Hanging by a Thread

by Sophie Littlefield

  “So,” Victoria said, yawning. “What’s with you and Jack?”

  “It’s no big deal, we were just talking,” I said, unsure how to navigate the conversation. “He was telling me about his dad.”

  “That was so sad,” Giselle said. “When he died. Almost everyone at school went. We didn’t even get into the main part of the church—we had to watch it on the big-screen TVs in the youth room. They had bagpipes. And firemen from practically the whole state.”

  “What about … after? I mean, Jack told me he went through a bad time for a while.” For all I knew, everyone in town already knew about the drinking and drugs, but if not, they weren’t going to hear it from me. But if there was more to it, maybe I could find out now.

  Giselle frowned. “He told you about him and Amanda?” she asked coldly.

  “Amanda who?”

  “Amanda Stavros?”

  The girl who disappeared. Whose name had been in the news for weeks. Her parents’ frantic pleas broadcast on the news every night. “What about her?”

  “Oh, you probably don’t remember her from when you lived here,” Giselle said. “She went to some private school down the coast until middle school.”

  “She was a sophomore, like us,” Victoria said. “She was going out with Jack when she disappeared. The police talked to him after. He was one of the last people to see her.”

  “Talked to … as in, he was a suspect?”

  “Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t in the paper or whatever. I don’t think they can do that, with minors, and he wasn’t eighteen yet last year.”

  “You don’t think he did it.” I didn’t mean for my words to come out as forcefully as they did, and Giselle glanced at me sharply.

  “Well, the cops gave up on him, so I guess he didn’t.” She didn’t bother to mask her sarcasm. “I mean, yeah, it’s not like I think he killed her and dumped her body. But he sure didn’t make things any easier for himself. He went nuts, Clare. If someone accused me of something that serious, I think I’d try to keep my shit together until they cleared me.”

  “Instead of …”

  “Instead of everything. Vandalism, fights, drugs … He was locked up for a while, before his mom got a lawyer.”

  “You shouldn’t tell her that, Giselle,” Victoria said, slurring her words. “Clare can make up her own mind. If she likes him or not.”

  “But—he’d lost his dad,” I protested. “And … and his girlfriend. I mean, he must have—” I thought of something else: Why hadn’t Rachel told me any of this before? Why hadn’t she said anything when I first met him?

  “Look, I realize he’s had a hard time,” Giselle interrupted, her voice softening. “I feel sorry for him. But I’m just trying to protect you. Trust me, you don’t want to get involved with him. This is a big year for you, you know?”

  “Your mom would probably have a fit,” Victoria added. “She’s a hippie or something, right?”

  “My mom?” I asked incredulously. Everyone had wildly inaccurate notions about our family, all because of Nana and things that had happened long ago. “Hardly. She’s more the corporate type.”

  “Well, I still wouldn’t want her to find out I was seeing him. If I were you.”

  “Why doesn’t Rachel like him?” I asked, taking a chance.

  “Oh, I don’t think she hates him or anything, she’s just really stressed about the Gold Key elections.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Elections are the first week of school. She’s running for president, so she has to keep her reputation squeaky clean. I mean, it’s ridiculous, but with Jack’s suspension and his trouble with the police and all, she can’t afford to be associated with him.”

  “But lots of people have been suspended,” I said, wondering why Rachel had never mentioned she was running for president. “I mean, Luke has, twice, right?”

  “That’s different,” Victoria said. “Luke’s a Herrera. His dad owns, like, half of Monterey County.”

  “So?” I’d heard that Luke’s dad was a wealthy real estate developer, but that wasn’t exactly huge news in Winston. Many of the residents of the town were like us, middle-class families. But in the last few decades the hills above town had become prime real estate, and a lot of wealthy people moved down from Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Millionaires were a dime a dozen.

  “So, if your dad gives a ton of money to the town, then you get away with anything. Come on, Clare, you’re from the big city, I can’t believe you’re that naïve.”

