I wish I believed in a heaven, the kind that Mrs. Giroux believes in. I wish I were one of those special people who can see and communicate with another world beyond this one. But clearly, I’m not one of those special people. I used to believe in ghosts. Now, I don’t believe anything except that life is awful.
Why did my mother ever go on about my “specialness”? What did she mean by that, anyway? Maybe she meant it to mock me, like when you call a tall person Tiny or a fat person Slim or a stupid person Genius.
I got an A on my latest history paper.
37
The early afternoon was slightly overcast when Mrs. Patterson dropped off Rosie and Meg in downtown Ogunquit. She was on her way to visit a client who was temporarily unable to get around easily due to a broken leg. She had been polite to Meg during the drive, but it was clear to Rosie that her mother was still not comfortable with the idea of the girls hanging out together. Meg, for her part, had been unusually quiet. Rosie had tried to fill the uneasy silence with chatter about a really fun episode of American Pickers she had watched the night before. She doubted her mother or Meg had really heard her.
“I’ll call you when I’m finished with Mrs. Romane,” Mrs. Patterson had told Rosie before driving away. “Have fun and be careful. Hold on tight to your bag. There are a lot of strangers in town this time of year.”
Rosie, hiding her annoyance, had promised she would hold on to her bag. When, she wondered, would her mother ever stop warning her about every little potential danger? Pickpockets, bag snatchers, unexpected rain showers, rabid squirrels, and stray dogs. Probably never. In Rosie’s admittedly limited experience with adults, she had kind of concluded that they didn’t much change, at least, not in big ways.
The girls strolled through the tiny downtown and drifted in and out of the shops. Rosie bought a couple of cashew turtles in Harbor Candy Shop and Meg bought a bag of dark chocolate nonpareils, half of which she ate before they had left the store. After a while they ambled down Shore Road to the mouth of the path that led to the Marginal Way, which would in turn lead them into Perkins Cove.
The Marginal Way was a popular footpath about one and a quarter miles long. It was very narrow in some spots, which was probably why bikes and Rollerblades weren’t allowed. Dragonflies seemed drawn to the flora along the path, and on this hot summer day, they flew past the girls in dizzying loops. The sound of cawing seagulls was at times almost deafening. Still, Rosie liked hearing the big white-and-gray birds going about the business of their lives. (Where did they nest? Rosie often wondered. She had never seen a seagull’s nest.) Pine trees, twisted by years of wind off the ocean, clung to the edges of the rocky cliff, and hardy purple and yellow wildflowers sprang from tiny deposits of sandy soil between the steel-gray rocks. Rosie’s mother had taught her to identify the bayberry and bittersweet bushes, but she had no trouble recognizing the bushes of pink and white roses. Here and there along the Marginal Way benches had been installed in memory of someone who had loved the town or the ocean or both. To the girls’ left was the Atlantic Ocean. To their right were massive, well-kept houses with long, perfectly manicured lawns stretching out before them.
“How much do you think that house cost?” Meg asked, pointing to a three-story pile made of brick and stone with a wraparound porch and what looked like a more modern, attached three-car garage.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Rosie admitted. “A lot. Maybe millions?”
“Yeah. And there’s probably just some weird old couple living in there, dressed in rags and rambling around a bunch of empty rooms.”
Rosie glanced at her friend. “What in the world would make you think that?”
Meg just shrugged.
A few minutes later the girls were forced to slow their pace. They had caught up with a group of middle-aged people, two men and two women. And by middle-aged, Rosie meant that they were older than her parents but not old enough to be, say, her grandparents. The two women were dressed a lot alike, both in bright-colored capri pants, white T-shirts, and white sun visors. And the two men were dressed alike, too. They were wearing khaki pants, striped polo shirts, and the kind of hat Gilligan wore in that old goofy TV show. Rosie found herself wondering about the four of them. Maybe they had been friends for ages, maybe even since high school or college. Rosie could see the glint of a yellow gold wedding ring on all four of them. Maybe they had been in each other’s weddings and gone on vacations together when their kids were little and—
“Playing tourist is fun,” Meg muttered under her breath, ending Rosie’s speculations. “Except when you get stuck behind a bunch of people walking, like, in slow motion.”
