by Andrea Bartz
Of course, Dad wasn’t any more interested in parenting than Mom was. He set me up on the daybed in his new apartment—I never got a real bed, never thought to ask—and continued on with his adult life, finding a job and dating new women and leaving me to fend for myself. How lucky for him, for both my parents, that I was smart and determined, that I got myself into Harvard no thanks to them. When he’d driven me to LAX for my flight to Boston, my suitcases almost bursting in the trunk, he’d turned up the baseball game on the radio in lieu of talking. I’d spent the entire drive—plus the six-hour flight—panicked about how I’d get myself from Logan International to my dorm.
But then, like a dummy, I’d thought things would be different after I graduated. I was an adult now, too, not someone he was expected to care for—not that he’d done much of that. That summer, I moved across the country at the last minute, ostensibly for a job at a tiny PR agency but in reality because I needed to run, needed to put as much land between Massachusetts and myself as possible. Then the loneliness really descended, like a heavy velvet drape: Eleanor, Mikki, and Katie having fun in New York City, and me miserably staring out at the Pacific. When Eleanor had begged me to move to New York and help her start the Herd six years later, I’d wept with relief.
I padded into the hallway and knocked on the guestroom door; inside, Mikki was crumpled on the bed, on top of the quilt.
“Hey,” I said.
“We need to go to the police,” she replied. “About the Bitcoin.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and swallowed.
Eleanor had called Mikki into her office the day she got the first blackmail letter a year ago; mine and Mikki’s had arrived that same morning, so we were all caught in the same hellish conundrum. In low voices, we’d debated; Mikki admitted that Jinny’s mother, still a high school teacher in Tennessee, had just been looking at her on LinkedIn. It might be her, we reasoned, the one person to whom Jinny had mentioned her whereabouts, now pushing us to turn ourselves in or at least make her life a little easier. The one person still searching for Jinny.
Mikki had suggested coming clean, giving the poor woman some closure, but Eleanor had shut that down. “I’ll pay for yours if you can’t afford it,” she’d hissed, and Mikki had blushed. Again, Eleanor had sealed off the incident, cauterized it on the spot: We never, ever speak of this again. And we hadn’t. And it had been working out fine, unless this woman—or someone she knew—had made their way to New York with Eleanor in their crosshairs.
“I don’t think we should,” I said. “But here’s the thing: Daniel got one of the letters. Meant for Eleanor.”
“Fuck.” Mikki tugged a pillow over her face.
“But he doesn’t want to know anything about it, about what Eleanor did. I didn’t tell him we’ve been getting them too. He let me take the letter, said the last thing he wants is to sully his memory of her. So it’s still okay.”
Mikki hugged the pillow to her chest. “I looked the mom up,” she finally said. “Definitely looked like she hasn’t been anywhere near New York this month. Or ever.”
“I did the same thing.” The minute I’d gotten home from Daniel’s apartment, before I’d even opened the envelope I’d yanked from Eleanor’s bed, I’d tracked Celia Hurst on all her feeds and apps. She always tagged a location or checked into spots on Hopscotch throughout her day, and certainly it appeared she was going about her life in Bristol, Tennessee. An alarming thought hit me and I shoved it away: What irony that’d be, if she’d collected our money and used it to fund her trip to the Big Apple—to fund Eleanor’s murder. “We’re gonna get through this. There’s nothing tying us to Jinny, and they’ll figure out who killed Eleanor and throw them in jail and, I promise, we’ll be okay.”
She wiped at her nose. “I just miss her.”
“Me too. So much.” I nestled into the pillow next to her and together, we cried.
* * *
—
I sat up. Mikki was gone and I was still on her bed, the quilt rumpled beneath me. The sky was purple gray and half a moon squinted into the window from between two clouds. Time had felt so strange this week, ballooning and shrinking from hour to hour. I spotted a clock on the wall—still late afternoon.
