True Blue (7 page)

I march back to the cabin in triumph and plunge into the cleanup.

“Where have you been?” Casey asks me, actually looking annoyed with me.

“Fixing the problem,” I say.

I take the broom and start sweeping beside Stephanie’s bunk. She’s still lying there, eating chocolate and watching all the activity with a twisted little smile on her face.

“Pack your bags,” I say to her, quietly.

“Why?”

In reply all I do is smirk and continue sweeping.

Mrs. Keefer sidles up to me at the beginning of campfire that night.

“I talked to Mrs. Glass,” she says. “She won’t be returning early—to rebook the flight will cost too much money. She also says her sister isn’t an option—she has her own kids and they don’t get along with Stephanie. She’s going to have to stay with us until Camp ends. I asked Bones about keeping Stephanie with her, but she said there are a couple of kids already in the infirmary—a poison ivy case and an intestinal bug of some kind. So, I’m afraid you will have to manage. If you think you can’t, I’ll send one of the older counselors to your cabin to take over from you and you can go to her cabin.”

I’m not about to do that. “We’ll manage,” I say.

“I’ll have another talk with Stephanie. And I’ll check in with you as often as I can.”

She heads down to the fire pit to lead in the singing of “Fire’s Burning.”

I hear a child’s voice in my ear.

“Do you still want me to pack?”

I turn around. It’s Stephanie, of course. She’s been listening the whole time. She doesn’t look at me. She’s watching Mrs. Keefer, waiting for the camp director to point to our section, and then she joins in the round.

Fire’s burning, fire’s burning

Draw nearer, draw nearer

In the glowing, in the glowing

Come sing and be merry.

Her voice is sweet, she is smiling, and I wonder if anybody would miss her if I strangled her in the night and dumped her body in the river.

Stephanie’s death continued to be big news.

Even though it seems to happen a lot, you know—school shootings and things—children killing children is news. I don’t know why. Children can be terrorists. I think adults block that out of their memories and create instead this picture of childhood as a time of joy and innocence. They forget about being bullied, being tormented, being left out. They forget the violence on the schoolyard and in the hall between classes—body slams and kicks, and hard things flying at your head for no reason you can see.

Why do people think children can’t be violent? Children are people. People are violent.

“Bugs aren’t violent,” Casey said one night.

We were in her den, watching the news with her folks. A man had just killed his whole family, including a neighbor’s kid who was playing over at the house. Then he shot the neighbor, who had come running at the sound of gunfire, then shot bullets through the windows of the homes across the street.

“Bugs aren’t violent,” Casey said. “Bugs kill to eat. We kill each other for no reason at all.”

That’s all Casey really wanted. She just wanted people to behave as well as bugs.

Stephanie’s death was particularly big news.

First, because Stephanie had been so pretty.

Second, because Casey is also attractive: not pretty but strong-looking and striking—at least I’ve always thought so. She was also a model teenager and had won all sorts of state and national science awards. She was the last person you’d expect to turn into a murderer. This gave the media lots of opportunities to do stories like, “What’s Wrong With Our Youth?” and “Is There A Monster At Your Supper Table?”

Third, because Casey had been Stephanie’s camp counselor, which led to many debates in the press and on radio phone-in shows about how society can protect its children. More surveillance was a popular solution. Spy-tech companies reported a boost in sales of devices parents could use to spy on their kids.

And last, because of the whole insect thing. It was weird, it was exotic, and it set this case apart from other kid-on-kid violence. Some idiot called the case “A small town
Silence of the Lambs
,” because that story had an insect and Casey liked insects. It made no sense, but the idea caught on.

One columnist wrote about Casey’s unhealthy obsession with science, that perhaps her preference for bugs over boys indicated some deep-seated perversion.

“Answer them!” Mom said to me, waving the newspaper in my face at the breakfast table. “Write them a letter. Tell them the truth. Stand up to them!”

The louder she got, the more I backed away.

And my father? His expression never changed. He ate his All Bran and never looked up.

Stephanie’s funeral was the next big event in town. It had been delayed because the coroner and the police took their time releasing her body.

It was held on a Friday morning at our church. Practically the whole town was there. Stephanie’s entire third-grade class was there—at least they would have been her class if she’d survived the summer. The kids laid flowers on the alter. One little girl read a poem, one of those “we will never forget you” deals. I would have found it more moving if I hadn’t seen that same girl mugging for the TV cameras before the service started.

