Cass and Gramps wanted me to stay home. The two of them tracked me around the kitchen this morning like bloodhounds with separation anxiety. I swore I could handle it.
“Didn’t she find that other girl, too? Lucy MacDonald?”
Cass’s locker is on the other side of the building. Now I’m alone and exposed.
Heads turn as I pass. Up ahead, there’s a poster on the health-class door naming every kind of STI. I keep my eyes trained on that list.
Syphilis.
Gonorrhea.
“Why was she even there?”
I don’t really want to be here, but I couldn’t stand another day at home. I spent the weekend in a kind of numb delirium, staring at my bedroom wall with hollow, aching eyes. Occasionally, Cass or Gramps brought me mugs of tea. Plates of food. I took bites, but didn’t taste. And then there were the nightmares.
I needed out of there.
Besides, Cass has her audition today. If I had stayed home, she would have insisted on staying with me.
“Weren’t she and Ava, like, a thing? Maybe she did it.”
Chlamydia.
“So weird that she came to school today.”
Human papillomavirus.
“I’d be way too upset.”
This morning, I made the mistake of turning on the news. Ava’s face was everywhere. Someone chose to use her yearbook picture. She’s cute, like always, but even Ava couldn’t take a school photo without looking awkward. There must be a million better pictures of her on social media. In her yearbook picture, she looks like any other high school girl, instead of Ava.
According to the news, the police think it’s a mugging. When they searched her belongings, her wallet was missing. Someone tried to rob her, then panicked.
That doesn’t explain why she sounded so scared when she called me. Why she was nervous in school on Friday. People don’t usually get advance notice before a robbery. But, just like everyone else, the police love easy explanations.
This was how it all started with Lucy. The cops made a show of looking into it, but weeks passed, and the only suspect was someone rich enough to be beyond consequences. The media moved on. The police shifted their attention to other cases. But I couldn’t forget the way Lucy looked when I found her. She was barely recognizable as a person, let alone a girl I knew from school. If no one else was going to get justice for her, I would.
But in the end, I failed her, too.
I don’t know if I have it in me this time. The numbness I’ve felt the last couple days is a shield, but I can feel it starting to slip. Watching the news made my hands shake with anger. I spilled hot coffee on my wrist. Still, that was only the barest flicker of the rage that usually powers me.
“What was Ava even doing?”
“Yeah, who goes wandering down some dark alleyway in Whitley at night? I mean, do you want to get shot?”
Herpes. Hepatitis.
I remember this part, too. Everyone was sad and shocked when Lucy’s murder first broke. But under that thin layer of horror was Where did she go wrong? The second the media figured out that Lucy hadn’t been some precious baby angel, everyone was ready to blame her for her own death. Because we’re all safer if it was Lucy’s fault, right? It could never happen to us.
A locker slams with a bang like a gun, and I jump.
Snickers. More whispers. They make my skin itch.
“Flora?” Mr. Kelly appears in the doorway to my English class. “Come on in. You don’t want to be late.”
A wave of weakness washes over me, and my legs nearly give out. What I want, more than anything, is total darkness and silence. A pause on the world.
Instead, I go to English class.
Cass is already in her seat. I take mine next to her as the bell rings.
The PA crackles to life, and Principal Adams says, “Good morning, students and faculty.” Long pause. “As you may have heard, we lost one of our own last week. Ava McQueen was a pillar of this community, and I’d like to take a moment of silence to honor our beloved student and peer.” She goes quiet. Uncomfortable fidgeting. What is it about a moment of silence that makes everyone suddenly want to dance and scream?
Adams continues. “I know this is a troubling time for us all. There are grief counselors available in the guidance office, if anyone needs support. A memorial service will be held Wednesday during sixth period, and all students and family members are welcome to attend. Take care of each other, please.”
That’s it. One moment of silence. Today will be weird. Every teacher will mention it in class. We’ll have the memorial, and then everything will go back to normal. It’s all so unbearably familiar.
