What had happened at the dance?
She sat back on her bed and tried to replay the events: the dance itself, the first swig of punch. She remembered the bitter taste of the punch. She stood up again and started to pace, trying to put the flimsy, shadowy pieces together. There were other people at the table. Were they drinking? Who else saw Erica? Who else was there?
She remembered, vaguely, Meatball standing by the bowl when she took the first cup.
Was he trying to poison me?
Brynna gulped and pulled Meatball—whose real name was Steven Thomson—and his phone number up in the Hawthorne High registry. She dialed and counted the rings until Meatball answered, his voice groggy with sleep.
“Yeah?”
She cleared her throat. “Steven?”
“Who’s this?” He sounded slightly more awake.
“It’s Brynna. From school? From the dance?”
There was a long pause, and Brynna thought Meatball was going to hang up on her. Then, “Yeah? What do you want?”
“I know you spiked the punch last night.”
He kind of did a snorty little laugh that made Brynna’s skin crawl. “Yeah, I spiked it. The booze was my idea. The drugs—”
“So there were drugs.”
“For you, yeah.”
Cold steel shot through Brynna’s whole body. “What do you mean, for me?”
“I was doing a favor. The money was good. You’re fine. No harm, no foul, right? My man Teddy have a good time?”
Horror sickened Brynna’s stomach as tears swelled before her eyes. “Teddy paid you to put something in my punch?”
“Look, whaddya want? You want another hit?”
“No, of course not. Teddy bought a hit from you and told you it was for me?”
“Nah, it wasn’t Teddy, it was a chick. That other chick.”
Brynna was reeling. “…it was a chick.” Her lips trembled and she wrapped an arm around herself, trying to stop the tremor. “Did she have long black hair?”
“I’m not a freakin’ hairdresser. Are you ordering or what?”
Brynna hung up the phone without answering.
Darcy drugged me, Brynna thought. She waited to be overcome with anger, but all she felt was a deep, aching betrayal. Was Darcy responsible for everything else too? Were they all in on it?
SEVENTEEN
“Bryn, we’re leaving in ten,” her father yelled from the downstairs landing.
She turned, still stunned, and scanned her closet again. Darcy was there when we were dress shopping. She suggested I go to the locker room and change my clothes when I found the purple crepe paper.
She felt sick and groped through her closet blindly, pulling out anything dark to reflect her mood. She finally selected a retro black dress with shiny gold buttons that Erica would have hated and pulled on a pair of black tights and black shoes. She yanked her hair back into a severe-looking bun and glanced at herself in the mirror. She looked like a cross between a schoolmarm and a ninja and the look wasn’t flattering, but that was Brynna’s point. She didn’t want to be noticed. Not that she didn’t want to be recognized—she didn’t want to exist at all. She was back to being a loner, back to being punished. Brynna tucked her purse under her arm and grabbed her phone when her mother called.
Her parents were solemn-faced and stayed that way through most of the journey into Point Lobos. She knew when her father offered to pull over at a Starbucks that they were getting close, and Brynna’s chest started to tighten. She glanced down at a discarded newspaper while she waited for her family’s drinks, and her skin started to prick. A three-inch column on the bottom left corner had a black-and-white picture of Erica, head thrown back, grinning. Brynna knew that picture; it was from a water park they had gone to their freshman year. She tried not to read the headline but couldn’t stop herself.
Point Lobos Teen’s Remains to Be Interred Today
The next few lines gave a short blip about Erica and then directions to the memorial and where donations could be sent. Brynna’s stomach churned and when they called her name, she dropped her latte into the trash.
She couldn’t get the words out of her mind: remains. They weren’t going to bury Erica; they were going to bury her remains.
Brynna handed her parents their coffees and clicked herself into the backseat while her father started the engine. Her mother leaned over the seatback and squeezed Brynna’s hand, offering one of her mom looks—this one soft and apologetic.
“You know, if you don’t want to do this, the Shaws will understand.”
Brynna’s mother had said that before they left too, and Brynna was beginning to wonder if the Shaws had called and said that they didn’t want Brynna there. They didn’t want the girl who survived—when their daughter didn’t—to celebrate Erica’s short life.