Rosie shrugged. “Why does it matter? We’re not in a rush.”
“You are just way more patient than I am.”
“I’m aware. Why don’t you try to enjoy the view of the water?”
Meg made a face. “I’ve seen the ocean a thousand times.”
“But it looks different all the time! Sometimes it’s blue and sometimes it’s gray and sometimes it’s as flat and shiny as glass and—”
“It’s just water, Rosie.”
Rosie laughed. “Wow, you are in a bad mood!”
“I’ll be in a better mood when we get off this stupid path!” Meg said darkly.
Finally, as if sensing the grumpy adolescent behind them, the two middle-aged couples ushered Meg and Rosie past them. Rosie thanked them. Before long the girls had reached Perkins Cove, which was jammed with vacationers and day-trippers.
“Shopping!” Meg announced. Rosie followed her into a really good jewelry store called Swamp John’s. Meg spent close to a full ten minutes pretty much drooling over a silver bangle bracelet. Finally, Rosie pulled Meg away from the display case, still moaning about how much she wanted the bracelet and how unfair it was that she couldn’t afford it.
“Why do you go into jewelry stores if it’s only going to make you miserable?” Rosie asked when they emerged into the sunlight. “It seems, I don’t know, counterproductive.”
“Because I get ideas for what I’m going to buy when I have a lot of money,” Meg explained, with a final look over her shoulder at the store’s display window.
“I only see you get frustrated. You know, they had some nice necklaces made with beach glass. You could probably afford one of those, if you saved up a bit.”
“Beach glass!” Meg cried. “No. Way. I want real stones, like aquamarines and diamonds and rubies!”
Rosie decided to let the subject of jewelry go away.
Just yards away a giant tour bus was letting off a group of elderly men and women just outside a restaurant called Jackie’s Too. Well, there were mostly women, Rosie saw after a moment, and they were filing inside the restaurant for lunch. Rosie thought it was nice that older people could get around and visit different places instead of being cooped up in their retirement villages or in some awful nursing home. She had never understood why some people thought being old meant being boring or useless.
“I don’t ever want to be old,” Meg said as the last of the group disappeared into the restaurant. “Ugh.”
“What’s so ugh about being old?” Rosie asked.
Meg shuddered. “Just—everything.”
“Maybe those people are happy,” Rosie said. “I mean, it’s a beautiful day and they’re out for lunch by the seaside. How miserable could they be?”
“They could be super miserable.”
“Are you saying you’d rather die when you’re young?”
“No, not young,” Meg said. “Just not ... old.”
“Well, I hope I live to be old. Maybe not one hundred, but at least into my late eighties. There’s so much I want to do!”
Meg frowned. “You do realize, don’t you, that people in their eighties have brittle bones and all sorts of icky skin tags and blotches. You are aware that half the time they can’t remember their own names and have to eat only bland, mushy foods because they have no teeth and their stomachs are rotted.
And cataracts. They can’t even see without, like, having an operation to vacuum out their eyes.”
Rosie stared at her friend and then grinned. “I don’t think cataracts are ‘vacuumed out.’ Anyway, wow. You’re in a really, really, really bad mood today! Did you fall out of bed again?”
Meg just shrugged.
“Well,” Rosie went on, “I’m not going to worry about stuff like brittle bones or senility. I want to enjoy today, right now, this very moment.”
“Is that what your therapist tells you to do?”
“Advises me to do,” Rosie corrected. “And, yes, it is. You should try it sometime.”
Meg nodded over Rosie’s shoulder. “Here’s something you can focus on this very minute. Stella Charron.”
“What about her?” Rosie asked. She felt a momentary flicker of panic but managed to tamp it down. She was only a victim if she let herself be a victim. That’s what Dr. Lowe had told her.
“She’s coming our way.”
