On the 6:00 news, Murray Langdon was saying, “Stay tuned. Coming up we’ll tell you why Bill Clinton will soon be in British Columbia.”
The phone rang again. Colin picked it up, already sure.
The young girl giggled. She said her name was Rhea.
He remembered then. He remembered her! She’d been in the Mac’s store in the rows of candy while he bought a Slurpee. She’d been with Ali, who lived up the street. She was Ali’s cousin, he believed, and he couldn’t remember her clearly. He had a vague impression of a chubby girl, a large nose, long, black hair down to her shoulders. She’d smiled at him shyly, and he’d said, “Hello.” Certainly there had been no chemistry, no flirtation. He had picked up a pack of Export A’s, and headed out to Tommy’s car, and never thought again of the girl. He had never given her his number. So how did she get his number? For Christ’s sake, his last name was Jones.
“I like you,” she said again. “I have a crush on you,” as if this was reason enough. It was the logic of a teen girl.
And it was not his way to be rude or mean, because he was laid back, and seemingly incapable of rage. He felt bad for the Rhea girl, and so he just mumbled something before hanging up the phone.
But then she wouldn’t leave him alone. She must have called him fifteen times. Her calls reminded him of the neighborhood girls, just coming over “like lost puppies.” Just bothering him, hanging around him.
Please. She said please, and she just kept calling, and calling. Seven times, maybe seventy times, just all the time, all day and all night, all the fucking time.
And finally he said, “Okay, meet me at Mac’s at 6:30.”
He’d never had any intention of meeting this Rhea girl, and he felt a little bit bad about lying and setting her up for disappointment, but he didn’t know what else to do. What else could he have done? He’d asked her not to call, asked politely, and she’d just kept calling, again and again and again. He thought this was the kindest way to get rid of her.
He imagined then Josephine giving his phone number to this Rhea girl. “Here,” she must have said. “Call up Colin Jones. He has a crush on you.” He had no idea why Josephine would do such a thing. Maybe she found out he’d ratted her out on the stolen car. Maybe she’d found out he’d told Nevada to stop hanging out with such an untrustworthy girl. Maybe she just thought it was funny. Certainly she was a twisted little troublemaker. He felt bad for the Rhea girl, waiting in the Mac’s hopefully. He was going to talk to Josephine the next time he saw her on the street. Don’t give out my phone number, that was all he really planned to say.
The Ways of the World
IN THE STORE, Reena waited in the aisle of candy. How much sweetness there was in the world, in this one aisle alone. Snickers, Mars Bars, Toblerone, Reese’s Pieces, Coffee Crisp. Her mother forbade chocolate. It was impure, like nicotine and gin, all the sweet, bad poisons Reena craved. Only yesterday, she’d felt so lonely she’d wanted to die, but now she was still alive, surrounded by all this sweetness, waiting for Colin Jones.
Colin Jones had not yet arrived at the Mac’s.
Her crush was so strong. Girls wrote the names of boys in notebooks two hundred times. They stared at posters of Leonardo DiCaprio and watched Titanic three hundred times. Was it in the genes, a sudden rush of hope? Please. Colin. Please.
Perhaps Syreeta and Marissa were in the store, waiting while their boyfriends bought cigarettes. The cashier would ask for ID, and Marissa would be giggling when Warren strolled out, his baggy pants starting to slip off his hips, the white hems dragging on the concrete. Warren would put his arm around Syreeta, and Dimitri would hold Marissa’s left hand, and they’d head up to the tracks like this, entwined.
They would not have noticed Reena, for they did not attend Shoreline with her, and she’d never been to the parties on the beaches or soccer fields.
Perhaps all of View Royal passed through the Mac’s, as they would so often, buying cigarettes and candy and magazines, and the things you forget until the last minute and don’t really want but still somehow need. They would get what they needed and return home.
Nobody noticed the girl wandering in the aisles, staring at her blue nails, afraid to look at the numerals on the red clock, a gift of Du Maurier Cigarette Company. She had gotten there so early, and besides, Colin was cool, and cool guys were usually late.
