People Like Us

by Dana Mele

  “Yes. But actually, Brie said to call Dr. Klein.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  That catches me off guard. “Doesn’t it?”

  “You tell me.”

  I press my lips together tightly. I know from experience how police can take statements and then twist the words into something you didn’t mean to say. “Sorry. Are we in trouble?”

  “Did any of you recognize the body?”

  I glance around at the others, but no one jumps in. Maddy is stiffly rocking from side to side, her arms still folded up inside her dress. Cori is watching the police down at the edge of the lake with an odd expression of fascination. Tricia’s eyes are downcast and her bare shoulders are trembling. Tai just watches me blankly, and Brie nods for me to continue.

  “No. Are we in trouble?”

  “I hope not.” Detective Morgan makes a signal over our heads to another officer, and I glance at Brie. She actually looks worried and I wonder if I should be. She makes a lock-and-key gesture over her lips and I nod very slightly and raise my eyebrows at the others. Tai nods evenly and Tricia and Cori link pinkie fingers, but Maddy looks seriously spooked.

  Just then, I see Dr. Klein cutting a path through the crowd, a short but formidable woman, somehow impeccably dressed and composed even at this hour and under these circumstances. She brushes aside a police officer with a tiny wave of her hand and marches straight up to us.

  “Not another word,” she says, laying one hand on my shoulder and one on Cori’s. “These girls are in my care. In their parents’ absentia, I am their guardian. You may not question them outside of my presence. Is that understood?”

  Detective Morgan opens her mouth to protest, but it’s no use arguing when Dr. Klein has gone full headmistress.

  “These students have just witnessed a horrific event and Ms. Matthews is soaking wet and at risk of hypothermia. Unless you’re going to question them indoors, you will simply have to come back another time. I’ll be happy to accommodate your schedule during school hours.”

  Detective Morgan smiles, again without showing teeth. “Fair enough. You girls have been through a lot. You go get a good night’s sleep, huh? Don’t let a tiny little tragedy ruin a great party.” She starts to walk away and then turns back to us. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Dr. Klein ushers us back toward the dorms and darts over to the water’s edge.

  I turn to Brie. “That was a bitchy thing to say.”

  “Yeah,” Brie says, looking troubled. “It almost sounded like a threat.”

  2

  By the next morning, the news has infected the entire school. My dorm is on the other side of campus and I still wake up to the sounds of sirens outside and muffled sobbing from above. I open my eyes to see Brie perched at the edge of my bed, her face pressed to the window. She’s already showered and dressed and is sipping coffee from my I ♥ Bates Soccer Girls mug.

  Looking at it sends a jolt of energy down my spine. We have a crucial game on Monday and I’ve scheduled a long practice this morning to prepare. I jump out of bed, pull my thick, wavy ginger hair into a tight ponytail, and throw on a pair of leggings.

  “Jessica Lane,” Brie says.

  A glacial frost laces over my skin, and my shoulders twitch. “What?”

  “The girl in the lake.”

  “Never heard of her.” I wish Brie hadn’t told me her name. It was nearly impossible to get her still, placid face out of my head last night as I lay awake next to Brie in my narrow dorm bed, and now I need to focus. I want to scrub every particle of last night from my mind. For three years I have been solid, and I will not crack and shatter over this. One snowflake.

  “I did. She was in my trig class.”

  I get a rotten, gnawing feeling in my stomach. “Maybe it wasn’t the greatest idea telling the police we didn’t know her.”

  “Don’t overthink it.” She sits next to me and winds one of my curls around her finger. “I mean, I barely, barely know who she was. We couldn’t tell the cops everything. They’d zero in on that and completely ruin our lives.” Brie has her own, very different reasons for being wary of law enforcement. For one thing, her parents are top criminal defense attorneys, and she’s heading in that direction. She probably knows more about criminal law than most first-year law students. Everything you say can and will be used against you. Since winning debate-club regionals last year, she has made a mantra of the quote “Dance like no one is watching; email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition.” For another, Brie has experienced racial profiling firsthand. Never at Bates, she said. But even I’ve noticed how different things are off campus. Once, when an off-campus party was broken up, a cop walked right past me, a minor holding an open bottle of beer, and asked Brie to take a Breathalyzer. She had a can of soda in her hand. They still made her do it.

