Cat picks up Tina’s shirt and throws it back to her.
“That goes for the rest of you too.” Tina’s eyes skim over everyone before settling on me. “If I see you on TV tonight, you better hope to hell it’s worth it tomorrow.”
We size each other up from opposite sides of the room, looking for cracks. She’s radiating anger, holding it to herself, keeping it close and not making room for anything else because anything else would be too much. She won’t let anyone see her pain, but you’d have to be a fool to think it wasn’t there.
“So what do you think happened to her?” Yumi asks quietly.
Tina finally tears her gaze from me. Throws her shirt onto the bench and goes into her locker for her gym clothes. “Doesn’t matter what I think.”
“Were you talking to Brock? Did he say…?”
“What would Brock have to say about it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he talked to Alek. Maybe Alek heard it from his dad…”
“Sheriff Turner won’t tell Alek anything now,” Tina mutters.
Cat crosses her arms over her chest. “I’ve got a curfew, so does my sister. Eight o’clock. Just in case some creep had her and he’s still out there. That’s what my mom thinks. She thinks Penny got raped. She thinks that’s what they’re not saying because—”
“Shut your fucking mouth.”
I’m expecting anyone’s voice but my own, don’t even realize I said it until it echoes back at me in my head. That was me. It was me. I stare at my open locker, my hands at the edge of my shirt. I forget what I was doing. I forget what I’m here for. There’s a point to all of this but I don’t know what it is anymore.
It’s quiet, and then, “What did you say?”
I bite my lip so nothing else accidentally comes out.
“What did you say to Cat, Grey?” Tina asks.
I close my locker and face the room. They’re all staring. Cat seems closer to Tina now. Tina may bite, but I’m the one that walks away from fights covered in blood.
“I told her to shut her fucking mouth.”
“Why?”
“Because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
“And you do? Really?” Tina runs her tongue over her teeth and I’m so sorry I started this. I don’t want to be the place she puts her anger. “Well, wait. You’re good at playing pretend about this kind of stuff. So you think she was raped before she was in the water?”
Cold. I’m cold. I don’t feel the floor under my feet, don’t feel anything. I flex my fingers and I wouldn’t know they were moving if I wasn’t watching them do it. I blink and the girls are still staring and I want to ask them if they feel it, that cold, because it can’t just be me.
“You—” Tina stops.
You.
If it had been me instead of Penny, no one would call me a light. No, they’d think of me the way they think of me now, think of it as some kind of natural conclusion to my story, sad, maybe, deserved it, well no, of course no one does, but. That girl. You can see it. It’s written on her.
They wrote it on her.
“Come on, I want to hear it from you,” Tina says. “What if she was?”
“Then she’s better off dead.”
*
in the girls’ bathroom, I run the water hot and hold my hands under it until I feel
a reporter tries to flag me down in the parking lot, some Ibis news station. He wears a stiff-looking suit and tie, smells like a sickening combination of hair spray and cologne. Would you be willing to say a few words about Penny Young? I shake my head and make my way to the other side of the street, where Todd waits in the New Yorker. I glance over my shoulder, pausing briefly to watch the reporter try and fail again to get someone to say something about Penny, and then finally—a bite. A willing freshman who must like the idea of being on television more than he fears the consequences. I climb into the car. Todd waits for a few walkers to go by before pulling out. I rest my head against the window and watch the school get farther and farther away.
“It should settle down soon,” I say.
“What’s that?” Todd asks.
“Everything. After they bury her.” I don’t have to look at him to know I made him cringe. “And then everyone will go back—” Back to where they came from. Todd doesn’t say anything, so I say it again. “Everyone will go. Right?”
“Likely, yeah,” he finally says.
“You think we should worry if someone’s out there? That did this to her?”
“Well, it’s crossed our minds. Your mother’s and mine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, we’ll be driving you to work and picking you up. Should’ve been doing it sooner. I don’t know what the hell we were thinking.” He looks like he wants to say more about it, but he doesn’t. A few drops of rain hit the windshield, and a few more. “I’ve got to stop at the hardware store and pick up a shelf kit for your mother. It’ll just take a second.”
We head up the main street and park in front of Baker’s Hardware. At first, I think I’ll stay in the New Yorker, but then I think about who might walk or drive by and see me. I follow Todd in. The manufactured scent of pine fills my nose. Manufactured pine and real dust.
“Howdy, Bartlett,” a feeble voice says. I follow it to the cash register, where Art Baker sits. He’s the kind of seventy-five that acts ninety. “Romy.”
“How you doing there, Art?”
“This rain keeps up, it won’t come down.”
Todd chuckles politely. “That’s for damn sure.”
“Shame about the Young girl, huh?”
“Yes, very.” Whatever trace of a smile was on Todd’s mouth disappears. “Really is. We were hoping for a better outcome.”
“We all were.”