People Like Us

by Dana Mele

  I lean against the door, stunned. This whole time we’ve been grasping for the link between the killer and Jessica, and it’s so tenuous it’s almost random.

  “Maddy was an adjustment, too. Like you said. I decided to change things up.”

  Maddy was an adjustment. I feel light-headed.

  “I did it for you, Kay,” she says with a humorless smile. “So now you know what I did. You know I tried to reverse it to clear your name. And you’ve said you would do anything to take back what you did to me. It’s the moment of truth. Are you going to turn me in, or let me go? Because right now, you are the only one who can put me in prison. And after everything you’ve done to me, you need to ask yourself if you can live with that.” She sets down the cactus and folds her arms over her chest.

  Lie for me like you did for Todd.

  But the lie I told for Todd was a killing lie. The chain reaction it caused ruined so many lives. And I want to make up for hurting Nola, but Jessica and Maddy deserve justice. They won’t get it this way. And I won’t get atonement for killing two people I didn’t kill.

  “Nola, I am never. Ever. Going to forgive myself for what I did. But lying for you won’t make any of that go away. You killed two innocent people. And then you framed me for murder.”

  “Please, Kay.” Her eyes have begun to swell with tears again, bright blue pools with dark, jagged edges. “You’re the only friend I have.”

  “I’m still your friend. Maddy was my friend, too. There is still a right thing to do.”

  She rolls her eyes and the motion edges the tears out, spilling charcoal tracks down her cheeks, matting her lashes together. “Right thing to do,” she says in a mocking tone. Then she leaps forward at me shockingly fast, grabbing a thin glass vase from her desk and slamming it down on my head.

  The pain cracks like lightning and sends a burst of adrenaline through me. A thousand thoughts run through my mind in a split second. I’m going to die. I must be bleeding. My skull is probably rent in half. My brain is broken. But I don’t have time. I only have pain and the choice between fight or flight.

  The glass splintered in her hand, sending shards to the floor and ribbons of red running down her fingers. We both dive down at the same time, but the fragments are so jagged, she cuts her hand again and curses. I try to shout for help, but I feel weak and my voice comes out small and shaky.

  As I pull myself to my feet, she turns and grabs one of her pen-sharpening tools from her desk, sliding the blade out as she faces me. I try to open the door, but I don’t have time, so I brace myself against it and kick her in the ribs.

  She flies backward, but since my back is against the door, I need to step toward her in order to escape, and she grabs my arm and pulls me close to her. She jabs the blade into my stomach and I cry out from the impact but it thankfully doesn’t break through the thick Burberry wool coat.

  “I killed for you. You owe me,” she shouts, her face white with rage.

  I grab at the desk and my fingers close around the ceramic pot that houses the cactus plant. I smash the pot against the side of her head and she lets go of me and stumbles to her knees, clutching her skull. I whirl around and swing the door open, and run down the hall and out of the dorm.

  When I reach the sidewalk, I keep running. I’m dizzy and nauseous, and I keep checking my head for blood, but all I feel are tiny pieces of broken glass in my hair. Nothing sticky. I’m afraid to look back, that she’s somehow right behind me, that she’ll slash me down in the middle of campus and no one will lift a finger to help because everyone hates me so much. I don’t go to campus police. I go straight to the town police and ask for Detective Morgan. Then I remove my coat, lift my sweater, and take off the microphone I’ve been wearing—the one Nola had placed in my pocket the morning after Maddy died—and hand it to her.

  “Here’s your killer,” I say.

  She hands me a tissue and a glass of water without a word, but there’s a trace of a smile on her lips.

  “Now tell me. What did you find of mine in Jessica’s room?”

  She pulls a sealed plastic bag from a filing cabinet and places it on her desk. “It’s evidence,” she says. “So we need to hold on to it for a while.”

  Tears fill my eyes as I smooth the plastic over the lost photograph I had kept hidden in the inner pocket of Todd’s coat.

  30

  Bianca was the original victim.

  After turning the evidence in and giving my witness statement, I was taken straight to the emergency room to have my head checked out. Apparently, I was very lucky. No broken skin, no sign of concussion. Just a mess of broken glass in my hair and a massive, aching bruise.

  I called Greg first from the hospital to tell him it was over. He held his breath while I told him who killed Jessica and then he cried into the phone. I keep forgetting how much he loved her. I sent two short texts to Spencer and Brie letting them know I was alive but out of commission for the time being. Then I called Bernie and Mrs. Kent. I don’t know why, but I felt guilty. Bernie had paid me, basically, to be Nola’s friend. To keep her out of trouble, maybe. And I’d delivered her to the police. Whatever the reason, I called them on my walk back to campus and let them know Nola was being arrested for murder and it was partially my fault.

  They apologized. To me.

