by Anna Jarzab
After Carly broke up with Neily, she’d written only a few entries until August twenty-seventh. “Mams died today” was all that one said. Less than nine months following Miranda’s death, and a little more than a year before Carly’s, Mams had succumbed to a terrible case of double pneumonia. Losing Mams was awful for me. With Mom gone and Dad the way he was, my grand-parents were the only people in the world I could really count on to take care of me, and now one of them had passed away.
But Carly was an absolute wreck. In some ways, I think Mams’s death might have been harder on Carly than her mom’s death had been. After Miranda’s diagnosis, her family was forced to face the possibility that she might not survive. Carly was, in some small way, prepared for what happened to her mom, but Mams’s death was a complete shock. We were in Carly’s bedroom doing the last of our summer assignments when Paul came in to give us the news, and I remember Carly’s expression of utter disbelief. She seemed stunned to find out that one major loss didn’t immunize her against others.
Carly didn’t speak very much at the funeral, but she did say one thing that’s followed me ever since.
“How many people are we going to lose before the universe decides we’ve had enough?” Carly asked me. I didn’t answer, but if I had known what was coming I would have said, “All of them.” Horrible, but true.
As I continued on through Carly’s diary, it amazed me how young we were then, and how stupid. Carly’s decision to get involved with Adam was the biggest mistake she ever made, but of course she couldn’t see it at the time. She dated him for the same reason people jump out of airplanes: because it was exciting and dangerous, and she didn’t seriously believe she could get hurt.
Adam was already notorious for dealing drugs, which at a school like Brighton, where nearly eighty percent of the students had more pocket money than most Americans make in several months, was a very profitable business. Adam played the part admirably, and he had a sinister presence that made every word or movement seem like a threat. He also had Cass, the only person who could control him. Cass brought out Adam’s better side. When it was just the four of us, things were fine, but when Cass was busy with basketball, I knew that Adam wasn’t so benign. Carly thought she could handle him. She was desperate for the sort of attention that she got from Adam, and she became reckless in her pursuit of it.
But it wasn’t until the summer before she died that I started to understand how much Adam had changed Carly, and how little perspective she had on her life.
Sophomore Year—Spring Semester
It was the Friday night before finals week, and we were celebrating with the Force, Carly’s favorite party drink. On paper, it’s pretty much the most disgusting thing that’s ever been invented—beer, vodka, and a can of frozen pink lemonade concentrate. In actuality, though, it tastes sort of okay. We mixed up a batch in her bathroom and filled two water bottles, taking them into her bedroom to play a drinking game to the movie Glitter.
“Okay, here’s the rule,” Carly said as she pressed PLAY. “Every time there’s an aerial shot of New York, we take a drink.”
Fun fact: Glitter has about thirty-seven thousand aerial shots of New York in it, so we were pleasantly buzzed by the time the movie was over. When the credits began to roll, Carly turned off the TV and turned on the radio.
“I love this song!” she said, flopping down on her bed.
“Me too! What is it?”
“I don’t know. Adam will—get me my phone, it’s in my bag.”
I was still sitting on the floor near her bed, so I leaned over and dragged her schoolbag toward me. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton and my arms were heavy, as if I had on those weight cuffs that runners wear. I practically dumped the contents of the bag into my lap to find her cell.
“Here,” I said, tossing the phone up to her. Carly dialed Adam and had him listen to the song over the phone. I was slowly putting everything back into her purse when a small square plastic bag filled with white powder fell out of her cosmetics case. I picked it up between two fingers, my mind scrolling through everything it could be besides drugs. All my fuzzy brain could come up with was flour, but I didn’t think Carly was doing any impromptu baking at school.
Carly hung up, laughing. “He was like, ‘I can’t even hear what you’re playing me, but if you like it, then it must be horrible.’ What an asshole.”
“Carly,” I said, holding up the bag. “What’s this?”
“Hey,” she cried, grabbing it out of my hand. “What are you going through my stuff for?”
“Is that cocaine?”
“No! Yes. I don’t know. It’s not even mine. Adam told me to give it to Jamie Pierson in trig and I forgot.”
“You forgot?”
“Yes, and don’t tell Adam, he’ll kill me. I told Jamie I’d drop it off at his house tomorrow morning. Unless you want to come with me tonight?” she proposed, grinning.
“No thanks,” I snapped. “If you want to let your boyfriend turn you into a drug mule that’s your business, but don’t you dare even think about getting me involved!”
“Aren’t you a saint,” she said. The look on Carly’s face infuriated me. She was clearly dumbfounded by my reaction, as if I were the one being totally irrational. I stormed out of her room and went right to Cass’s house, but he didn’t respond as I’d expected.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about Carly,” he said with trademark nonchalance. “It is possible to be friends with Adam and do him the occasional favor and not entirely ruin your life. I speak from experience.”
“That’s not the point,” I fumed.
“I’ll talk to her if you want,” Cass offered. “And Adam listens to me. I can make sure she doesn’t become a delivery service.” I wrapped my arms around his waist and snuggled close to him. “Thanks, Cass.”
