The Herd

by Andrea Bartz

  Gary asked about Jinny’s age, several times, confirmed that she was older than us. Nailed down exactly who this woman was, what we knew about her, who might come looking. It later dawned on me that he was doing the math: a stranger, a homeless, vagrant drug dealer, careful not to set down roots nor leave a trace. Now, it occurred to me that he’d be found responsible alongside us, since there’d been a minor—Eleanor, secretly twenty—drinking in his home.

  He’d looked each of us in the eyes, speaking kindly, carefully: And you’re positive you didn’t tell anyone about this trip. That no one knows you’re here. We’d all nodded, sniffling like toddlers.

  Then you drive back now. You say you never left campus, had a quiet night in. Work on your story on the drive home, get it straight, repeat it until you can say what happened down to the tiniest detail. From this moment on we never, ever mention that girl again.

  * * *

  —

  I reached for the old-fashioned knob on Eleanor’s door and locked myself inside. It was dark, abruptly, like a riptide had yanked down the sun. So Eleanor had lied—convincingly, to my face—about the Herd’s origin story. But why? Had something else happened around that time that made her long for a no-boys-allowed club, but she fictionalized it for the Gleam On blog? I tried calling Mikki, listening hard in case I could hear the ring—no luck. Hmm. Karen wasn’t about to tell me, but Cameron or Ted might know something, a secret or story squirreled away from their shared childhood.

  I grabbed my purse and headed downstairs. As I turned into the hall, I paused in front of the door to the den. It was closed, Katie shut up on the other side of it. Her words still stung, her defensive flailing, but I felt a sudden, sisterly urge to tell her about the weirdness with Karen and about Eleanor’s odd fake Adventure Camp story. Katie was smart, her brain making pinging, Christmas-light connections I’d never spot on my own, so maybe she’d have some insights. Actually, she’d been researching that damn book—maybe she knew something I didn’t.

  I knocked, softly and then three crisp thumps. The old door was closed but not latched, so my last bang sent it swinging inward. I caught the knob in my hand, apologizing as some of the room came into view, and then froze. There was movement, a scramble, and then four eyes stared back at me, wide as raccoons’. The rest of the scene sorted itself out around them: Katie and Ted were on the pull-out couch, her with one end of a sheet pulled up to her heart, Ted with another end strewn over his lap.

  The spell broke and with a little shake of my head, I turned away. “Oh my God, I’m sorry, the door wasn’t latched.”

  More rustling as they presumably flung clothes on. “Hana, is everything okay? What are you…”

  I peered out into the hallway, but mentally I kept hinging back and forth between them: Katie…and Ted. Ted…and Katie. This felt unfathomable, like learning your coworker met your childhood friend while backpacking across Nepal.

  “Sorry. I was just—I don’t know where anyone is, and I was gonna walk over to Cameron’s. Just wanted to let you know. Is he…” The awkwardness plumed, filling up the room like smoke. “Ted, is he home, do you know?”

  “Uhhh…I think so. Try his cottage first.” His voice ached with embarrassment.

  I pulled the door closed, tugging too long in an unsuccessful bid to get it to latch. Then, face burning, I yanked my coat from the hall closet. A hunter-green backpack on the floor caught my eye; it wasn’t mine or Mikki’s, and it hadn’t been here before. Something of Eleanor’s, pulled out by Gary? The top gaped a bit, and I couldn’t help myself—I nosed it open and pulled out the manila folder inside.

  My chest froze: The first page was a printout of a Click profile, annotated in small, spiky handwriting. Eleanor. I turned the page: bank statements, Eleanor’s account number printed at the top, all slightly askew like someone had snapped surreptitious photos of the originals. Sprinkled with dots and arrows and question marks. Nausea mushroomed in my belly as I continued flipping through: a copy of a scratched-out Post-it, a meaningless code in what looked to be Eleanor’s handwriting. Then a confusing block of numbers and text, and I had to follow the scribbled annotations for a few pages before I realized this was Eleanor’s browser history, filched from the router.

