Two Truths and a Lie

by Meg Mitchell Moore

  Fine, she thought. Let him.

  Then she checked her Silk Stockings Instagram account, which was different from her personal account, the one her mom had on her own feed. Alexa hardly ever posted on her personal account—an occasional sunset, a cute photo of Bernice, just to stay in the game. She posted on the Silk Stockings account any time she put up a new video, pointing her 21,000 Instagram followers to it. Nothing fancy, just a tasteful selfie (tasteful, @silvergurl!) where she displayed her outfit of the day and summarized the topic of the video. She thought she’d probably gotten a lot of new viewers that way, although there was no way to tell exactly where they’d come from.

  Cam’s Instagram was mostly golf-related. Alexa didn’t spend much time there.

  Her direct messages were as open as the day was long. To be a public figure you had to make yourself available. That was part of the game.

  Direct message from @jt76 to @silkstockings via Instagram: Heading to L.A. soon, huh? You’ll love it out here!

  She clicked on jt76’s profile. No photo. Followers: zero. Following: one. Silk Stockings.

  Okay, possibly jt76 was creepy. Or he/she was a talent scout, setting up shell accounts to contact potential clients. She’d heard of that happening.

  She typed back, Thanks! I’m sure I will!

  At the Griffins’ house, after Sherri departed for work, Alexa made some small talk with Katie. She couldn’t go right for the notebook. She asked Katie if she was hungry or if she wanted to walk over to Kent Street playground, which was not far away. But Katie gave her a baffled look and declined.

  “I don’t really do playgrounds anymore?” she said.

  “Of course not,” said Alexa. Katie and Morgan were at that in-between age: too old to use playgrounds seriously, too young to use them ironically, the way the high school kids sometimes did, swinging in the dark of night with their vape pens or their edibles.

  Alexa tried again. Did Katie want to walk down to the waterfront or go for ice cream at Haley’s? They could get to Haley’s via the rail trail.

  “I’m good,” said Katie, her face placid. Alexa’s mother hated when people said I’m good—she considered it a non-answer kind of answer—so both Morgan and Alexa had been conditioned not to say it. But Alexa believed in free speech within the walls of one’s own home so she just nodded. “I’m reading,” Katie added. She held up Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Alexa recognized the book as her own copy, the one she’d handed down to Morgan, because of the jagged tear in the cover. Katie was reading the first of the series, the one where Tibby meets the girl who has cancer. Alexa loved those books when she was in middle school; she had hoped that her own female friendships would turn out to be as sustaining, as reliable and life-affirming and, well, fun, as those of Tibby, Bridget, Lena, and Carmen, but, alas, Destiny and Caitlin simply didn’t seem to have what it took.

  “Okay,” said Alexa. “If you need me, just holler. I’ll be around.” Katie went back to her book and Alexa clattered around in the kitchen for a few minutes, for show, in case Katie was listening. She inspected the contents of the refrigerator (disappointing) and the cupboards (barren). She looked for the liquor cabinet (nonexistent).

  There was a copy of the Newburyport Daily News on the counter, and on the front page was one of those advertising stickers with an ad for Canobie Lake Park, the amusement park not far away in Salem, New Hampshire. As a kid Alexa loved Canobie—it was small enough that she used to be allowed to go off with friends (back when she had friends), and big enough that some of the rides were legitimately scary. In the past few years they’d put in a new roller coaster, Untamed, and Alexa hadn’t tried it yet.

  Maybe it was the knowledge that she’d be gone soon, or maybe it was the realization that she didn’t have any friends, and if Tyler kept it up with @silvergurl she soon wouldn’t have a boyfriend either (not that she cared), but Alexa found herself overcome by a fit of generosity, as powerful and unexpected as a punch. “Hey, Katie,” she said. “Do you like roller coasters?”

  Katie looked up from her book. Her eyes were bright and shiny. “I love roller coasters.”

  “Morgan does too,” said Alexa. This was true—surprisingly true, given Morgan’s fear of so much else in the world. “Have you ever heard of Canobie Lake, the amusement park?”

  Katie shook her head.

