People Like Us

by Dana Mele

  She doesn’t hesitate. “We’d hire my parents.”

  “Did you ever really think I might have done it?”

  “Not for a second.”

  “You questioned me with a hidden mic,” I remind her. “Yesterday, you said doubt was the cornerstone of faith.”

  “It is.” She doesn’t look as confident as she did then.

  “I don’t know how we got here.”

  She takes a long sip of coffee. “I have a couple ideas.”

  “You hurt me. I hurt you. You’re never going to leave Justine.”

  “I love her.” She looks at me almost guiltily. “She’s always been there for me.”

  We abandoned each other, I realize. It was a two-way street.

  “Then before I destroy my friendship with the one person who’s been here for me the past month, tell me why you asked us all to split up the night Jessica was murdered.”

  “Don’t make me,” she whispers.

  “If you want me to turn against Nola, give me a sign of good faith.”

  Brie’s cheeks flush and she bites her sleeve. “You can never tell.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I was with Lee Madera. Ask her.”

  “So it’s not really Justine. It’s me.”

  “The timing never worked,” she says in a hoarse voice. “First you told that homophobic joke about Elizabeth Stone right before I was going to ask you out. Then you pulled that Dear Valentine stunt, just when I thought maybe you weren’t like the others. And then the cast party, which I thought was supposed to be a date, when you threw yourself at Spencer. You have broken my heart so many times. When you finally kissed me and then yanked your hand away and went back to Spencer . . . I mean that was it. Even after that, at the Skeleton Dance, when Justine and I had a huge fight, I went looking for you and found you all over that junior. It just never worked.”

  The picture rearranges itself in my mind. She hasn’t been holding my heart hostage all this time. I’ve had chance after chance to get things right, and I never did. “I’m so sorry, Brie. I didn’t realize.”

  Brie raises her eyes to mine tentatively. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

  “I’m not lost. Maddy and Jessica are dead. They have nothing to come back from. Cori has a shield of nepotism and Tai and Tricia will manage to deal with public school. You and I are going to recover. Or not. It’s up to you.”

  “I miss you.”

  I smile, but my lips feel twitchy. “Me too. You’re my one good thing.”

  “You’re my very bad habit.” She grins and brushes the back of her hand over her damp eyelashes. “Tell the police about Nola.” She places the paper outlining her theory of Nola’s guilt in my lap.

  I open the window a crack, breathing a wisp of frozen air. “It doesn’t matter what I tell them. There’s no evidence against Nola.”

  That means I have until the DNA testing is complete before I’m arrested.

  Twenty-four hours or less.

  * * *

  • • •

  NOLA RETURNS THAT afternoon. I meet her at the train station, and she fills me in on the rest of her Thanksgiving break. Her parents flipped out and begged Bianca to come home, which she finally condescended to do, and then of course once the other guests arrived, they all acted like nothing happened. The rest was blah: Bordeaux, cliff-side golf, cranberry vodka.

  We stop in the village to pick up some food, but she wants to go back to her dorm to eat it. This works out pretty well because I’d love the opportunity to sneak one last look at her journals before making any accusations. Luck is on my side; as soon as we walk in the door, she puts her food down and heads out to use the bathroom and I dive for the journals and start flipping through madly.

  It’s mostly pages and pages of boring accounts of daily routines in that practiced calligraphy. There are some copies of poetry and Shakespearean sonnets and speeches. I see one or two famous ones that I recognize, but most are obscure, at least to my eye. I finally find one that’s dated this year and my heart stops when I read the first line in that delicate, studied handwriting:

  Tai Burned Chicken

  I snap the journal shut, my mind racing. She could be back at any second. I dive across the room and stick the journal hurriedly behind my back and underneath my coat. Most of those pages, nearly all of them, are copies of things other people have written. I didn’t catch the exact date on this entry, just the year. For all I know, Nola used the revenge blog as source material to practice her calligraphy. Even so, how twisted is that? Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare—that’s one thing. But this?

  Nola opens the door and floats back into the room. She looks like an old-fashioned doll, dressed in a short black velvet dress with a lacy collar, white tights, and black Mary Janes, her hair tied with a sleek black ribbon and her eyes made even wider than usual with black liner and dark mascara. She’s back to being School Nola.

  I hang back by the bed, the journal stuffed into the back of my jeans, hidden under my coat. Part of me wants to take it and run, but I can’t bring myself to do it. After everything we’ve been through, if Nola really did this, I need to hear it from her. To my face. No more guesswork and no more connecting dots. I need a confession or a refusal.

  “You want to hear something awkward?”

  “Always.” She sets down her tray and drizzles an amber dressing on her salad, then looks up at me with sparkling eyes. “Spare no details.”

  “I ran into Brie on my train home.”

  Her expression darkens, but she doesn’t say anything, instead taking a prim bite of strawberry and swirling her tea with a plastic spoon. Then she waves her hand as if granting me permission to continue.

  “She was actually pretty apologetic about how things blew up.”

  “I bet.”

  “She sounded like she meant it.”

  “Ha!” Nola snorts.

  I sit down on the bed hard and bounce my knees up and down nervously. I don’t want to get off subject. “She had her own ideas about the whole Jessica thing.”