  The router. The knapsack, rugged-looking yet expensive, was obviously Ted’s. Why on earth had he been stalking her? And where had he gotten all this? Had he broken into her home, or—the thought like a flashbulb—Eleanor’s office at the Herd?

  I glanced back down the hallway, where Ted and Katie were still closed up in the den. She was safe with him, right? Where the hell was Mikki—where was everybody? I slipped the folder back into the bag, zipped up my coat, and hurried out into the tundra.

  CHAPTER 19

  Katie

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 5:35 P.M.

  Hana rattled the doorknob for three excruciating seconds, four, pulling at the door and twisting hard as I squeezed my eyes closed and silently begged her to stop. Finally, she did, and we listened as she moved farther down the hall.

  “Sooo…that was awkward,” Ted announced, correctly.

  I cupped my hands around the lower half of my face, then glanced at him. “Really? Because that was part of an elaborate ploy to indulge my exhibitionism.” He looked at me with enough alarm that I flopped back on the bed. “I’m kidding. Haven’t you noticed by now that I make stupid jokes when I’m uncomfortable? Because holy hell, am I uncomfortable.”

  “You and me and her both.” He zipped his jeans and sat back on the bed, springs creaking. “What do you think that was all about? I thought you two weren’t talking.”

  “We weren’t. I have no idea.” Already, her intrusion felt removed, like a scene that should’ve been cut from a movie. Everything about today had had a sad, cinematic, dreamy quality to it, come to think of it. The huge mustard-yellow house that looked exactly like I’d pictured it. The thin hallways and rattling windows and multiple fireplaces, all the architectural details I’d walked past on a self-guided tour, running the pads of my fingers over every surface. There wasn’t a speck of dust here, not anywhere.

  Earlier today I’d spotted a lineup of photo albums in a seating area near the front door. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I’d pulled one out and opened it, gluey pages sticking as I dragged them across the binder rings. Eleanor in first grade—too far back. I tried another where Eleanor was a little older, skinny and shiny-haired with a mouthful of braces. I found the right era, bell-bottomed jeans and neon tube tops, but I never did find the exact shot I’d seen in the Facebook group, the one on the page with the zigzagging blue glue behind it.

  Surreal, that was the word for today. An entire lifetime had passed since we’d left Penn Station, and it wasn’t even dinnertime. It was instantly clear our visit was a bad idea; Gary could hardly speak and Karen kept babbling, high-pitched and taut. After poking around in their photo albums, I’d come upon the grieving couple drinking wine in the kitchen and felt an instant urge to apologize—here I was, a stranger wandering their home as they tried to mourn their freshly killed daughter. Gary looked up and his expression told me he was thinking the same thing—what the hell was I doing there?—but Karen had waved me over and fetched a glass for me.

  They’d asked me questions, politely pushing over follow-up after follow-up like a long line of dominoes. I told them about my freelance work, living in Michigan for a year, attempting to join the Herd. They asked about my book project, about the fake-news factory in Iron River, and my chest seized up as I mumbled something about still nailing down a new angle since the research hadn’t gone as planned. I was cagey but they barely seemed to notice, each wrapped in their own cocoon of grief.

  And then Ted had walked in, cherry-nosed, and explained that the snowblower’s shear pins had needed replacing mid-job, but luckily his dad had a set back in their garage, which was all to say that their drive was snow-free and the
snowblower was in better condition than when he’d taken it out of the Walshes’ garage. They’d listened blankly and then murmured their thanks, and Ted had noticed my save-me glance.

  “Ted, I was actually hoping you could show me how to do something on my laptop,” I said, “for an interactive story I’m writing? I could use your help.”

  I’d started to rise and Gary picked up the cue, announcing he was going to head to the basement to watch the Patriots game. Exchanging looks, we’d all left Karen with her back to us, staring out at the darkening patio. One sconce was like a spotlight on the snow-covered pool.