  “My old school wasn’t—” I didn’t finish the sentence; there were plenty of rich kids at Blake too, but there was a sort of reverse elitism there. You were supposed to pretend you didn’t care about money and status, that all that mattered was your art.

  “Jack’s family’s poor,” Giselle said, with the careful enunciation drunk people used when they were trying to make an obvious point. “Gold Key pretends they don’t care about that, but they do. Just look at the membership list sometime.”

  “But if that’s what they care about, I mean … Rachel’s family is rich,” I said.

  “That’s not the problem. Rachel only got in her sophomore year, which never happens, and that’s like a black mark against her. The alum advisory committee didn’t even want to let her run, but they were the ones who made the exception for her in the first place.”

  “Can we stop talking about this?” Victoria said. “Clare and I aren’t in your Diamond Butthole society, so this conversation isn’t doing much for me.”

  “Stop being so jealous,” Giselle said, but she was laughing. “It’s not like anyone cares outside of this stupid town.”

  “Wait, what happened with Rachel?” I asked, confused.

  “She didn’t tell you?” Victoria looked surprised. “I thought you guys were like best friends.”

  “It was this huge scandal when she didn’t get in freshman year,” Giselle said. “Everyone thought she was in for sure, being a legacy and all, but she partied a lot in middle school.”

  “She did?” This was news to me. Rachel hid her partying incredibly well. To outside appearances, she was a model citizen.

  Giselle and Victoria exchanged glances. “Yeah. Like, she got caught in the middle school bathroom getting high—”

  “Her mom lost it,” Victoria said. “She was grounded for like the whole summer; she and her mom fought for months. She snuck out a lot and—”

  “Clare doesn’t need to know about all that,” Giselle said. Suddenly she didn’t seem quite as drunk as before, and I got an eerie sense that maybe Gold Key membership really did mean something to these girls. Come to think of it, the girls who were members partied with the rest of the crowd, but they stopped short of anything that would look bad, anything that would reflect poorly on them or each other. “All you need to know is that Rachel worked really, really hard freshman year to restore her reputation. And when Amanda disappeared, they had a spot to fill, and they picked Rachel.”

  “And now she’s running for president.”

  “Were you guys, like, really close to Amanda?” I asked.

  Both of them shrugged, and they exchanged a glance. “Not really. I mean, I don’t know if anyone was. Everyone liked her and all, but … it was like she didn’t have best friends, just more like … casual friends.”

  “She was into guys,” Giselle said. “More than other girls. Y’know?”

  I figured I did. I’d known girls like that, who went from guy to guy without ever taking a break in between, who kept other girls at a distance.

  “Okay,” Victoria interrupted. “New subject. Are you guys going to Dillon’s memorial tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, everyone is,” Giselle said. “You should come with us, Clare.”

  Yet another thing Rachel hadn’t mentioned. Maybe she didn’t know about it either, though that seemed unlikely. I was starting to get really confused about my relationship with her—it seemed like there was a lot she hadn’t told me. “Um, I guess I could
, depending on when it is. Are they having one for Amanda too?”

  “No, her mom’s not into it, I guess. It’s Dillon’s parents who planned this whole service. They put a lot of effort into it.”

  “It’s at two down at Raley Park,” Giselle said. I wondered if they knew the park was named after the same family my crazy grandmother had married into, the family whose mansion she now lived in. “It’s not going to last long. I can pick you up if you want. Then you can come over after. My folks are making me stay in, because of the ax murderer.”

  That got them giggling, which made me feel queasy. It was weird how none of the kids seemed to take the anniversary very seriously, but maybe it was some sort of post-traumatic stress thing, a way to compartmentalize the fear and horror of losing someone they’d all known.

  “Mrs. Granger stopped by today to talk to my mom about the house walk,” I said. “She was really nice.”

  “She’s amazing,” Giselle said. “I mean, after what happened? She says it helps her heal to give back to the town. But Mr. Granger’s another story.”

  “He’s, like, insane,” Victoria said. “Did you ever see him at a game?”

