“Oh no, we’d honor all the girls at once. Everyone thought it would be best that way.”
In other words, get the memorial out of the way before homecoming, because my sister’s two best friends died five years ago the night before their homecoming. It wouldn’t be very nice to remind the crowd about the horrific way Juliana Ruiz and Susan Berry were killed when everyone just wants to watch some football. “Wow. Okay. Thanks. I actually think I have a quiz next period.”
“Of course. I’ll write you a pass.”
While Demarco fishes around in his drawer for his stack of passes, I let my eyes wander. There’s a Sunnybrook Warriors pennant over his desk, right next to a New York Giants calendar. Right above a framed photo of the Sunnybrook football team from six years ago, posing with the state championship trophy. We haven’t won it since.
* * *
—
If you look at pictures of my family, you might wonder whether my sister was adopted. Mom, Petey, and I all have shocks of brown-black hair and blue eyes. Jennifer was blond, like our real father, and had his green eyes.
I remember a time when she liked me. There’s proof: photographs of us trick-or-treating dressed as sister Disney princesses and videos of us putting on plays on the back patio, starring ourselves and Mango, our Jack Russell/rat terrier mix.
But we were four years apart, and once Jen started middle school, it seemed like my very existence offended her.
“That’s just how it is with sisters,” Mom would tell me when I was still small enough to climb onto her lap, face stiff with tears after a fight with Jen. Feel her fingers grazing over my ear as she played with my hair. “Aunt Ellen and I didn’t become friends until we were in college.”
Before homecoming her sophomore year, I gave Jen strep throat. It wound up saving her life. For a little while, at least.
Susan’s parents were in Vermont for her cousin’s wedding the night before the game, and Juliana and Jen were going to stay at her house with her. Susan refused to miss homecoming, even for the wedding, and besides, someone needed to be at home with Beethoven, the Berrys’ beloved Saint Bernard.
Mr. Ruiz was going to pick them up in the morning so they could grab breakfast at the diner before the homecoming game. It was a tradition Juliana had with her family—pancakes before she performed.
It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, a bunch of fifteen-year-old girls spending the night by themselves. Sunnybrook was one of the safest towns in the country, and on our street, everyone looked out for each other. But when Juliana’s father arrived to pick the girls up the next morning, both of them were dead.
They’d been strangled. Juliana’s hands were sliced open, and one still held a shard from the broken mirror that hung in the foyer. She had fought like hell.
Susan hadn’t seen it coming. She was on her back at the top of the stairs, staring at the ceiling. Across the hall, the shower was still on. She must have run out when she heard Juliana’s screams.
If my sister hadn’t been too sick to sleep over at Susan Berry’s house that night, Susan’s deranged neighbor would have murdered Jen too.
Lucky, everyone called her. Blessed.
In the end, though, it didn’t make a difference.
Some people say a curse fell over our town five years ago. What else could explain the tragic deaths of five girls, in three separate incidents, in less than two months?
Some people think Jen’s death was the most tragic of all.
Jen was in the top three in her class, beloved by everyone who was lucky enough to know her. She wanted to spend the summer before her junior year in South America, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. She was planning on going to veterinary school, because as much as she loved helping people, her heart belonged to animals—especially the horses she used to ride as a child.
Jen wouldn’t have done it. That’s what they don’t understand. My sister, with her pages-long to-do list of everything she wanted to do in life, never would have killed herself. Maybe it makes sense to them that she would do it, once they put themselves in Jen’s shoes. Would living every day having to imagine what Jack Canning would have done to her if she’d been at that house be much of a life at all? Was life even worth living if all of her friends were dead?
I don’t know if we’re cursed. All I know is that my sister wouldn’t have killed herself. And if she did, why didn’t she leave a note explaining why?
I need to make another stop at the bathroom, so I head for the faculty ones by the main office, because everyone knows teachers aren’t disgusting pigs like the rest of us. You have to ask the secretary for a key, but Mrs. Barnes is married to one of the officers who works with Tom. She lets me in all the time.
There’s someone in the women’s room, so I lean against the wall opposite the front doors while I wait, watching the stragglers file into the building. When you show up late for school, you have to sign in with the security guard sitting at the desk by the door.
A brown-haired guy is bent over, scrawling something in the security guard’s notebook, laughing at something he’s saying. The guy isn’t a student; he’s too tall, too not-high-school-looking…
What the hell is he doing here?
A slick of sweat breaks out on my palms. I whip around to face the bathroom door, away from him, but it’s too late. A quick glance over my shoulder and I know he saw me.
I want to kick down the faculty bathroom door, yell for whoever is taking her time in there to let me in. Instead, I swivel and take off down the hall, in the opposite direction he’s heading, even though I’m moving away from the science wing and my chemistry teacher Mr. Franken’s room.
I speed-walk, biting the inside of my lip to distract from the stabbing in my abdomen. Straight down the hall, where there’s a pair of student bathrooms. Don’t stop—
“Monica! Wait up.”
It’s not Brandon’s voice. Of course it’s not Brandon calling out to me—why would he act like he knows me here?
I turn to face a guy wearing a Sunnybrook cross-country jersey. Jimmy Varney, one of Matt’s best friends. He smiles and nods at me. “Hey. How was your summer?”
“Good,” I murmur, afraid I’ll puke in his face if I open my mouth any wider. Jimmy’s eyes refocus on something—someone—over my shoulder. He raises a hand. “Coach! Yo!”
Jimmy rests a hand on my arm. “I’ll catch up with you later?”
I nod, and Jimmy darts off. Brandon is trapped as Jimmy descends on him. I pick up my pace and don’t stop until I hit the bathroom, where I shut myself in the first stall.
Brandon is the new cross-country coach.
I don’t even make it to my knees before I vomit into the toilet.
* * *
—
None of this would have happened if it weren’t for that white dress.
I got the job at New Haven Country Club in June. When I told my mom I needed a ride for my first day of work, she blinked at me and said, “God, Monica, if you wanted money, you could have asked me.”
But it wasn’t about making money, not really. I’d wanted something more than summer days spent in Rachel’s backyard, practicing straddles and aerials on her trampoline. I wanted a way out of evenings at the lake, Matt’s beer breath in my ear and hand on my thigh.
The members of the New Haven Country Club have the type of money that they can shell out eighty bucks for someone to watch their kids while they play golf and sit in the spa sauna all day. My title was Kiddie Camp Counselor, but all I had to do was accompany the kids to the pool and the tennis courts and make sure they didn’t die in the process.
On my first day, I saw Brandon hanging out at the lifeguard hut, swinging his lanyard around his wrist.