by K.N. Lee
“What’s up? Are you sick?”
“Yeah, I don’t feel well. I’m just going to go to bed.”
“That’s not like you. Here, let me feel your forehead…Yes, you’re a little warm. Why don’t you get into bed and I’ll go downstairs to get something to help you sleep? Some water, too. You have to stay hydrated.”
Her voice got quieter as she moved out of the room and the door closed behind her.
I waited a half a minute before sneaking out of the closet, and brought my clothes out with me.
The moment was over, for sure. I couldn’t do anything with the lieutenant in the house.
I looked around the room. It was cute, something I would imagine she would have.
Pretty, girly, but not like a little girl’s room, either. I sat on the bed, smoothing the blankets before I did.
We sorta made a mess—it was a miracle her dad didn’t notice.
There was a picture on the nightstand which caught my eye. I picked it up to take a closer look.
What was Trinity doing with Angela?
Then I noticed how much they looked alike. God, they could have been twins. They had to be related, somehow.
When was the last time I saw her? I thought back and couldn’t remember. She was dating Drake for a while.
She was a sweet girl—probably too sweet for Drake, who wasn’t very nice to girls sometimes. She was innocent and kind, and she always had a smile on her face. I liked her a lot.
Where did she run off to?
She probably got tired of Drake’s shit and kicked him to the curb. If she had, I wouldn’t blame her.
I never understood why they were together, anyhow. They were total opposites.
But she had had a crush on him from the minute they met, so I guessed love was really blind.
Then I remembered Drake telling me she moved away. I had been sad when he told me—she was nice, and it wasn’t all the time that I got to see a friendly face.
I had actually thought about asking her to babysit Gigi for me a couple times, but knew Sabina would lose her shit if she saw a pretty, young girl coming over.
I heard a noise at the door and jumped up from the bed. It was only Trinity.
“You scared the shit out of me,” I whispered when she closed the door.
“Sorry,” she grinned, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead. “That was a close one.”
“Right. You were great, though.”
I smiled at her. I would never have pegged her for the kind of girl who would lie to her dad like that, with a guy in her closet. She didn’t seem the type.
She looked at my hands. I was still holding the picture.
Her face changed, her eyes growing wide. “What are you doing with that?”
From her voice, I knew it was an important picture.
“I’m sorry, I was just looking.” I replaced it right away. “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
She stood still for a long time, her eyes staring at the framed picture. I wondered what she was thinking.
Then, she looked up at me. “It’s okay. It’s just…there’s a lot of emotion, you know?”
She sat on the bed, with her hands in her lap. She looked down at them. It was like she became a different person in the blink of an eye.
“Did I do something wrong? I didn’t mean to. Maybe I should go now.”
Trinity held up one hand. “No. Wait until he’s asleep. Please?”
“Okay.” I didn’t know what to do, so I sat down on the bed. She didn’t seem to care.
I looked at her, in her fuzzy pink bathrobe and matching slippers. The matching slippers killed me. It was so like something she would wear.
We were quiet for a long time. I had no idea what to say, but I knew I couldn’t sit forever like that.
“Do you wanna talk about it? I mean, I’m here if you do.”
She nodded, but still wouldn’t look at me.
“That’s Angela,” she said. From her voice, I knew it wasn’t a good idea to tell her I knew Angela.
I didn’t know why. I just had the feeling I should keep my mouth shut.
“Who is she to you? I mean, you look alike.”
“Yeah, we did.”
Did? An idea formed in my head, and I didn’t like it. Past tense. What happened to Angela?
“Who is she?”
“My sister. My…little sister.”
The sound of her voice as it had dropped off almost to a whisper made my chest ache. Her little sister?
How had I not figured it out right away? God, it was so obvious they were siblings.
Maybe it was the difference in their personalities—Trinity was more serious and more mature.
“You said you did look alike. What does that mean? Where is she?”
I heard her breath catch, and soon saw a tear drop from her face onto her hands which were still in her lap.
Oh, shit. I didn’t wanna to hear this. Not Angela.
“She’s dead.”
I couldn’t speak. Dead? How? When?
I bit back the questions, knowing it wasn’t the time to ask them.
And I had the feeling, still, that it wasn’t a smart move for me to let Trinity know my history with her, even though it was innocent.
All I could do was put an arm around her shoulders and wonder how a sweet, innocent young girl like Angela had ended up dead.
Chapter 3 - Trinity
It was so hard talking about her.
I didn’t even talk to Maggie about my sister, and she was my best friend. It was too painful.
Thinking about her was one thing, but even saying her name made my heart hurt.
I hated the feeling, and I hated that there was pain associated with my bright and beautiful baby sister.
Angela had never caused a moment’s pain in her life when she was alive. It seemed so unfair that now, when she was gone, I felt such terrible heartache when I thought of her.
“Sometimes I wake up in the morning and for a second, it’s like I forget she’s gone. You know?”
