Frozen Beauty

by Lexa Hillyer

  County Jail: Hey . . . are you—

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Yes, I’m still here. And I . . . yes, yeah. Of course. [shaky sigh] I believe you. At least, I think I do. I want to. I’m just . . . scared.

  County Jail: [shaky sigh] It’s okay. I don’t blame any of you. I mean, I’m mad, it hurts, but it’s okay. Like you said, I get it—everyone’s just scared. Or maybe, maybe—

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Maybe what?

  County Jail: I don’t know, I just have had a lot of time by myself here, a lot of time to think over the past couple of days, and I’m wondering, like, what if someone wanted me to take the fall?

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Like who?

  County Jail: Like whoever really killed her.

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [silence]

  County Jail: So . . .

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Where would I even start?

  County Jail: I overheard something when I was at the station. You won’t want to hear this, but . . . apparently Patrick Donovan has gone missing. Since that night.

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Wait, what?

  County Jail: Yeah, apparently one of the Donovans called in to say their great-nephew hadn’t come home Friday night. I’m not saying this means anything, I’m just saying . . . it’s worth following up on, don’t you think?

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [pause] I—I don’t know. But what about your fingerprints?

  County Jail: What do you mean?

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: They were everywhere. At the, the scene.

  County Jail: [sigh] Oh, come on, really? It was my truck. How could my fingerprints not have been everywhere? I drive it every day. I—I can’t believe I even have to explain myself. Not to you. Not to any of you.

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: So are you saying you weren’t there at all that night? Out on 28? What about—

  County Jail: Kit had a copy of the keys. I made her a copy for Christmas. Those were the ones in the ignition—no one’s saying it, but they have to be. Mine are at home on my nightstand, where I always leave them. If someone would just come to their senses and look, they would see my keys are at home and they were never in the truck with her, because she went out alone. She took the truck without asking me. I didn’t even know.

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: You didn’t notice it was gone all night?

  County Jail: Did you?

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [pause] I didn’t know she had your keys. Are there any other things I should know about you two?

  County Jail: Don’t do this.

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Don’t do what?

  County Jail: Don’t start doubting me. Listen to me. Listen to what I’m saying. Listen to sense. I have always cared so much about all of you. I have only ever done right by you. I don’t deserve this. I can take being blamed by cops who don’t know me, who just want the easy story. I hate it, but I can take it. But I can’t stand being doubted by you. I’ll really lose it, if I think that you . . . [crying]

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: What do you want me to do?

  County Jail: [sniffing] The person who did this, [whispered] the person who killed your sister. You need to find him. [pause] I would do it. I would try. But I’m stuck in here and you’re out there.

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [silence]

  County Jail: They’re saying this will go to trial. They want me to plead guilty so it will make my sentence less bad or something. Which is crazy. Why should I admit to something I would never do? Listen, I don’t know how soon this is all going to go down. We’re waiting on a court date. Okay?

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Okay, what?

  County Jail: So you have to hurry. [pause] But—but I want you to be careful, okay? Can you promise me you’ll be really careful? [crying]

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Boyd. Boyd.

  County Jail: [sniffing again] Yeah.

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Okay.

  County Jail: Okay?

  Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: I’ll help you.

  Chapter Five

  Before

  9/13

  Dear Diary,

  September is a lie.

  It’s supposed to be fall, you’re stuck in class all the time, but out here the leaves are blazing green and the sun is just mocking us with this tanning weather. It’s lunch period and we’re lying on the grass right now. Dar is saying, I don’t know, something hilarious about what happened in gym today. Mel literally just snorted out her chocolate milk (how unclassy) and some got on your pages. I’m sorry for that. My friends are heathens.

  While they’re talking I’ve been observing the boy across the quad. Patrick. Aka THE CRIMINAL. He’s sitting alone under a tree with one ankle over the other, wearing headphones and tapping his pencil against an open textbook like a drum. All around him, the Frisbee kids are in a heated game.

