Shelly.
The bottom drawer of Shelly’s desk was locked. She used a hammer to smash it open. Inside was nothing. An emptiness. She yanked out the drawer, and then all the other drawers. She overturned the entire desk. Something that was stuck to the back tore away. A tin lockbox. Written across green-and-pink-snowflake-patterned masking tape it read: Pain Box.
She yanked. Couldn’t open it without the key. So she tapped it with the hammer. The frame bent. She stopped. There might be something fragile in there. Something just like Shelly. She took it, along with the other evidence, back down to the main floor. She hid the Pain Box in her office.
Then she slammed the brush and cut hair in the sink and poured lighter fluid all over, along with the broken dishes beneath. She hoisted the stepping stool and ripped out the ceiling fire alarm as it sounded, tearing batteries loose from their holsters. She poured more lighter fluid until the blaze was deep blue at its roots, the hair perfect, protein-scented kindling. She poured until the bristles turned to ash and the polyurethane melted and the compressed wood went to char. She did this until the sink itself was ruined.
A proper mess. Stinking and flamboyant. The char was the center, blue and orange and red flaming out, like entering a black hole. She followed with her eyes and with her mind, a kind of unburdening. She was spiriting Shelly to the safety of the other side, a game with time itself.
All the while, she thought: Someone else was to blame for all that was happening. She had not done this.
Thursday, July 22
Shelly Schroeder. Shelly Schroeder.
What happened to you?
For the people of Maple Street, the scream and the slap that followed stayed fresh in their minds. I’m sorry, they remembered. Sorry for what?
A bright girl. Brittle, too, with rough, bully edges—in a family that large, there’s bound to be one of them. The people of Maple Street agreed she wasn’t a black sheep. She came from too good a family for that. Rhea paid too much attention, helped too much with homework, rallied too much for the PTA. Fritz was too well respected, devoted in his quiet way to supporting his family. No, this was just a phase Shelly would have outgrown by high school, all the more resilient for having expunged it from her system.
Shelly Schroeder. Shelly Schroeder. Did you have a secret?
Nikita Kaur asked her son Sam to repeat every detail of the story, one more time.
He remembered something new: comments Shelly had made about Arlo Wilde. Nikita asked him to repeat these. She had her husband, Sai, listen. Sai, knowing that his son was both eager to please and easy to influence, said it was probably nothing. Still, Nikita had Sam repeat it to Cat Hestia, and then the Ponti men, who reacted with shocked outrage. It’s outlandish, Sally Walsh said, though when she went home and relayed the story to her wife, Margie, they agreed that it added up. Even if Julia’s story was true, and they’d been racing each other to the far edge of the park, Shelly was far too smart to use a dangerous slab for a shortcut. What if Julia was lying, to protect someone? Perhaps something had driven those girls. Perhaps… they’d been running from Arlo.
The Hestias asked their daughter Lainee, who corroborated and also embellished Sam’s story. Lainee wasn’t malicious, just immature. Sheltered her whole life, she lacked the ability to extrapolate that her story might get Arlo Wilde into serious trouble.
Mrs. Jane Harrison asked Dave to corroborate: Did Shelly tell you kids that Arlo Wilde was bothering her? Mouth agape in disappointment (how could his mother make such a reckless suggestion?), Dave said: It was a crazy lie Shelly made up like she always used to make things up, because she was batshit. Then he ran away to punch some pillows, not because he was mad at his mom—she’d done so much dumb stuff that his fists would fall off if he punched something every time that happened—but because he’d talked about Shelly in the past tense. And he owed it to Shelly, his first kiss, and the only one he’d ever kept a secret, to believe until the end.
At last, Nikita forced Sam to repeat the story to Linda Ottomanelli. By this time, Sam had become reluctant. He did so haltingly, with tears.