People Like Us

by Dana Mele

  “He was a shithead. He put my brother in the hospital and forced my mom to run to a shelter twice. So I stole a car and made it look like he did it. We’re all much better off.” He sucked in a lungful of air and puffed it out. “That feels really good to say. I’ve never said that out loud. Do you want to go to IHOP?”

  “I don’t think we can drive. Also, don’t steal any more cars.”

  He grinned. “I got his car when he went to prison.” He started laughing. He had a perfect smile, more perfect when an edge of darkness crept into his eyes. “It sucks in a way because he definitely loves me, and I’m, like, the only one he didn’t beat, so, like. Fuck him.”

  I climbed up onto my knees with the world spinning and leaned against his chest. “Everything about me is a lie and I’m terrified everyone will find out.”

  “They won’t,” he said simply, looking deep into my eyes. “Don’t tell them and they won’t. I got your back, Katie.”

  And then I whispered the last challenge of the game. “I never killed a person.”

  We both drank at the same time.

  “You first,” he said.

  I closed my eyes. “When I was a kid, I was really close to my older brother. He would hang out with me and my best friend all the time, reading comic books, playing video games, all the nerdy stuff his cool friends weren’t into. Then the summer after seventh grade they started flirting and it got weird and eventually they started hanging out without me. So, school starts again, and Megan suddenly texts me that she wants me to hang out again, and when I get to her house, I’m still just hurt and pissed at both of them and I’m all ready for this huge blowout fight, but instead, she pulls me into her room and locks the door. I see she’s been crying for a long time. And she tells me that she had texted Todd photos of herself naked. Like, a lot of them, throughout the summer. And that day, apparently, they broke up and he sent them around to everyone at the entire school.”

  “Shit,” Spencer said.

  I opened my eyes and looked up at him. His glass was raised to his lips, but it was empty. I took it from him and pressed it to my hot forehead. “I didn’t know what to say. She’d ignored me all summer and I had more or less refused to speak to Todd in all that time. But it seemed so unlikely that he could have done that deliberately. I knew him so well . . . forever. She was looking at me like the next thing out of my mouth would either fix everything or destroy everyone’s life. It was like Romeo and Juliet or something. Like, why was I chosen as the fatal messenger? I wasn’t included in Acts One through Four.”

  I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was that or cry, and I had worked very hard up until that point not to let tears win. The glass slid onto the bed and Spencer picked it up and set it on the counter.

  “Game over.” Spencer helped me sit up. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “I did. They both died. I told Megan I thought it was probably a mistake, and she screamed at me to leave and never spoke to me again. Then when I asked Todd what happened, he told me someone stole his phone that day and must have sent the pictures out. I believed it. But no one was with him at the time, so I lied to the police and said I was. It made sense at the time. But those pictures just kept getting posted on websites and people commented and said the worst things about Megan. I wanted to call, but I was afraid. And then one day school was canceled. And we found out she killed herself.”

  “God, Katie. You don’t need to tell me all of this.”

  “I want to. And you can never ever mention it again. To anyone else, or to me.”

  “Okay.” He folded his hands in front of his crossed knees, almost prayerlike.

  “So. I never killed someone.” I took the empty glass off the table and drank a sip of air.

  “Do you . . . ,” he began hesitantly. “Do you still think your brother was telling the truth?”

  I shrugged. “Too late to ask him now. Megan’s brother murdered him after she killed herself.”

  “But what do you think?”

  I look him in the eye. “I don’t think I’d blame myself if I was one hundred percent sure he was innocent. Do you?”

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, taking my hand. “You believed him at the time. You can’t go back and change things based on what you know now.”

  “Oh yeah? Who did you kill?”

  “I didn’t. I was just finishing my drink.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I LOOK AROUND Nola’s room for the clothes I was wearing last night and note with regret that they are still lying soaking wet exactly where I stripped them off. I look down at myself. I can’t make a walk of shame across campus to my dorm wearing this ridiculous ensemble. Not in this weather. The wind is keening relentlessly outside, and I’m genuinely worried that if I don’t take care of myself, I could get pneumonia. I’m helpless. And that’s my least favorite feeling in the world.