  I’ve heard at some schools the people who play Frisbee are the cool ones? Yeah, no, that’s not a thing here at Devil’s Lake. Here they’re the geeks who aren’t actually smart enough to be in the real geek clubs such as Roman Coins.

  Here are some things to know about our school:

  Studio Band is hot. Orchestra is not.

  Art class is hot. Art Club is not.

  Winter musical is sorta for losers but the student-directed spring play always has people waiting in lines that wrap all the way down B hall and into C (mostly bc of the epic student theater cast parties).

  I’m not going to lie. It’s nice to be a sophomore and know this stuff.

  Patrick probably feels lost without all this information.

  Not that I feel sorry for him or anything. He is the criminal, after all.

  Also, much as I hate to admit it anywhere but here in the privacy of your gold-and-pink-lined pages, Diary . . . he is also just as hot as Mel (and her mom, gross) have said. Like, when he pointed out in fourth-period geometry yesterday (our only shared class) that the volume of a cylinder is contingent not just on its width but also its length, Mrs. Gluckman literally broke the piece of chalk she was holding against the chalkboard, okay?

  Just trust me.

  His hotness is kind of weirdly exaggerated by the fact that he saves his voice for only these occasional comments. This is a good indicator that he is a complete asshole, but fuck it.

  I made a promise to Mel. And, Diary, you should know that people do NOT break promises with Mel.

  Besides, I already tried to tell her he seems like bad news and she was like wah, you’re not even giving him a chaaaance. He’s probably just shyyyy. He doesn’t knoooow anyone here.

  Now she’s bugging me to make our move before “someone else nabs him first.” I swear, to her dating is the exact equivalent of bargain shopping on Black Friday. Pure mania, and you don’t even really know what you’re bringing home until you open your bags later and go WTF did I just do?

  But Mel . . . she’s like an undertow, okay? She asks you to help her with something—running for class pres or asking out a boy—and you say yes. You get sucked into her rhythm, into doing things her way or else toppling over and landing flat on your face. And sometimes Tessa will say that Mel is making me her gofer or whatever, but that’s easy for Tessa to say because she doesn’t really HAVE friends (other than a few weirdos).

  (And Boyd.)

  (I think he’s mostly friends with her out of pity, and the fact that they are the same year.)

  Anyway. I know deep down Mel’s just terrified of rejection. She’s really pretty and everything, even though she says her nose is too crooked, but it just goes to show that even people who look great on the outside are sometimes hot messes on the inside. And lately, it has seemed worse, like even though she puts on a great show, she’s fragile and could shatter. I don’t know when that happened, or why. All I know is, I’m her buffer.

  Also, whatever. I don’t have anything better to do.

  This is not going to be easy, though. I mean, we’re a full week into sophomore year and I’ve seen this guy speak maybe thr
ee or four times so far (including the geometry cylinder thing).

  Also? He’s been sitting alone every day during lunch. People are actually afraid of him, haha!

  But he doesn’t really look like a criminal to me. He has the scruffy jeans and messy hair (again, hot) but up close (in math class—he sits behind me), I could see he has these freckles that make him seem like just a kid.

  To try to warm things up earlier today, I turned around and offered to lend him a pencil, since Mrs. Gluckman was all “Why aren’t you people taking notes?” He gave me this half grin and held up his own. It’s seriously like he has mastered the Zen Art of Avoiding Speaking Altogether. I swiveled back around and wrote him a note during Gluck’s mind-numbing lecture. “Do you have a girlfriend—yes/no.” While she was handing quizzes back (I got a B!!!!), I dropped it on his desk.

  BUT HE NEVER ANSWERED IT.

  And I swear I could feel his eyes boring into the back of my neck for the rest of class and okay, the note was very immature, but it’s still MORE immature not to respond at all, isn’t it? Like, he could have just said yes even if it wasn’t true and I would have gotten the hint. But noooo.

  RUDE.