  I sigh. “And you can’t tell Maddy anything unless you want the entire school to know.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  Fair is beside the point. Last year, Maddy accidentally released the names of the new soccer team recruits online before we could “kidnap” them from their rooms in the traditional initiation ceremony. That tradition cements us as a team, and besides that, it’s fun. When you take the fear out of initiation night, you take the exhilaration out of the moment you learn you have been chosen. You are good enough. But no. Maddy leaked the names I emailed her for the website and I learned Brie’s mantra the hard way. Email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition. Or posted in a school-wide community forum.

  Maybe we’re not completely fair to Maddy. A few weeks ago, Tai started this new “Notorious” nickname that I honestly don’t get, but I’m not going to be the only person to admit it. Even Brie has been a little standoffish about Maddy lately, and I haven’t been able to pin down exactly why. She isn’t as witty as Tai or as studious as Brie, but she has a reputation among our group as being sort of the stupid one, while she’s actually fairly brilliant. She has the second-highest GPA in the junior class, is field hockey captain, and she designs websites for all of the athletic teams. She gains nothing from the time she puts into it, and it makes us look better. I think she just lacks a certain cynicism the rest of us share, and people tend to see that as a kind of weakness. She reminds me of my best friend back home, Megan Galloway. Megan’s whole worldview was silver linings. That kind of vision is dangerous, but I envy it.

  Sometimes it feels like all I see are dark spots.

  “Anyway, her body’s been identified. Parents called. All over the news.” Brie points to the ceiling and I look up, slightly disoriented. The crying seems to intensify.

  I clap a hand over my mouth and gesture up. “Was that her room?”

  Brie nods. “I think so. The dorm’s sectioned off with police tape and there’s been crying up there for about two hours. I can’t believe you slept through it.”

  “It’s me.” I’m a notoriously efficient sleeper—if and when I manage to shut my brain off—and no one knows it better than Brie. She was my roommate for two years before we got senior single privileges, and we still have frequent sleepovers.

  She grins for a moment, and then her smile fades. “Bates hasn’t had a suicide in over a decade.”

  “I know.” She’s tactful enough not to mention that in the past, when her mother attended, there was an epidemic. An entire wing of Henderson was closed for nearly thirty years.

  “How did you not know her?” Brie says.

  “Maybe she spent a lot of time off campus.”

  I pull a sweatshirt over my head and grab my campus ID and keys and then hesitate, my hand on the doorknob. I glance at the calendar hanging above my bed. My parents gave it to me in September with match days already circled heavily in red marker. Three scouts will be at Monday’s game to see me play, and unlike my friends, I can’t fall back on money if I’m not offered a college scholarsh
ip. I’m not the average Bates girl from a wealthy New England family. I’m here on a “whole student” scholarship, which is code for athletic, because my grades aren’t enough to float me, and my family can’t afford the tuition. Still, this is an extenuating circumstance and it might look bad to hold practice today. My parents might even understand.

  I turn to Brie. “Should I cancel practice?”

  She gives me one of her honestly-I’m-not-judging-you looks. “Kay, it’s already canceled.”

  “They can’t do that.”

  “Of course they can. We don’t run the school. Athletics, music, theater, every nonacademic department is shut down while this is under investigation.”

  I drop back down on the bed, my head buzzing. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Monday is the biggest day of my life.”

  She puts her arm around my shoulder, drawing me into her warmth. “I know, sweetie. It’s not over. It’s just on hold.”

  I drop my keys on the floor and bury my forehead in Brie’s shoulder, my eyes stinging. “I’m not allowed to be upset, am I?”

  “You’re supposed to be upset. You just haven’t fully processed what you’re actually upset about. Last night was traumatic.”