Rosie turned and for a moment didn’t recognize the girl walking toward them. She had gotten an entirely new haircut, something Rosie thought was called a pixie cut—Meg would know for sure, she thought—and she was wearing ragged cut-off jean shorts and a cotton top with long, bell-shaped sleeves and lots of intricate embroidery. The design looked Indian, Rosie thought. The whole outfit was really different from the sort of clothes Stella used to wear, preppy stuff like polo shirts and chinos. It was all a bit puzzling.
Stella came to a stop a few feet away. “Hey,” she said, sticking her hands in the back pockets of her shorts. “Can I talk to you guys?”
Meg looked to Rosie. Rosie nodded.
“Okay,” Meg said.
Stella smiled and came a bit closer. “I just want to say that I’m really sorry about what happened. I swear I didn’t even know about some of the stuff Mackenzie did until it was over. Like ...” Stella’s cheeks flushed. “Like what happened with your hair, Rosie. But I still should have said or done something to stop them. I’m sorry.”
Rosie nodded. It was a moment before she could trust herself to speak without crying. This was something she had never, ever expected. “Okay,” she said then. “Thanks.”
Meg glanced again at Rosie before asking, “You’re not friends with them anymore?”
Stella laughed a bit nervously. “I never was their friend. And they weren’t my friends, either. Mackenzie and Courtney and Jill don’t know anything about friendship. All they care about is, I don’t know, power. And making people feel bad. I don’t really understand what it is they want. Maybe they don’t, either.”
“Then why did you hang out with them?” Rosie asked. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she believed that Stella really was contrite and not trying to fool them into anything.
“I don’t really know,” Stella said with a shrug. “I mean, things were kind of weird at home for a while. My little sister got sick and my parents sort of checked out as far as I was concerned. I guess I just went a little crazy for a while.”
“Sorry,” Meg said. “Is your sister okay now?”
“Better. Thanks. And my parents finally remembered I’m alive, too. Anyway, I can’t believe Mackenzie even wanted me around. I was never really part of that group.” Stella laughed. “Actually, she liked the fact that I had a bunch of money to spend on stuff. I wound up paying for her almost every time we went to a movie. Do you know how many pairs of those stupid plastic glittery hoop earrings I bought her, the ones everyone was wearing last year? Like, twelve or something like that.”
Meg winced. “Yikes.”
“I know,” Stella agreed. “I was totally used. But I kind of let myself be used, too. It’s actually pretty embarrassing when I think about it. But at the start, Mackenzie made me feel so special, like I actually mattered.” Stella gave an exaggerated shudder. “Ugh. It freaks me out to think about it.”
Rosie knew all about memories that freaked you out. And many of hers, she wasn’t ready to share. She didn’t know if she would ever be.
“And I have to confess about something else,” Stella was saying. “Back around Valentine’s Day I gave Mackenzie the money to buy a prepaid phone. She told me that her cell was dead and that her father wouldn’t get her a new one. I had no idea she was lying or that she was going to use the prepaid phone to send that text to everyone about Rosie and Roger. I swear. I kind of figured it out after, and I was so mad I confronted her. I asked her if she’d lied to me.”
“What did she say?” Meg asked.
Stella shook her head. “She totally denied everything. And I didn’t get the phone back. And, like, the very next day she was using her regular phone. I felt really bad about it all. I’m sorry, Rosie. If I had known what she was going to do I wouldn’t have given her the money in the first place, I swear.”
“It’s okay,” Rosie said. “Thanks for telling me.”
“So, did you believe that Mackenzie was telling the truth?” Meg asked sharply. Rosie thought she sounded like a lawyer for the prosecution. “Did you believe that she wasn’t responsible for the text?”
“No,” Stella admitted. “I knew she was lying but I pretended to believe her. I was still too under her thumb to break away. I guess I was scared she’d do to me what she’d done to Rosie.”
Meg blushed and nodded. “I think I understand.”
“Anyway,” Stella went on, “after school got out I finally went to my mother and told her about who I’d been hanging out with and all. She helped me understand a lot of stuff. She said that being friends with people like Mackenzie is the same as being in an abusive relationship, like what sometimes happens in marriages. The bully is always blaming the victim for his own cruelty, then apologizing, and then being cruel all over again.”