These comings and goings were so random and common that the town kept no record. A boy skates across a bridge, his arms out-stretched. A mother buys milk for her family. Young couples in love hold hands and head for the train tracks.
In the Mac’s, Reena raised her eyes as the door swung open, the bells made a faint sound on the glass. Hope kept her there, waiting, but Colin Jones, he never arrived.
• • •
Syreeta was wondering how to tell Warren of the denial. Really, it was no surprise. Her mother said, “Rita,” when she asked her, and already then, she knew, the answer was no. There would be no argument, because Syreeta respected the decision.
“You know I like Warren,” Syreeta’s mother said, “but he just can’t move in here.”
“Why not?” Syreeta asked.
She did not ask, “Why not” because she was defiant, but only because she wanted to have a good reason to provide Warren. Tonight she would see him. He would say so hopefully, “Did you ask your mom about me moving in there?” And she would have to say no, and he would ask why.
Her mother wore an apron; the ties around the back dangled down over her plaid dress. Sometimes her mother looked like her twin, as though they were sisters, with the same length between their waist and the rest of the body. There was white flour on her mother—s hands. She dusted sugar on the berries, then picked up a napkin, wiped the sugar and flour from her hands.
“There would be complications,” her mother said, “and what if you got pregnant? It’s just not a good idea.”
“I don’t know where he’ll go,” Syreeta said, but she did not argue.
Her mother put the pie in the oven. On the television, they were talking about Bill Clinton coming to Vancouver. Syreeta wasn’t listening. She was just feeling really bad for Warren, just wondering where he would go now. If he left her, she thought, she would die. If he moved to California to be with his mean dad, or back to Nanaimo with his drunk mother, she would die. She would die. She would die. She rushed through her dinner. She wanted to call Diana, Marissa, Tara, and Felicity and ask them what they thought. It was unusual. Syreeta was the one everyone came to for help; her quiet and definite air of competence unusual in a girl so young, but this was her boyfriend, her first love, and they all loved him. All her friends loved him too, and nobody would want Warren to leave. They would die too. They all loved him so.
• • •
She is so young, Amy thought. She’s someone who doesn’t know the ways of the world.
They were walking along the beach though the sky was gray and sunless. Often she’d have her meetings with Reena on the beach, because they could talk more easily away from the counselor’s office. Reena’s hair was so long now, Amy thought, and she was wearing an Adidas jacket, which she said belonged to her boyfriend, Jack Batley.
Reena said Jack was a Crip, and because he’d given her the jacket she was a Crip too. Later, in her notes, Amy would write that Reena was “affiliating herself with the Crips because they were people who had respect.” But on the beach, she just listened, thinking, Reena’s so young, she doesn’t know the ways of the world. Was that such a bad thing though? Some of the girls she saw knew too much about the ways of the world. They were so savvy and jaded and hard.
Days before, Amy had given Reena a diary with birds and the tree of life on the cover. “You need to have a voice,” she’d said. Amy believed that girls should have a voice—it was a kind of feminist cliché, she supposed, the subject of all those books by Virginia Woolf and Carol Gilligan, and yet, she liked the idea of Reena writing in the journal. She’d been working as a counselor for o
nly a year, and her own reports on Reena seemed perfunctory and official. Words like naive and cultural and religious struggles with family did not quite capture the yearning quality, the goodness she observed.
“The Crips are hassling me,” Reena said quietly.
Amy heard Reena say this, but she was noticing the waves. The winds were strong; the waves were rolling in; they should leave the beach, she thought, before the storm of cold wind and rain.
Reena leaned down, and she searched in the sand. Amy’s boyfriend collected glass shards—the shards worn and smooth from the waves. Reena found some small blue pieces of glass, and smiling, she handed these to Amy.
“You’re so thoughtful,” Amy said, and she tried to think of what she could say about the Crips. Were the Crips even real? Weren’t they some gang in LA? Instead, she asked Reena if she had written in her diary.
“You should write about everything that’s going on with your family. It just helps sometimes to write your thoughts down.”