  “You wouldn’t get it.” I pull away from her and press my knuckles into my eye sockets. “I can’t go home. Even if you weren’t already signed, you have absolutely nothing at stake.”

  “That’s not fair, or true.”

  I study her earnest mahogany eyes and perpetually furrowed brow. Her soft, cloudlike hair frames her face almost like a halo. She’s always so neat and together. She doesn’t belong in my nuclear mess of a room, or my life. She has brains, looks, money, and a perfect family. “You wouldn’t get it,” I whisper again.

  “It’s going to be open and shut,” Brie says firmly, rising and gazing out the window again. “Clearly a suicide.”

  “What exactly are they investigating, then?”

  “Whether there was foul play, I guess.”

  “Murder?”

  “That’s generally what they look into when someone dies a violent death.”

  The words echo in my brain. It was a violent death. She looked so calm, so serene, but death is sharp and severe. It is violent by definition. “Here?”

  “There are killers everywhere, Kay. In nursing homes and emergency rooms. Police stations. Everywhere you’re supposed to be safe. Why not a boarding school?”

  “Because we’ve been here four years and we know everyone.”

  Brie shakes her head. “Killers are people. They eat the same food and breathe the same air. They don’t announce their presence.”

  “Maybe they do if you’re listening.”

  Brie weaves her fingers through mine. My hands are always cold; hers are always warm. “It was a suicide. In a couple of days, athletics will be running again. You’ll be recruited. No question.”

  The way the word suicide keeps rolling off her tongue with such ease is jarring. There’s poison in it, eroding parts of me barely stitched together that I don’t want Brie to see. “Now they’re going to blanket bomb us with assemblies on warning signs and how not to kill ourselves and shit. Because that’s so helpful after the fact.” Which I guess it is to a point, when you consider Bates’s history. It’s better than nothing. But it does fuck all for the person who’s gone and everyone who cared about them.

  Brie hesitates. “Well, before the fact, we should definitely be nicer to people. You should think about that.”

  I gaze into her eyes and look for my shadow self somewhere in the depths. Maybe there is a better version of me somewhere out there, and if it exists, it is in Brie’s mind. “Nice is subjective.”

  “Spoken like a true Bates girl. We are such a self-involved species. How into yourself do you have to be to not notice someone who’s about to implode?”

  For just a split second, I think she’s talking about me.

  But she isn’t. She’s talking about Jessica.

  I breathe again.

  “You’re not running for president yet. It’s not your job to be everyone’s best friend. Just mine.” I grab her into a big bear hug and tackle her.

  She sighs and nestles her forehead into the nape of my neck. I allow one moment of serenity, breathing the scent of her hair, one moment in the alternate universe where I’m a good person and Brie and I are together. Then I force myself to sit up. “Did you try to call Justine?”

  She pulls her cell phone out of her pocket, dialing as she speaks. “She isn’t picking up. She sleeps late on Saturdays.” Justine is Brie’s girlfriend. Brie and I never date Bates students as a rule, so we mostly end up with students from Easterly, the local public high school. I recently split with my Easterly Ex, the eminently unfaithful Spencer Morrow. Tai had come up with that moniker while passionately disavowing him after we heard that he’d cheated, and for some reason it had cracked me up and become his nickname. I hear a faint, gravelly morning voice on the other side of the line, and Brie’s face brightens. She pushes me off her and the room suddenly feels colder and emptier as she scrambles up, grabbing her coffee and darting into the hall. I wish Justine would sleep later on Saturdays. I wish she would sleep all weekend. I pick my way over to the window, careful not to trip on the land mine of clothes and textbooks and practice equipment. Laundry day isn’t until tomorrow.

  Outside, people swarm like it’s moving-in day, but it’s not just students and their families. A row of news vans lines the curb, beside which a handful of women holding clipboards pace anxiously and bark orders at tall guys with Steadicams strapped around their torsos. There are dozens of people wearing matching bright-blue T-shirts with a logo that looks like a cross between an infinity symbol and two linked hearts. Throngs of disheveled, homeless-looking townies mill around, bleary eyed, some of them crying. It’s total chaos. It looks like the T-shirt people have set up a table and are providing coffee and bagels. Maybe I should head down to them instead of to the dining hall. It will be impossible to get to it in this mess, anyway.