  I hear my ringtone from within the wet pile of rags and dive for it. Nola watches me, chewing on her thumbnail, with something like jealousy in her eyes. Or maybe I’m delirious. It’s Brie. “Hello?” I rasp.

  “Oh my God. Are you okay?”

  In one instant, all of my anger evaporates and I want her to be home again. I’m sick and falling to pieces and I just want to be close to her.

  “I’m sick.”

  “I mean, did you hear?”

  “I found her.”

  A shocked silence follows, and then her voice tightens. “I’m so sorry I’m not there, sweetie.”

  An icy chill runs down my spine. That means she hasn’t seen the horrible, bitchy, heartless note I left on her door. “Don’t be,” I say queasily. I stand up, but the room swirls around me and I need to cling to the bedpost to keep from face-planting on the floor.

  “I’m coming home right after breakfast.”

  “Don’t.” Brie and Justine had been planning the New York trip for months. They even had Hamilton tickets. It was no small thing. I was a Class A narcissist to blame her for wanting to spend her anniversary with her girlfriend.

  “Maddy’s dead.”

  The words fall out of the phone like bricks from a crumbling building, and I don’t know how to respond. Maddy is dead. It sounds new every time I think it or hear it. It sounds like funeral bells. There is no way to keep the world going forward anymore. Not by myself. Brie has to find out, just like Mom did, like Jessica’s family will, and Dr. Klein, like everybody does, that death is just a skip in the record. After Megan and Todd died, I became convinced for a very short time that I had a heart defect and was dying, but was reassured in the emergency room that I was very healthy and experiencing something called PVCs brought on by anxiety, trauma, and extreme stress. A PVC is a premature ventricular contraction. It feels like your heart isn’t beating anymore, like it’s skipping, but really it’s just that the rhythm’s been thrown for a loop, and it almost always jumps right back into routine immediately afterward. No matter how convinced you are that everything is falling apart, it’s actually working exactly as it should. I briefly saw a behavioral psychologist for my anxiety disorder, and she put it to me this way: “You go to sleep at night, and you wake up in the morning, and all that time you’ve relinquished control of your body to your body, and it does everything it’s supposed to.”

  I walked out of her office and stepped on a dead bird that had not been dead long enough to attract scavengers or to look very dead, and it occurred to me: Death is the PVC. It feels like the end of all that has been done and known. It seemed like the street should be quiet without the bird, but there were plenty of birds singing and chipmunks chattering to each other. I somehow thought the school would board up the locker room after Megan died in it, but they just cleaned out her locker, and I started changing in the bathroom down the hall. It felt like the football team should have stopped playing after Todd died, but . . . playoffs. Mom went o
ff to the hospital, but Dad kept going to work. I went to school, and at first I got away with not doing any work, but then I failed a test. My best friend was gone and my brother was gone. Some girl wrote on my locker, “I heart perverts.” Some other girl crossed that out and wrote, “I heart dead perverts.” I got high and hooked up with Trevor McGrew behind the school and started having PVCs. And things just kept going and going and going.

  “You still there?” Brie sounds far away. My brain feels cloudy and I’m having a hard time making myself focus.

  “Yeah. I’m in Nola’s room. I slept over.”

  There’s a pause. “Why?”

  “Because I was alone and fucking scared, Brie.”

  Nola raises her eyebrows at me and mouths, Should I leave? I shake my head.

  “Call me when you get back, okay?”

  “Okay.” She draws the word out, sounds like she wants to ask me something else. “Do you want me to pick anything up on my way back to campus?”

  “Nyquil. And orange juice.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” she repeats in a softer voice.

  “You didn’t know. None of us did.”

  “Don’t die, Kay.”