  “Dare I hope you had an opportunity to record them?”

  “Of course not. She ambushed me.”

  “Are you okay? Why didn’t you call me?” Nola seems truly concerned, which just makes this all the more painful.

  “It was fine. I went to Spencer’s just in case.” She gives me an uncertain look. “He’s out. Multiple alibis. And he slept on the couch. He thinks it was Greg.”

  She relaxes. “I should have come back sooner. My parents are so obsessed with my sister, they wouldn’t have noticed if I left.” She shakes her head and waves her hand.

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “It’s never enough. They want me to be Bianca,” she says with a sad smile.

  I’m getting sidetracked. I look at her, determined. “Brie had a really interesting theory.”

  She sighs loudly. “Will you shut up about Brie?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I get it. You’re in love with her. You always have been. You always will be.” She adopts a mocking tone. “She says the sky is yellow and you say, gosh, I never realized that, Brie. You’re so brilliant.”

  My mouth drops open. “You don’t know the first thing about my heart, Nola. And that doesn’t shock me because I’m not sure you have one. You act like we’re so close and then you say things like that to my face?”

  She laughs, completely undisturbed. “Kay, get over yourself. I’m just speaking your language. This is how you talk to people.”

  “Not anymore. I hate that I was such a bitch to you.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And I apologized.”

  “Did you?” She tosses her empty salad bowl in the trash can and starts on an oversize chocolate chip cookie. She holds it out to me, but it doesn’t feel
like a peace offering. More like a ritual that marks the beginning of a brutal competition, a coin toss at the start of a game.

  I shake my head uneasily. “I thought I did. I’m getting way off track. I need to just get this out of my system and have it over with and done.”

  “Rip the Band-Aid off, Donovan,” she says, smirking.

  “Brie is pretty convinced—no, she’s almost positive,” I correct myself. “She thinks there’s only one person who fits all the pieces of the puzzle. The cat, the website, me, the investigation. Everything but Jessica.”

  “There goes your brilliant theory.”

  “I know. We’ve been thinking of Jessica as the central piece. But when you’re solving a puzzle, you can’t get obsessed with a missing piece. You connect the pieces you do have, and then sometimes the picture emerges.”

  “So what if the other pieces are unconnected?”

  “The thing is, they fit together pretty well.”

  She pauses for a moment. “Okay. Hit me.”

  I take a deep, shaky breath and knot my fingers together. My heart is fluttering and I feel light-headed. This must be what it’s like for those doctors or police officers who tell family members that their loved one just died. It’s unreal and dreamlike and I’m afraid of what comes next. “Brie thinks the only person who could possibly have done all of those things is you.”

  She looks at me, perfectly still, mid-bite, like a deer who’s just heard something out of place and doesn’t know if it is in danger yet. She swallows, takes a delicate sip of her tea, and folds her hands on her desk. “What do you think?” she asks.

  I don’t know for sure until the words leave my lips. “I know she’s right.”

  29

  Nola doesn’t move a muscle. “Go on.”

  My heart is beating so fast now, it feels like a humming in my chest. “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me. Tell me how I did it. Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re the one going to prison.”

  I draw a deep, shuddering breath. “You’re not denying it?”

  “I’m asking you to tell me what you think. And how you’re going prove it.”

  I slip my hand into my pocket and hand her the recording device she bought me. It isn’t turned on, of course. She wouldn’t speak to me if it were. She eyes it curiously. “I think you’re a liar. I think your parents can vouch for that. I think you’re capable of cruelty and killing. You proved that when you stole Hunter from Dr. Klein’s house and killed him and then buried his body in the woods. You didn’t find him kidnapped and tortured by someone else. You tortured him yourself. Just to see what it felt like to torture a cat.”

  “Wrong,” she says, sounding bored. “I didn’t torture Hunter.”

  “But you did take him. And you did kill him.”

  “So?”

  “Some people would say that’s pretty twisted. Some would even say killing animals is the natural precursor to killing people.”

  “Well, for the record, Kay, I didn’t plan to kill the damn cat. The original plan was to heroically find him and return him to Dr. Klein. But he was such a jerk about it.” She speaks so casually, it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “Violent little freak.”

  “So there’s that,” I say. “Then there’s me.”

  “It’s all about you,” she says softly. She smiles a marionette smile, as if strings have lifted and then immediately dropped the corners of her lips.

  “I think maybe this time it is. The revenge blog. You blackmailed me into turning the entire school against me. Jeopardizing Tai’s chances of going pro. Forcing Tricia out. Humiliating Cori, if that’s possible. Almost sinking the soccer team. And I don’t even know if you ever had anything on me.”

  “Police records are easy to hack. Even the sealed records of minors.”

  “Not for most people.”

  Nola nods graciously.

  “But you’re better than most.”

  “And you’re worse. Not many people would brag about lying to protect their creepy-ass dead brother. But you went ahead and did all this evil stuff to your friends to keep that secret, and then you told me anyway. What were you thinking?”

  I shake my head. “I trusted you.”

  She smiles mischievously and bites her lip. “Oops.”