Reena nodded, but she seemed distracted. White foam on the waves; white clouds in the sky. Amy suggested they leave the beach and go for a drive or a coffee. As they walked over the sand, Reena laughed because the wind was filling up Jack’s coat, and her body seemed as if it was shrouded in a billowing sail.
Once they’d reached the parking lot, Reena reached into her pocket and drew out something shiny. Reena handed Amy the shimmery object, looked down at the concrete, shyly, as if her kindness might be met with indifference or mockery. “Because you’ve helped me so much,” she said.
The ring was gold with three white stones set into a little cluster, like a small flower.
“I have one too,” Reena said. “It’s a friendship ring.”
Amy slipped the ring on her third finger and hugged Reena, and Reena said the same thing again, which made her feel guilty and grateful at once. “Because you’ve helped me so much,” she said, and for some reason, they both began to cry. The wind may have caused their tears, as sometimes the winds of View Royal could bring tears to your eyes.
• • •
Colin Jones did not set out to find Josephine in a vengeful, deliberate way, nor did he pursue the girl by chucking rocks at Nevada’s window or even phoning Kelly Ellard’s home. Once he saw Kelly’s big brother drive by in his Monte Carlo, with the windows tinted and the silver trim, and he felt a vague pang of envy for the vehicle but neither motivation nor passion to yell, “Where’s your sister and her little troublemaking friend?”
Later, he couldn’t even remember where he saw her and when. Of course, the police wanted to know all those facts, and Colin, “typical stoner,” was not a compendium of details. He knew only that around the first week in November, he saw Josephine.
“Why did you give that Rhea girl my number?” he asked.
Josephine stepped forward, and her face reddened, and her eyes blazed, and all the softness seemed to leave her skin. “That little bitch,” she said. “I’m gonna kick her face in.”
“She called me, like, every day,” he explained. “Ten, maybe twenty times.”
In the months he’d known her, when she’d corrupted Nevada, taken the cars of strangers, insulted Nevada, wrecked Tommy’s party, dressed sleazy, and bothered him late in the evening, Josephine had never once apologized. Apology seemed a feat, like grace and kindness, that was never to be given by the girl. And yet now, she looked at him. Her eyes wide and genuine as her rage had been earlier, she said, “Colin, I’m really sorry. She stole my address book. She’s been calling everybody I’m really, really sorry.”
He sighed. He suddenly felt indifferent to it all, and he just wanted to go home and listen to Metallica.
It was embarrassing and petty, a stolen address book and the secret crushes of girls.
He turned away, not before giving her a look of sincere disdain.
“Don’t worry,” Josephine said, and he didn’t really think much of it, until later, of course.
“Don’t worry,” Josephine said. “You won’t be hearing from her again.”
The Conversation
I HAVE A BAD HEADACHE,” Josephine said to her mother as she stood in her mother’s doorway.
Elaine Bell stood in the doorway, unsure. (“Sometimes Josephine just came in through the window because she doesn’t have a key”)
“I’m feeling sick,” Josephine pleaded, willing herself to look pale and faint, though her complexion was perfect, aided by her large stolen cache of Maybelline. Her cheeks were always pink, and her skin was even and a color called summer sand. She did not look sick at all.
“I’m really tired,” Josephine said, rubbing her eyes and yawning.
Her mother looked at her skeptically.
“I’m hungry,” Josephine said. At last her mother relented and opened the door. Josephine sashayed into the kitchen, elevated by her thick black stolen soles. “They don’t feed me properly at Seven Oaks.”
“That’s because you miss mealtimes,” Josephine’s mother said.
“I don’t want to go to school,” Josephine announced. “Can you call them and tell them I’m sick?”
She opened the cupboard, took down some cereal, and began to eat the cereal ravenously.
Perhaps under the spell of her daughter’s seemingly innate, slightly regal, skill at issuing commands, perhaps feeling guilty, perhaps not up for a confrontation at 9:30 on a Wednesday morning, Elaine Bell followed her daughter’s order. (“I called Shoreline. I told them she wouldn’t be there that day and that she had a headache.”)
