“Really? You’ll do it?”
He turned toward me now. “Sure, Sophie. I’ll go to the lawyer with you. If that’s what you want to do.”
“I do. I just need someone to look at all the things I found and tell me whether I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy, baby,” he insisted. “You’re the smartest girl I know. But sometimes that’s not enough.”
True. “I got very mad at you last week.”
“I know.” He picked up the second half of his sandwich.
“No, I mean I got very mad after I dug through the hospital database and found my brother’s blood work from the night he died. Why didn’t you tell me that he was high, too?”
Jude’s eyes widened. “He…what?”
I groaned. “Don’t even tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. I pulled up tox screen results for both of you from the hospital’s database. They’re almost identical. Oxycodone and another drug.”
“Jesus.” He put down his sandwich. “Gavin was high? That doesn’t sound like him.”
“Jude!” I hissed across the table. “How could you not notice that?”
“Gee, Soph.” His tone was laced with sarcasm. “Maybe because I was so high I couldn’t feel my face. Never said I was intelligent.”
Don’t yell, I warned myself. Don’t ruin a good day. But I felt my blood pressure double. “Why were you with Gavin at all? Won’t you just tell me?”
“I will, baby.” He pushed his plate away, his expression sad. He reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “If you’re sure you want to know.”
I nodded.
“Gavin wanted to sell prescription painkillers to my junkie friends.”
“He…” I replayed Jude’s words, and they made no sense. “Wh-what?” I stuttered. What a mind fuck. “He wanted to sell them? Like a dealer?”
He nodded slowly. “More or less. He had a friend from the lacrosse team—his roommate I think? The guy’s dad was a doctor. They stole a prescription pad and accumulated quite a stash of painkillers. There was some trip they were trying to fund for after graduation.”
“Jamaica,” I said slowly. Gavin and his pals had wanted to party in the Caribbean.
“Yeah. So your brother decided to go slumming. He asked me to introduce him to some customers.”
“So you said, ‘Sure, bro! Hop in my car’?”
“No, first I turned him down. But then Gavin offered me some free samples, and I changed my answer faster than you can say hooked.” He rubbed my hand. “Remember, I was not in a good place. I would have gotten into that car with Darth Vader, Soph. And I would have driven him anywhere. My body wanted pills. He had pills. The end.”
That shut me up. These past two months I’d often begged Jude to be honest with me. And then when he was, I wished I didn’t have to imagine him that way.
He stroked my hand patiently. My pain was probably written all over my face. “I wasn’t in a good place,” he repeated quietly. “I didn’t know your brother was using. But if you’re telling me he was high, I’d have to guess that it was a brand new hobby for him.”
“So you didn’t see him take it?”
Jude shrugged. “I don’t remember. He had two different drugs on him that night. One of them was unfamiliar to me—some other painkiller. But I did a line anyway, because I’m so smart like that. That might be why I got so fucked up. Or maybe his stash was a lot purer than what I was used to. But that’s what happened. That’s how I got into the accident on the way back into town.”
“On the way…back? From where?”
“I took him to Dex’s trailer and I did some lines there. That’s the last thing I remember.”
“Oh.”
There was a dreadful silence while I pictured Jude and my brother snorting lines of drugs into their noses.
Shit.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
My throat threatened to close up. “I still don’t get it, Jude.” My voice cracked. “Why didn’t anyone tell me my brother was trying to sell drugs?”
“Because he’s dead, Sophie. I tried to tell the cops. They threw a baggie of pills in my face during the interrogation. I said they were Gavin’s, then the cop kicked me in the face. So I stopped saying that. Besides, it doesn’t matter if the passenger was high, right? It’s not illegal to be high in a car unless you’re behind the wheel.”
My neck did its tingling thing now, because I wasn’t sure that anyone sitting at this table actually knew who had been behind that wheel. “Jude, do you remember actually driving away from Dex’s trailer?”
“No,” he said, his voice flat. “I remember sort of stumbling down off that milk crate Dex had instead of a front stoop. And I remember arguing with your brother about the music.” Jude let out an unhappy grunt. “Because that seemed so crucial at the time.”
All the hair stood up on my neck. “Say that again?”
“Say…which part?”
“You argued about the music.”