“All right, folks,” Mr. Kelly says. “I know we were supposed to have a quiz on the first three chapters of Slaughterhouse-Five, but I’ll postpone that until tomorrow.”
Someone in the back hisses, “Yes!” It’s met with awkward giggles.
Mr. Kelly ignores it. “I thought it might be best if we took the day to remember our friend Ava.” He leans against the whiteboard. “You’re all young. You haven’t had much experience with death. I’ve found that it really helps to share stories about those who have passed.”
It’s a nice thought, but it annoys me for a reason I can’t name. Mr. Kelly is that teacher who wears band shirts under his button-downs. All the artsy girls have crushes on him. They eat lunch in his classroom and titter over stories about his Burning Man days.
He’s still talking. “Does anyone have a story they’d like to tell?”
Everyone shifts in their seats, avoiding eye contact.
“It doesn’t have to be anything monumental,” Mr. Kelly says. “Even a fleeting moment can be profound.”
Silence. The old-fashioned clock hands tick away, counting our breaths.
“I’ll go,” Maggie Quinn says. Everyone turns toward her. Maggie blushes and picks at her sweater. “Ava was in my drama class freshman year. She started this game. Whenever Mrs. Duneski wasn’t looking, you’d point a finger gun at someone, and they had to fall to the ground. Like, even if they were holding coffee or something. We never told anyone about it. It was like a code? Mrs. Duneski thought there was some kind of fainting spell going around.”
A nervous laugh rustles through the room.
“Good, that’s good,” Mr. Kelly encourages. He’s got that artificially soft voice that’s supposed to be comforting.
More people chime in. Ava argued with someone about reparations for slavery at a Diversity Club meeting. Ava sang about mitosis to the tune of a Beyoncé song for a presentation in bio. Ava’s band played an awesome Prince cover at Devon Miller’s house party.
I squeeze my eyes shut. These stories are so particular, each one a distinct image of the girl I knew: Ava bold. Ava generous. Ava funny. But they’re all so peripheral. Ava’s stuck in the shadows at the edges of all our lives. That’s all she’ll ever get to be now.
I have a lot of the same kinds of memories. Ava dressed up as the Bride of Frankenstein one Halloween. Freshman year, in that intense, often heated class about activism we took together, she’d throw out a one-liner that was so smart, so sharp, that the entire class and Mrs. Bennett would burst out laughing. I remember the Ava the outside world saw and loved.
But I also remember other things. Like the warmth of her mouth. Like the warmth of her blood on my hands.
The softest touch on my forearm forces my eyes open. Cass looks at me in a way that is both a question and an assurance: Are you all right? You are all right.
I nod, but who knows if I’m reassuring her or myself?
The classroom door opens, and a sophomore walks in with a yellow slip in his hand. He hands it to Mr. Kelly and leaves.
Mr. Kelly reads the paper, then looks at me with those gentle English teacher eyes. “Flora? They want to see you in the guidance office.”
I should have expected it. No way they’d let me get through this day without some counselor wanting to poke and prod inside my head.
Out in the hall, my feet carry me in the wrong direction, away from the front office. I should go see the counselor. If I don’t, they’ll call my house and it’ll be a whole thing.
After Lucy, Mom sent me to therapy a few times. A nice middle-aged lady with frizzy blond hair and a thick gold wedding band that she twisted around and around while she waited for me to talk. The first time, the silence wasn’t so bad. The second time, it was uncomfortable and kind of boring. The third time, I waited until Mom pulled out of the parking lot and then wandered the neighborhood for an hour. Mom looked so disappointed when I finally came home, but I was used to that by then. There was no fourth time.
I pass a display of student artwork. I lean in to examine a still life of a breakfast spread: coffee, toast, eggs.
Those three gunshots ring in my ears.
I shouldn’t be here today. I could text Cass. She’d leave with me in a heartbeat. She’d understand. Reschedule her audition or something.