People nudged each other when Mom and I walked into the church. Within moments, the whole congregation, except for Stephanie’s mother, was twisting around to look at me.

“What are you staring at?” Mom demanded. I got her into a pew before she could say anything more.

I looked for Casey’s parents but I didn’t see them.

Funerals are sad events, and I was of course sad that Stephanie was dead, but I found myself feeling angrier and angrier as the service went on. Everyone wanted to get in on the action. The junior choir sang. Kids in the choir whispered and giggled until the camera was pointed at them, then they instantly shut up and looked sorrowful. Reverend Fleet strutted like a peacock to the pulpit and said the benediction like he’d been practicing with a drama coach.

TV turns everything into garbage.

But that’s not what was making me angry. It was Stephanie, that pain-in-the-neck kid who had gotten herself killed. She’d turned what should have been a fun last year of high school into a nightmare. Mom’s illness was taking over because of her, my friend was in jail because of her. I was lonely and a social pariah.

Because of her.

As the service went on, my anger shifted away from Stephanie. She had been just a little kid, after all. She was annoying but she hadn’t asked to be killed. It was silly to be angry with her.

But I was still angry, although I didn’t feel the full force of it until the service was over and we were outside of the church.

Mrs. Glass, followed by all the TV cameras, came up to me.

“Why did you let her do it?” she asked me, her voice cold and clear. “You must have known all along what she was like, and still you left her alone with those girls, with my Stephanie. As far as I’m concerned, you’re as guilty as she is. How could you let her do it? You knew what she was like!”

I froze. A dozen microphones were thrust into my face and the cameras zoomed in close. I could have—should have—turned and walked away. I could have—should have—said something dignified and sympathetic about Mrs. Glass’s loss. What I did instead was open my stupid mouth and say, “I…I…I didn’t know she was like that.”

The barrage of media questions that followed my burst of idiocy jarred me out of my stupor and I backed away. The crowd thinned out then, sliding into waiting cars and limousines for the drive to the cemetery.

In that moment, my anger turned to Casey. She was to blame for this. She had left me all alone out here to deal with this madness. Even if she hadn’t actually killed Stephanie, she hadn’t been doing her job right. She had let Stephanie be killed. I thought back to Casey’s letter. Casey was right. She was guilty.

All of this mess was Casey’s fault. I warned her. If she’d listened to me, we could have put a stop to that kid, but Casey always had to do things her own way. I felt such a rage then that my body actually trembled.

I looked around for Mom. She was on the sidewalk, standing as far as possible from the line of cars now filling with mourners. Beside her were Casey’s mother and father.

They had come, after all. I wondered why they hadn’t gone inside during the service. They were church members. They should have been there.

Then, gripped by a sudden notion, I spun around to look at the church steps. The wheelchair ramp had been taken down.

I hated Galloway then. I hated, hated, hated my home town.

But I hated myself more, because I knew that, without Casey to lean on, I didn’t have the guts to stand up to it.

August, 28 - 31

Day 6 - 9

It is all-out war now. We divide to try to conquer. One of us takes the seven good kids and one of us stays close to Stephanie. We try to move as a group. We try not to let it show that one of us is always on Stephanie-watch, but she figures it out anyway. And she enjoys it.

I hate it. I hate being in charge of the seven good kids, because it takes too much effort to keep them entertained. And I hate being in charge of Stephanie, because that takes even more effort.

And it doesn’t really work. She still manages to give us the slip. Casey is right—the kid is brave. She even crawls under the cabin to hide, where there are spiders and weeds and probably garter-snake nests.

Other counselors watch out for her, and so do the adult staff, marching her back to us when they find her off where she’s not supposed to be. She gets lectures, she gets warnings. She does as she pleases. Casey’s microscope turns up at the back of the mess-hall broom closet. It’s smashed into pieces. Stephanie smiles and says, “Prove it.”

She keeps stealing. Flashlights, hats, shoes, whatever she wants. One night she tries taking Casey’s praying mantis hair clip again, crawling right up into Casey’s bunk to get it while Casey is sleeping. Casey wakes up with a jolt, just in time, then Stephanie starts yelling that Casey almost made her fall off the top bunk and hurt herself. It takes a lot of work and a lot of patience to get the cabin quiet again. Kids get upset about one thing and they suddenly remember they are upset about a lot of things, and there are tears and tantrums and all kinds of chaos.

