And she slammed her head back against the concrete block wall, hard, screaming, “JANE STOP JANE STOP JANE NOOOOOOOOOO!” And she screamed it like she was auditioning for a horror movie.
Need I go on? She collapsed to the floor, sobbing, while I watched her, saying, Oh please, but then it does turn out that when a girl everyone thinks is damaged goods gets accused of assault by the popular brainiac, they tend to believe the ever-smiling, ever-gentle-voiced Kamala.
Thanks to Mom’s epic deer lie and the suicide note, I was what my English teacher called an “unreliable narrator.”
The teacher took me to Mrs. Coulter, hustling me past dozens of staring and whispering students; they took a tearful Kamala to the nurse. Kamala kept crying out, “It’s not Jane’s fault. Is she OK? Is Jane all right? Did she hurt herself, too? Let me see her.” I could hear her plaintive yet calculated cries down the concrete-and-tile hallways, echoing off the shuttered classrooms. Every student and teacher heard my fall from grace, like the frightened animals in Eden.
Slow clap.
Kamala’s parents came. For some reason the Graysons came and talked at me. Yes, at.
“I don’t understand why you would do this, Jane. Kamala has always been your dearest friend. A sister, even, to you,” Dr. Grayson said. She had been a runner-up in a beauty pageant, whatever the big global one was with all the different countries and costumes. I only mention that because she was a very good doctor and much respected, but there was this giant picture of her in her waiting room, in her evening gown and sash, stunning, and it was so unrelated to being a good doctor. I never knew why she needed that picture up in the waiting area, why she needed to remind us all. She was gorgeous and she was brilliant and she felt entitled to give me a lecture. She even took a deep breath before she began.
I tried. I did. I waited for another deep breath. “I didn’t lay a finger on her. She knocked her own head into the wall, she threw herself to the floor. Because she’s mad at me. I won’t let her control me.”
You can imagine how this sounded, in the hush of Mrs. Coulter’s office.
“How could you tell such a lie?” She actually kind of hissed this at me.
Some people, including Kamala’s parents, could not stand for their child to be criticized. Mr. Grayson left to go yell at Mrs. Coulter. I wondered where my mother was. She had been called. She hadn’t responded.
I looked Doctor Beauty right in the eye. “I’m not lying. I think about how she acted when we were kids and maybe I’m seeing it in a new light, all the high school years stripped away when it’s easier to be allied with someone like Kamala, when you’re under her protection. I lost that. I see her for what she is.”
I thought she was going to slap me. She sure thought about it, I could see the decision practically inching across her brain. Please, I thought, do it. Hit me. Then for a moment maybe I’ll be pitied.
But she didn’t.
“We won’t file charges,” Dr. Grayson said. She and Kamala had the same harsh line of mouth that curled into an oh-so-kind smile.
“I would hope not, so she doesn’t end up committing perjury”—well, that was what I thought of saying two hours later. In the office I just stared at my feet and wished I’d died in the crash. It would have been easier, wouldn’t it? She started repeating herself in her outraged lecturing of me, so I interrupted:
“Well, it would be my word against hers. I still have a word, you know.”
She looked at me like I was dirt, and since we were alone, the smile vanished. “A girl who kills a friend when she wants to kill herself.”
“I wasn’t suicidal!”
“How do you even know? You don’t remember.” And that is how you play the trump card, the unanswerable charge, the crime I can never deny. So I was the girl who killed David and attacked Kamala.
They didn’t expel me; the Graysons made this huge show of pleading for mercy for me. Kamala, too. She wrote an editorial to the paper. I bet someone sent it to the Pope, to speed along her sainthood paperwork. It made them look so angelic and wonderful. I didn’t have to bear the stares anymore, the sneers, the dumb questions of did I remember someone or had my memories come back. I finished my last few months working alone with a special-needs teacher, the whole day in an unused classroom. I was done at Lakehaven. I was done.
32
ADAM SAID, “I don’t like leaving you here.”
“You’ve got classes. Go. I just need to think and I want to be outside. Thanks for the help.”
He could not look less convinced. “What did you find?”
After he’d kept his big secret? No, she wouldn’t share this information. Not yet. She closed the car door and walked to the park bench. After a full minute of just staring at her and waiting, Adam gave her a tentative wave. She waved back, like it was all right. He drove off. The park had a Playscape, and a few preschoolers cavorted around the swings and the slides, watched by careful moms and nannies. She went to a deserted swing and sat down.
Her father had brought her to this park when she was little. She remembered him pushing her in this very swing, her scared to go up too high, him pushing her up toward the limitless sky, her laughter bubbling out of her, her feet kicking toward the clouds, which the swing seemed to put within her reach. He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, quiet, much quieter than her mother. He would catch the swing and lower her when she yelled, “Enough, Daddy!” letting her know she was safe.
She didn’t remember losing him: the agony, the sheer pain of it. How horrible and wrenching it must have been. That was harder than not remembering the crash, in some ways. The pain of knowing she had lost him and not remembering the grief. The grief mattered: now he was simply gone, and she’d had to go through the mourning all over again, and she was sure it was a dim echo of what she had felt the first time. In a way she felt she had failed him.
She pulled the files out of the backpack. Dad or David first? She opened the file on her father with trembling hands. First she looked at a summary sheet; Brent Norton had been investigated by Franklin for a few months before he died.
First she paged through the material quickly, looking for an indication of who had hired Franklin. Nothing. If there was a client record, it was gone.
Had Franklin just done this himself? That made no sense. She paged through the reports. Franklin followed her father, writing about where he went (mostly the office and Jane’s school), compiling a list of people that he had called—how had Franklin managed to get that? According to Franklin’s notes, it was mostly business associates from his days as a chief financial officer for two start-up companies, including the one he’d founded with his neighbor and friend, Cal Hall.
There were certain phone numbers highlighted on the printout of his phone log. She got out her phone and Internet-searched them. One was a number tied to the Austin FBI office. Another was to the US Secret Service office in Washington, a general-inquiries number.