Her only unselfish act is not taking Lauren down with her. Or maybe she just doesn’t care anymore.
Hours after the sentencing, we find out that it’s the latter. The district attorney calls to tell us that Jade had been hoarding migraine pills and tried to overdose. Another inmate found her in the bathroom, slumped over the toilet.
She survives; days later, her attorney forwards me a letter. The handwriting sends me into a panic.
The letter is a page long, obviously written before her suicide attempt. Jade tells me she wishes she’d never met me. That Bailey was all she had, and I’d made Bailey so crazy it had ruined her life. Jade says she’s going to kill herself because she has nothing left. She wants me to know it’s my fault.
I think back to how she smiled at me when Bailey introduced us. The pain on her face that first morning we realized Bailey was gone. The way she slept in Bailey’s bed the night after the vigil because she couldn’t be alone. I wonder if any of it was real, or if the media is right—that Jade can’t feel, she only mimics emotions to control and manipulate.
I wonder what was going through her head when she decided she wanted to die. I’d like to believe it’s because she felt remorse and couldn’t live with what she’d done.
Sometimes it’s the only way I can live with myself.
—
Ashley is not leaving my dad. Lauren will need her parents when she gets out. She’s not expected to serve the full eight years the judge sentenced her to. The thought of being able to hug her again someday, smell the hint of Froot Loops in her shampoo, makes my chest tight.
It also scares me. Because if she turned on Bailey so fast, who’s to say I’ll ever be safe?
Lauren killed someone. No amount of time in that place can undo that.
And who will she be when she gets out?
We’re moving out of the house on Sparrow Road. Ashley and my dad are, at least. They bought a small house closer to Madison, only fifteen minutes from where Lauren is being treated. Andrew accepted the full ride to Madison—he couldn’t turn down free college, especially in light of how much Lauren’s attorneys cost—and I’m staying with my mom for the last couple weeks of summer before I come back to start community college not far from Andrew’s school.
In the weeks after Jade was arrested, Ashley dragged me to Andrew’s therapist. She suggested I write my mom and not send it, but I realized I needed her to hear everything. She wrote back. We’ve been talking on the phone for the past couple months. She sounds different—I don’t know if either of us has changed enough. Ashley and my dad said they’d get me on the first flight back home if things get bad.
It’s my first night back in New York, in my mother’s new apartment. It’s a new construction—one of those places with a golf course no one uses and all white fixtures inside. When I walk in, feel my feet sink into the carpet, I stop. Inhale.
“What?” My mother looks nervous. “Did I forget to take the garbage out?”
“No,” I say. “It smells like you. Just you.”
That smell is almost enough to unglue me—it reminds me of a time when it was just the two of us and everything was good. I wonder if we’ll ever get that back.
I want to believe it. I have to believe it.
I’m jet-lagged, so my mother suggests we order pizza. I think of gathering around the table at the house on Sparrow Road, over a sausage pizza with half pineapple for Andrew, and a pit opens up in my stomach.
“Why don’t I cook?” I say.
“Cook what?” My mother looks concerned as I raid her kitchen for something to throw together. Her cabinets are modestly stocked, but she has the staples for grilled cheese.
I need to busy my hands, keep them occupied so I don’t wind up on my phone, Googling our names.
Kacey Young. Jade Becker. Lauren Markham.
Everyone has something to say about the girls who caused Bailey Hammond’s death.
“This is delicious, baby,” my mother says after the first bite of grilled cheese. She licks away a string of orange from her lip. I’m staring, I know, but all I can think is, She had cheese in the house.
It’s too much, that she bought my favorite food. My face is wet and I can’t swallow the bite of sandwich in my mouth.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
I just shake my head. I can’t say it, can’t put into words how bad I am at this business of being loved. Some days it feels like a burden.
My father and Ashley don’t blame me for what happened, but I don’t think I can stand to see how they blame themselves. Maybe if they’d focused less on Andrew’s issues and more on Lauren’s. Maybe if they’d brought her to a therapist after the bullying with Keelie March. Maybe if they’d loved each other enough that Ashley hadn’t made that phone call to Beth Schrader. Maybe they simply blame themselves for creating a child with a monster deep within her.
In my darkest moments, I blame myself. If Lauren had been at Emma’s birthday party the night of the barn, I would be the one who’s dead, not Bailey. She would be in jail along with Jade—or maybe Bailey and Jade would have pulled it off, and I would have been the girl who vanished. The one people would remember on anniversaries. The Markhams would miss me, I know they would, but they wouldn’t be as broken as they are right now.
We. Not they.
Because that’s the one thing Andrew was right about: that I’m one of them, and I always will be.
—
My mother lets me turn in early for the night without interrogation; she insists I take her bed in the master suite and says she doesn’t mind the couch.
But when I wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented, my breath heavy, her arms are around me.
“You were screaming,” she said. Her face is streaked with tears. I realize she’s under the covers with me.
“I didn’t want to leave you,” my mother says. “I never, ever should have let you leave.”
I cry into her, my nose mashed against her collarbone. The nightmare has followed me here: the one where my sister plunges the knife from our kitchen into Bailey’s stomach and then turns it on me. I run from her every time. She never catches me.
I always manage to wake up in time.
I’ve taken to thinking about the engagement ring on Ellie Knepper’s finger when my brain can’t handle the weight of it all. I like to think I could have a life like hers someday. That eventually I’ll be able to stop searching for home and make one for myself. I distract myself by trying to imagine a distant future. One where I’m a pastry chef or an art teacher like Mr. White, and I go out for drinks after school with the other teachers and forget everything that happened in Broken Falls.
It’s better than the alternative, which is thinking about the last words Lauren said to me—the thing she whispered before I left her hospital room that day, when I asked her why she really killed Bailey.
She was going to ruin everything.
You were going to have to leave us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS