The S-Word

by Chelsea Pitcher

  “God bless finals week.”

  “Exactly. Where’s ‘your bar’?”

  I laugh a little. “It’s this hole-in-the-wall coffee place. She treats it like her own personal saloon.” I wait a beat. “Are you coming?”

  “Do you need me there?”

  Do you even have to ask?

  “If you want,” I say casually.

  He waits a second before answering. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on. You can keep me on track. You know, in case I start to bulldoze her.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Sure you did,” I say too flippantly. “You were right.”

  Another pause. “I guess I could come by. Give me the address.”

  “We can just meet up after school.”

  “I got some stuff to do,” he says.

  Oh no. He’s pulling away from me. He thinks I’m a psycho. He doesn’t want to be friends.

  “That’s cool,” I say, like he needs my permission. I’m starting to feel like nothing I say will be right at this point. “It’s really close to school. On Emberson and Ivy.”

  “Oh, that place? I heard Marvin Higgins bragging about you taking him there.”

  My grip tightens on the phone. “Are you kidding me?”

  “He wouldn’t shut up about it.”

  “That little piece of—”

  “Wait, so it’s not true?” He’s trying to stay serious but I can hear the amusement in his voice. “You guys aren’t dating?”

  “I think he’s the one who drew that picture of Lizzie.”

  Silence. Total, dead silence.

  “You know, the one where she’s . . . undressed. Jesse?”

  Great. I’ve done it again. If I could put my foot any farther in my mouth, it’d be coming out of my ass.

  His voice is soft, broken. “I’m here.”

  “Did you not know about that?”

  “I knew about it.” He swallows. I can hear it. “Some of the guys forwarded it around.”

  “Are you serious?” I can feel the rage building inside of me. “That’s so—”

  “I know. It was from an address I didn’t recognize. I sent back a pretty nasty response.”

  I sigh. “God, this just keeps getting worse. Every time I think I have a handle on things—”

  “I know, I’m sorry. I need to stop telling you things.”

  “No, I want to know.” My hand is starting to hurt. I realize I’m still clutching the phone. But I can’t loosen my grip. “If I know who’s guilty, I know who to expose.”

  “Angie.”

  “I know, I should just leave it alone. But doesn’t it make you angry? Doesn’t it make you enraged?”

  “It makes me sad. I don’t like talking about it.”

  And I need to talk about it. They call that a stalemate.

  “I appreciate what you’re doing for me,” I say. I want to make him feel like he’s helping. But I think it only makes him feel responsible for the mess I’m making.

  “It’s no problem. Have a good night, okay? Try to get some sleep.”

  Yeah, right. The shit I see in my dreams is no better than what I hear during the day. But I don’t tell him that. I don’t want to alienate him any further. So I just say “You too,” like a sad little kitten, and I stare at the phone when he hangs up.

  Why am I so attached to him?

  That’s a mystery I can’t seem to crack. Maybe I’m just too tired or maybe there’s no good reason for the intensity of my feelings. I keep glancing at the phone like he’s going to call me back.

  It’s pathetic.

  I’m just drifting off to sleep when the thought comes to me, an explanation I’ll have forgotten by morning: I’ve hardly had a moment to myself all week and still I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been in my life.

  seventeen

  ISPEND ALL DAY Sunday cramming for finals. Most of mine fall at the beginning of the week. Wednesday’s the last official day of school, and by then I’ll only have two tests left: History and Drama. So I’ll worry about those last.

  Monday morning I stroll into English and churn out an essay about overarching themes in American literature. I’m pretty sure I nail it. I’m great at making stuff up. After that, there’s my oral exam in French, followed by an “interpretive drawing” in Art class.

  Seriously, they should just give me the As now.

  After school, I get to the coffee shop just in time to find Kennedy dozing off. Maybe I’m not the only one who’s afraid to sleep at night. Her eyes are red, like she’s been crying. She looks like a child who has a monster under her bed.

  She looks like she knows she’s about to wake it up.

  “First things first.” She sets some pages on the table. She’s wearing her Verity High sweatshirt and jeans. Nothing flashy. “Someone was passing them around in Cara’s third period. I told the girls to give me any they can find.”

  “Thanks,” I say without emotion. I already know the pages are from Lizzie’s diary. And if I’m supposed to show gratitude toward the people who wrote SLUT on her car, well . . . maybe they should hold their breath.

  “They are sorry, you know,” she says.

  “I’m sure they are.” I sip my latte. It tastes like nothing. A lot of things do lately.

  “If they’d had any idea—”

  “I didn’t come here to talk about this.” The last thing I want is to hear about the innocence of her friends. Of course they knew their attack would hurt Lizzie.

  That’s why they did it.

  “Okay,” Kennedy says. “I guess that’s fair.” She dumps some fake sugar into her coffee. Her flask is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she’s started thinking about the reason she drinks so much.

  Maybe I need to stop reading Psychology Today.

  “I have some ground rules,” she says.

  “I heard.” My eyes stray to the empty space beside her. Jesse’s late or else he’s not coming. Not that it matters, I tell myself. It’s better for everyone if I don’t care.