I sag against the wall. I have no idea what I want or need right now. The least I can do is let Cass have her day. I’m not so screwed up that I need to ruin that for her, right?
Footsteps down the hall. A whirl of blue-green hair disappears through a door.
I recognize that hair. I follow it into the photo lab.
“Hey, Lainie.” I ease the darkroom door shut behind me.
Lainie Andrews, Ava’s best friend and the photo editor for the school paper. She looks up from her trays of chemicals. Tears track down her cheeks, glittering in the hazy red light.
“What do you want?”
I flinch. Lainie and I aren’t friends, but we usually get along.
Last spring, she was accused of plagiarizing a bunch of essay assignments. One of the other reporters on the school paper was also the lead in the spring musical, and he didn’t like Lainie’s review of his performance. He stole a bunch of her papers from her backpack and uploaded them to the school’s anti-plagiarism software under a different name, so it would look like she copied someone else’s work. Ava, Lainie, and I set up a sting operation involving a fake essay left lying on Lainie’s newsroom desk as bait, and we caught the guy in the act.
On the day we closed out the case, I stood around talking with the two of them until Lainie left, and then it was just Ava and me. At the time, we hadn’t spoken since freshman year. We kept filling the space with chitchat, neither one of us wanting to leave, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I pulled her into the darkroom and kissed her against the door.
This very darkroom.
Lainie’s still watching me warily.
“People were talking about Ava in my English class,” I tell her.
Lainie turns back to the negatives in front of her. “Yeah, me, too.”
On a normal day, I would ask her some questions. She knew Ava better than anyone. I lean back against the door. The same door that I once pressed Ava against. Twisted my fingers in the hem of her shirt.
Lainie sniffles, dragging me out of my memories again. “Was”—she chokes on her words—“was she scared?”
The question catches me off guard, and suddenly I’m ripped open all over again.
The blind terror in Ava’s darting eyes. The air thick with the smell of her blood.
How do I tell her best friend any of that?
“I don’t understand how she can just be gone.” Lainie grips the edge of the table. “I saw her Friday afternoon, and now she’s dead?”
She curls her chin to her chest and tries to hold back the sob, but a tiny cry escapes her.
I’m paralyzed. Do I hug her? Console her? Cass would know.
“You were there with her,” Lainie says, and a note of accusation cuts through her suffering. “Why were you there?”
Her blood under my hands, flowing and flowing no matter how much I tried to stop it.
I force the words out. “Ava called me. She asked me to meet her, but when I got there…”
“Why?” Her voice cracks, and she swipes angrily at a fresh wave of tears. “Why did she call you? Why did you get to be the one with her, when sh-she—” Lainie can’t hold it back anymore. Her body goes rigid with pain as she sobs and gasps, beyond words.
Hesitantly, I lay my hand on her arm. She tenses but doesn’t move away.
“I tried to help her,” I say. Lainie squeezes her eyes shut. I ache with the kind of hurt you feel when you look at a wounded animal, but I keep going. “I didn’t get there fast enough, but I stayed with her. She wasn’t alone, at the end.” I don’t know if that matters at all, but it’s the best I can offer.
Lainie takes wet gulps of air. “Why would someone hurt her? The cops are saying some guy took her wallet and then shot her anyway. How does that make any sense?”
I don’t know. The police’s theory sounds even weaker in the face of Lainie’s overwhelming loss. Again, I feel the urge to untangle the knot. If I could get answers, maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much—for all of us.
But I’ve been here before, with Lucy, and I only made things worse for everyone. There are a lot of people who could get hurt if I fuck up another murder investigation. Not just my people, like Gramps and Cass, but people like Lainie, or Ava’s family. Do I trust myself to get things right this time?
Lainie hugs her arms to her chest, her shoulders hunched and shaking. In the tiny, close space of the darkroom, her every whimper is magnified until it rings in my ears.