Casey and I get dirty looks from other counselors.

“If you can’t control your cabin, maybe you should go work at Burger World,” they say. I hate them all. I sneak into the Director’s office while she’s eating supper and call the aunt myself. All I get is an answering machine. I ask her to come and get her niece. But I don’t hold my breath.

We talk about canceling the sleep-out. In fact, we do decide to cancel it. We have a hard enough time keeping track of Stephanie in the enclosed space of the cabin. We could not possibly control her in a dark field some distance away from the main camp.

But then, just as the last days of camp approaches, she seems to calm down. She still disappears, but not for long. She’s already stolen everything she wants to. We are worn out and just want the camp to end. She decides to almost-behave.

And we decide to have the sleep-out after all.

The legal machinery really cranked into action once Stephanie was buried, as if it would have been unseemly for it to do so before then.

Two lawyers visited me in one day.

First came Jack Tesler. He showed up soon after I got home from school. Mom answered the door. She hadn’t said a word to me since my stupid comment to Mrs. Glass was aired on the news. I heard the lawyer identify himself and I heard her slam the door in his face. She bolted it against him and hit the door with the flat of her hand, to drive home her point. I thought about going out the back door and sneaking around to the front and talking to him in the driveway, out of embarrassment at Mom’s behavior, but I stayed where I was. I didn’t owe him an explanation. I didn’t owe him anything.

I had a short babysitting job after supper and when I got home, Casey’s lawyer was sitting in our living room. She was drinking tea from one of the good china cups. Mom had laid out an assortment of bakery squares.

“She is the most wonderful girl,” Mom was saying as I walked into the room. I thought she was talking about me until she said, “I’d be proud to be a character witness for her. Oh, here’s my ‘Hey Jude.’”

“It’s Jess,” I said, shaking Mela Cross’s outstretched hand.

“I’ve heard all about you from Casey,” Mela said.

“They’ve been best friends since they were small,” Mom said. “Jude will help you all she can.”

Mela managed to smile at my mother and, at the same time, peer at me with a critical eye. “Mrs. Harris, would you mind if I took Jude out for a walk?”

“Call me Vivian,” Mom said, then practically pushed me out the door.

At least the sun had gone down. I felt much more comfortable in the dark by this point. Mela seemed to know that. We chitchatted for a while as we walked, mostly about Ten Willows and how the kids at school were reacting to Casey’s arrest.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee,” she suggested.

“I don’t drink coffee,” I lied.

“Hot chocolate, then. I’m buying.” She steered me into one of Galloway’s many donut shops, keeping up the small talk until we were settled in a small booth. I sat across from her. The light in the donut shop was very bright.

I looked around. It was obvious that people knew who we were. When I made eye contact, they looked away, staring down at their walnut crullers or giving their coffee another stir.

“Casey’s a rather remarkable young woman,” Mela said, drawing my attention back to her.

“Yes, she is,” I agreed. “Very smart, too.”

“She has an uncanny capacity for loyalty,” Mela continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Uncanny, especially in a world where people have more loyalty to brands of toothpaste or blue jeans than they have to ideas. Or to friends.”

I pretended to be absorbed in spooning hot chocolate over the little hill of phony whipping cream. I felt myself growing cold. A drop of sweat ran from under my arm down my side.

“For example, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, she still insists on referring to you as her best friend.”

If I don’t look up
, I thought,
she’ll go away
.

“She says that you had nothing to do with her letter appearing in the newspaper.”

“I didn’t!” I said, perhaps a little too forcefully. My conscience should have been clear on that point but it wasn’t. And I could tell from the look on Mela’s face that she didn’t believe me.

I had nothing to say to that, so I said nothing.

“Tell me, Jude, has Casey done you some monumental wrong? Has she injured you in some way? Are you angry at some crime she’s committed against you?”

An image came into my head then—a collage of images, really—of Casey with her head near the ground, staring at an anthill or watching a hornet walk across her hand, her whole attention absorbed. Nothing left for me.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“Has she disappointed you? Betrayed you?”

