She remembers coming back from homecoming. Her date kissed her goodbye. Did more than kiss her, leaning in, opening his mouth to slip his tongue between her lips. She kissed him back, delighted by the novelty of it, even if she had no interest in the boy himself, who had all the substance of damp cardboard. Her father saw.
He didn’t say anything. But the next day he asked her to bring him one of his guns, saying he needed to clean it, and then he spun the cylinder and sighted casually down the barrel at her and mentioned, as if out of nowhere, that he’d rather his daughters be dead than be whores.
Three weeks later she went out again with the same boy and she leaned his car seat back and fucked him in the parking lot behind the gas station, all of their clothes still on. She’d always assumed it would hurt, but it didn’t. She didn’t even bleed.
“My turn,” Logan whispers in her ear. His hand goes to her shoulder, pressing down.
She shakes her head. “Not right now,” she says.
“Come on. I made you feel good. And I know you can tell how much I want you,” he says, pressed against her.
She doesn’t mind them—blow jobs. The name is ridiculous and so is the act, but it’s fine. Faster than sex, at least, and she doesn’t spend the whole time trying to think of something to make herself excited, make herself come, because he’s always so sulky when he knows she didn’t. But everything is turning sour in her mind and her stomach, and his touch feels filthy with grit, feels unbearable.
“Not right now,” she says, and shoves him away. Not hard. Not weakly, either. He steps back, spreading his hands.
“Whoa. No worries,” he says, and she reminds herself that Logan has never pushed, only ever asked. He takes out his flask, offers it to her. She accepts, drinks deeply. It’s warm in her hand, like the grip of the revolver when her father handed it back to her.
“Turns out it’s still clean. Don’t need to do anything about it yet.”
“Maybe you’d rather go down on Nina after all,” Logan says with a smirk.
“Fuck off,” she says.
“I’m just saying. I wouldn’t mind having a front-row seat, if you wanted. I bet she’d be up to it.”
“Shut your fucking mouth already,” Juliette snaps, panic rising in her throat like bile. Does he know? Can he tell? He can’t know. No one can. Not until she gets away, and she can’t get away until Daphne is out of the house, because Emma doesn’t understand how the rules work, that someone needs to keep Mom and Dad happy so that they don’t realize that Daphne is strange in a way that they haven’t quite noticed and will never understand.
He gives her a look. “What’s up with you tonight?” he asks. He reaches out to touch her cheek; she slaps him away.
“Don’t touch me.” He knows he knows he’s going to find out—
“I’m just—”
“Don’t touch me! Leave me alone! Fuck off!” she yells, shoving him hard in the chest, and then to her horror she bursts into tears.
Logan, baffled, stares at her.
“The fuck did you do, Ellis?” Nina asks, storming out of the house.
No, no, no, not her, Juliette thinks. Nina and Logan are shouting at each other. He throws up his hands. Nina stalks past, yells something at him that Juliette can’t hear over the sound of her own sobs.
Then Nina has her arms around her, shushing her. “What did he do? Are you okay?”
Juliette shakes her head. He didn’t do anything. He didn’t do anything, but she can’t seem to stop crying.
“Come on,” Nina says. Holding Juliette close, she walks her away from the house. Nina guides her to a toppled log. Juliette realizes they’re next to the road. “I parked a little farther along. I’ll go get the car, you stay here. I’ll take you home. Don’t move.”
Juliette nods miserably. Embarrassment is beginning to overtake the roil of emotions. She can’t think. What is she doing?
She still has Logan’s flask. She takes another drink. Her eyes feel gummy. Logan is never going to talk to her again, she thinks, and finds she doesn’t care. She wishes she knew what he gave her, what they’re supposed to do to you, because she can’t tell which parts of what she’s feeling are her and which are chemicals and whether it matters. She’s alone. Nina isn’t there.
She can’t be alone with Nina. She can’t. Because Nina knows, doesn’t she? She knew when she pulled away from that kiss.
Juliette stands. Nina is going to be back soon. She can see headlights in the distance. She wipes her mouth on the back of her arm.
Alone, less than two hours before a shot is fired into the back of her father’s head, less than five until her sister will instruct her in how to lie, she staggers into the trees, heading toward home, and dark waters close over her mind.
25
JJ
Now
Yellow wallpaper, white grip, red hand.
The memories had been submerged for years, but here in Arden Hills JJ couldn’t seem to keep them from looping through her mind.
Vic hadn’t wanted her to come. They’d fought about it. Loudly, as usual, but that was always a relief. She always knew when it came to Vic that nothing went unsaid, no secret feelings smothered in the name of propriety and appearances.
“It’s a trap,” Vic had told her, chopping onions with a speed and precision that was both impressive and a bit intimidating.
“You think Emma is setting a trap for me?” JJ asked, hip propped against the counter, arms crossed. Vic had her hair in locs piled artfully on her head and a smudge of turmeric on her cheek; her palms were stained with it, too, and the kitchen already smelled divine from toasting spices for the curry.
“No, I think she’s walking into the same trap that you are. It’s not literal, it’s spiritual,” Vic said, gesturing with the knife alarmingly. She was wearing a white undershirt and bright pink boy briefs, since the kitchen in their tiny apartment was too goddamn hot for pants this time of year, by her own official assessment. It made it harder to argue with her. “You’re going back there for, what, closure? There’s no such thing.”
“What if she finds something?” JJ asked.
“If there was anything to find, the cops would’ve found it back then.”
“Hadley kept them focused on Emma.”
“And that’s what this is really about, isn’t it? You feel bad that Emma took the blame. But that wasn’t your fault.”
JJ hadn’t answered. She’d told Vic so much—more than she’d ever told anyone. But there were things she hadn’t admitted even to her.
“If I’d told them everything, they wouldn’t have been looking at Emma. They would have been looking at me,” JJ said.
Vic chopped the end off a carrot with more force than was strictly necessary. “And that’s a good thing?” She set down the knife and stepped over to JJ, putting her hands on either side of JJ’s face. “Babe. Going back there is just inviting the worst kind of energy into your life. You want to fix things with Emma, call her. Don’t go back there and stir up things that might hurt you. Hurt us.”
JJ leaned her forehead against Vic’s, breathing in the scent of her, of cloves and coriander. “All right. I won’t go,” she said.
Yet in the end, she had. She still couldn’t tell if it was for the reason Vic assumed—a search for closure—or out of fear of what Emma might discover. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do when she got there, only that she had to go.
Yellow wallpaper, white grip, red hand.
She hadn’t had a plan, or even the notion of one.
She had always thought of herself as the one in control. The one who knew what to do, who understood the world and how to survive it. Emma was too angry and foolish, Daphne too strange and disconnected, but Juliette was practical, savvy, worldly in a way no one guessed. She’d believed it up until she’d stood there panicking, with her mother’s body three feet away, and Emma was the one who spoke with perfect, frightening calm, laying out what they had to do.
Now she was turning that methodical bent to asking the questions JJ had been terrified of for fourteen years. JJ had gotten a Facebook message from Logan Ellis of all people, warning her that Emma was nosing around. The only reason no one had looked at Emma was they had no idea what Juliette had been up to, sneaking out with Logan. Now Emma knew.