  I take the stairs two by two, hoping not to run into Jessica’s family, who I assume are here to clear out her room. At the front door I find Jenny standing guard and I flash her a smile. “Get any sleep?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “Be safe, Kay.”

  “You want a coffee or anything?”

  She smiles weakly. “That’d be great.”

  I hop over to the table where the people wearing the blue shirts are pouring coffees and handing out bagels and I grab two empty cups. I’m about to fill them when a guy standing behind the table yanks the cups out of my hand. I stare at him in shock. I know his face, but not his name. He’s a student from Easterly, like Spencer and Justine, and a regular at their cast parties. Since Justine stars in most of their theater productions, I’ve seen him around quite a bit, but never onstage. He’s probably a techie.

  Sleeve tattoos cover his bare, muscular arms from wrist to elbow. His lower lip is pierced and his wavy dark hair tumbles over his eyes like he’s just rolled out of bed. In skintight jeans and a torn-up black sweater, he looks like a washed-up rock star, complete with coke-chic sniffle and bloodshot eyes. Then I notice the balled-up tissue in his hand and wonder if he’s not so much doing lines bright and early on a Saturday morning as he is crying.

  My momentary sympathy dissolves the moment he opens his mouth.

  “Bye-bye, now.”

  “I’m sorry, was I supposed to pay for those?”

  He just glares. This guy’s antisocial, a complete weirdo, even if he would be kind of hot without the tortured-artist vibe and holier-than-thou attitude. “They aren’t for you,” he finally says.

  I look around, confused. “Who exactly are they for?”

  He gestures wordlessly to the crowd.

  “What?”

  He sighs and his dark eyes narrow. He leans in clos
e to me and whispers, looking embarrassed. “We’re here for Jessica’s people. The homeless.”

  “Oh.” I straighten up. “I thought this was because of the crowd.”

  “That is the crowd,” he says.

  I look around again, and realize he’s right. The people filling the parking lot don’t just look homeless, they are homeless. Most of the people here are probably from shelters. I look back to sleeve-tattoo guy. “Why?”

  “They’re mourning a lost friend. Unlike some people.” He flicks his hands. “Back to your lair.”

  I eye the coffee cups he took from me and then glance back at Jenny. “Could I just have one of those?”

  He looks at me with contempt. “No. You can’t. Go to Starbucks.”

  “Starbucks is a five-mile walk. And it’s not for me.” I point to Jenny. “That’s Officer Jenny Biggs. She was on duty when the body was found. She hasn’t slept since then. Can you imagine being up that long after finding a girl dead, a girl you’d sworn to protect?”

  He sighs and pours a coffee, then hands it to me. “Fine. If I see you drinking that, I’ll blacklist you.”

  I roll my eyes. “From your shelter?”

  “Luck flips hard, Kay Donovan.”

  “Okay, Hank.”

  He looks confused. “My name is Greg.”

  I wink. “Now I know. And pull your sleeves down, it’s freezing.” I weave through the crowd and hand the coffee to Jenny, who knocks it back like a shot.

  “I hope they figure this one out fast, kiddo.” She flashes me an encouraging smile but doesn’t look me in the eye, which is a little unsettling. I notice her tapping her phone against her thigh and wonder if she got news while I was talking to Greg.

  “Is that likely?” I ask, knowing she won’t answer.

  She shrugs and gestures to the dorm. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  I head back to my room, wolf down a couple of energy bars and a Vitaminwater, then open up my laptop to google the news story. I learn that Jessica’s family is local, and she started a nonprofit that helps the homeless find jobs and gives them basic computer training through an online learning program she designed herself. Pretty impressive for a high school student, even at Bates. Other than that, there isn’t much. The news stories report that she was found in the lake shortly after midnight, cause of death undetermined. I read several more articles. No mention of her wrists.