I was staring off into the darkness, not looking at Tyler, not really seeing the wall in front of me.
I saw myself, and all the mornings when I woke up with hope in my heart. It was crushed every time, as soon as the realization hit me again.
She’s gone.
It always felt fresh and the pain came as a shock. “After six months, it still hurts just as much every time.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
In the darkness, I felt his hand close over mine. I could hardly make out his shadow as he sat beside me, but I could feel the warmth and comfort of his hand.
“It’s funny. Talking to you about it…it makes me feel better somehow. You’re the first person I’ve been able to talk to about it.”
“Not even your dad?”
“Oh God, no,” I laughed bitterly. “He’s the last person I could talk to. He is so closed off right now it’s like he’s living in denial, even though he’s falling apart. Does that make any sense?”
“Sure. I remember when my mom died. She wasn’t the best mom—like, she tried, but she never really wanted to be a mother. And she had a hard life. But it was still tough when she died. I had a lot of things to take care of when it happened, and that sort of made it easier to deal with. Like, if I kept myself busy, I wouldn’t have to think about it.”
“Oh, wow.” I shook my head in amazement. “That’s exactly what he’s doing.” I turned my hand over, so our palms touched, and I squeezed. “I’m sorry about your mom, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
We were both quiet for a minute, before he cleared his throat.
“You know, not to sound morbid or anything, but there was one thing I learned when I was going through it. Holding it in doesn’t help, because it never gets any better and it never goes away. I’m here, right now, if you wanna talk about it.”
Did I? There was a measure of peace that came over me when I opened up to him.<
br />
He didn’t ask a lot of probing, salacious questions. He just wanted to know about her, and about how I was coping. I’d been holding it all inside me since it happened.
But I had to be careful. I couldn’t tell him too much because I didn’t want him to know my sister was the reason I hooked up with his gang in the first place.
I was determined to find out as much as I could about her relationship with them—if I spooked him, he might close off and ruin any chance I had of bringing her killer to justice.
It wasn’t easy, but I opened my heart a little wider.
“She was the best sister,” I murmured, smiling. “She was so full of life and love. I know that sounds cheesy, and at the time, I never thought about it. Now that she’s gone I can see how much light she brought to our family. Nothing was ever a big deal…there was no drama with her. She was the most chill person I ever knew. Something stressful would happen, and she would laugh it off. Nothing seemed to bother her.”
“You’re not like that?” he asked.
“Oh, no. I was always the serious one. I’m still pretty even-tempered, but I always buckle down and get things done. She was much more free and easy. I could never understand how she could be like that. Without a care.”
“Some people just are.”
“It baffles me. I was always the oldest, holding things together as best I could. She was the clown, making Dad laugh, making me laugh. Brightening things up. She was thoughtful, too. She never forgot a friend’s birthday. When she went shopping, she always brought me home a little something, just to make me smile. When I was having a bad day, she would bend over backward to cheer me up, sometimes just doing ridiculous things until she got me to laugh.”
I sighed, and my voice broke a little. I was trying not to cry, but it was getting harder.
“You can imagine how it feels to have that sort of person taken from your life so suddenly. One minute she was here, the next she wasn’t. There’s this gaping hole inside of me. And this house—it’s like a morgue. Dad and I hardly speak unless we need to. He’s shutting down right before my eyes and that makes it even harder.”
“Was she sick?”
“What?”
“I don’t want to pry, I just wondered if she got sick. If that’s how she died, I mean.”
“Oh…no. That might have made it a little easier, as morbid as it sounds.”
“What do you mean?”
I sighed again and shifted on the bed.
“She was murdered.”
My mouth felt sour, as if the word itself tasted bad. My beautiful sister was murdered. I don’t think I’d ever said it out loud before.
“Oh, shit. I’m so sorry. Trinity. Jesus, I shouldn’t have asked.”
I shrugged.
“It is what it is. That’s how she died. Somebody killed her…on purpose. She was found in the park one night around Halloween. She…she had been strangled. They dumped her there like garbage.”
I felt the stinging behind my eyes, the pressure in my head. I wanted to sob as the images of her body started flashing through my mind, unbidden.
Her face had been blue, her eyes were bulging out. There were ugly purple marks around her neck.
It had been cold that night, when they found her, and her poor little body was lying under a bench.
The kids who found her thought it was a Halloween joke, or a decoration somebody threw away.
No, it was just my sister being thrown away.
“I can’t believe it. That’s awful.”
He was quiet for a long time and there was a certain discomfort between us now, the sort of discomfort that comes when you ask a question you couldn’t possibly know had a terrible answer.
Then he asked the real kicker, “Was the person ever caught?”
That did it. It was hard enough knowing how she died, remembering the way her poor body looked, and her pretty face.
It was hard enough living without her, in a house that got a little quieter each and every day.
The knowledge that her killer still walked free while she rotted was the last straw.