“What do you mean?” Meg asked.
“Like, the bully husband hits his wife and then says, ‘See what you made me do? You made me hit you.’ Then he apologizes, but of course he doesn’t mean it. And then he hits her again.”
Rosie shook her head. “That’s just awful.”
“You’re never happy,” Stella went on. “It’s like, you know something bad could always happen, so you learn not to trust things when they seem okay. Because deep down you know that they’re not okay, ever.”
“It sounds terrible,” Meg said with a shudder.
“It is. I think it’s worse for Jill and even for Courtney than it was for me. They seem to really need Mackenzie. I only thought I did.”
“Aren’t you afraid that Mackenzie’s going to do something bad to you,” Rosie asked, “now that you’re not hanging out with her anymore?”
Stella shrugged. “A little bit, I guess. But if she even looks at me weird I’m telling my parents and anyone else who will listen. I am so over all that craziness. I feel like that wasn’t even me all those months. It’s like I became someone else.”
“Speaking of becoming someone else,” Meg said with a smile, “what made you get such a radical haircut? I mean, it looks great, but it’s so totally different from what you had before.”
Stella put a hand to her short hair. “I know. My mother was kind of freaked when I told her this is what I wanted. But I was tired of long hair and I just wanted a big change, in all sorts of ways. This is like a symbol of starting over for me.”
“It looks really good,” Rosie said. “It suits you.”
“Thanks. My dad says the clothes make me look like a hippie. But I like it. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of hippies and I think they look cool.” Stella looked at her watch. “Well, I should be going. I’m just here to pick up some candy for my mom.” Stella pointed in the direction of Perkins Cove Candies. “She has a major sweet tooth and she really loves the gummies they sell there.”
She waved and walked on in the direction of the candy shop.
Meg raised her eyebrows. “Wow,” she said. “That was ... weird.”
“Do you believe her?” Rosie asked. “That she’s sorry. Do you believe that she’s not friend
s with Mackenzie Egan anymore?”
Meg thought about her answer for a moment. “Yeah,” she said finally. “I do. Do you?”
“Yes,” Rosie said. “I do, too.”
38
Jane sat with her back ramrod straight and her hands at ten and two, just like she had been taught all those years ago in driver’s education. The girls were in the backseat, sharing observations about what they were passing (cute guys behind the wheel of a car was a favorite) and occasionally laughing at some inside joke or an amusing bumper sticker. At times the giggling was shrill.
At least, Jane thought, they weren’t each plugged into some electronic device, ignoring each other. She would never understand how two people could sit side by side and each be completely occupied with someone or something else on a screen. Why not just stay home alone? She could probably blame her age on the puzzlement this caused her, but she had a strong feeling that even if she were much younger, she would not be one of those super-plugged-in people. Clearly, though Rosie was computer savvy, she had no interest in spending a good part of the day with something stuck into her ear. Meg, on the other hand, was dying for an iPhone. Good luck with that, Jane thought. As far as she knew, Frannie still hadn’t gotten Meg a regular, basic phone, which, in Jane’s opinion, made no sense at all. It was a safety issue, pure and simple. Not that she could argue the issue with Frannie, but maybe Mike could say something to her. She would talk to him about it that evening.
Traffic along this stretch of Route 1 was light at this time of the morning. Jane was glad. Not that it gave her an excuse to let her mind wander, but at least she didn’t have to be as tense as she was when traffic was heavy or when she was forced to drive alongside a massive truck or trailer. She hoped that when Rosie got her license, which wouldn’t be long now, she wasn’t as fearful behind the wheel as her mother. Time would tell, Jane thought, glancing in the rearview mirror at her daughter.
Rosie had told her about meeting Stella Charron in the cove. Jane had heard something about the Charrons’ younger daughter being ill. She was glad to learn that the little girl was doing well. And if Stella Charron was being honest with Rosie and Meg, and the girls thought that she was, then she was indeed a brave young woman for apologizing for her part in the bullying.
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