The Lives of Desperate Girls

by MacKenzie Common

  “Yeah?” I asked quietly. I knew what she would say but found myself still hoping that her wine-sodden brain wouldn’t make the connection.

  “You’re the Shaughnessy kid’s best friend. I remember logging the interview tapes the police did with you.”

  “Uh, yeah, I am,” I said softly, unsure whether I should use the past or present tense for my friendship with Chloe. Something passive, resting between the two, would have been best.

  “They really find you uncooperative. That’s why they keep interviewing you; they know you’re not telling them stuff. Why are you lying to them?” Leslie asked accusingly, her drunken face crumpling into an exaggerated frown.

  “I’m not!” I said. Tom was staring at me in confusion.

  “Oh, come on. Your best friend just disappears one day and you don’t know anything that could help? You must know something, something to help understand what happened.”

  “I don’t,” I said firmly. “I don’t know anything.”

  Leslie looked at me in disbelief, and even Richard looked perturbed, but what I found most disturbing was the expression on Tom’s face. He looked as if he was seeing me in a new and unpleasant light.

  —

  After dinner, Tom’s dad and Leslie disappeared upstairs. Leslie gave us a drunken wink and mouthed, “Be good.” Her frustration with me had apparently evaporated with her next glass of wine.

  Tom led me back to his room, saying that we should talk about what we had learned. But I wasn’t interested in talking. As soon as he shut his bedroom door, I leaned against the wall and grabbed him, kissing him feverishly. The whole scene felt exciting and illicit, mashed up against a wall making out with a boy I barely knew. We kissed furiously until I felt Tom pull away. I grabbed his hands, trying to drag him in, but he stepped back forcefully.

  “Jenny? What are you doing?” he asked.

  I leaned against the wall, my head rumpling a few of the pictures he had taped there. I was breathing heavily and trying to pretend I couldn’t see how he was looking at me. Throughout the end of dinner, he had stared at me as if trying to understand what he was seeing. It was the same sort of disappointed look you get when you find an ice cream container in the freezer only to discover that it’s been used to store soup.

  “What? I thought I was pretending to be your girlfriend,” I said lightly, but my heart thumped painfully against my ribs.

  “This isn’t about that. This is about you trying to avoid the Chloe thing,” Tom said accusingly.

  “There is no Chloe thing,” I retorted. “What? You think I’m hiding some big secret, just like everyone else? Or maybe you think I killed her?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Tom said, staring past me to the Pink Floyd poster on his wall.

  “Don’t act like you give a fuck about Chloe!” I snapped. “It’s bad enough that you’re pretending to care about Helen!”

  “At least I’m not running around acting like some northern Nancy Drew so I don’t have to deal with shit!” Tom retorted. His words stung, and I looked away so he wouldn’t see the confusion on my face. And not just because I was nothing like Nancy Drew. I mean, Nancy was rich and had a father.

  “This is real,” I whispered. “Helen was real. I thought you understood that.”

  “Maybe I don’t,” Tom said quietly, a surly expression that he usually reserved for school stealing over his face. I felt a crushing sense of disappointment. Tom was turning out to be so different than I had hoped. He was supposed to help me through all of this. Not only was he failing, but I was pretty sure that I was failing him as well. I didn’t even know what he wanted from me, but I didn’t think he was getting it.

  “Glad to know where we stand then,” I said briskly. Then I grabbed my jacket and left. Tom didn’t try to stop me.

  For a fake relationship, it sure felt like a real breakup.

  —

  I climbed into my car feeling deflated. I hadn’t realized how excited I’d been about dinner at Tom’s until I felt the weight of my regret. The whole night had been a waste of time. I’d watched two adults get drunk, been accused of obstructing justice by a police employee and then fought with my only friend. The high point of the evening had been learning that I liked cannelloni. Unfortunately, I could have made the same discovery at an Italian restaurant without dysfunction for dessert.

  Beyond my car lay the pitch-black night. It was the kind of darkness that lingered around the autumn and spring, when the snow began to melt and grow dirty. You didn’t realize how much light the snow was lending you until it disappeared. I crouched over the steering wheel, grimly concentrating on the section of winding road illuminated by the weak beams of my headlights.

  The only important thing I had learned was that the police were no longer investigating Helen’s case. It felt like racism, but a subtle kind backed up by other excuses. The whole thing left me exhausted because there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t change Canadian culture; I couldn’t stop people from murdering teenage girls; and I couldn’t talk to Tom about Chloe.

  He barely knew her. Tom needed to understand how Chloe always read her magazines from back to front. How she’d made a wind chime out of old CDs she painted with nail polish. How, if you shared a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked with her, you had to stop her from strip-mining it of all the chunks. He would certainly need to eat her killer French toast with bananas. Tom would have to admire the confident way she painted daises on her fingernails with a toothpick. He’d have to listen to her whisper in the darkness of a sleepover about how she didn’t want a life like her parents’. Tom would need to understand how Chloe was the person I was closest to, and that her memory had become sacred to me. Tom would need to know that I lived my life now as if I were composing a letter to her, doing everything while simultaneously describing it to Chloe in my head. And I knew that all of that was impossible. Tom couldn’t do those things, and I couldn’t explain what Chloe meant to me.