“No.” Tears rolled down my cheeks unchecked. I couldn’t hold them back any longer. “They never caught anyone.”
He put an arm around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder as the tears flowed. It felt good to let it all go.
“That’s the worst part,” I sobbed. “She was so sweet and good, and the person who did it couldn’t have been. But they get to walk around, free like nothing ever happened. It’s so unfair. I don’t understand how things like that are allowed to happen!”
He soothed me, stroking my arm. “I don’t know, either. It’s a fucked up world.”
I nodded, still crying. I could agree with that.
I wanted to tell him everything. Now that I had started, it felt natural to open up and spill the entire story.
How I knew it had to be someone in his gang. How I had warned my sister time and again to stay away from them.
How it had to be one of them because she hadn’t known anyone else who would be capable of something like what happened to her—all of her friends were nice people, like her.
It was only when she started hanging out with Tyler’s friends that something terrible had happened.
If she’d never met them, she would probably still be alive.
I trusted him, but I didn’t trust him that much yet. I knew he was different from the rest—how, I wasn’t sure.
It was an instinct I guess. Like the way he differed from Drake.
Drake, I wouldn’t have trusted. I wouldn’t even have let him come into the house, much less up to my room or to hold me in the darkness while I cried.
But Tyler had a sweetness to him, hard as he tried to cover it up with bravado. I knew that wasn’t the real him.
But there was a world of difference between trusting him in my bedroom and trusting him not to tell his friends that I suspected one of them.
And if he shut me out, I would never get another way in.
Wait, I thought. Maybe he already knows who did it. Maybe he could tell me.
Maybe he did it himself.
I shook myself. No way. He wasn’t that kind of person.
How did I know? I didn’t really know him.
He seemed nice, but a lot of people seemed nice. People could seem any way they wanted to seem.
Wasn’t he the sort of guy Angela would have gravitated toward?
Handsome, with a heart of gold? The thought made me shiver. Who was holding me?
“Are you cold?”
“No,” I said, doing whatever I could to not give myself away. “Just…remembering.”
He held me tighter. He seemed relaxed enough, not like someone with a secret they were trying to keep.
He wasn’t behaving suspiciously at all. He only seemed to care whether or not I was all right.
We both fell silent, my tears easing up. I heard the sounds of heavy snoring from my dad’s room, and I couldn’t help snickering.
“He’s asleep,” I murmured. “I think you’d better go before we press our luck again.”
***
“Are you effing serious?”
Maggie stared at me, open-mouthed. I rolled my eyes, shrugging.
I had known telling Maggie would mean taking a risk, but I had to tell someone all that had happened between Tyler and me.
I was bursting. I figured the odds were fifty-fifty between her squealing with excitement and screaming at me in anger. She screamed.
“You have to be insane,” she continued.
“Wait a minute. The other day you were all excited because he was so hot and there was a little something between us.”
“Okay, yeah, it is one thing to have a hot guy catch you when you jump off a frigging roof. It’s completely another thing to—” she looked around at the crowd of students rushing past us, dropping her voice to a whisper. “It’s another thing to almost sleep with him, Trinity.”
“I know
, I know.”
“You do not want to get involved with him! With any of them!”
“Jeez, don’t you think I know that?”
“Apparently not! Your hormones are working overtime, and you’ve lost your mind. That’s what I think.”
She was the one to talk. She always had boyfriends, or hookups, or whatever she called them.
I made out with one person and she damn near lost her mind.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “You weren’t there…and you’re not in my shoes.”
I wished I could explain myself to her in a way she could understand. Tyler was too hot. I couldn’t resist him.
Before I met him, I didn’t realize I had a thing for bad boys. I didn’t know what they would do to me.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t all bad boys. Maybe it was just Tyler.
He had a cocky confidence, a swagger. Combined with his gorgeous face and body, I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
“Trinity, listen to me,” Maggie said as she pulled me aside.
I’d be late for class, but she didn’t seem to care that she was holding me up.
“I know you don’t want to hear this, but I have to say it. I would think the example of what happened to Angela would be enough for you. Understand?”
I sighed, feeling deflated. “Of course, I do.”
“You see why I’m so worried about you, then. Don’t you think she felt the same way?”
That stung. “I don’t know how she felt, thanks.”
“I’m sorry, I really am, but I have to say what I think here. I’m betting that Angela was just as swept up as you are, and common sense went out the window. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. Okay?”
I nodded, and we kept walking, and Maggie sighed. “I know you won’t listen to me.”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “I’m too close.”
“What’s your next step?”
“I think Tyler’s best friend knew Angela.”
I described his reaction on first seeing me. I glanced at Maggie, and she nodded.
“At least let me help you with this,” she offered. “I would feel much better knowing you’re not going into this alone.”
Chapter 4 - Tyler
For two days I couldn’t stop thinking about Trinity and Angela.
