Now, Beth DeCasio walked in front of Cameron, arms linked with Kaylee Walker and Ana Sanchez. She wore purple, Lucinda’s favorite color. This made Cameron think of Lucinda’s diary—the cover was purple suede, with a white elastic band holding it shut. The girls cried, their shoulders hunched, tissues bunched in their palms.
Usually, Lucinda left her house between 7:07 and 7:18 a.m. Sometimes, her dad would take the morning off from his law firm and they would go to breakfast at the Golden Egg, but this generally happened less than once a month, and Cameron always factored in the odds. It occurred to Cameron now, as Lucinda’s friends cried in front of trophy cases, that this morning had been different, and he hadn’t even known—Lucinda had not been walking down the street, behind or in front of him. She had not brushed her teeth over the bathroom sink, she had not eaten a croissant or yelled at her mom, she had not wrestled her arms into her yellow down coat.
Cameron felt genuinely sorry for Beth, Kaylee, and Ana, though he didn’t think anyone had a right to be sadder than anyone else. A girl was dead, a beautiful girl, and there was tragedy in that. And anyway, some types of love were quieter than others.
“I bet it was some kinky shit that killed her,” Ronnie said as they took their seats in history class. “Like, strangulation or something. Everyone’s talking about her ex-boyfriend, that soccer player—Zap. Douchebag looks like he’s into the nasty shit.” He made a choking motion.
Ms. Evans flicked on a movie about the Hundred Years’ War and shut the lights.
Cameron was afraid of the dark. It came down to thinking and unthinking. Once he imagined the possibilities that accompanied absolute darkness, he would convince and unconvince himself of all sorts of horrors: A stroke in his sleep, and the subsequent paralysis. Sleepwalking to the drawer of steak knives in the kitchen. All the awful things your own body could do to itself. He’d twist in circles around his miserable brain until he exhausted himself and fell asleep or lifted the screen off his bedroom window and ran. Neither option helped much.
“Excuse me,” said a gruff voice from the doorway. The smell—Dad had smelled just like that. Tobacco, coffee, rusty chains. “May we speak with one of your students?”
“Of course,” Ms. Evans said.
“Cameron Whitley?” The police officer was silhouetted in the crack of fluorescent light that streamed in from the hall. “You’ll need to come with us.”
Jade
I have a theory: faking shock is easier than faking sadness. Shock is a more basic emotion than sadness—it’s just an inflated version of surprise.
“The details have been released,” the vice-principal says. He claps his hands together, all business. “The victim was a student here at Jefferson High, Lucinda Hayes. The ninth-grade class is currently in the auditorium, where Principal Barnes is delivering the news. There will be a memorial service on Friday. Counseling will be available in the front office. We encourage you all to stay alert.”
He strides out of the classroom, a swish of khakis.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. I look stupid, but so does everyone else. Half the class looks genuinely sad—embarrassingly sad—and the other half bounces with the sort of glee you only find during a drama like this.
I imagine how the shock must look on Zap, but I don’t dare turn around.
Zap has this way of sitting. He leans back in chairs, spreads his knees wide, lets his limbs do what they want. It’s not arrogant or lazy. It’s intentional. Comfortable. Zap leans back and lets his body occupy that space, as if he commanded the chair to assemble beneath him and it listened.
Today, Zap sits at the broken leftie desk by the window, three rows back. He wears a red sweat shirt and corduroy pants with holes in the knees. They’re too short at the ankles because Zap grew five inches last winter. His glasses are still fogged up from walking across Willow Square in the biting February cold.
These are things I know without looking.
The rest is up to my imagination—how the shock of Lucinda Hayes sits carefully on him. All wrong at first, loose on his frame. But it will sink in. The shock will move from Zap’s shoulders to his neck, to the birthmark on his second left rib. From there it will spread to all the places I can’t see.
Shock is just sadness that hasn’t reached the gut.
Of course, I already know that Lucinda Hayes is dead.
I find out before school this morning, over a naked Toaster Strudel. Ma throws away the frosting packets so we won’t get fat, leaving our strudels an unassuming brown, bare oven tracks running across their backs.
“Sit down, girls,” Ma says. She taps ash from her cigarette into the kitchen sink. A hiss. In the morning, the wrinkles on Ma’s face are canyons.
Amy totters to the kitchen table and swings her gigantic purse onto my chair. Amy recently decided backpacks were immature for a seventh-grader, so she carries a brown faux-leather purse instead. Her math textbook is so heavy she walks with a limp.
“It’s about Lucinda,” Ma says. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. She’s—she’s passed away.” Ma sighs in her pitying way (usually reserved for the post-office attendant and the boy in Amy’s class with recurrent cancer).
Amy’s bottom lip quakes. Then a shrill, gravelly cry. She stands dramatically and backs into the sliding door, spreading her pink-painted fingernails against the glass and suctioning them there like starfish.
Ma puts out her cigarette on a pizza-stained paper plate and crouches in her sweat pants next to Amy, who slides to the floor. Ma strokes her hair, unknotting the tangles inconspicuously.
“I’m so sorry, honey. They’ll make an announcement at school today.”
Ma is sorry for Amy. She is not sorry for me. I’ve never cried like that, so frantic and choked. I’m not trying to be brave or stoic or anything. I’ve just never liked anyone enough. Ma knows this. She glares at me, Amy’s head still in the crook of her elbow. A runny line of snot drips from Amy’s nose onto Ma’s freckled arm.
“Jesus, Jade,” she says, shifting her gaze to my stomach, which pudges out from the bottom of my Crucibles T-shirt, bare under my unzipped army parka. “Go put on a real shirt. You’re taking your sister to school today.”
I lean over the kitchen counter, resting my elbows on an outdated phone book.
Emotions shouldn’t have names. I don’t know why we bother talking about them, because emotions are never what they’re supposed to be. You could say I feel ecstatic, or guilty, or disgusted with myself. You could say all of the above. Amy sobs, but I identify only this foreign lightness: like someone has sucked the weight from my legs, taken the terrible thoughts out of my head, softened some sharpness jabbing at my ribs. I don’t know.
It’s so calm.
“Are you even human?” Amy asks.
Madison Middle School is a rectangle in the distance.
“Alien,” I say. “Surprise.”
“You’re not even sad.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re not. Ma says you have serious issues with ‘empathy’ and ‘self-control’ and ‘sad tendencies.’?”
“The word is ‘sadistic,’?” I tell her.