Without a word, Lanie headed for the box of granola bars on the counter.
“Hey,” Ellen said, standing up. “What happened to the outfit I picked out for you?”
Lanie shrugged, unwrapping a granola bar. “I changed my mind.”
“You can’t wear that,” Ellen said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Says who,” Lanie demanded, jutting her chin out. Her eyes glittered with an unfamiliar relish of challenge, an eagerness for a fight.
“That’s not what we agreed on,” Ellen insisted.
“Leave her alone,” Aunt A commanded. “Your cousin can dress herself however she sees fit. She doesn’t need your approval.”
“I’m just trying to help, Mom. She’s going to make a bad impression on the first day.”
“Your opinion has been noted. I’m sure Lanie will take it into consideration, but the decision is hers.” Aunt A paused and turned to Lanie. “Although, dear, you might want to brush your hair.”
Lanie smirked through a mouthful of granola bar.
She didn’t brush her hair that day, or for a week thereafter. Only when it was so greasy and gnarled that the school counselor called home to check up on her did she consent to wash it. Her clothing never improved. Despite Ellen’s repeated attempts to cajole (and some days force) her into clean pants and sweaters, Lanie continued to dress herself as though she were a vagrant and developed the habit of rimming her eyes thickly in black liner.
But it was more than just her appearance. Ellen, in her quest to aid our transition to public school, had compiled a list of unsavory characters best avoided. The list took up two pages of college-ruled notebook paper, front and back, and warned us away from, among others, terminal nerds, band geeks, the entire girls’ volleyball team, and kids who listened to My Chemical Romance. Topping that list was anyone in the Strong family, and it was Ryder Strong who Lanie immediately gravitated toward. A skinny girl with a mean little mouth, scabby arms, and overprocessed kinky blond hair, Ryder was infamous for coming to class in seventh grade with a flask full of Jack Daniel’s and stabbing one of her many cousins with an X-Acto knife during a school assembly that past fall. In no time, Lanie was running around on Ryder’s sneakered heels, smoking Marlboros in the girls’ bathroom, and cheering as guys with stick-and-poke tattoos nearly killed themselves with skateboards and half-pipes.
It wasn’t much longer before Aunt A began to get phone calls from the school saying that Lanie had skipped class, and then Lanie started coming home smelling like sweet smoke, and then she started not coming home at all.
After Ellen had returned my hair and eyebrows to a shade closer to their natural hue, she proclaimed herself exhausted and retired with Peter to her old bedroom. I snickered at the thought of Peter’s large, distinguished form sleeping under Ellen’s pink plaid comforter underneath her old Britney Spears and *NSYNC posters.
But me? I dreaded the thought of going up to my and Lanie’s old bedroom almost as much as I dreaded being alone with my thoughts, so I was grateful when Aunt A opened a bottle of red wine. We poured it into coffee mugs, shamelessly filling them to the brim, and sat on the couch together, Bubbles stretching his soft, ancient body across our combined laps.
“She did a good job,” Aunt A said, nodding toward my hair.
“What, you didn’t like the blond, either?” I asked, trying to make a joke even as my voice cracked.
Aunt A reached over and squeezed my hand. “Are you all right, sweetheart? It’s okay if you’re not. This family has had a rough go of it.”
I bit my lip and shook my head. “I don’t know how any of us could be all right. Mom’s dead, and we can’t even properly grieve her because of that stupid podcast.”
“That podcast,” Aunt A spit, her words wobbling with venom. “Honestly. What trash. How dare that woman call herself a journalist. Journalists cover real news. They don’t spend their time interfering in decade-old closed cases. It’s disgusting.”
“It is. I feel sick every time I overhear some stranger talking about who really killed Chuck Buhrman.” I swallowed the question that began to rise: But what if it wasn’t Warren Cave? I hated Poppy Parnell for making me doubt the only closure we’d ever had.
“You know who we have to thank for all this, don’t you? Melanie Cave. As if that woman hasn’t done enough. Carrying on with your father, raising the monster who killed him, and now refusing to let him rest in peace. She paints herself as a victim, but she’s the real linchpin in all of this.”
I remembered how fascinated I had been with glamorous Melanie Cave when she, her husband, and her son had first moved next door. With her perfectly coiffed ash-blond hair and enticing apricot-colored lipstick, she had seemed the polar opposite of my own mother with her loose, inky hair and bare feet. My interest would later feel like betrayal when I learned I wasn’t the only Buhrman fascinated with the contrast between Melanie Cave and Erin Buhrman.
“Have you listened to it?”
Aunt A nodded with a grimace. “The first two episodes. Have you?”
“Same. I downloaded the third episode at the airport, but I haven’t listened to it yet.”
“Don’t,” Aunt A said, shuddering. “I’m not listening anymore. I wish I hadn’t started. The only reason I did was because everyone was talking about it, from the folks on TV to the other teachers at school. Even the students, and they’re no more than thirteen years old. I thought I owed it to your mother to know what they were saying about her. Well, that and I wanted to understand why there were so many people camped out in my front yard.”
I twisted around to look out the picture window. I saw no evidence of campers, just a row of pedestrian trash cans lined up on the curb, awaiting garbage pickup.
“They’re gone now. Apparently, they have some human decency and have made themselves scarce since your mother’s death. But before that, there’d be ten or twelve of them out there at any given time. They were mostly young people with iPhones and handheld video recorders. I couldn’t even step outside to pick up the mail without them shouting for a quote for their YouTube channels or blogs or whatchamacallits, or asking about the whereabouts of you girls.”
I flinched, hating the idea of Aunt A facing down aggressive fans on her own. “I’m sorry you had to deal with that. I had no idea it was so bad. They never found me in New York.”
“I suppose that’s one benefit of living in that concrete jungle. There are enough people there that you can be anonymous when you want to be.”