“Any time,” he said.
Carly didn’t react well to whatever Cass told her; she resented his interference, and their once casual, good-natured friendship quickly deteriorated into loathing on her side. She even encouraged me to break up with him a couple of times; Carly was good at holding a grudge. In any case, it didn’t matter; our own relationship had reached an obstacle it couldn’t really overcome. Plenty of our friends used drugs recreation-ally, but I was scared for Carly. If nothing else, my parents’ history had taught me that substance abuse leads to violence, and getting involved with Adam’s affairs would only lead to misery.
Senior Year
Carly and I argued a lot in the next few months before she died. It was clear that she didn’t think she could trust me anymore, but I couldn’t let it go. She didn’t want my advice. She was so entrenched in Adam’s world that she couldn’t see a way out of it; she was secretive, withholding. They fought all the time, but she wouldn’t leave him. It was as if she didn’t think she was worth anything more than what Adam could give her. She didn’t say it quite that way in her diary, but everything she wrote about him was laced with self-loathing and despair.
An entry dated June eighth, the tail end of our sophomore year, caught my eye:
Something happened last night at Cass’s party. I took a couple of shots in the kitchen, and when I came out into the hall somebody (?) handed me a drink. I’m afraid it was drugged. I don’t remember anything after that, but when I woke up this morning—in my own bed (who drove me home?)—I couldn’t find my underwear. There are bruises on my thighs and stomach—I’m afraid something bad happened. I can’t remember, but I know this feeling. I want to ask Adam if we had sex last night, but if he says we didn’t, I just don’t know what I’ll do. What will I tell him if he asks why? Who could I have slept with? Who would do this to me? I can’t tell Audrey—she’ll freak.
I put my hand to my forehead; my fingers were cold. I willed myself to keep reading, but there wasn’t anything else. The next entry wasn’t until August, and it mentioned nothing about what had happened in June.
I had been at that party. Cass—and, before Cass, his b
rother, Jerod—had a tradition of throwing a party at the end of the school year; they called it the School’s Out for Summer Bash. It was the same party Carly had broken up with Neily at the year before. Cass had gone all out, buying several kegs of expensive beer and creating a sickly sweet pink punch for the girls, most of whom were already drunk. I showed up late, on my way home from Grandpa Charles’s birthday dinner, and I couldn’t find Carly anywhere. I asked around for her, but nobody could tell me where she was. Cass was in the game room playing beer pong with his buddies; I watched for a while, but after about an hour of spectating and socializing I wandered into the Irvings’ spectacular screening room, where I nursed a beer while The Godfather played and a few couples made out furiously. I was asleep in a cushy theater chair when Adam woke me roughly and thrust Carly, incredibly drunk and nearly passed out, into my arms.
“Take her home,” he snapped. “And tell her not to call me in the morning.” Then he walked off.
Carly’s hair was mussed and her clothes were tangled, but at the time it seemed like par for the course. She revived a little in the car when I rolled down the windows. I had to pull over to let her throw up three times, but eventually I got her home.
“How much did you drink?” I whispered as I put her to bed.
She covered her eyes with her arm and slurred, “Too much.”
I slept next to her in the bed the whole night, and after checking on her in the morning I slipped out and went home. It never occurred to me that something might have happened to her at the party—she always overdid it, especially when Adam was around—and, true to her word, she never mentioned anything to me. I felt sick to my stomach, thinking about how I’d been sleeping in the screening room while Carly was being raped.
How was I going to tell Neily?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I’ll wait while you process,” I said, folding my arms on the table and squinting behind my sunglasses at Neily. I was wearing them inside the Calamity Diner, not because I thought I was cool or I was trying to be incognito, but because I didn’t want Neily to see how red my eyes were.
He jumped out of his chair and began pacing. “I don’t want to process, I want to hit something.”
“Don’t overreact,” I warned.
“Overreact? I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Maybe we should go talk to Harriet.”
“No way. She’ll tell us to go to the police.”
“Well, maybe we should.”
“And say what? We think Carly Ribelli was raped? They’d probably laugh in our faces and tell us she got what was coming to her.”
“They would not!” I said. Neily was given to exaggeration. Yes, Carly had had a few run-ins with the police—they had once found her sleeping, drunk, on a park bench in the middle of the afternoon after a series of events I’m still not quite clear on; she’d been in attendance at several parties they’d broken up; and she was with Adam the one time they tried unsuccessfully to bust him for dealing marijuana out of his car in the back parking lot of Howard’s Yogurt—but she wasn’t exactly Public Enemy Number One.
“With the people she hung out with? The only person who made anywhere near the amount of trouble in this town as Adam’s gang was your dad. How far did police sympathy get him?”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, not really believing it.
“Plus, we don’t even know that whatever happened to her that night had anything to do with her death. No,” he said firmly. “We can do this on our own.”
“I’m going to show the diary to my dad’s lawyer,” I told him. “Between this and the ring, maybe he can build a strong enough case to justify an appeal.”