  Then they asked me what I really knew about Bianca, and of course, I said nothing.

  If I’d been there when they made the arrest, I would have found out that Nola is Bianca. She started calling herself Nola when she came to Bates. Completely changed her clothes, her hair, even her accent. She was tired of being Bianca, I guess. The way the Kents told it, it was some terrible secret.

  But it’s kind of the story of my life.

  Nola is also a pathological liar. There’s basically no way to know if anything she told me, ever, is true. The Kents invited me to come visit them again, whenever I like. It was weird.

  I spend the rest of the afternoon hiding out in my room until I see the last of the police cruisers leaving campus. Part of me wants to find Brie and tell her how everything went down over coffee and croissants, and part of me wants to flee campus and drive around aimlessly with Spencer all night. But I don’t feel up to facing either of them. Both of them have the luxury of going back to normal now. I’ve been jolted off orbit and I’ll always be running to keep up.

  Nola did manage one final act of revenge between the time I left her room and her arrest, and this one is going to leave shock waves. She emailed the Dear Valentine girl story to the entire school, to the press, and to Jessica’s family, claiming that Jessica was the victim. I read the story on seven news sites within an hour of returning from the police station. I’ve decided that I’m not going to defend myself. The real story is known to me, my remaining friends, Nola, and the police. Jessica’s parents will find out as the case unfolds. It’s not important that the community knows the truth. I did what I did, and so did the rest of us, and the fact that we did it to someone who ended up being a killer doesn’t lessen the fact that we did it. There will be fallout, too. I’m not going to get a top draft. My rep is for shit. My parents are just going to have to deal with that. Jessica is dead, and so is Maddy, and that’s an indirect result of my ego and lack of judgment. I’m going to carry the weight of what we did to Nola, of the repercussions it had on Jessica and Maddy, for the rest of my life. I’ll take comeuppance for $800, Alex.

  By the time I finish the last of the articles, campus is still nearly deserted and I decide to go for a walk in the cold twilight. Most of the students will return tomorrow night, milking Thanksgiving break for all it’s worth. I’m glad for every moment of solitude. The sun is just gone by the time I reach the lake, with wisps of icy blue lining the horizon, the final remains of daylight. The dirt crunches under my sneakers, not frozen, but just on the cusp. My breath floats out in clouds. I pause at the place where we found Jessica
and look down into the water. You would think there would be some marker, but there isn’t. It would be unsightly. It’s just water over water, next to water. I only know it because of the thornbush I decimated trying to rescue Brie from unknown horrors. Unknown at the time. Now we know.

  I take my coat off and tuck it under the bushes. It’s a windless night, and the lake is smooth as polished stone. Stars scatter over the surface like snowflakes. I take off one shoe and sock and dip my foot in up to the ankle. It’s so cold, the pain is paralyzing, hypnotic. I kick off my other shoe.

  I may not have killed Jessica, but I’ve done other things. Bad things. Maybe worse. And I’ve always been able to begin again, like I did when I came to Bates. It’s like Tricia said: Everyone has secrets. And truths are things you make, not things that happen. Like when I created Todd’s alibi when the pictures of Megan were sent on his phone.

  And when I created Rob’s alibi when Todd was killed.

  There are so many truths in tragedy. One truth that is indisputable is that the football game ended at ten, and the only reason it is indisputable is because so many people agree. A truth is only a truth because people say it, and continue to say it. Our car was parked close to the school, but I asked Todd to walk me to my bike, which I’d left at the playground, because that was the plan.

  Rob and his friend Hayden were going to beat the shit out of Todd. It was fair. After Rob had shown me the evidence in his truck, he had said that everyone on that list killed Megan. I killed Megan. And I realized I had one chance to redeem myself. Rob agreed immediately. He and Hayden would wear ski masks, and I would run for help so it wouldn’t look like a setup. No weapons. No one would ever know. It was the perfect plan.

  Of course Todd offered me a ride with his friends and I insisted that we walk because it was a nice night. Because that was the plan.

  The march across the dark and deserted parking lot, away from the field where people were laughing and celebrating, was endless.

  My brother put his arm around me and ruffled my hair and called me kiddo, and my stomach tightened slowly until it was the size of a bullet. When we reached the playground, I stood by my bike and waited. But only for a moment.

  Because as Todd and I stood there in the dark, someone shouted, “Move, kid!” and headlights suddenly beamed at us from the side of the playground. Rob’s truck shot out from the darkness and smashed into Todd, and my world exploded into infinite microscopic pieces.

  I tried to scream, tried to look for Todd, but Hayden tossed my bike into the truckbed and grabbed me, and then we were skidding down the street. I shook violently on his lap, unable to pry my gaze away from the sharp beams of the headlights as they swung over the dirt roads, the back roads, crunching twigs and bark and maybe bones.