  Kennedy nods slowly. “You have to understand I’ve never told anyone about this. Not the details.” She takes a sip. “But if you need to know about Lizzie . . .” She trails off.

  “I do,” I say. Then, not to appear greedy, I add, “I feel like I do.”

  “Okay.” She nods again. Her hair has fallen into her coffee. I wait a minute, contemplating moving it, when she finally notices. She squeezes the excess liquid with her fingertips. “I was so mad at her for so long. Then she killed herself and I . . . I wanted to feel relieved, you know?”

  “Why would you feel relieved?” I lean back. I’m trying to distance myself from her confession. But I can’t separate from it; those words wrap themselves around me. The idea that anyone could be relieved by Lizzie’s death is suffocating, and I find myself gripping the edges of the table, struggling for breath.

  “I didn’t say I was,” Kennedy snaps. “I said I wanted to be.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it, Angie.” She catches my eye. “Lizzie was the only one who knew what he did. So when she died . . .”

  The secret died with her.

  She doesn’t say it. Neither of us says it. Still, those words hover between us, staining the air. Making it hard to see.

  “Is that why you hated her?” I ask, wiping my eyes. “You thought she might tell somebody?”

  Kennedy shakes her head. “I knew she wouldn’t, even though I feared it. I know when I’m being irrational.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  She smiles. It strikes me, in that moment, that I’ve always been able to say anything around her. I don’t censor my craziness like I do with Jesse.

  But does that say something about her, or him, or me?

  “I blamed her,” Kennedy says. “I know that wasn’t fair of me. But she knew what he was and she still asked me to stay.” Her voice is flat like she’s working out a math problem. Or maybe she’s just had this conversation a lot in he
r own head. “She asked me to sleep over knowing what would happen.”

  “Maybe she thought it wouldn’t, if you were there.”

  “I’ve thought of that. More so lately.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t explain it, Angie. I can’t explain to you why my four-year-old mentality stayed with me all these years. But I hated her for it. Maybe because I couldn’t hate him.”

  “Why?” My voice is angrier than I planned.

  “Because then I’d have to do something. I’d have to tell someone about him.”

  “And you felt you couldn’t?”

  “I can’t explain it,” she says again. “I can’t explain how it makes you feel.” She puts her hands around her mug, warming them. “How embarrassed and ashamed. You take on a lot of blame.”

  “You were kids.”

  “It doesn’t matter. That stuff happens to adults too. I mean, that kind of thing. It fucks with your head so badly, you feel like if anyone knew about it, you’d be going through it all over again. And the way they’d look at you, wondering if you were telling the truth. Wondering what you did to invite it . . . I couldn’t. I won’t, still.”

  I don’t point out that she’s telling me right now. In a way, I know I trapped her into it. And I do feel bad about that. I’ll feel worse when I finish what I’ve started, and I have the time to feel all the things I haven’t allowed myself to really process. Guilt. Sadness. Immeasurable loss.

  Where is Jesse?

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” I say. “After you stopped hanging out with Lizzie, I was with her a lot. I was with her all the time.”

  She nods, like she already knows where this is going. “I think maybe I stopped him, for a while.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I threatened to tell. Not to him. I threatened Lizzie. I told her if she ever talked to me, I would tell people what he’d done and they’d take her away from him.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I know. It was an awful thing to say to a kid.”

  “In a way, yeah. But she would have been better off.”

  “I couldn’t . . .” Kennedy says.

  I realize she thinks I’m accusing her. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean don’t feel bad for what you said to her. She must have told him if he stopped . . . I mean, I stayed over there for years, you know? And nothing. Unless he just spared me.”

  She shakes her head. “I watched everyone really closely. I was afraid to say anything but I also felt like if I knew he was doing it, I would have to. So I just kept an eye on things. On everyone I knew. Except Lizzie.”

  “How would you have known?”

  “You can tell,” she says firmly, and then backs off a little. “You can usually tell if you’re looking for it. Kids act different when they’re hiding something big. They retreat or else they start acting out.”

  I guess that’s true—at least, I’ve read enough articles about it. It’d be a whole different thing to live through it.

  “I can’t believe she never told me,” I say.

  “Why would she? She wanted you to love her.” She takes a big drink of her coffee. It’s almost like, even though the alcohol isn’t there, the ritual is still soothing. “It makes you think no one will love you if they knew. Like it’s too messed up for anyone to handle. Lizzie was so sensitive. I think you’d be the last person she’d want to find out.”

  That hurts but I know it’s true: I was the last person Lizzie wanted to lose. Still, she could’ve told me. Of course she could have. I wonder if her dad ever started up again, after Kennedy threatened him.

  I exhale big, trying to push the thought out with my breath. It stays with me.

  “Is that all?” Kennedy asks. “I mean, do you have what you needed?”

  I don’t want to say what I’m thinking, but I have to. It would be wrong not to. “Now that you’ve told me—”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.”

  “No. No way.”

  “He’s going on that yearly camping trip this summer, you know? That trip where all the kids from Sunday school spend a weekend with him?”