  The guy is a jerk. It’s unequivocal. Or equivocal. I forget which means which. Dear Diary, do not ever let Kit read you, she will scream at the bad grammar and it will be the first and last scream from her pure, untouched being, a scream of torment and despair. Children will weep and flowers will wilt.

  What was I talking about? Oh yeah, math class. Well, anyway, who cares what Patrick thinks of me? I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for Mel, so I may as well get it over with. . . .

  “So what’s our move?” Mel asked, poking Lilly in the rib with a plastic fork.

  “Ow.” She sat up and closed her diary, tucking it into her backpack where it was safe. “I’m still working on it. But really, you’re going to regret this. Best-case scenario, he says yes—and then you’re actually stuck going out with him!”

  Dar played with her bangs. “Do you think he really went to juvie?”

  Mel shook her head. “That’s a rumor. He got expelled over a fistfight last year, that’s all I know for sure.”

  “Oh,” Dar said. “Just a fistfight.”

  Lilly laughed and Mel folded her arms, fake pouting. “Fine. You guys can laugh all you want.” But behind the pout, Lilly could sense something else—a flicker of something real. Sadness? Loneliness? Doubt?

  “Oh, Mel.” Dar sighed, breaking the spell, and Mel shoved her in the shoulder.

  Lilly took a deep breath, stood up, and began walking over to Patrick. As much as she didn’t want to interact with him, it was better than disappointing Mel. Ever since last year and their “vow,” the girl had dated five boys without ever asking a single one of them out. It was kind of like how she lined up all her lip gloss along her sink at home, from darkest to light. It looked like a makeup museum. You had to be super careful, because if you knocked one over, you’d knock over all of them.

  As Lilly made her way through the crowded field, she was aware of Tessa sitting at one of the picnic tables near the cafeteria door, blowing a spitball at Boyd. Almost everyone ate lunch in the quad until the last possible moment. Sometimes even when it snowed last winter, Lilly would find Tess eating her lunch outside at the picnic table, bundled in a parka that made her hair go staticky.

  She didn’t see Kit anywhere, but that was not surprising. She was usually tutoring or on a planning committee or catching up on homework in the library—a missed opportunity, from Lilly’s point of view. Kit could easily be DLHS royalty—center quad status, homecoming queen material, and everything else that came with being pretty, smart, and liked by literally everyone. But Kit acted like those things didn’t matter.

  It was high school: what else did matter?

  As Lilly came closer to Tessa’s table, she caught Boyd’s eye. She smiled but kept walking, hoping he got a good look at the cutout in her T-shirt, exposing her back, which stopped just above the line of her shorts. She’d cut it herself over the summer.

  Passing by, she felt something wet smack against the small of her bare back. She yelped and turned.

  Tessa was grinning as she threw a straw under the table. Too late, though. Lilly saw.

  She scraped the slobbery blob from her skin and marched over to Tessa and Boyd and the weirdo table. “Tess, what the hell?”

  Tessa laughed. “Oh, relax, we were just playing around.”

  Lilly’s face went hot at the word we. Like Boyd was automatically on Tessa’s side. The side making fun of her. Treating her like a kid they could just pick on when they wanted to. She took a deep breath. “Tessa, why don’t you just grow up and find a hobby or something?”

  “Why would I, when I’m having so much fun bugging you, sis?” Tessa was smirking like it was the permanent shape of her face, which maybe it was.

  But then Boyd wrapped his big arm around Lilly’s waist. “Chill, little Lill. I will personally make sure that no further saliva-covered items touch your delicate skin.”

  A giant shiver raced through Lilly’s body. This was the thing with Boyd: he was always so casual with all of them. Throwing his arm around them like a protective brother. Wrestling in the yard. Teasing them. How could they ever tell if it was more than that?

  And what was that he’d just said about saliva and skin?

  “Fine.” She turned to face him, blocking out Tessa on purpose. “If you promise.” She leaned toward him, wondering if he could see her cleavage and if that was gross and eager of her to think.