  “You got me. The revenge blog was a mind game. Your mind game.” I take the journal out from behind my back and show her the entry. “Oops.”

  She shrugs. “That website no longer exists.”

  “I’m no computer genius, but I’m pretty sure police detectives can find deleted web pages.”

  “Only with a warrant. And there’s no reasonable cause to issue one.” Her eyes remain on the journal, though. I grip it tightly, like a weapon.

  “Which brings us to Maddy. Who you also killed, just before you came to my room to unlock the clue about her so we could find her together. My guess is that you crushed a lethal dose of sleeping pills into her coffee just before she took her bath, then pushed her under the water to finish the job. But this time—and here’s the part Brie doesn’t get but I think I do—you did it to shift the blame away from me.”

  Her mask of smugness freezes, and I see her lower lip twitch uncertainly.

  “You did, didn’t you?” I take a step toward her, but also toward the door, because I don’t want to be trapped in her room with no escape. I don’t know what she’s capable of right here, right now, without witnesses. “You had second thoughts about framing me, and you wanted to backtrack. You went as far as killing Maddy when you saw a picture of her with Spencer because it was the perfect opportunity to set up someone else. You’re one of my only friends, Nola. I know I’m yours, too. It’s not too late to do the right thing.”

  She looks at me, her eyes glassy. “Of course it’s too late. There is no right thing anymore.”

  “Turn yourself in. No one else has to get hurt. There’s a body count. Nothing can be done about that. We can’t turn back time.”

  “Would you?” she interrupts. “Would you take back what you did?”

  “Of course I regret being shitty to you.”

  She looks at me with wet eyes, her lips trembling. “You were more than shitty. You tortured me.”

  I try to remember singling her out. We cracked those jokes about necrophilia, devil worship . . . Not nice stuff. But I don’t remember anything more pointed than that.

  She hands me the wooden chest from her desk and I open it to find a dozen envelopes marked Dear Valentine along with a little glass jar filled with tiny dried orchid petals.

  And then the horrible, jagged truth crushes me.

  Nola wrote the revenge website, and she made up the connection between me, my friends, and Jessica. She knew all about the Dear Valentine incident. But she wasn’t the delivery girl.

  I stare down at it for a moment, speechless, and then open one of the envelopes. All of me. I pick up the smooth bone and then stuff it back inside and slam the lid back on the box.

  “Dear Valentine,” she says quietly, in her soft singsong voice.

  I raise my eyes to hers. “I’m so sorry. I would do anything to take it back.”

  She nods slowly, as if underwater. “No amount of sorry can ever erase how you made me feel. My first time away from my family. They were in pieces and they sent me away, and then you all treated me like I was worthless. I was so fucking isolated. I thought you would understand, Kay. You weren’t like the others either. But you pretend so hard. And you crushed me.”

  “That’s not fair. You weren’t allowed to know about my life before Bates.”

  “Well, I did, and I thought—”

  “You were wrong. I made myself fit here.”

  “You made yourself a bitch. And you made me what I am. You ruined my life.”

  “I didn’t even kn
ow who you were,” I say weakly.

  “What difference did that make?” Her eyes well up, but her expression doesn’t change. “You still destroyed me.”

  “Did you ever even speak to Jessica?”

  “I didn’t know her,” she says.

  “What difference did that make?” I echo quietly. “You still killed her.”

  “I had no intention of killing her. I wanted to hurt you and I was supposed to be the victim. That was the whole point of the website.”

  “Your website.”

  “I planned it perfectly. You would have been able to access it after you entered enough incorrect passwords. You didn’t need me at all. Just your own paranoia and time to self-destruct.”

  I nod. “And you needed a victim.”

  “Well, the plan was to frame you for murder. It’s not like I was excited to kill someone. Even less enthusiastic about dying. But framing requires a body. I chose Halloween night, by slitting my wrists and hurling myself into the lake. Because I knew you would be the one to find me.”

  “But that’s not what happened.”

  She spins a hanging ivy plant and then halts it suddenly and places it on the floor. She begins to take down all of her hanging plants. “No, it’s not. Because I had to watch you in the weeks leading up to murder, to make sure every move you made was accounted for in my plans. And you deviated from what I expected. You broke up with Spencer. He slept with this girl I’d never really noticed before. Most people hadn’t. Jessica Lane. And the fact is, you had a motive to kill her. She was a much better frame than I was.”

  “So you decided to kill Jessica when I broke up with Spencer?”

  “No. I mean I thought about it. But killing is . . .” She makes a face. “Yikes.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Skeleton Dance happened. I went, just like everyone else. I was determined to stick to my plan, and I went to the lake and stared down into the water. And I started to doubt myself. I didn’t deserve to die. But I wasn’t alone. Jessica was there, pacing back and forth, texting, and she wouldn’t go away. And I finally turned to her and asked if she was okay, and she told me to fuck off. I asked her nicely if I could be alone, and she repeated herself. So she took my place. It’s not like I enjoyed killing her, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful. No one wants to die. So I got to live. Jess had to die. And you had to take the blame. You even left me a murder weapon. It was like a sign.” She holds a cactus in her hand, gently tapping the thin needles with her slender fingertips.