“Not anymore. I was, but now I’m home.”
“You were there? You saw it?”
Meredith drew her knees to her chest. It felt like she was talking about something she’d seen on television, like she was relaying someone else’s story. It didn’t really make her feel anything to tell Jules this, nothing but the rush that came from the act of telling, of having news, of sharing a secret. It wasn’t a happy rush, but it wasn’t a sad rush either.
“Yeah,” she said. “I saw it.”
“Jesus. Jesus, Meredith.”
“I know, right?”
There was a long silence, then another, “Jesus. What’d your parents do? Are they flipping? What’d Evan do? Oh my god, I can’t even believe—”
“Nobody knows,” Meredith said. “I mean, except the police and my parents and Evan, obviously. And now you.”
“So what happened? Can you tell me the story? Are you allowed to tell me the story?”
“There’s no story, really. I was just getting a root beer. And then the guy came in and then he took the money and then he took Lisa and that was it.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“What were you doing while all that was happening?”
“Lying on the floor,” she said. “He told us to lie on the floor.”
“Jesus.”
“You can’t tell anyone, okay?” Meredith said. “I’m going back to school on Monday and you can’t tell anyone.”
“Don’t you think people are going to find out eventually? Isn’t there going to be like a trial or something?”
“For who?”
“Okay, that was stupid. I just mean, it seems like this is the kind of thing people find out about.”
“Just keep it to yourself, okay?” Meredith said. “For now? Okay?”
She knew that Jules would tell. She wouldn’t tell everyone—she wasn’t going to post it on Facebook or anything—but she would tell at least Kristy and probably two or three other people, because Jules liked to know things first but, more importantly, Jules liked to tell things first. It wasn’t like letting out the intolerant cat, exactly, but rather like leaving the door open to see what the intolerant cat would do.
Meredith hung up and lay down on her bed. You could never tell for certain, 100 percent, what a cat would do. But Meredith knew that Lisa knew what the dog, Annie, would do. The dog would wait until everything in the bed was over. Then the dog would leap up onto the bed and form a barrier between Lisa’s body and the other body.
Meredith knew that Lisa could count on this. She was sure of it. It was all she could count on.
8
Claire knew Meredith was on the phone and she knew it was Jules whom she would call first, because Jules’s personality was stronger and she would say things that would make Meredith feel better. Concrete things. Definitive things. Jules was just dumb enough to be sure of herself, to offer proclamations and advice without any waffling, unlike Kristy who had always been wise enough to waffle. That said, Claire had heard all of them—not just Jules, but Kristy, and Meredith, too—say things about other girls that had shocked her. The predictable antics of Lisa Bellow and her clique of mean girls often paled in comparison to the cruel judgment of the supposed nice girls in the back of her minivan—their slut shaming, their collective contempt, their insistence that the most popular girls were “stupid hos.” Every carpool, entire lives were being dismissed with the wave of a hand.
Maybe they were all bitches, Claire thought. Maybe that was all there was to be in eighth grade. Maybe you didn’t have any choice. Maybe your only choice was figuring out what kind of bitch you wanted to be.
She could never say something like that to Mark. It wouldn’t be as bad as willfully injuring a child with a dental instrument, but it was in the same ballpark, lumping every eighth-grade girl into that one ugly category. She knew that when he looked at Meredith and her friends the girls he saw were still eight or nine, still only playing at being teenagers, their giggles about kisses instead of blow jobs, their whispered conversations some version of the Mystery Date board game they had played years ago, where the luckiest girl always wound up with the dark-haired singer from the boy band. Claire knew that Mark not only imagined the girls that way, but that was what he really saw when he looked at them, the way an anorexic girl really saw a fat girl in the mirror, despite all the physical evidence to the contrary.
Not that Claire was any expert on teenage girls, or even (or, okay, especially) her own teenage girl. She listened to them in the car as she drove them to the mall or a movie or a birthday party, and sometimes she stood outside Meredith’s room and listened to her talk on the phone, or listened to the three of them late on a Friday night during slumber parties, their voices clear as day until they dropped to whispers when a romantic bombshell was coming. She was not the mother who sat around chatting with the girls about who was going out with whom and what the popular shoes were.
(The shoes. Mark had called them cute, those awful gold sandals, but had there ever, ever been any more ridiculous shoe? She had seen them on the feet of some of her young patients and sighed inwardly, amazed again by the power of peer pressure. Only when under the hypnotic power of someone else, or someone elses, would a person believe that the shoe, last embraced by a hot, sandy society approximately two thousand years ago, was actually attractive. Still, Claire knew that there was some compelling reason Meredith had picked those shoes on this day, and so she was not going to say anything about it. If Meredith had picked out those shoes on a normal day, at the end of a week where she had not almost been abducted, strapped them on and wobbled absurdly around the shoe store like she had this afternoon, primed for the colosseum, Claire would have said no way.) ?