“A rape that might not have actually been a rape and a missing souvenir ring? Yeah, that sounds like a convincing argument. Maybe your dad should just fire his lawyer and get you to defend him.”
“Shut up and sit down, you’re making me nervous.” I lifted my sunglasses and rubbed my eyes. I had stayed up all night parsing the diary, and had found no other mention of the rape.
He took his seat and a deep breath. “I just don’t know what to do with all this.”
“I know. Me either.” I leaned forward. “Hey, I have a question. Did you send Carly any letters between June and September?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think I’d remember. Why do you ask?”
“It’s just that in the diary she mentions getting a letter from you, but she doesn’t say when it came or what it said. I got the impression it wasn’t the first.”
“Show me.”
I passed him the diary opened to the relevant page. He read it twice, then shook his head. “I have no idea what she’s talking about.”
I sighed.
“So what’s our next move?”
“I guess we find out who was alone with Carly the night of Cass’s party. Ask around.”
“Okay, except who’s going to tell us anything? We’re a regular little leper colony.”
“I’ll figure it out. I may not be friends with the in-crowd anymore, but I still know how to push their buttons.”
“Want me to come with you?”
“No,” I said. “You make people uncomfortable.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s a compliment, believe me, but it’s not going to get the job done. Those people are professional secret keepers—the reason they get away with everything is because they protect one another.”
“So what’s your strategy?”
“Pick out the limping gazelle, isolate it from the herd,” I murmured.
“Who’s that?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“Lucy Miller.”
I hadn’t talked to Lucy since Carly’s funeral. At one time, she and Carly and I had been inseparable, a trio of girlfriends in a social group made up mostly of guys. We banded together, confiding and gossiping about boys, but those days were so remote to me now, it was as if the memories weren’t even mine. I felt like my life had started anew the moment I heard that Carly was dead.
I showed up at Lucy’s house at around four o’clock, knowing that her parents wouldn’t be home from work yet. Her dad was a pediatrician at the hospital, and her mom was a lawyer at a prestigious firm in Palo Alto.
Lucy was surprised to see me. She glared at me like I was an intruder, a stranger whose very presence on her doorstep was grounds for suspicion.
“Hi, Lucy,” I said softly, knowing that submission was the only way to ingratiate myself. What Lucy wanted—what she had always wanted—was power and influence over others, though she was neither charismatic enough nor strong enough to demand it. She had always taken a backseat to Carly and me when we were friends, and I knew that asserting myself was the quickest way to shut her off. I needed to earn her trust or her curiosity. Either would do.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, fixing me with a cold stare.
“I wanted to talk.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “About?”
“Can I come in?”
“No.” But she was wavering. Gossip was her one true love.
“Come on, Luce,” I pleaded. “It’s about Carly.”
She looked stricken. If I had ever wondered if Lucy actually missed Carly, I knew the answer now. She never would’ve reacted like that if she didn’t. “No way,” she said sharply.
“I’m not leaving until you agree to talk.” I made a big show of sitting down on her stoop and taking out a copy of In Style. “Don’t worry, I brought a magazine.”
Lucy checked her watch, then spent a few moments trying to figure out if I was serious. “Okay. But I don’t have a lot of time. I’m meeting someone later.”
“It won’t take very long,” I promised, stepping inside the cool, dark foyer. “Is there somewhere private we can talk?”
Lucy led me out onto the patio and gestured to a pair of lounge chairs. Four feet away, the Millers’ infinity pool glistened, the
water lapping over the side and plunging, so it seemed, into the valley below.
“Sit,” she commanded, taking the chair opposite and stretching out. She was trying to affect some semblance of calm, a cool remoteness she had picked up from Carly. At first Lucy had resented Carly; she had been close friends with Adam for ages and was jealous of his intense interest in a girl who just five minutes before had been one of those bookish weirdos who were too smart for regular classes. But Lucy eventually came to adore Carly. She looked up to her like an older sister even though we were all the same age. Lucy was a cute girl, petite with dark curly hair, a pert nose, and stormy gray eyes; she was always with some guy or another, but she had a hard time getting any of them to fall in love with her. Carly, on the other hand, had had every one of Adam’s goons—and Adam, too—wrapped around her finger. She did it by acting distant, which never failed to get the attention she was looking for. Lucy had learned by watching, and was doing a pretty good job of imitating Carly’s method, but that’s all it was, artificial posing.
“Tell me.”
“Do you remember Cass’s School’s Out for Summer party?”
“Which one?”
“Sophomore year.”
“I’m gonna need a little bit more.”
I tried to dig up some other notable events from that night. “I think that was the night Stephanie Cohen threw up all over your new shoes.”
“The black Balenciaga peep toes?” Lucy asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, I remember,” she sighed. “God, I loved those shoes. Stephanie owes me five hundred dollars. I’m pretty sure that’s why she moved.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s why.” Not because, you know, her dad got transferred or anything, I thought. “Did you see Carly at all that night?”
