“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought it,” Jules said. “Because I know you have. He couldn’t have picked a bigger bitch. Years of treating people like shit, and now, well . . . ”
Don’t say, “Serves her right,” Meredith thought. Don’t put those words out there. Once they’re out there . . .
“I’m just glad it wasn’t you,” Kristy said. “It would be horrible if it was you. I mean, it’s horrible no matter what . . . just not as horrible.”
“So are you like friends with them now or what?” Jules asked.
“I don’t think so,” Meredith said.
“What else did they talk about?” Kristy asked.
“Nothing,” Meredith said. “I mean, nothing really. It was all about Lisa.”
“Are you sitting with them tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” Meredith said. “We didn’t . . . I mean, nobody said anything about tomorrow. So probably not?”
“You’re popular,” Jules said. “I can’t believe it. Of all of us, I didn’t think it would be you first.”
“That’s messed up,” Kristy said. “She’s not popular. She’s just . . . ”
“Popular,” Jules said.
Lisa was taking a nap on the couch. He had given her some sheets and a blanket and gone to work and she fell asleep watching television, the dog tucked in the crook of her arm, its little paws jerking with rabbit dreams. In Lisa’s dreams all the stores in the Parkway Mall were open twenty-four hours and she was moving from store to store and taking anything she wanted.
?
After school Becca Nichols came up behind her at her locker.
“My friends are crazy,” she said. “They don’t know anything. They just wish they knew something.”
“Sure,” Meredith said. “It’s understandable. I mean . . . ”
“Are you walking home?” Becca said.
Except for their brief interaction on the town square, and the occasional forced exchange in math, Becca Nichols had never actually spoken to her before. She had moved to the area in sixth grade and immediately allied with Lisa and her group. She was prettier than Lisa, had long straight hair that was so dark brown it was almost black. It went to the small of her back and shimmered. Meredith knew this because in seventh grade she’d sat behind Becca in Algebra I and spent a long time staring at her back trying to figure out how someone’s hair could shimmer, if it was something Becca put in it or if it was just her natural good luck that made it look that way.
“My parents are picking me up,” Meredith said.
“They must be freaking out,” Becca said.
“Kind of.” Meredith closed her locker. “In their own way.”
She turned toward the door and Becca turned with her. They walked past the rows of lockers and Meredith could feel people watching her, watching them. They pushed out the front doors and stood on the pavement outside the school. It was a sunny day and didn’t feel like October, though it was only two weeks until Halloween. Kids were boarding the buses. Did Becca ride the bus? Meredith didn’t know.
“Lisa’s dead,” Becca said abruptly. “I haven’t said so to anybody else, but since you guys weren’t friends I can say it to you. I’m pretty sure he killed her. I think he killed her right away.”
Meredith felt something break in her, a crack as real as bone, something that made her want to strike Becca, the way her father had struck that closet door last summer.
“She’s not dead,” Meredith said.
“How do you know?”
“I just . . . she’s not. She’s not dead,” Meredith said.
“I think he killed her,” Becca said flatly. “That day. That afternoon.” Meredith could tell she’d been saying these things to herself all weekend. They sounded rehearsed, almost. “I think he raped her and then he killed her. I think they’re going to find her body somewhere. In a Dumpster or—”
“I have to go,” Meredith said. She could see their minivan in the lot, parked illegally, idling behind the buses. But she would have fled regardless. She would have gotten into any car in the world to get away from Becca. She would have gotten into a car with a total stranger. She would have gotten into the car with the kidnapper. She walked quickly toward the van and swung into the front seat, dropping her backpack at her feet. Her father was driving.
“Well?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. She sat on her trembling hands. “It was fine.”
“Yeah? Good.”
She could see the Deli Barn from the school driveway. There were two cars in the parking lot and someone standing on the sidewalk out front. It was a block away so she couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Mrs. Bellow, Lisa’s mom. But maybe not. Maybe it was just some lady, popping in for a ham and Swiss. Her father turned the car the other way, even though it would be shorter to go by the Deli Barn.
“So I take it everybody knows,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “How—”
“We’ve gotten a lot of calls. Nice calls, I mean. Support. I guess you can’t keep something like that under wraps for very long. Was it okay?”
“It was okay,” she said.
“Do you want anything? You want to stop anywhere? You hungry?”
“No,” she said. “I just want to go home.”
“Then home it is,” he said.
?
Lisa was watching television. This is what she did. This is what you did when you were kidnapped. When you were a kidnap victim. When you were a victim of kidnapping. You were neither free nor dead and so you lived in the suspended animation of television watching. What else was there to do, you in the sweatpants and T-shirt and the unwashed hair tangled from the bed and smelling like a man you didn’t know? You watched television was what you did.
Except Lisa wasn’t exactly watching the television. She was sitting on the couch facing the television and the television was on, but she wasn’t watching it. She was just pushing the up arrow on the channel button on the remote and the channels changed and she did not stop. She went all the way up and after a hundred and something it was just black but there were still numbers in the corner and so she kept going up and up and then finally at seven hundred and something it flipped around to zero again and she started over. And again she didn’t stop on anything, not even for a second, and it was just flashes of people that she saw, and some she recognized but most she did not, but even if she did she just kept going and then it was past the channels and then it was three hundred and then it was four hundred and seventy-four and she just kept clicking, sitting by herself on the couch and Meredith, watching her through the glass door, wanted to run into the room and take the remote from her hand and—what? Hit her with it? Knock her out cold? Or just settle on a channel already, on Meerkat Manor or Cupcake Wars or SpongeBob, just anything, just stop anywhere, somewhere, please, and then shove the remote under a couch cushion like she and Evan used to do so that no one could find it and change the channel. Lisa with the hair, that blond hair from the yearbook Meredith had rubbed at with her thumb, hoping to diminish but not destroy it, and it was now hanging like weeds from Lisa’s head.