  Alexa held up the sticker she’d peeled from the paper and pointed it toward Katie. “I’ll take you two,” she said. “You and Morgan. On my next day off. It’s really fun.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” said Alexa. “Why not?” Katie was very pretty when she smiled; she had potential, Alexa decided. Obviously she wasn’t going to inherit any fashion sense from her mother. But if Alexa took her under her wing, maybe then there would be some hope. Plus it would make her mother happy to see her doing something with Morgan. In fact, it would make Alexa happy too. She’d been a crappy big sister lately.

  She waited until Katie had turned back to her book and made her way craftily up the stairs. She was so quiet that she figured if the Silk Stockings money dried up she could probably get work as a ninja. Silk Stalkings.

  She found the notebook in the same place she’d found it before, under the pillow. Katie would probably not make a good ninja, judging from her uninspired hiding choice. Alexa sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to mess up the comforter.

  And then she started to read.

  I’m not supposed to write down any of this. I’m not even supposed to think about it, because it is all a secret.

  I am supposed to be Katie Griffin and not that other Katie I used to be.

  I have a new friend named Morgan who is just as nice as my friends were at home, and in some ways she is much nicer. I had to say good-bye to all of those friends anyway. Except I didn’t say good-bye because I wasn’t allowed to do that. I wasn’t allowed to say good-bye to anyone. We left in the middle of the night, when everyone I knew was sleeping. So I said good-bye in my head.

  We live in a nice place now, in a pretty town by the ocean, where there are beaches and ice cream shops and restaurants that sell fried fish and lobster rolls. We have eaten the lobster rolls but we haven’t tried a whole lobster. I don’t know if we will because they are a little bit weird and you have to crack the shells on your own and dig inside to get the meat out. Morgan likes them and she promises that I will too.

  (Morgan liked lobster? This was news to Alexa.)

  Morgan is friends with a big group of girls and I have met most of them. I am trying to remember all of their names but it’s hard. I went over to swim in Taylor’s pool. It was a nice pool and really fun and we had a contest to see who could hold their breath the longest underwater. I won. I always win contests like that because I don’t ever give up. And I never, ever tell secrets, even the big secret that I have.

  In the fall I will go to the Nock Middle School which is a brick building that is not that pretty from the outside but I went inside when Mom registered me and it is much nicer on the inside. The library has couches in it and lots of books and there is a small courtyard that Morgan says sometimes has ducks in it that you can watch from the windows. I like the idea of being able to watch the ducks during school.

  (Alexa remembered the ducks from when she was in middle school. Most likely they were different ducks now.)

  In school I will be on either the Crimson or the Gold team but I hope I am on the same team as Morgan. She said that we can eat lunch together even if we are on different teams. I will get a binder from PB Teen with my name stenciled on it, which is what Morgan said all the girls get for middle school. I have already picked mine out online. It is ombré and starts off dark purple but becomes teal by the end. My first name will go sideways on the Velcro pocket. Or my initials. But I think I will use my first name because that is the part that has always belonged to me. Actually, my initials are the same even if my last name is different now.

  Inside the binder are places to put all of your pens
and pencils and erasers and a ruler punched with three holes, which Morgan says is definitely going to be on the school supply list. She said that when we get the list we can go shopping together. I asked Mom when we can order the binder and she said, Soon, which I hope she means because Morgan says the binders sell out very quickly, and sometimes Mom says, Soon, about something and then it never happens. She is distracted a lot since we moved here.

  I’ve never had a diary before. I always thought they were kind of dumb. Morgan gave me this notebook when I went over to her house. She has a lot of notebooks. She also has a bed with a canopy and a trampoline in her backyard and a big beautiful kitchen that reminds me of the kitchen we used to have before we moved. Morgan’s house makes me miss our old house, which I am not supposed to think about anymore.

  She also has an older sister who is really beautiful and fancy.

  (Alexa smiled at this.)

  And also a little bit scary.

  (Alexa frowned.)

  When I brought the notebook home I thought I would draw in it. The lady with the brown eyes told me it would be good for me to draw whenever I was feeling sad or confused.

  (The lady with the brown eyes was probably some sort of child psychologist Katie saw because of the divorce.)

  So, hello, diary. It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for keeping all of my secrets.

  Here is secret #1:

  Even though I don’t miss Daddy that much I miss him sometimes. Also sometimes I have bad dreams. I don’t like to talk about what the dreams are about, even to Mom. When I scream in the night Miss Josephine bangs on the wall and then I try to quiet down.

  Here is secret #2:

  I was allowed to keep my hair because I’m a kid. I just wear it in a braid all the time now instead of down and curly the way I liked it. Mom had to change hers. She used to have beautiful blond hair and now she has boring ugly brown hair. She changed it for the first time in the motel room and when she came out of the bathroom I cried and cried because I wanted my old mother back, the glamorous one who used to wear dresses and super-high heels and always had nail polish on her fingers and her toes and wore a gold bikini on vacation. But I can’t have her back because of the crime.

  Here is secret #3:

  My job now is very simple. My job is to fit in. My job is to not think about Daddy in jail. I am to be Katie Griffin. Katie Griffin is nice and friendly and popular and doesn’t feel scared if she wakes up in the middle of the night. Everybody likes Katie Griffin and wants to get to know her. It’s okay that she doesn’t know how to surf because she moved from Ohio, which is in the middle of the country and has no ocean around it. It’s okay that she asks if there are sharks in the water. It’s okay that she doesn’t have a dad because Morgan doesn’t have a dad either. This is all normal.

  I asked Mom if she can call me by my other name, the name from New Jersey, sometimes, just when we’re alone. She got a scary look in her eyes and she said, no, never, don’t you ever ask that again, Katie. Don’t you ever even say that name out loud again. You have to promise me. Right now, Katie, you have to promise me.

  So I can’t say it, because I promised her. I can’t tell anyone, because I have to keep us safe. I can’t ever tell who my father is or what he did. I can’t talk about the Witness Protection Program. But I can write my name here. Katie Giordano. Katie Giordano. Katie Giordano.

  Alexa slammed the notebook shut and shoved it back where she found it. Her hands were trembling. Something was going on here, and she didn’t know what.

  “Katie!” she called.

  There was no answer.

  “Katie!” Still nothing. Alexa flew down the stairs and rounded the corner to the living room. Katie’s chair was empty. “Katie!”

  “Sup?” said Katie. She was coming out of the kitchen, elbow deep in a box of Cheez-Its. “I’m right here.” She held the box out to Alexa. “You want some?”

  Alexa Thornhill, did this evening’s babysitting gig meet your expectations? On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your experience?

  35.

  The Squad

  It was early July when we began to notice that Alexa’s interest in the Griffins had become, well, for lack of a better word, surprising. One of us saw her leaving their house on Olive Street on a Monday evening. Another one of us, getting cones with her daughter and a friend at the Cottage during Alexa’s afternoon shift, heard her tell her coworker, a standout on the Pingree girls’ lacrosse team named Hannah, that she was babysitting the following evening as a favor to her mother’s friend. Gina reported it to a few of us via text, but not on the main text. A subtext, if you will. Tension between Gina and Rebecca had been high since the sleeping bag incident of 2019. Like we’ve told you, we have no idea how that story got out. And even if a couple of the moms knew, we never told our children. We thought maybe Rebecca was holding the whole thing needlessly against Gina. Not that we blamed her! She was grieving!

  (Some of us still wondered. What was Rebecca doing with her summer? Except for that ill-fated pontoon ride, we’d hardly seen her.)

  To the text about the babysitting we sent back various bewildered emojis. We thought, babysitting? Our children had finally reached the age where babysitters were unnecessary, unless we had younger siblings to consider, which the Griffins did not. Or unless we were going into Boston or Portland, or unless we were going to be out very, very late—for the famous/infamous Dalton Club Christmas party, for example. But surely Katie Griffin was old enough to stay by herself during the day or into the early evening. Surely she didn’t need a babysitter.

  It was Esther who first posited that maybe something else was going on.

  After that, we couldn’t help but wonder, every one of us.