  It was a bit of a blur after that—in the den, Ted had remarked, Oh, I love this room, and I’d pushed the door closed without really thinking, and then I’d sat on the foldout bed and asked how he was doing, and he said he’d been unable to sleep last night, thinking about Eleanor, and I agreed and started to cry and said we never should have come, never should have imposed on Gary and Karen, and he’d gently wiped a tear from my cheek and said that he, for one, was glad I was there, and then he let his hand rest against my jaw and then my palm went to his chest and then, and then, and then.

  And then Hana burst in, and now she was gone, and the room had that dizzying, whiplash quality, gears switched so suddenly and so entirely. Right when things were about to get good, to be honest. When Ted and I had probably both been wondering who was going to float the idea of obtaining a condom first.

  Now I just felt confused. Something had happened, something had nudged Hana out of her fury storm and back into speaking-with-me territory.

  “I’m gonna try calling Hana. We were fighting, like, two seconds ago, so she must’ve come in here for a reason.” I patted at the bedding around me in search of my phone. “Siblings are the worst.”

  “They are.” He leaned against the sofa’s back and rubbed his beard. “They’re, like, the only people you can take your stress out on. And we’re all pretty upset right now. Cameron was just yelling at me about me not paying off a parking ticket in person for him or something.”

  “A parking ticket? Definitely not your problem. Anyway, this is different. Hana’s right—I did something pretty shitty. Oh, here it is.” Finally I spotted the screen’s glossy blackness on the hardwood floor. I called her, then dropped the phone back onto my lap. “Straight to voicemail. I hope she’s okay.” I gazed out the window, where old-fashioned streetlamps cast golden, bell jar–shaped glows. “I wonder why she’s going to see Cameron. She probably wasn’t getting any attention here.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Getting any attention?”

  “You saw how Gary and Karen were being.”

  He nodded. “What were you two fighting about?”

  I took a deep breath. “Like I said, it was my fault, she wasn’t being…overbearing, or anything.” And then I told him, how I’d been grabbing furiously for something else to write about. I recounted how panicked I’d felt, how I would’ve said anything to make the nightmare end—the furious agent, the advance I couldn’t repay—and it was only after the words had left my lips that I realized what I’d done. How a book was all I’d ever wanted, ever since I was a little girl in Michigan, filling notebooks with stories and using markers to make fake picture books, writing “author” on every line that asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. And how it’d all fallen apart now—how my idiotic agent had told the wrong person, turned Eleanor’s death into a public spectacle. I stared at my hands as I spoke, methodically dragging my thumbnail across each cuticle, and when I finished speaking and looked up, Ted had uncrossed his legs. Subtly, like a wilting flower, he was leaning away now.

  “Why couldn’t you just write the book about the fake-news people?”

  It was the same question Erin had asked a couple weeks ago, and even she had sounded less judgmental, more curious. What a mess I’d made.

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  He frowned, nodded slowly. “But, like…was it worth it? Selling out your friend so you could keep the book deal?”

  My whole face contorted around my eyebrows: “I just said it was shitty. I feel awful.”

  “Right. I just…Eleanor was probably going through a lot and didn’t need her friend sticking her under a microscope. I bet she could tell, and that it sucked.”

  I stared at him, my eyes and mouth both o’s. He looked around the room, anywhere but at me, and shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

  Tears surged down my cheeks. “Are you saying it’s my fault she tried to leave? That she got killed?”

  He reared away from me, like I was an unexploded grenade. “No. Shit, don’t cry. I’m just, I dunno. I feel bad for Eleanor. She was my friend. Hey.” He pulled me into a hug and I cried on his shoulder for a moment. “We’re all tense. Let’s breathe.”

  “I’m gonna try calling Hana again,” I announced, turning away. I accidentally opened my phone’s photos app, and it gave me an idea. “Hey, have you seen this before?”

  He grabbed it and looked close, the image I’d copied from the Antiherd, tween Eleanor in her low-slung jeans and corset top. “Ha, where did you find this?” He grinned. “It’s in one of our photo albums at home. Cameron used to tease her about it.”