  I smile and blow a kiss into the phone. Nola isn’t smiling when I look up.

  “Can we focus, please?”

  My nose is stuffed, my head aches, and my throat feels like there are razors scraping up and down when I speak. The only thing I want to do is rest.

  I lie back on the bed and close my eyes. “On what?”

  “Spencer.”

  “The eminently unfaithful.”

  “The eminently homicidal.” She shows me the pictures of Spencer and Maddy again.

  I throw her phone back at her, my eyes stinging. “Maddy is dead. I have some kind of plague, and my head feels like it’s stuffed with explosives. I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  She bites her lip. “Fine. But someone killed Maddy, and Jessica, too. Your best bet at clearing your name is recording a confession.” She produces a small recording device from her desk, seals it in a ziplock bag, and places it in my jacket pocket. “I use this when I’m rehearsing for plays. It’s ancient, but it works. We’ll need a better one to record an actual conversation in a public place with background noises, but this is better than nothing.”

  “I’m not using that on Spencer.”

  “Think about it. Now that there are two bodies and your motive applies to both of them, the clock is ticking.” Nola pushes the hair back from my forehead. “You are on fire, Kay.” She digs through her desk drawers and retrieves a bottle of aspirin. “Take one.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I tell her.

  16

  I wake up soaked in sweat but shaking with chills. I must have drifted off still lying in Nola’s bed, dressed in her pajamas. I sit up and blow my nose while my eyes slowly adjust to the light. My phone is glowing on the floor next to me and when I pick it up, I see that it’s already early afternoon and I have three missed calls from Brie and one text consisting of a picture of the god-awful message I left on her door. I rub my forehead with my palm. A migraine is gathering force. There’s also a missed call from Spencer but no voice mail. I tap his name, but as soon as the phone rings, I end the call and dial Brie’s number.

  “Where are you?” she says by way of greeting.

  “I’m still in Nola’s room.” My wrecked vocal cords and stuffed nose combined with congestion in my ears make my voice sound like a maniacal troll’s, and it startles me so badly, I nearly drop the phone.

  “Be right there.” She hangs up, and I sit there uncomfortably, feeling like a child waiting in the principal’s office for her parents to arrive so that the punishment phase can begin. It’s even worse that I’m dressed like a character in a whimsical movie where a child’s wish to be a grown-up suddenly comes true with hilarious consequences. I reach for the clothes I was wearing last night, still in a pile on the floor, but to my dismay, they are still damp and cold. I grit my teeth distastefully and text Brie, bring clothes please?

  I look around Nola’s room. It’s an odd feeling being in someone’s room without them. The first time I was alone in Spencer’s room, I tore every inch of it apart. I looked for evidence of prescription drugs, ex-girlfriends, embarrassing childhood photographs, a retainer, anything I might not already know about him. Nothing particularly scandalous turned up. There were a couple of mildly pornographic sketches in the back pages of his math notebook, some girl’s pink fuzzy sweater stuffed in the back of his closet, and an Altoids box in his underwear drawer containing a handful of assorted pills I identified as three Adderall, four Klonopin, four oxycodone, and seventeen actual Altoids.

  I was a little curious about the sweater, a new-looking cashmere cardigan, but it was so buried back there between soccer jerseys and winter coats that it didn’t particularly worry me. And the tiny stash of pills was like candy compared to some of the crap Spencer’s friends messed around with. Altogether it was a disappointing expedition, and I never mentioned my findings. I wonder about the sweater now, though. This was months before the incident that broke us up, but it clearly belonged to someone, and Spencer may have had her in his room before the night he walked in on me and Brie.