  I was close to town when my car ran out of gas. I had just climbed a steep hill called Tower Drive and the only comfort was that I hadn’t stopped halfway up. The car coasted to a stop on the shoulder.

  Sitting in my silent car, I felt like a complete idiot. When was the last time I had even looked at the gas gauge? It was as if I’d decided that the requirements of daily life didn’t apply since I was so consumed with bigger things. When something really bad happens, you somehow expect everything to stop around you, but the laundry piles up and your grades go down. It can feel like another injustice, the way life refuses to acknowledge what you’ve lost.

  When I realized that there was no cell service, I felt my frustration boil to the surface. I punched the steering wheel, a huff of anger whistling through my teeth. I didn’t need any of this on a night that I was looking forward to ending. I just wanted to crawl into bed, fall asleep and try again tomorrow.

  I was parked on the dirt shoulder beneath a sweep of tall evergreens. Tower Drive was sparsely populated. It consisted of summer cottages nestled among long stretches of uninterrupted bush. There were no street lamps, and the only light came from the sliver of moon above and the occasional lantern at the end of a driveway. But I had no choice. I had to walk toward town until I got cell service.

  I was already shivering in my thin jacket. I had wanted to look good, so I’d worn something cute instead of something warm. It had seemed reasonable when I thought I could compensate with the car heater. Now I found myself in a wet and chilly night. March nights could be worse than January because there was more moisture in the air. March cold was the kind that seeped into your bones and took up residency in your marrow.

  I locked up the car and began to walk down the road. Tower Drive was utterly quiet, the only sounds coming from a tree shifting in the wind or a clump of wet snow falling from a branch. The light from a driveway elongated my shadow across the wooded expanse, and I irrationally wished that it wasn’t there to call attention to me. Still, I felt a pang of loneliness as I w
alked farther away from the light and my shadow was enveloped back into the darkness.

  I tried to calm my racing heart, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched from the woods. It was all too easy to imagine being stalked down Tower Drive until I arrived at a particularly secluded section, where I would be hunted like prey. Someone in Thunder Creek was capable of killing teenage girls. A killer had been here, and while I didn’t know if he still was, I had the sensation that he knew where I was right now. I could almost see him in the woods, stealing between the trees, mirroring my movements. I tried to look away, scared that imagining him too vividly would make him appear, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the dangerous forest pressing down on the road.

  Waves of anxiety rose in my throat. I knew that when they reached my brain, they would be transformed into white-hot panic. I would end up sprinting down Tower Drive, wide-eyed and sure that the footsteps I could hear behind me were more than just an echo of my own. I needed to distract myself from that fear.

  Quietly, I began to sing, lifting my face to the shadowed trees and singing the songs I had learned in Girl Guides and elementary school. I sang relentlessly as I walked toward town, trying to ignore the cold in my bones, the flickering of my shadow among the trees, the lonely noise of one set of feet crunching through snow.

  By the time I reached an area with service, my voice was hoarse and my limbs were numb, but I felt a crushing relief as I waited for my mom to pick me up. I had survived the harrowing night alone.

  Chapter Fifteen

  March 2, 2006

  The next morning, I woke up still feeling chilled. Even the woods I had dreamed about were covered in ice and snow, the chairlifts making endless loops on the hill while tiny figures in ski jackets hung in the air exposed to slicing winds. There was a core of ice inside of me that refused to melt. The hot shower warmed the surface of my skin, but no matter how long I stood there, the heat didn’t spread down into the coldness beneath.

  I checked my phone but Tom hadn’t texted. I considered texting him but I wasn’t sure what to say. Chloe and I had never fought; she was the leader and I followed, so there was no disagreement. Besides, things were more complicated with Tom. I had never wanted Chloe to kiss me.

  I stood in my room and stared longingly at my bed. All I wanted to do was fall back into oblivion, but my mom was going to be home all day. She might have been too busy to hover over me, but even my mother would notice if her teenage daughter was home on a school day.

  I walked down the stairs with a heavy gait, every step feeling like an effort. I was wrapped up in a thick fleece sweater but I still felt chilled. I could feel the after-effects of the night before lingering in my body. I now had zero friends and a lingering case of frostbite. Things were going well for Jenny Parker.

  “Morning,” my mom said. She was sitting at our table eating toast and coffee. The table was littered with mail, scraps of paper, old phone books and a fruit bowl full of oranges. It was a large table and there were only two of us, so we used the rest of the space for storage.

  “Morning,” I said, pouring a bowl of Corn Flakes in the kitchen. I sat down next to my mom and watched her blearily sip her coffee. She was wearing the shabby green terrycloth housecoat that she’d had for my entire life. I could tell she was exhausted and would probably go back to bed after breakfast. She’d been working nonstop for days, and I felt bad that I had likely woken her up the night before when I called for help.

  My mom had brought a canister of gas and drove me back to my car. We’d filled it up and then she’d escorted me to the closest gas station to finish the job. I doubted it was how she’d been planning to spend a rare night off.

