”

“… assaulted …”

“… one witness claims …”

“… this latest attack …”

I throw off the covers, grab the radio with both hands. And howl. Long and hard and fierce. My ears hum, my throat starts to sting. But I can’t hear the babble. I’m drowning it, killing it.

Then my mom’s arms around me. The radio pulled from my hands.

“Shhh,” she says, rocking me. “No more.”

*   *   *

Last night on the phone, Taylor and I tried for about five minutes to actually talk about it. But then she said, “This needs to be face to face.”

Now we’re face to face in the Athens Diner on Broadway, where we always go because it’s a few blocks from school, and we still don’t know what to say.

Which is not like Taylor at all. Taylor is tiny: four feet eight, including her explosion of curls. She weighs maybe a hundred pounds. But that’s just the physical. In terms of energy, Taylor is ten tons of sheer volume—as any school administrator who’s ever tried to stop her from getting the real story knows. Cafeteria muffins not certified organic? Unequal funding for girls’ and boys’ basketball? School’s stock investments support criminal regimes? Taylor’s on it.

I order my second muffin—stress does not kill my appetite. Taylor asks for a refill on coffee.

Fingers over her mouth, Taylor says, “I wish I’d liked her more.”

“She didn’t die ’cause you didn’t like her, Tay.”

“No, I know.” She picks up her coffee. “My mom’s like, ‘See, I told you, I told you there were crazy people out there. You think you’re so tough, but it can happen to you.’ I said, ‘Mom, I’m not an idiot who goes into the park drunk in the middle of the night.’ ”

I look at her. Because Wendy didn’t die because she was an idiot either. Wendy died because …

Those hands again, the ones I imagined last night. But no face. No reason. Just craziness tearing at you. Which makes me crazy. Not knowing why feels like staring into a bottomless pit; you feel dizzy, disoriented. Nothing makes sense and you could fall any second.

Taylor sighs. “I can’t get close to the reality of it. That we’ll go to school and she won’t be there and the reason she won’t be there is …” She frowns. “See?”

“The reason Wendy won’t be there,” I say, because Taylor didn’t use her name, “is that she’s dead. Wendy’s dead.”

The words still sound empty to me. They don’t make any sense. I think of how long Wendy’s been dead. What she’s already missed. She missed that incredibly beautiful day yesterday. She didn’t see a minute of it. Because she died before it got light. She died …

I feel Taylor’s hand tight over mine. “Hey, baby.”

I swallow. Shake my head.

“I can wait,” says Taylor. “Actually, I’d be seriously grateful if you made me miss first period, because it’s trig and guess who didn’t do the homework?”

My throat eases up. I say, “I’m okay.”

“Why should you be okay?”

To distract myself, I examine Taylor’s bag. It’s black, battered leather. On the strap, a small round pin. Black and gold, with a single letter:
E
. Alcott gives out four E pins every year to those who have excelled, exceeded, whatever
E
word you want to use. The school usually gets it right: people who get them have become judges and senators, won Oscars, Pulitzer Prizes. The real trick is wearing it without looking like a snob. Some kids even make a point of not showing them in public, they think it’s obnoxious.

Taylor got hers last year, and I think she handles it just right. It runs in the family; her brother got one too. I’ve never gotten one—too shy. Wendy used to joke that the things she excelled at, they didn’t give out E pins for.

“Tay?”

“Um, hm?”

“What happened? At the party Saturday. How did Wendy end up in the middle of Central Park at night?” Maybe, I think, if I know the whole story of Wendy’s last night, what happened to her will make some kind of sense.

Taylor rolls her eyes:
Where to start?
“She was drunk, of course. I mean, sorry to speak ill of the hm, hm, but she was.”

“She didn’t seem
that
bad when I saw her,” I say. “I mean, not so trashed that she’d go stumbling into the park in the middle of the night.”

“She had on her little happy high.” Taylor puts on a manic smile, bugs out her eyes. “The look that announces to anyone with half a brain that mayhem is about to ensue. And …” She stops.

“And what?”

Taylor shrugs, uncomfortable. “And also Nico was there and what else do you need to know? Wendy took one look at him and what working brain she had went
pop
.”

Now it’s my turn to sit back. When Ms. Geller asked me if I had Nico Phelps’s number, I almost said, Yes, it’s right here, next to Satan’s.

Most kids, I remind myself, like Nico. They invite him to their parties. They let him stay at their summer homes. Even Daisy Loring, who once accused him of stealing her mother’s earrings.

Probably Nico’s friends have a million stories about nice things he’s done. Only those aren’t the stories I’ve heard. And it’s not the Nico I know.

Nico’s not rich and he doesn’t have famous parents. His mom’s a home nurse and his dad, well, Nico usually calls his
dad a loser and leaves it at that. He used to live in Queens before moving to Manhattan. But Nico does have two things. He’s beautiful. I mean, ridiculous, with blond hair and blue eyes and a cleft in his chin. He’s well built; a man’s body, not a boy’s. Supposedly, Nico’s been approached by modeling agencies, he’s that handsome.

And danger. Nico has danger. It’s as if because he doesn’t come from our world, he doesn’t have to follow our rules. He breaks them, laughs about it, and everybody else laughs right along with him. So when he threw a drink in Kirsty Pennington’s face, it was Ah, they were both kind of drunk. And when he got busted for drugs in the Hamptons—could have happened to anyone.