“I don’t know why,” I tell her, then hesitate before asking, “Does ‘Wes Grays’ mean anything to you?” Ava’s last words, if that’s even what they were, have been playing on a loop in my head for days. I tried googling it this morning while I was waiting for Cass to finish getting ready. There are more than a thousand Facebook profiles for people with some variation on Wes Grays, but only twenty within a thirty-mile radius of here, and zero with an obvious connection to Ava. Oh, and there’s an architecture firm in California.
Lainie wipes her damp face. “No. I don’t think so. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s something Ava said to me that night. She didn’t know anyone with that name?”
“No. I mean, not that I know.”
“Had she been acting strange at all lately?” I ask.
Lainie looks at her shoes. “Yeah. She’d been weird for a while now. I was gone last summer, doing this photography program at Yale. When I got back, Ava was different. She was never around.”
Her words make the hairs on my arms prickle.
Lainie’s voice is still thick with tears, but it steadies as she speaks. “She said she got a job as a messenger for her dad’s office. He works for the Whitley Gazette. I thought that was kind of weird, because she didn’t tell me until after she’d started, but I didn’t ask a lot of questions.” She makes an ashamed grimace at the floor. “I was jealous. I’ve always been into journalism stuff, and Ava never really cared about it.”
I thought it was me. For months, I thought Ava was avoiding me because I’m such a disaster. But maybe there was something else going on the whole time. From the sound of it, the changes began right around the same time she ditched me. New, mysterious job. Pulling away from friends. It all started last summer.
“You couldn’t have known,” I say. “It might not even be related.”
Am I comforting her, or myself? How did I not realize Ava was in trouble?
Those are messier thoughts than I have time for now. “What about more recently? Anything else?”
“A few days after Thanksgiving she showed up at my house crying. She kept apologizing. Said she knew she’d been a crappy friend. After that, things got better. She was around more often, but she still seemed distracted all the time.” Quiet tears start up again. “It’s senior year. I thought we were drifting apart. Normal stuff. I thought we’d work it out, eventually.” Lainie looks at me with wide, glassy eyes. “She used to talk about you, you know.”
Everything inside me goes cold. I don’t want to hear this. I want t
o hear it so much.
Lainie goes on, “She thought you were a badass. When Lucy died? She thought you were right. She was mad when he got away with it.”
I can’t speak. I bite down on my tongue to keep myself here. Now.
Lainie asks, “You think she called you because she needed help?”
I nod.
Lainie’s mouth quivers, but she holds it together. “Will you still do it? Help Ava, I mean. You could find out who did this to her.”
I’m quiet a long time.
I don’t know if I’ll find any answers, but it doesn’t sound like the police are going to, either. To them, Ava is just one girl. At best, she’s one name on a long list of victims. And then there’s the undeniable fact that it’s all too easy for the cops to shrug their shoulders and move on when a black girl is shot to death in an alleyway.
But Lainie will never move on. I will never move on.
So who’s going to fight for Ava?
“I will,” I tell Lainie. “I promise.”
I ask her to find me if she thinks of anything else, then slip out of the darkroom, leaving Ava’s best friend alone in her grief.
I make it three steps down the hall before I have to stop and catch my breath.
Cass and Gramps were right. I shouldn’t have come to school today. Gramps would come get me if I asked, but Cass would be furious if I left without telling her.
I text her: Can’t do this anymore. I need to go home, but you stay for your audition. I’ll be fine I promise
She writes back within seconds: Meet me out front in 5. Don’t argue
Outside, I perch on the stone wall to wait for Cass. I tilt my face to the sky to catch some of the weak winter sunlight. Barely five seconds out of the building, and I already feel a little better.
The distinctive pong! of a bouncing tennis ball makes me look around. Elle Dorsey is waiting by the curb, scrolling through her phone with one hand and bouncing a tennis ball with the other.
Elle is the dark queen of Hartsdale High. She’s one of those perfectly coiffed, perfectly tweezed girls who could (and would) slit your throat with one of her manicured nails.
She knows everything that goes on at this school.
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