I shook my head. “She’s my best friend.”

“Friendships can be complicated,” Mela said. “They shouldn’t be. When two people like each other, everything should be easy. But humans are good at making things hard.”

I tried to think of something to say but there was no need. Mela was into a monologue.

“For example,” she went on, “there’s the matter of the Tinker Bell t-shirt that showed up in Casey’s bag. Stephanie was the only girl in your cabin to have a t-shirt with Tinker Bell on it. Plus, it was her favorite shirt—she got it at Disney World and it had her name on it. She wore it almost all the time, and everyone assumed she had it on when she was killed, because after they searched her bag and the cabin was cleaned, it wasn’t anywhere to be found. But then they found Stephanie’s body without the t-shirt. The rest of her clothes were accounted for, except for that shirt. So then everyone guessed that her killer had taken it as some kind of a trophy. The police got a warrant to search Casey’s house and they found the shirt in her duffel bag. And then they arrested her and charged her with murder. Do you follow me so far?”

I kept stirring the hot chocolate.

“Casey can explain everything,” Mela continued. “She says Stephanie had a nosebleed on the last day. You were with the rest of your girls at archery and she’d taken Stephanie back to the cabin because she kept trying to shoot arrows at the other kids. She says on the way back to the cabin Stephanie fell and her nose bled a little—not bad enough to go to the infirmary, just a little. But some of her blood got on the Tinker Bell t-shirt. Stephanie became hysterical. Casey offered to wash the blood out of it before it set, but Stephanie wouldn’t calm down. She scratched up Casey’s arms until they were bleeding. That’s how both girls’ blood ended up on the shirt.

“In the midst of the struggle over the shirt, Stephanie yanked the praying mantis hair clip out of Casey’s hair, pulling out some strands of hair with it. She shoved the clip into her pocket and refused to give it back. Casey decided to wait until Stephanie calmed down before trying to get it back. But she never got the chance.”

Mela sat back in the booth and watched me for a moment before continuing.

“You were the one to pack up Stephanie’s things,” Mela said. “The campers had gone and the camp director had sent you to pack up both your belongings and Casey’s, and then sweep out the cabin. She says you were whining about having to take part in the search and she sent you to Cabin Three because she was tired of hearing you complain.”

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“Shut up,” Mela said, but quietly. She went on.

“You were the one to put Stephanie’s things together and carry them up to the dining hall for her parents to take home. You were the one to put Casey’s things together. But most of Casey’s things were already together, weren’t they? Other than the clothes she had taken with her on the sleep-out, every piece of clothing she had at camp was washed, dried, folded neatly, and packed into her duffel. That’s what the police found when they searched her bag—her clothes ordered and nicely packed away. But shoved down into the middle of them was Stephanie’s Tinker Bell shirt, rolled up in a ball.

“Casey said you must have put it in there. You said you didn’t. So the police think Casey is lying about that, and lying about everything else. And you made that ridiculous, inflammatory statement to Mrs. Glass at the funeral—in front of a TV camera! What were you thinking?

“Jess, it’s not too late to turn this around, you know. It’s not too late to do the right thing.”

The fake whipping cream was now an oily puddle at the top of the cooling chocolate. I kept playing with it.

Mela grabbed the spoon from my hand and slammed it down on the table. I knew without looking that every head in the donut shop had snapped to attention and every eye was now zoomed in on us.

“You are some piece of work,” Mela said. “No emotions. Have you no soul?”

All I could manage in response was another feeble, “That’s not fair.”

She stared at me in silence for such a long time I started thinking about getting up to leave.

I started to rise. Mela reached across the table and grabbed my wrist.

“You think she did it, don’t you?”

I met her eyes for a few seconds. Then I looked away again and yanked my arm out of her grip.

Mela stood up. “I won’t repeat any of this to Casey. She wouldn’t believe me anyway.
She
knows what it means to be a friend. At least I have your mother as a witness.”

“My mother is not well,” I said.

“Your mother is well enough,” Mela said, putting on her jacket. “Sanity looks like madness in an insane world.”

With that, she walked out.

The other donut shop customers were staring openly now, clearly watching the show and not caring that they were being nosey. I looked down into my now-cold hot chocolate, wanting to give Mela time to get away. She was nowhere around when I left.