  We mean, Alexa Thornhill was a big deal. Her Silk Stockings account was verified on Instagram.

  If Alexa Thornhill had some reason to hang around with Sherri and Katie Griffin, were we missing something? And if so, what was it?

  We swear Nicole wasn’t thinking about any of this when she sent out the evite to Riley’s Boda Borg birthday party. If you don’t know, Boda Borg is a real-world gaming environment where you divide into teams and go through these “quests” with challenges both mental and physical. You’ve never done it? You should. You totally should. It’s really a good time. It’s in Malden, sort of a haul from us, but worth it. They don’t say this on the Web site, but a shot of tequila really makes the experience sing.

  A few of us did it on a couple’s night out a while back. It was a lot of fun: we rented a van and a driver. All of our teams had color names. The Green Team won, not that we’re bragging. We invited Rebecca, but she didn’t come. (We didn’t blame her! She was still grieving!) Even so, it would have been nice if she’d specifically declined instead of just not showing up. It was that night that Brandy said she saw Rebecca getting a blowout on a random Thursday evening in February, when nobody had any plans to go out. And she was dressed up too. Not in her teacher clothes. She was wearing a pair of to-the-knee leather boots Brandy had never seen before.

  It was probably nothing.

  Boda Borg is not cheap. Nicole was on a budget that summer, not that she wanted everybody to know about Mason losing his job, but Riley begged and begged and begged for her Boda Borg party. She’d been counting on this all year. So Nicole had to put a limit on it, that’s all. That’s why she ended up not including Morgan or Katie.

  It was nobody’s fault. Looking back, at the end of the summer, we suppose it’s possible that that’s where some of the drama started.

  Call Boda Borg yourself, if you don’t believe us about the price.

  36.

  Alexa

  Once Katie was asleep Alexa sat cross-legged on the couch, deep into Google.

  She tried “Giordano” and “crime.” “Giordano” and “jail.” “Giordano” and “New Jersey” and “crime” and “jail.”

  Bingo.

  Google returned approximately one million articles on the
arrest of a man named Bobby Giordano and three other men for the murder of a teenage girl named Madison Miller in New Jersey. The first article Alexa clicked on said that the men were rumored to be a little-known part of the New Jersey Cambellini crime family—an offshoot, as they were described. A smaller branch. They made it sound almost friendly, like the smaller, suburban banks that went with a larger city bank.

  Madison Miller’s body had been found in a shallow grave in a wooded area on the outskirts of a city park by a dog walker seventeen days after she had gone missing from a local Target. She had been strangled. The four men who were tried for her murder admitted in court that Madison Miller had seen something in one of their trucks that she shouldn’t have seen.

  Alexa felt like she was going to throw up, especially when she saw the photo of Madison Miller, in which she looked perky and nice, like somebody Alexa might like to be friends with, or anyway, like someone who might want to be friends with Alexa.

  She kept reading. She continued googling. The trial was all over the Jersey news. Google, google, google. Her fingers flew over the phone screen.

  One article talked about a “protected government witness.” The courtroom was closed during the trial; no media allowed, the identity of the witness was not disclosed. Alexa tried “Bobby Giordano” and “New Jersey” and “wife.” Bingo. Up came a grainy photograph from a local paper. Bobby Giordano was wearing a tuxedo and standing at what looked like a fancy party with a woman clinging to his arm. Bobby Giordano and his wife, Sharon, arrive at the third annual New Year’s Eve gala to benefit the Hope Society of Jersey City, said the caption. The photo was dated eight years ago. Alexa tried to enlarge the photo, but when she did it became even grainier, so she returned it to its original size and leaned in very close to the screen. The woman’s hair was very blond, and it was piled on top of her head. She looked a little bit like early photos of Ivana Trump, before she shed Trump. The dress was not something Alexa would ever wear but then again it was eight years ago and fashion had totally changed since then. The woman had her head turned slightly to the side . . . and, yes, there was something familiar in the tilt of the head, the angle of the nose. Yes, this could be the Sherri Alexa knew: blonder, more full figured, younger, with a surprisingly rocking body.