  “He got in a lot of trouble a few years ago,” Giselle explained for my benefit. “He got in a fight with another father at one of Dillon’s baseball games.”

  “The refs threw him out. He was always yelling at them from the stands. He yelled at Dillon too. He ended up getting barred from the games and practices. He was going to sue for a while, but I guess Mrs. Granger talked him out of it.”

  “He’s not like that since they lost Dillon,” Giselle said. “I mean, you see him around town but he hardly even talks anymore.”

  “Yeah, but he stares at you. At all the kids. Haven’t you noticed? They go to my church.” Victoria shivered. “My mom won’t sit anywhere near him.”

  “I can’t imagine losing a child,” I said, feeling a ridiculous urge to defend someone I’d never met.

  “Yeah, I guess it could mess you up. Mrs. Stavros is a drunk now. And Amanda’s dad took off a few months after she disappeared. Couldn’t handle it.”

  “She used to be so beautiful,” Giselle sighed. “Did you know she was a model?”

  “It’s true,” Victoria confirmed. “She did ads, maybe? Catalogs? Amanda’s dad was a lot older. I think he went back to Greece or something.”

  Rachel popped up along the path at that moment, out of breath. “I got to pee so bad,” she announced.

  “Well, do it before you get in the car,” I said. “Since I borrowed my mom’s.”

  Mom was still reluctant to let me take the car, since I’d barely passed my license test. I didn’t get a lot of practice until she bought a car when we found out we were moving back to Winston. I talked her into loaning it to me by reminding her that I needed practice, and swearing that I wouldn’t have anything to drink.

  And by reminding her that most of the girls I was driving were Gold Key members, which usually served to make people imagine halos over their heads.

  We dropped Victoria off first, drove up into the hills where the rich people lived and dropped off Giselle, and then it was only me and Rachel. I drove to her house and parked in the driveway. She was drunker than I’d realized, and she swayed back and forth in the front seat.

  “Hey, don’t throw up in here, okay?” I asked anxiously.

  Rachel giggled. I knew I should wait until she was sober to talk to her, but I couldn’t help it. “Why didn’t you tell me about Jack?” I demanded, with more irritation than I intended.

  “What about him?”

  “About him and Amanda Stavros? That they were dating? That he was a suspect in her disappearance?”

  “Oh, Cee-Cee …” She hiccupped. “That’s … that’s.”

  “How about the fact that he was arrested? Think you could have mentioned that? I had to hear about it from Giselle and Victoria!”

  “I woulda told you,” she said, slurring her words, “if you’d started dating him or something. I wouldn’t have let that happen.”

  “Let it happen? What about letting me make my own decisions? What about telling me what you know about him so I could decide?”

  “What’re you so mad about? I was trying to protect you.”

  That made me even angrier, but I wasn’t sure why. After all, I believed her—Rachel probably thought she was doing the right thing. “You don’t think I can handle myself with a guy like him, is that it?”

  Her head lolled toward me and she looked at me with wide eyes. “He was never cleared, you know. Some people still think he did it. That he killed Amanda.”

  “Well, great. So you didn’t warn me that he was a murderer?” I knew that part of my frustration was directed at myself, at how attracted I was to Jack, even knowing what I knew about him. It would have been way easier if I could like an honors student, or at least Kane De Ponceau, who wasn’t guilty of anything except getting drunk and stupid, as far as I could tell.

  “Cee-Cee … Okay, forget it. Jack didn’t kill her.”

  “How do you know?”

  To my surprise, her eyes welled with tears and she snuffled against the sleeve of the sweatshirt she’d borrowed. “He just … didn’t. There were other people involved.”

  “Other people involved in what?”

  “Everything,” she said vaguely, waving her hands, hitting one of them against the passenger window. “Ow. Dillon and Amanda and everything.”

  “Are you saying you know something about who killed them?”

  “It’s just … Oh, never mind, I shouldn’t have said anything, okay? Jack thinks he’s better than everyone else because he doesn’t party. But if you want to go out with him then I guess you can.”