Josephine was soon lying on the sofa, talking loudly on the telephone.
The Conversation went on for quite some time. The Conversation would last almost two hours.
Josephine at first spoke of boys and clothes and parties. “The part when I started to pay attention,” her mother would later recall, “was when she started to talk about how to kill this person.”
Elaine Bell heard a name, Rea. (“It’s an unusual name, so I was alert to it, I guess.”)
And she heard Josephine say: “We should go in the forest somewhere and dig a big hole in the earth and make it so that it’s, you know, deep enough like a grave, and then put things on top of it to cover it up, and then walk with Rea to the forest and have her fall in and then start burying her alive.”
Elaine listened to her daughter discuss walking a girl to the forest, pushing her into a hidden grave, and burying her alive.
But it struck her that her daughter’s tone was not a serious tone. Later she would recall the murder scheme was described as a “sort of what-if scenario.”
We should go in the forest somewhere. Dig a big hole in the earth. Make it so that it’s deep enough. Like a grave. Put things on top of it. To cover it up. Cover it up. Then walk with Rea. To the forest. And have her fall in. Have her fall. In. And then. Then. Start. Start burying her alive.
Mrs. Bell was hearing only one side of the conversation, of course, so she was not hearing the plan of murder suggested by Josephine’s friend, only her daughter’s response.
Josephine laughed. She said, “Oh you! That’s awful.”
Various ways of killing Rea were discussed, and to some suggested by her friend, Josephine would say, “I couldn’t do that.” Josephine lay on the sofa, her heels over the curved end, reclining, a devious girl in repose. Her mind was full of so many possibilities. In the movies of the men she loved, she had seen so many ways for the nemesis to get whacked or iced. Bodies were stashed in trunks. There were execution-style killings, but Josephine and her friend, they did not have guns.
Elaine heard her daughter exclaim, “I couldn’t do that,” draw in her breath, and then declare: “I could do this!”
Another plan was devised, a plan that Josephine could do. Her daughter discussed her plan to kill Rea for another hour or so while lying on the couch, her blonde hair like a gold fan across the embroidered mauve pillow.
So this is what Elaine heard: her daughter discussing digging a hole in the earth,
covering the hole, pushing a girl into the secret grave, and covering up the grave with leaves so it would remain undiscovered—a grave, deep and secret and closed.
“There was definitely hostility there,” Elaine observed. “It wasn’t clear to me what Rea had done to make Josephine so angry, but it was clear that there was hostility toward her, for sure. She was a ‘bitch’ and deserving of some sort of punishment.”
When Josephine hung up the phone, Elaine asked her only this: “Who were you talking to?”
“Kelly,” Josephine said.
She then yawned and stood up, heading toward the mirror. Josephine applied some lipstick, and Elaine did not ask her daughter anymore about what she’d heard: Kelly and Josephine making plans to walk Rea to a grave and have her fall in.
Just Kinda Kidding Around
AT SHORELINE SCHOOL, the foyer was by the trophy case and the pay phones. The foyer acted as a de facto platform, a selection process, a gated community. To be seen in the foyer, to sit in the foyer, this was similar to living in a mansion on the hill—exclusive, privileged, arrived. In the foyer, Josephine and Kelly discussed their plan to punish a girl.
Melanie was just sitting there when Kelly came over and sat down and started talking with Josephine. “They starting talking about this girl they didn’t like,” Melanie recalls.
“This girl,” Kelly explained to Melanie. “We’re going to beat her up. She’s talking behind Josephine’s back.”
Teachers walked by wearing red poppies. Melanie looked at the red felt petals pinned above their hearts. Tomorrow would be Remembrance Day, a day they would have an assembly and remember the soldiers who died in the war. They would read “In Flanders Fields” in English class, the poem they read every year, even though none of them had ever been to war, and were too young to even know a veteran. They would stand and chant and try to look tough, because it was really corny, but sometimes a few girls would cry.
Under the Bridge Page 7