  I stand, my head fuzzy and legs wobbly, and make my way over to Nola’s desk. It’s meticulously well organized, with stacks of books on one side, electronic devices on the other, and rows of knickknacks lining the edge. She has a wooden box that looks like it’s been carved out of driftwood, an old-fashioned inkwell, and an array of writing instruments, including several antique fountain pens and a feather with long, dusty plumes. There is a replica of a human skull mounted on a polished mahogany stand with a brass plate engraved with the words ALAS, POOR YORICK. Even I recognize the quote from Hamlet. She has stacks of suede- and leather-bound journals and scripts, some of them Shakespearean and some by playwrights I’ve never heard of: Nicky Silver, Wendy MacLeod, John Guare.

  I pick up one of the journals and flip through. It’s filled with beautifully calligraphied journal entries in violet ink. The first one I turn to is dated three years ago and describes a breakfast in excruciatingly boring detail—we’re talking oatmeal with milk and honey, a cup of tea, and a glass of orange juice. The entry describes the consistency of the oatmeal, the acidity and amount of pulp in the juice, the cracks in the ceiling. It must have been a writing exercise or something. I start to flip ahead in the journal, but a sudden knock at the door sends a wave of guilt through me. I replace the book and open the door to find Brie standing in the doorway, unsmiling, holding a stack of clothes. She’s even more difficult to read than usual with a pair of aviator sunglasses and a hood partially obscuring her face. Her skin looks ashen and her usually glossy lips are dry and cracked.

  “Hi.” I sniffle.

  She shoves the clothes at me and slips into the room, closing the door behind her. “Get dressed,” she orders. “We’re going.”

  I obey meekly as she removes her sunglasses and eyes the room distastefully. She scoops up my clothes and places them in her backpack. “So, what, you’re like Nola Kent’s bitch now?”

  I squeeze myself out of Nola’s tiny T-shirt and glare at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Brie lifts the T-shirt off the floor with one finger like it’s contaminated with bedbugs. “First, you’re dressing like a little clone. And FYI, you look ridiculous in this.”

  “I know that.” I pull the warm fleece Brie brought me over my head and instantly feel comforted by both the familiar feel and smell of it. It smells like Brie, like our cranberry-pomegranate shampoo and our mint-basil deodorant. I feel a little bit like myself for the first time in days.

  “And that bullshit message you left on my door.” Her eyes well up, and it feels like a knife twisting in my chest. “That’s not you.”

  “It is.” Now my eyes fe
el hot and prickly. “It’s not her fault. She wasn’t even there.”

  “What the hell is going on with you, then?”

  I slide the skintight pajama pants off and pull on the track pants Brie brought me. I shake my head, unable to offer an answer, and reach for my coat, but it’s still wet. Brie shrugs her own coat off and hands it to me, and that’s the thing that breaks me. I sit down on Nola’s bed and shove my face into my hands. “I don’t know,” I choke.

  I swipe at my face with a handful of tissues, but I’m awful with crying. It takes me forever to stop once I’ve started, and sometimes it escalates until I lose control of my entire body in spasms of bursting, pulsing sorrow—grief that runs through me like shock waves. It’s the most terrifying feeling in the world. That’s why I decided to never do it again, why I designed the room with the thick ice walls. To keep me from losing myself inside myself.

  “Let’s not talk about this here,” Brie says. “I got you Nyquil and orange juice. Can you make it back to my room?”

  I nod. I don’t want Nola to see me cry again, anyway, and I still feel weird about last night. I walk back to Brie’s room with my head cast down so that my hair completely covers my face. There’s no need for it, I know. People expect me to be crying, and Brie, too. One of ours is dead. I wish I could call Tai and Tricia. Even Cori. We should be together right now. But I can’t be the one to make the call. I have to be the one to answer it. I really hope I get a chance to.

  When we get to her room, she takes her coat back and hangs it up neatly, and puts my wet clothes on her radiator to dry. Then she pours me a cup of orange juice and dosing cup of Nyquil.

  “Are you sleeping over?” she asks.

  “Are you going to abandon me while I’m sleeping?”

  She gives me a horrifically disappointed look. “Really?”

  “I’m sorry. My brain is scrambled. I’ll go if you want me to.”

  “I’d rather keep an eye on you, to be honest.”