  Her head just falls into her hands. “Fuck.” She can’t look at me. She won’t look at me. She’s pressing her fingers into her eyelids, like she’s pushing the truth away. Or maybe just the memories.

  “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “I’m not trying to pressure you, I swear. I just want you to think about it.”

  She looks up, wiping her face with her sleeve. Her eyes are still red but at least she’s not crying. It scares me to see someone so together come unhinged. It makes me think none of us are in control.

  “Okay,” she says. “Yeah. I’ll think about it.”

  “Thank you.” I nod, scooting back. Giving her space. “For what it’s worth, I really appreciate you talking to me. You have no idea how much.”

  “Good.” Half of me expects her to smile, to say it helped to get things off her chest.

  But the other half knows better. “Now I need something from you,” she says.

  “Sure. What?”

  “Leave the girls alone.”

  I shake my head. I don’t want to fight with her, but I’m not going to lie. “I can’t do that.”

  “You don’t know how this has affected them. You don’t see the things I see.”

  “Unless you’ve seen them begging for mercy, you haven’t seen anything.”

  “Jesus, Angelina—you’re not God.”

  I laugh, because I’ve never been more aware of that fact. Never been more aware of my powerlessness. “If I were God, I would never have allowed people to be so evil. If I were God, Lizzie’s body wouldn’t be lying under six feet of dirt.”

  Then again, if I were God, I’d know when to shut the hell up.

  “I’m asking you as a friend,” she says, holding my gaze. “I did you a big favor today. And you’ve already taken Jesse—”

  “Taken him?” I look left, then right. “Where am I keeping him?”

  She purses her lips. “He was supposed to be my new bestie,” she says. “A boy who would respect me without trying to take advantage. You know how rare that is?”

  “Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  “Fair enough.” She pauses, leaning in. “I don’t know who invited Drake to Cara’s party.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea.” I can feel my cheeks warming. “Sorry about that night, by the way.”

  She laughs for the first time since my arrival. “You kidding? Your outburst made my night. I haven’t seen a show like that in ages.”

  “So you knew I was acting?”

  “Not at first. But you’re smart, Angie. You’d never flip like that in real life.”

  You want to bet?

  “Of course,” she goes on, “you’re proving my point. Jesse’s your right-hand boy.”

  I wave my hand. “I practically begged him to do it.”

  “Even so. He wouldn’t have done it for me.”

  Why wouldn’t he? I wonder. I feel like I should know, but I don’t.

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” She pulls a folded note out of her pocket. I open it immediately.

  Dearest Princess,

  My sincerest apologies. I couldn’t bear to sit through it. I’m growing thicker skin as we speak.

  Yours in Cahoots,

  Jesse M.

  Next to his sprawling signature is a winking smiley face. And yeah, I read too much into it.

  “You should be flattered.” Kennedy downs the remains of her coffee. “He doesn’t like very many people.”

  I think you’ve got that backward, I muse as she slides out of her seat. But I say, “I’m still not certain he likes me.”

  “Mighty insecure, aren’t we?” She taps my nose. I unfold Lizzie’s pages the moment she’s gone.

  May 25th

  Tonight, the dream begins the same. I’m standing outside my house, staring at th
e forest of evil. Then the creature appears and I’m running before I can even think. I run through the darkness. I run until I’m bleeding.

  Then, something different.

  I see a break in the trees. I race for that light as if my life depends on it. Really, it’s my soul. The very essence that makes me a living thing. If I can just make it to that light, I will surely be free. Free from the creature.

  Free from my own evil that draws him to me.

  The light of God will fill me up.

  I pass through the forest and find myself in the schoolyard. The grounds are empty but I can hear the creature panting behind me. I’m racing past the clock tower when I stop, for an instant, and look up. The tower is framed by the sun.

  No—it’s haloed in holy light. This is my sanctuary.

  I just have to climb up to meet it.

  The fire escape is right where it’s always been, but the rungs are slippery. My hands keep sliding down. The creature grabs the end of my dress but misses my leg. Then I’m pulling myself up to the top and looking down at the world below. I’m victorious!

  The creature has disappeared.

  There’s a rustling at my back. I turn. There stands the entire student body, sharp objects in their hands. They are screaming at me. I look down to see my own sharp claws, curling and curling like a dead person’s nails.

  I have not escaped the monster. The monster has become me.

  I turn my head. I need to take a step back but there’s nowhere to go. I’m stuck here on this little ledge and people are advancing. I try to tell them that I’m not really a monster, but they don’t listen. Why would they listen?

  Just look at me.

  I look down. The world sways before my eyes. Then, just as I go to turn back, a flash of light catches my eye. It is you, standing down below, dressed in gold like an angel.

  I try to motion to you with my hands. You look up but you don’t see me waving.

  I call down, “It’s me! Please help me!”

  Still, you show no signs of recognition. I am screaming myself hoarse, but still you don’t hear me. Why won’t you listen to me? Why won’t you help me?

  “I need you!”

  The crowd is close now. They want to tear me to pieces. I am evil embodied and they must destroy me to survive. They must destroy me or they will become like me. You will become like me too.