  Rob spoke calm and low and dangerously. “Listen to me. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies. You came straight to Megan’s to help her mom make cookies.”

  A truth is only a truth because people say it, and continue to say it.

  I’d left the game right at the end and rode my bike to Megan’s house to help her mom make chocolate chip cookies, Megan’s favorite. Her brother, Rob, and his friend Hayden were there, eating pizza and playing Dungeons & Dragons. They were about six hours into a ten-hour campaign when I arrived. A half hour later I got the call that stopped my world on its axis for the second time. Todd was dead, had been killed by a hit-and-run.

  * * *

  • • •

  I STRIP THE rest of my clothes off and stare down at the water. When I dove into the lake my first year, I was Katie, the girl who failed to stop her best friend’s suicide and then killed her own brother. I emerged Kay, the social powerhouse who fought her way to being within inches of having everything she ever wanted. The girl, and then the guy of my dreams, more friends than I needed, a college scholarship, the illusion of a perfect life.

  I wade in knee deep, the cold scraping my skin raw. Now I enter the water as a person with essentially nothing and no one. Brie and Spencer, and even Greg I think, will be there when I need them. But they don’t know me. They don’t know what I’ve done. What I’m capable of. And for all Spencer’s pretty words, he has no idea what it takes to love a person who does bad things. It changes you.

  A cloud passes over the moon, and the water seems to deepen.

  Who will I be when I emerge this time?

  In Tranquility, I was Katherine. Nola named me.

  I only have one more half year to ride out at Bates, and if I can manage to bring up my grades and get back in the game, I might still have an outside shot at a scholarship, though it won’t be to the kind of school my parents envisioned for me. Maybe I’ll take up the Kents on their offer to visit. Of course I could never replace their daughter. But their house will be empty for a very long time, and despite what my father says, he sent me away for a reason. He doesn’t know I helped Rob, but he knows I know more than I say I do. And he will never forgive me. I don’t blame him.

  I killed his son.

  You never find closure for that sort of thing, even if it wasn’t what you intended. It settles into you and absorbs through your skin and worms its way in until it’s in your marrow, deep in your bones. It moves when you move, it’s still when you are still, but never, for a single, solitary instant, does it sleep.

  Nola and I aren’t the same, exactly, but she wasn’t entirely wrong about me either. I didn’t make her kill Jessica and I didn’t make Todd or Rob do what they did, but I played a role. I spoke.

  What if I’d spoken different words to Megan?

  Refused to lie for Todd?

  Written no valentines?

  If I could talk to any of them right now?

  I like to believe I’d know what to say. But I think I’m done lying. Maybe that’s the kind of person Katherine will be.

  I don’t feel cold anymore. I take a deep breath, prepare for a long submersion, and plunge into oblivion.

  Acknowledgments

  there are too many people to acknowledge than there is room left in the book.

  The first thank-you must go to my agent, Andrea Somberg, because without her, I would still be practicing my acknowledgments in the bathroom mirror, Oscar speech style. Andrea is a fierce advocate, a patient hand-holder, and an expert defuser of writer anxieties.

  My second thank-you goes to my amazing editor at Putnam, Arianne Lewin. Ari is ridiculously brilliant and it was an astounding honor to watch my book evolve and grow into itself with her edits. She is tireless, lightning fast, and her enthusiasm is dangerously infectious. It is thrilling to work with Ari.

  I owe many, many thanks to Amalia Frick for reading endless drafts, talking through changes with me over the phone, and sending me my beautiful ARCs.

  I am so very grateful to Maggie Edkins for designing the perfect cover for this book.

  Thanks to everyone at Putnam and at Penguin Random House who has spent time, or will spend time, working on my little project that has turned into a great big one.

  I am grateful for the invaluable comments and critiques provided by Katie Tastrom, Chelsea Ichaso, Jessica Rubinkowski, Sa’iyda Shabazz, Michelle Moody, Joy Thierry Llewellyn, Kate Francia, and Jen Nadol. In the later rounds of editing, I would most certainly have dissolved into a pool of tears and melted Klondike bars if not for the advice, feedback, and encouragement of Kaitlyn Sage Patterson, Rachel Lynn Solomon, and Jessica Bayliss. I also owe thanks to the Sisterhood, who gamely read my terrible fanfiction aloud in the basements of the new dorms many years ago.

  Thanks to my family for celebrating my successes and supporting me through my struggles, and who made it possible to continue working this year when life interrupted, as it does.

  To my husband, David, for going all in on the writing gamble. I am grateful to my partner, co-parent, and friend fo
r supporting me through long nights and busy days of scribbling, plotting, and adulting. This book would not exist without his help.

  Finally, I am most grateful to my son, Benjamin. To and for.

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