I crept back into my room and looked around, taking in the details, all things that Eleanor, once a living, breathing, red-blooded girl, had chosen, given places of honor in her bedroom. A Frida Kahlo portrait watched me coolly from above the door. Had Eleanor truly planned to move to Mexico, or was it a harmless fantasy? It felt so campy and farfetched. As ridiculous as my best friend turning up dead on the roof of her own company headquarters. The teenage girl who’d picked out this cloud-covered comforter never saw it coming.
My eyes fell on her yearbooks on one end of her bookshelf: thin, stapled ones in grade school and then shiny hardcovers in high school. I pulled out the last paperback one; growing up she’d gone to school with Ted and Cameron, if I remembered correctly, and I was curious to see them all as kids. But when I pulled it out, it wasn’t junior high, as I’d expected: Hillside Elementary School was splattered across the cardstock cover. But the year was just a year before high school, and Eleanor was in…
Right, the two skipped grades.
Suddenly I was sick of being alone. Why come all the way up here to hide in our respective corners? I went out into the hall and paused at the top of the stairs, facing a window that overlooked the back patio. The pool. That fucking pool.
It’d all been innocent. We were so young, drunk on our youth and promise, rising stars about to set the world on fire. We’d proposed toast after toast, clinking our shot glasses together heartily, sampling different bottles from Gary’s vast booze collection, aged Macallan and Hendrick’s Gin and a weird, licoricey Hungarian liqueur, its bottle the shape of a cartoon bomb. And that’s what we were—bombed.
I gazed down, as if this were a play, as if I could travel back in time and watch from up here. My eyes rolled across the girls below: Eleanor in her mother’s silk robe, me lining up Solo cups on a side table, Mikki in a crop top and jean shorts, fiddling with the music. And Jinny: skinny, relaxed, with huge wire-rim glasses and a patch shaved from her black hair above one ear.
Her backstory was the stuff of legend: Jinny, the story went, had hopped a train north to escape from her family, squashed in a trailer home in Appalachia. She’d stopped in New York but hated the vibes there, so she continued north, settling somewhere outside Boston. She was a few years older than us, and Eleanor had met her during her high school years. We rule-following Harvard students all had girl crushes on her—we were honored when she chose to hang around after making a delivery, shooting the shit and enjoying her wares with us. She’d dropped out of high school the moment she turned eighteen, had lived on the streets when she and her crust-punk boyfriend had split, and there was an aura of danger around her, a thrilling rebellious streak. She lived somewhere between Cambridge and Beverly—we were never sure where, and it probably changed by the week—so it was a no-brainer to hit her up while the three of us were in Eleanor’s hometown.
We’d all been giddy that night—it was finally warm and graduation was a few weeks away, and Eleanor had just scored her investment meeting to get Gleam off the ground. In fact, it was a celebration: Eleanor’s parents were out of town, so we’d have a secret party, not telling anyone or posting on social media so that our other friends wouldn’t feel left out.
In my mind, the little figures on the patio milled around: Booze was everywhere, splashing into cups with pours of Sprite or Diet Coke. Coke, real coke, from Jinny’s backpack, little lines Mikki expertly arranged on the patio table. Tabs of Molly, of course, and some ketamine, though I was too scared to touch it. Jinny had had a little of everything, and she was rolling, seemed genuinely happy to be there with us.
We were playing music from somebody’s phone, dancing next to the swimming pool.
I could feel it all: the dizzying hum of the season’s first cicadas, wafts of lilac eddying around, a few fireflies strobing in the lawn. Mikki cueing “Empire State of Mind” on her iPhone and clapping in delight as Eleanor stood to shout-sing along: “Let’s hear it for Neeew Yooork…”
Someone had had the great idea of going for a swim. And Eleanor said it was fine, as long as we left everything how we found it. So we’d peeled the pool cover back halfway, folded it on itself, then stripped to our underwear and jumped in. Diving and doing handstands and dunking each other, so full of life and liquor. Jinny’s eyeliner bled down her cheeks. I had the dizzy notion we were all best friends that night, Jinny was one of us, although we only saw her every few months, although she knew much more about our lives than we did hers.