  Cameron. The air in the room felt different, quivering, a sudden drop in cabin pressure. I fished around for a red herring: “It showed up on a memorial site today. I’ve been seeing what fans are posting online.”

  “Yeah, that was probably him.” A wistful chuckle. “She was a firecracker.”

  I grabbed my phone back and gazed at it. This little Eleanor—Ted had known her as a tiny thing, had probably biked around the neighborhood with her, played night games in the dark. I’d met her when she was just a teenager and she’d awed me then, brilliance blazing like a blast of heat. And if Ted was right, I’d played a part in snuffing it out. I’d made her feel like she was in a fishbowl, turned the Herd into a crucible. Suddenly I was crying again, wet lines streaming from my eyes and nose.

  “I think I wanna be alone,” I managed.

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He pulled the door closed behind him and it didn’t latch, swung open a second later, so I could hear him clomp down the hallway, rustle for his bag and coat, and slip out into the night. I lay still for a while, humiliation and fury beating around me like a huge heart. Because he was right: I’d tried to sell out Eleanor, one of my best friends, to save my own ass. Chasing wildly after prestige, after my Big Fancy Publishing Deal, somehow caring more about impressing my agent than about my actual friends. All because I was a fucking unethical moron during my year in Michigan.

  For a moment, it’d all seemed too good to be true: After a few weeks of playing nurse to Mom, feeling lonely and useless, I’d spun my sad move to Kalamazoo into gold. My article on nearby Northern Sky Labs, pitched on a whim after someone from high school mentioned she knew the CEO, had gone viral; Erin wanted to represent me, a bona fide publisher wanted to make me an author. Now, finally, I had something new to focus on, something to give my life structure and meaning, something solid and impressive to tell my former high school classmates when I bumped into them at the drugstore. It would be great, because it had to be.

  And at first, it was. The CEO, a charismatic fortysomething named Bill, was an ideal antihero: witty, outrageous, totally unapologetic in his pursuit of profit. His little brother, Ben, was CTO, and though he lacked Bill’s charm, he seemed to be the more sympathetic of the two, glad to be making Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth for the first time in his life, but tormented by the implications of their creation. Bill’s taciturn wife handled the bookkeeping, and she made my life easy—scheduling interviews, ushering me into investor meetings, inviting me along on extracurricular activities, fishing trips and boating days and picnics and ATV outings, the kind of scenes she correctly assumed I’d need to add some color to the narra
tive. She was small and striking, brilliant in an unsung, under-the-radar way, married to her high school sweetheart and quietly fulfilling about four hundred roles.

  And we became friends. How could we not? I was so lonely, not eager to leave their small headquarters and see Mom in her frailty, and so she and I stayed late some nights, or even drove together to her pinewood home, sipping beer and chatting. She wanted to know everything about New York, every detail, and then in gummy tones I told her how good she had it—this husband, this house, this unexpected windfall, making money from the social-media scramble without having to compete in the twenty-four-hour beauty pageant herself.

  And we were deep into one such conversation early in the fall, sitting on her plump, floral-patterned sofa, on a Monday night when her husband, Bill, and brother-in-law, Ben, were down in Chicago for an expo. I’d brought over some brandy and we were talking about high school, comparing our experiences—her with twenty-eight other kids in her graduating class, Bill among them, and me just an hour away with close to two hundred classmates. And how we’d both found others to serve as armor: her BMOC boyfriend, now husband. And my sister and her cool friends at Harvard, the ones who loved when I visited, who saw past my bad skin and braces and made me feel less invisible.

  “But everyone who meets you sees you,” Chris said, slurring a bit. “You can’t…you’re unmissable.”

  I smiled, then looked away. “Except I feel like nobody really misses me right now.” I finished my glass, the golden liquid no longer burning. “I miss other people, but they don’t miss me.”

  Half the brandy was gone. Chris topped off our glasses.

  I took another swallow. “There’s no way I can drive home now,” I said, my concern like something scampering off into the woods.