  I could tell I was losing her attention; her eyelids were sliding down and she looked like she was about to fall asleep. “Do you know something?” I asked again, with more urgency. Rachel had never talked to me like this when she was sober. I put my hand on her arm and shook it gently.

  Then, as an afterthought, I touched the hem of the shirt she was wearing under the sweatshirt, the one she’d changed into after she took off the beach dress, but the clothes had nothing to tell me. Which wasn’t surprising: Rachel and her mom were huge shoppers, and her shirt was new.

  “Mrs. Stavros does.”

  “Does what?”

  “She knows. She has …”

  Rachel made a face and hiccupped gently, and then she got the car door open just in time to throw up on her parents’ driveway.

  After getting Rachel up to her room, I drove home, preoccupied with Dillon Granger and Amanda Stavros. I was thinking back to a year ago. Mom had taken off all four days of the holiday weekend, which was practically unheard of, and we got to go out on a boat belonging to her ex-boss. We went to a concert in Golden Gate park, and shopping downtown. It had been a good weekend.

  And three hours away, in the town I grew up in, a girl my age had been taken, most likely murdered.

  In my room, my laptop’s screen saver flashed pictures from the last Blake School exhibit I’d taken part in. There were Lincoln’s copper tubing sculptures, weird landscapes in oil pastel by my friend Maura. Caleb’s photos, which I never had the heart to tell him looked like the ones I had taken on my mom’s phone when I was in grade school. And my masterpiece from last year: a sixties cherry red wool swing coat I’d taken apart and painstakingly reconstructed, tailoring it perfectly for myself, lining it with camel-colored silk. Lincoln had gone with me to a notion shop in Oakland to buy the buttons, which were made of genuine bone. Even impossible-to-please Mrs. Bertrand had grudgingly admired the finished product, and gave me an A for the semester; too bad it would hardly ever get cold enough to wear it in Winston.

  I really needed to call the rest of my old friends. Lincoln and I had talked about all of them visiting in August, and he said he’d ask to borrow his dad’s Lexus and bring Maura and Caleb with him.

  I was happier about moving than I’d expected to be.
I had NewToYou and Rachel and now Jack, but I missed things about my old life, too. I missed our taco truck lunches on the steps of the school, the vegan kids glaring at us as we licked our greasy fingers. I missed trips to Buffalo Exchange, the best vintage clothing store ever. I missed nights up on Lincoln’s roof deck talking about the boys we liked.

  But I wasn’t ready for my old world and my new friends to collide. Not quite yet, not until I figured out the situation with Jack, not until things were more settled. I promised myself I’d call everyone later in the week.

  I watched the screen saver for a few minutes, letting it cycle through the images twice. Then I took a deep breath and Googled Jack. I knew that any official police reports wouldn’t be public, since he had been a minor when he got into trouble, but you never knew what would turn up online.

  I scrolled through the hits. There were a few articles about Amanda, in which Jack was listed as a friend, nothing more. There were no reports of his arrest or suspension. I found a few mentions of him in articles from sources as far away as Monterey about the soccer team, and it appeared that he really had been a good player.

  I wasn’t finding anything to help put my mind at ease, and it felt a bit wrong to be looking. Okay, a lot wrong, even if Jack was practically a stranger. He didn’t know about my weird gift, about the visions. Wasn’t it wrong to go around behind his back? To spy on him?

  Except he hadn’t told me much about himself. He could be trouble—big trouble, if he hadn’t really reformed the way he implied. Rachel said he was innocent, and even if she wouldn’t tell me why, my intuition agreed—at least, I thought Jack was innocent of hurting Amanda. But wouldn’t it be stupid to make that assumption without any proof?

  Unable to decide one way or another, I typed in Amanda’s name instead. Maybe something would turn up there, a quote or interview or something. I wanted to know more, especially since Jack had dated her. I was curious, and there was something else, some uneasy, scared feeling that was nagging in the back of my mind.