I watched as the imaginary Hana below me had another idea, the decision that would change the course of our lives. Pizza. I’d wanted frozen pizza, volunteered to make it, climbed out of the pool shrieking about the cold. I’d closed the patio doors behind me and stumbled to the basement, holding on to shelves and things to keep from falling as I made my way to the chest freezer in the back. And I’d found a box, pepperonis and sausages and tiny squares of red and green peppers glistening on the front, and hugged it to my chest idiotically before beginning the climb back upstairs.
The lights in the kitchen had been on, and using up my full, drunken concentration I’d found a pan, sliced at the pizza’s plastic covering—careful, careful with the knife, I told myself. The other three were still outside, music blasting. I managed to get the pizza onto the cookie sheet and slide it into the oven without burning myself, and I’d celebrated that small victory for a moment before realizing I hadn’t turned it on.
I was still fumbling around the kitchen when someone banged against the glass door, and I screamed and dropped the Coke and rum I’d been clutching. Then Mikki threw open the sliding door and stepped inside, tripping over the base.
The next part was hazy, the timeline unclear.
Jinny fell, Eleanor cried, slurring and sobbing as she stumbled inside. They were dripping everywhere, trembling from the wetness and the terror. Jinny had slipped and hit her head on her way into the pool, they said again, and they’d tried to get her out but she’d gotten herself tangled in the pool cover, fighting them off as they tried to yank her out. And then she’d gone limp. By the time they’d pulled her onto the cold cement, she was already gone, already cold, already dead.
If I’d been out there…well, we’d never know. But it was easy to imagine things would have turned out differently. I’d have noticed her more quickly, coordinated our rescue effort. I’d have run inside and dialed 911. But even then, standing just inside the sliding doors, drunk and damp and high, I’d done nothing.
I’ve thought about it a lot since then. Perhaps I didn’t protest because my inebriated mind was performing some unspoken calculations. Four drunk women, three of them white. The cops who’d come knocking if we dialed those three numbers.
All at once, as I stood in front of the second-story window, sparkly static whooshed in front of my eyes, and my hands and feet screamed out with fizzy tingling. Holding on to the wall for support, I shuffled back into Eleanor’s room, closed the door, and sank to the floor.
My eyes fell on her grade-school yearbook, still leaning out from the shelf. It snapped into place, like popping a single bit of bubble wrap. Eleanor’s Gleam On article, the one we’d worked so hard on together, me pushing for more details until it was just right: The Herd’s origin story, how she’d hated this junior-high-only Adventure Camp, ropes courses under the male gaze, the long yarn from that to New York’s premier all-female coworking space and community. But if she hadn’t gone to middle school…?
Would Mikki know what to make of this? It was probably nothing, some simple explanation; Eleanor had gone to camp in grade school, maybe, and she’d moved the story up by a few years to make it more relatable, fudged the dates. I wandered the house, peering in on seating areas scattered every which way. Again, it struck me how cavernous this mansion seemed, how easy it was to lose a person, tangled in the neon-blue tarp stretched like skin over the pool outside. Mikki was nowhere to be found and this just compounded my confusion, a general sense of disorientation, of reality crumbling off in tiny flakes.
I almost walked directly into Karen, who was coming out of the basement, carrying wine.
“I—I wanted to see if you needed help with dinner or anything.”
She looked alarmed. “It’s not even five yet,” she replied.
“Oh. I…I fell asleep.”
She inched toward the kitchen. “Well, speaking of five o’clock, I was just going to open this nice Merlot blend. Can I get you some?”
She chattered nervously as she battled with a corkscrew, and I took in the scene: two empty bottles lined up by the sink, a lipstick-stained glass she’d pulled over next to her. While we visitors had retreated to our quarters, Karen had been drinking. Before today, even at fancy restaurants, I’d never seen her finish a glass.
She carried over two hearty pours and I clinked hers before taking a sip. Her small-talk soliloquy made me nervous; normally Gary was the talker. Finally she ran out of steam and fell silent.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked. “About Eleanor, I mean.” I looked down at the wine, gave it a little spin.
“Of course.”