  “You’re fine to drive to school, right? Your car doesn’t have any other problems?” my mom asked. I nodded.

  “No, honestly, it’s been running fine,” I said.

  “Just pay more attention to the gas, sweetie. I mean, you could have gotten hypothermia out there, and, you know, it might be dangerous to be out at night alone—”

  “Mom, I know,” I said, interrupting her. I was surprised by the edge in my voice. I was grateful to her for helping me, but I didn’t need reminding about the dangers of being a teenage girl in Thunder Creek.

  “Well, I thought you knew,” my mom said, sounding frustrated. “What were you even doing out there?”

  “I was just seeing a friend,” I said. “A new friend.” My mom stared at me, waiting for me to explain further, but I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t want to tell her about Tom because I didn’t want to have to go into what we did together and the Helen investigation. It was easier to keep a whole secret than half of one.

  “Well, just be smarter from now on,” my mom said, her voice hurt. She knew I was keeping things from her. “I guess you’d better get a move on so you’re not late for school.”

  “Yeah,” I said, chalking up another secret I’d have to keep from her. Now I just had to figure out where I could go to kill time before school ended.

  —

  I found myself at the Thunder Creek Public Library, sitting at the computer banks in the basement. The only other people around were two librarians, an older woman in a floral sweatshirt flicking through back issues of Cottage Living magazine and a guy in his twenties who was picking at his skin and rocking in his seat as he scrolled through music websites. He looked like a drug addict, and I made sure to discreetly pick a seat as far away from him as possible.

  Helen’s death had made me want to learn about the kinds of things we weren’t taught in school. I searched variations of “Native girl murder” and started scrolling through the results. There were thousands, and my eyes flicked past story after story from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The articles painted a very different image of my country than the friendly one I was used to. I read about the pig farmer in British Columbia who killed Native prostitutes. By the time they caught him, he had racked up an obscenely high body count because he chose victims the police didn’t care about. I read about bodies found in Winnipeg dumpsters and a girl named Helen Betty Osborne who was murdered simply because she was a Native girl trying to get an education in a white town. I read about wrongful convictions of First Nations men on the East Coast, and the grim living conditions of the Inuit in the Arctic. I read that Aboriginal women were seven times more likely to be murdered, and that their murders were significantly more likely to remain unsolved. All of the facts were disturbing, but Helen wasn’t just a statistic in a grim report on Aboriginal women. There were no statistics if you were looking closely enough.

  Just when I didn’t think I could handle any more sadness, I found an article about the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia. I read about Native girls going missing after hitchhiking. The crimes remained unsolved, but most people believed that a serial killer was working as a trucker in the area. I had read a number of articles before I noticed the obvious fact: the Highway of Tears only became famous when a white girl went missing on the road. Before her disappearance, the murders were just a local story, but after her, the story went nationwide. People got worried when a white girl disappeared. If she was blond, it was a national emergency.

  Most newspapers didn’t even bother reporting the Native victims’ names, as if those people couldn’t possibly hold the reader’s interest. The pig farmer case, the Highway of Tears—all of the focus was on the killer and the crime scenes, not on the people who had existed before and then suddenly didn’t. Conversely, white victims got full-page articles about their personalities, their achievements and their dreams. They were victims. Aboriginal women were only bodies.

  I felt all of this hate and pain so intensely that I had to rest my forehead against the screen. I wished I could talk to Tom and share what I had learned with him. I didn’t know if I could do this alone, but I wasn’t sure what other choice I had. I couldn’t stop asking questions just because I didn’t like the answers I was being given.

  —
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  After school, I found myself waiting for Bobby in the parking lot, hoping to catch him before he got on his bus. Everything I’d learned over the last few days was humming madly in my brain and I needed to talk it through with someone. The irony of the fact that I had skipped school all day only to show up at quitting time didn’t escape me. I was secretly hoping I might run into Tom as well, though I had no idea what I would say if I did.

  I hadn’t spotted Tom by the time a tall, black-haired boy crossed the front lawn and walked toward a school bus. Without thinking, I tumbled out of my car and ran toward him, yelling, “Bobby!” He turned around, but so did the hordes of students milling nearby. I must have looked like some red-eyed girl begging her teenage boyfriend not to go.

  “Uh, hey, Jenny,” he said, clutching the thick handle of the trumpet case. I could tell he was embarrassed, that he was the kind of boy who prided himself on slipping through days unnoticed.

  “Look, I really need to talk to you,” I said, uncertain of what he would say.

  I needed him to listen, needed to know that everything I had discovered wasn’t just in my head. I wanted to bring answers to those who needed them, but since I didn’t have any answers yet, I wanted to tell them I was at least asking questions. And maybe I was looking to boost my friend count in light of my fight with Tom.

  “Uh, well, I need to catch my bus…,” he said, looking genuinely pained as he glanced back and saw the door of the bus fold shut like a paper fan.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll give you a ride,” I said firmly. Bobby bit his lip and then nodded.

  We started walking to my car. I could see how unsure Bobby looked. He couldn’t know that I had been investigating Helen’s death. To him, I was just a girl who had given him a ride in a snowstorm and was now acting like we were best friends.