“So, what are you saying?” I ask Taylor. “Nico was mean to her or …?”

Taylor shakes her head sharply.

“Well, what happened between them?”

Taylor shrugs. “Nothing, as far as I know.”

This rings false. One thing you could be sure of with Wendy, when she promised drama, that promise was kept. I press. “Did you see them together at all?”

“Once. She was standing next to him, and they were talking.”

“What was he like?”

“Did just enough to keep Wendy interested. You don’t have to do much with her, let’s face it.”

I ignore Taylor’s dig at Wendy. “Where was Sasha?”

Taylor drinks her coffee as she tries to remember. “Not with Nico.”

Frustrated, I say, “You would have noticed if Wendy and Nico ended up making out on the couch, right?”

“There was no big drama explosion,” Taylor says firmly. “Wendy split not that long after you—and from what I saw, she left alone.”

“So, she didn’t get Nico.”

Taylor stares. “Did you ever think she would?”

I sit back. The image of Wendy on the screen—
I am going to get you and you are going to love every moment
—so much bravado. Her scampering over to Nico the second he arrived. I imagine his sneer as he turns away from her. Wendy backing off, shot down again. Top girls win, Wendy loses. One last diss, one last flush, one last cackle.

I need one person there that I know is on my side
.

God, why didn’t I stay?

I mash my mouth shut, trying not cry. Just then a woman comes up to us and says, “Excuse me?” We look up. “I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t help hearing …”

When I was younger, I did speech therapy because the cleft palate screwed up my pronunciation. Endless hours of listening and repeating words and sounds. Maybe it’s that, or maybe all the times I’ve listened to people “confess,” but a lot of times when people talk, I don’t hear the words. Because the words don’t matter. What they’re really saying is in the tone of their voice, or their eyes, or the way they hold their mouth. And when this woman says she couldn’t help overhearing, I know she’s lying. Her tense smile, the excitement in her voice—everything about her feels hungry.

“Did you know that poor girl? The one they found in the park?”

Taylor and I look at each other. I pick her to speak. Taylor says, “She went to our school.”

“How terrible. Was she a friend?”

“Why?” Which is Taylor saying, Drop the act.

The smile slips. The woman nods:
Got me
. “I’m with the
Herald
, I don’t know if you know—”

“I know it’s garbage,” says Taylor.

The woman doesn’t even bother getting insulted. “I want to know who your friend was. We’re hearing stories. Ugly stories.
Unfair
stories.”

I ask, “What kind of—” Taylor does a quick head shake at me and I shut up.

Too late. The woman turns on me. “I want to get the truth out there before they trash her. That’s all.”

Trash her? Trash Wendy? Why? I’m frozen. I don’t want to tell this woman anything and I want her to tell me everything.

I feel Taylor’s hand on my arm, but I resist, wanting one little name, one fact.

“My card,” says the woman, tucking it into my book bag. “Call me. I can help you help your friend.”

Taylor pulls me out. As we spill onto the street, I hear the woman call after us, “Wendy can’t speak for herself anymore. Speak for her! Speak for Wendy.”

A block later Taylor lets go of my arm. Says, “Don’t even think about it.”

“No.”

“In fact, give me the card.”

I put my hand over my bag.

“Rain …”

“I’m okay.”

“Great, give me the card.”

But I’m not going to. As scummy as that woman was, the last thing she said to me was “Speak for Wendy.” As if I have the power to do that. As if there’s still something I can say that would help her. And I won’t give up on that.

“I won’t tell her anything,” I say.

“You’ll tell her things without knowing it,” says Taylor.

“How? I’m not even going to call her.”

“So.”

But before Taylor can demand the card again, we turn the corner and see … an army. I mean, that’s what it looks like. The Alcott School is a five-story limestone mansion—Taylor says it used to be a home for the rich and insane—nestled on a quiet stretch of Riverside Drive. Now it’s under siege. Trucks and satellite dishes and cable, and a hundred people in the street. Cameras everywhere you look. Reporters with microphones. And kids, talking to the reporters.

“Oh my God,” says Taylor. “How are we supposed to get through this?”

Wendy, I think as I walk through the halls. Where is Wendy?

Like Taylor said, it’s so hard to get—really get—that Wendy isn’t here. That she isn’t anywhere anymore. Almost every spot, lockers, bathrooms, water fountain, is a space where Wendy used to be. Wendy groaning as she hoisted her backpack into her locker. Wendy dribbling water down her sweater, laughing, “I am
such
a total spaz.” Wendy crying, “Oh my God, how ARE you?” before a huge swaying hug. Now I look at all those places and I see emptiness.

I want to talk about her, I think wildly. Right now. If she’s not here, then I need to make her be here with words. I turn to
a girl standing nearby—Fiona Robinson—and say, “God, remember how Wendy …”

Startled, Fiona steps back, says, “Sorry, what?”

She couldn’t understand you
. That’s what crashes into my mind.
She heard, Ga, ’member how Wenny? and the poor girl’s totally confused
.

I know I
didn’t
say that. The speech therapy worked. I don’t sound like that anymore. But the pause is long enough to make me feel stupid. Fiona wasn’t really one of Wendy’s friends. She might not know that Wendy and I were friends. She probably thinks I’m a creepy crisis junkie.

“No, nothing,” I say, and do a little hi-bye wave as I hurry on.