This wouldn’t be my big moment. I hadn’t come up with that one yet—the final, glorious act of revenge that would bring Chantal to her knees and show her she’d better never mess with me again. But the camping trip . . . it did provide an opportunity.
I went inside the office and told Miss Lacey, the lady who answered the phones and sorted the mail, that I was there to pick up Mrs. Bobbie’s package. She went into the back to get it, and I glanced around the office. It was done up in a Western theme, with horseshoes hung on the wall and cactus plants in pots. The curtains were made of red bandanas stitched together. By Mrs. Bobbie, probably.
A large omelet flecked with bits of orange cheese and pink ham sat on a paper plate, a few bites taken out of it by Miss Lacey. I heard a thump from the back room and quickly lunged forward, scooping up a handful of egg and cheese and ham and dropping it into the pocket of my jeans.
Miss Lacey reentered the room, box first, huffing. “Can you carry this all the way home, Daphne?” she asked. “It’s a booger.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I took the box and pushed against the front door with my rear end. The sun nearly blinded me. It really was too hot for this sweater. I set the box down on the porch and leaned against the hitching post. The mountain of camping gear had grown substantially, and now there were two houseparents milling around the vans too. Mr. Barry, the marine, and his wife, Mrs. Vessa.
I approached one group of squealing girls. They sobered when they saw me.
“Sorry you can’t go,” one of them said. Her name was Tiffany J. There were two other Tiffanys in her house, Tiffany L. and Tiffany B. The other girls all clucked sympathetically and said how unfair it was. How Omega and the other Super Tramps were mean and ruined everything for everybody. I nodded and glanced toward the pile of gear. Mr. Barry, Mrs. Vessa, and the rest of the adults were gathered at the rear of the vans, discussing something animatedly.
I moved to the pile. Chantal’s frayed backpack was toward the bottom. It had been red once, but was now bleached out to an uneven pink. On the back, with a black marker, Chantal had written *NSYNC in big block letters. Probably the same marker she’d used to write on Omega’s underwear, that jackrabbit. That Devil Eyes. That big bunch of Nothing with a capital N.
I scooped the omelet from my pocket, crouched, unzipped the pack. Inside, I felt clothing—a sweatshirt, a pair of jeans, and some underwear. A brush and a tube of toothpaste. I smeared the egg over it all, really smashing it in good. Then, at the bottom of the backpack, my fingers closed around a plastic bottle—the kind you got in a pharmacy. Ha! Chantal’s vitamins. I pulled it out and stuffed it in my pocket.
I looked furtively over one shoulder, then stood. The girls had migrated to the office porch and were pushing the porch swing and singing some song from the radio. Chantal had joined them and, as usual, was shouting over them, bossing them around. She hadn’t even noticed me yet or she’d be over here, running her stupid mouth. I squatted again, pulled Chantal’s sweatshirt out of her pack, then zipped it up and shoved the pack under the bottom of the pile.
I thought of Chantal shivering in her sleeping bag up at the falls, wondering if she’d dropped her sweatshirt on the way up the mountain. I grinned, then bit my lip. She’d wonder what happened to her vitamins too. I didn’t know how bad she’d feel without them—maybe she’d just get weak, feel sick or dizzy and have to sit out some of the activities. I hoped she’d feel miserable the whole weekend. That would teach her. And sometime later, after she’d been back for a while, I’d leave the medicine bottle on her bunk, for her to find. Then she’d know who was boss. She’d be sorry she messed with me.
I stood and fluffed out the sweater over the bottle in my pocket. The sweatshirt I tossed under the closest van, then shuffled over to the porch and retrieved Mrs. Bobbie’s box, feeling the gaze of the girls. As I walked away, I heard someone call out.
“Have a nice weekend, Daphne Doodle-Do.”
I turned. It was Chantal.
When I got back to the house, I dropped off the box outside Mrs. Bobbie’s bedroom door and ran to my room, where I put the pills on Chantal’s bed.
I hadn’t bothered to read the label on the bottle or to even consider that Chantal had not told me the truth about the pills or why she had to take them. Even if I had seen the word on the label—Depakote—it still wouldn’t have meant a thing to me.
I wouldn’t have known that it was not a vitamin at all, nor that it wasn’t prescribed for girls with malnutrition, but for people who suffered from epileptic seizures.
Chapter Nineteen
After I finished talking, Heath spoke. “What happened to her? To Chantal?”
We’d migrated to the bed and were lying on our sides—bodies aligned, heads propped on our arms, faces inches apart. Heath smoothed a lock of hair from my face. His breath smelled of mint and wine. His eyes were fastened on me. They hadn’t left my face the whole time I’d been talking.
“She got sick. Up on the mountain, on the camping trip, the first night. She had wandered away, they think maybe looking for Tré and Shellie. She had a seizure and fell off a cliff. There was a search party. They found her the next day. Her body.”
He just stared at me.
“Say it,” I said. “Say what you’re thinking. It was my fault.”
“You thought they were vitamins, Daphne. You didn’t realize what you were doing.”
“No. I knew. Somewhere . . . somewhere inside, I knew. And I wanted something terrible to happen to her.”
He was quiet. Still studying me with that look that cut through my very soul. But I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want him looking at me that way—full of pity or judgment or whatever it was he was feeling. I turned so I couldn’t see his face.
“What happened then?”
I rolled onto my back and laced my hands over my chest. “The police questioned everyone who was there on the trip. The kids from Piney Woods and Maranatha. All the houseparents. Then they showed up at the house. They just talked to Mrs. Bobbie, though, I think just to find out if she knew where the pills were. No reason to talk to me and Omega, since we hadn’t been on the trip. It was an accident, they said. Chantal forgot her pills and she had a seizure, simple as that. It was terrible. But it was just an accident.”
“What did you do with the pills?” he asked.
I hesitated. To say the words aloud . . . what would that feel like? For the truth to finally come out of my mouth? Would it change things? Would I feel at peace with the fact that I was a monster who had hated a young girl? Who had wanted her dead? Wished her dead and made her die?
“Daphne?”
I had to force the words out of my mouth. “Mrs. Bobbie had given Chantal her pills to pack in her bag before the trip. I just pushed them up under the dresser, so it looked like they rolled there and she had forgotten them.”
He was quiet.
“They took all us girls in the brown house to see a child psychologist in Macon. They brought us in, one by one, to talk to her. She asked questions about Chantal and our life at home. At the ranch and the house. She asked about Mr. Al. About . . .”
“What?”
I cleared my throat. “Apparently, the night of the camping trip, the night Chantal wandered off, he and a couple of the older girls had left their tents to go smoke weed in the woods. Chantal found them. They made her leave, and on her way back to the campsite, she lost her way.” I touched my forehead. A sharp pain had begun to stab me right behind my left eye.
“That’s terrible.”
I inhaled. “She pushed, the psychologist. She kept asking me questions. What kind of father was Mr. Al, what did he do with us at the ranch? Did he spend time alone with us? Did he find ways to get us away from Mrs. Bobbie?” I shook my head. “I was a kid, and surprisingly still pretty innocent. I didn’t understand what they were getting at. And to tell the truth, I don’t think they had anything on him other than the whole weed-smoking business. But . . .”
“They fired him.”
I nodded. “He went to prison.”