  “I promise.” He reached up and mussed her hair. Great. Just like that she was the baby all over again. But before she could figure out what to say next, she caught Mel’s eye across the quad. She still had a job to do.

  “Gotta go.”

  “You’re always in high demand,” said Tessa, but not as a compliment. She tore a piece of celery in half and crunched on one end of it. For such a tiny girl, she had all the grace of a horse.

  “Actually, I’m about to ask that guy out,” Lilly said, seeing an opportunity. She tilted her head in the direction of Patrick, who was no longer leaning against his tree but was, in fact, in the process of shoving his book into his bag.

  “Ooooh, good luck,” Tessa called to her back, which was still faintly damp in one spot, as though she’d been marked.

  Lilly had to run to catch up with Patrick just as he was rounding the far end of the quad, toward the parking lot. She grabbed on to his shoulder. “Hey.”

  He turned, a surprised look on his face, which, combined with the freckles, struck Lilly as young looking. His eyes were bright blue. Ugh.

  “Sorry.” She dropped her arm.

  His expression remained unreadable.

  “I just, um, wanted to catch you.”

  His eyes darted across her face like he was trying to connect the dots and figure out what her problem was. It made her blush, which was annoying.

  “I mean,” she stammered on, losing her rhythm, “you never replied to my note. From math.”

  He licked the corner of his lips and she wasn’t sure if he was preparing to say something, so she paused. He shifted his weight, still studying her like she was a bug on the wall and he wasn’t sure whether he should squash her or set her free.

  “Anyway,” she went on, unable to stand the silence, or the awkwardness blooming from her chest to her face, “I was asking for a friend. Melissa. The one with the dark hair who I was sitting with earlier? She wants to know if you’ll go out with her. I told her I’d ask you, so.”

  Was Boyd watching? She hoped so.

  Patrick cracked a smile at last. Relief flooded her. But it was replaced almost instantaneously with a flurry of other sensations, not entirely unpleasant but still destabilizing, as though she’d just touched an electric fence.

  He still didn’t say anything.

  “So?” she prodded, starting to get annoyed.

  “So what?” His voice wasn’t
deep and low like some guys’ voices, but it had a bit of gravel to it. Maybe this was his strategy—making people so desperate to hear his voice that when he finally spoke, even just two words, you savored them like two SweeTarts (Lilly’s favorite) dissolving slowly on your tongue while you wait for a movie to start.

  “So what’s your answer?” she said more slowly. She was beginning to feel sidetracked.

  “Oh.” He bit his lip and shifted his backpack. “No.”

  She stared at him, trying to read his expression, still half a smile lingering there like he’d meant to remove it but got distracted halfway through. “No, you don’t have a girlfriend, or no, you don’t want to go out with Mel?”

  “Both.”

  He turned and walked over to where a motorcycle was propped near a sign in the student parking area. She watched, brow furrowed and jaw hanging slightly open, as he put on a helmet, hopped onto the back of the bike and revved the engine, then drove off the school lot.

  It was only after he rounded the corner and the bell rang loudly, signaling the start of sixth period, that she closed her mouth and turned to walk back to class, realizing that it was still the middle of the day and Patrick was apparently cutting the rest of school, just like that.

  It wasn’t, obviously, proof that he was a criminal, but it was enough for her to know she didn’t want anything to do with him, and his maddeningly cute grin and his rudeness and his . . . no.

  Chapter Six

  Before

  HIS FAVORITE FLIP KNIFE. Boxers. Deodorant. A handful of T-shirts.

  People were, inherently, assholes. This was what Patrick Donovan was thinking as he slammed his belongings into the ripping army duffel his uncle Mike had given him, sometime before going on a thirteen-day bender that ended with his jaundiced body found plastered to the floor, half behind the old plaid couch in his work shed. Liver failure.

  People just blatantly sucked. They were self-serving, always, even when it seemed like they were doing a nice thing. “Patrick, why don’t you get a break from all this drama?” his mom had said before shipping him off. “It isn’t healthy,” she’d said.