“She skipped seventh and eighth grade, right?”
“That’s right, yeah. The school psychologist thought she’d be fine jumping three years ahead, but we thought that was a bit much.”
“Right.” I took another sip. “But she seemed okay with two?”
“Oh, she thrived.” Her voice cracked. “She seemed so relieved to be challenged, to not be sitting in class bored out of her skull. That boredom was much harder for her, being so far ahead of the other students. She’d grasp a concept in two seconds and then the class would spend two weeks on it.”
“For sure. That must’ve been awful.” I tapped a nail against the glass, listened to the chime. “How did you know it was bothering her? Was she acting out, or…”
“It wasn’t good for anybody. She was always…almost too smart for her own good, I’d say.” She grimaced. “Certainly smarter than the rest of us here, that much was clear.”
There was discomfort in this, pain in the jokey self-deprecation. Sober, she might have been able to cover it up, but I saw it in the way she recovered, curled herself over her glass.
“This is gonna sound random, but did she ever go to an adventure camp? Like in the summer, before the school year?”
She swallowed and looked up; her eyes made it clear she had no idea what I was talking about. “A what camp? Adventure? That sounds like Eleanor’s nightmare.”
“Okay. So she didn’t…” I wrapped my fingers around the glass’s spine. “It’s just weird, because when she announced she was starting the Herd, she wrote this essay. And…maybe she was just remembering it wrong, or conflating it with something else, but…”
I saw Karen’s eyes, white and round as two sand dollars, and stopped. It was that Oh crap look, equal parts bewildered and defensive.
“I’m getting all mixed up,” she announced, touching her temple. “I haven’t been eating much and then I just went ahead and opened this wine because it’s what we do when Eleanor’s here for the holidays, and usually Gary or someone will say, ‘Hey, it’s five o’clock somewhere!’ and so I just…I thought…” Abruptly she pushed both palms onto her face and I watched in alarm as her shoulders shook, her crying somehow both huge and tiny. After a moment I scraped back my chair and put my hand on her back, rubbing gingerly, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Do you want me to find Gary?”
She shook her head, her hands moving with her face.
“Do you want…should I help you upstairs, do you want to lie
down?” This she ignored, too, and I thought suddenly of my mom, what she’d definitely want in that moment: “Would you like to be left alone?”
A little sobbing noise slipped through her fingers and she nodded. I thought about attempting a hug and instead gave her shoulder a final pat, then headed back upstairs, dread building in my lungs with every step.
* * *
—
I’d seen Karen cry like that exactly once before. When I woke up in Eleanor’s bed almost a decade ago, I’d been so hungover my skin hurt, my eyeballs, my bone marrow, every cubic inch of me. I’d lain still while my sludgy brain tried to figure out how much of the night before was a nightmare, a bad dream.
None of it, it turned out. It was all real, too real. In the late hours of May 7, while Jinny’s body leaked blood onto the patio, we rising stars had listened to Eleanor, cocaine coursing through our veins, alcohol gnawing away at our brain cells. We faced her, crying as she decided we couldn’t handle this now, her parents would know what to do, we should move the body inside and then deal with it in the morning, when we were clearer, when her parents could help.
I’d watched, trying not to scream, as Eleanor and Mikki carried Jinny inside and laid her on her back. We’d turned off the lights and huddled together on Eleanor’s bed, afraid to be alone. As we shivered in the dark, Eleanor told us again why this was for the best—graduation was around the corner, we had illegal substances in our systems, it would be clear we were breaking the law, our futures could be ruined. Plus we’d already moved the body, and there was no guarantee anyone would believe that it was an accident.
Then Mikki had begun to freak out, her chest heaving, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. And Eleanor had run her fingers through Mikki’s hair and said we would get it all straightened out in the morning.
We’d woken to the sound of Karen’s screams. They’d gotten Eleanor’s voicemails, begging them to hurry home, but we’d slept through their calls back. Eleanor had explained everything, all three of us sobbing with high-pitched coyote sounds, and Karen had cried silently, shoulders shaking, just like she had a minute ago.
