Tragedy Girl

by Christine Hurley Deriso

  Lauren leans closer. “Anne, this is no laughing matter. He looked like his head was about to explode.”

  “Well, that would be one way to get rid of him.”

  “I’ve never trusted that guy,” Lauren continues, her voice low. “He’s so damn wholesome, so nauseatingly fake-humble … yet he still somehow manages to hog every crumb of attention within a fifty-mile radius. You know, I couldn’t help thinking he was secretly loving the attention after Cara died. It sounded too awful to even say it, but I truly got that vibe … everybody giving him a wide berth like he was some kind of freakin’ celebrity, everybody whispering about him and tiptoeing around him, so careful not to shake his little world or upset his delicate sensibilities … He was loving it. He was. I could tell. He was eating it up.”

  Lauren inches her head closer toward my face. “He’s a world-class creep,” she concludes definitively. “Let me walk you to your car after school.”

  I feel ridiculously high-maintenance, but my shoulders relax at the suggestion. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  She smiles warmly—maybe the first authentic smile she’s really given me. “I’ve got your back,” she says.

  “And I have to study tonight, but I’ll call you after I get back from the—”

  Lauren’s phone interrupts her, ringing as she walks me to my car after school. She continues walking for the first moment or two, then stops dead in her tracks. I stop, too, and watch her eyes widen. I hear her incredulously blurting, “When?” “How many?” “Where?”

  When she ends the call, she stands motionless for a moment, looking frozen in place.

  “What? ” I prod.

  She blinks several times and finally meets my gaze.

  “It’s Jamie,” she says.

  “What about him?”

  She blinks again, stares into space, and says:

  “He tried to kill himself.”

  Twenty-Five

  “Oh, god!”

  Lauren and I sweep Melanie into an embrace, her body shaking, as we enter the hospital waiting room.

  We disentangle and Melanie opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

  “Here,” Lauren says, taking her arm and guiding her to a chair. She lowers Melanie into the chair, then Lauren and I sit beside her.

  “What happened?” Lauren says, her voice lowered even though no one else is in the room.

  Melanie blinks back tears. “I … I … ”

  Lauren grabs a tissue from the end table and hands it to her. Mel clutches it tightly.

  “Take your time,” Lauren says.

  We wait a couple of moments, then Melanie looks at us, one after the other.

  “I went to his house during lunch,” she says. “His mom answered the door; she said he came home not feeling well and had been asleep ever since. She seemed … I dunno, a little worried, but not excessively. Still, we talked for a long time. We’d only met a couple of times before, just to say hi, so we must have spent over an hour just getting to know each other. She told me how depressed Jamie had been since Cara died, that they’d gotten really close while she and Blake were dating, and that it destroyed him not to be able to save her.”

  Melanie dabs her tear-stained cheeks with the tissue.

  “So, you know, we talked mostly about him, but his mom asked me a few questions about myself, and we just kind of chit-chatted awhile.”

  “Yes?” I say.

  “Then … it was weird, because both of us seemed to get a weird feeling at the same time … we decided his mom should poke her head in his bedroom and check on him … ”

  My heart clutches. What the hell are we about to hear?

  Melanie starts sobbing. Lauren holds her hand while I offer the tissue box.

  “She called me from upstairs,” Melanie says, her voice jagged with sobs. “I ran up there, and his mom was trying to shake him awake. She couldn’t figure out why it was so hard to wake him up. He’s a really light sleeper.”

  She wrings her hands in her lap.

  “I went over and tried to help her. We were both calling his name, louder and louder.”

  Lauren and I exchange anxious glances.

  “Then his mom pulled the sheets off him, and that’s when we saw the bottle … ”

  We lean in closer and narrow our eyes.

  “He’d taken a bottle of pills, something his mom had been prescribed after her knee surgery,” Melanie says, shaking with more sobs. “She screamed, ‘Call 911! Call 911!’ So I called, and she just kept shaking him while we waited for the ambulance to get there, but we couldn’t wake him up, then they came, and … ”

  She drops her head and shakes it, still weeping.

  “What do the doctors say?” I ask, stroking her hair. “Is he gonna be okay?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know anything. His parents are with him. I just keep waiting for somebody to tell me what’s going on.”

  While Lauren continues to console Melanie, I slip to the other side of the room and send Natalie a private Facebook message giving her my phone number and a message:

  “I don’t have your phone number. Please call me immediately at 555-0127. URGENT.”

  An hour passes with no more information than we had when Lauren and I first ran to the hospital. But a bigger crowd has gathered in the waiting room, including Aunt Meg and Melanie’s parents.

  I’m willing myself to sit calmly, trying not to fidget other than pressing my parents’ rings against my chest. Natalie called me within ten minutes of getting my message and said I’d hear back from her shortly, but so far, nothing. Oh well. I’ve begged her to do me a favor, and if she’s doing it, it’s no doubt taking a while. She told me she wasn’t sure she’d be able to come through, but that she’d try. What more can I ask? Nothing to do now but wait.

  Aunt Meg wanders over to my chair. “So tell me again how Blake and Jamie are connected … ?”

  “Best friends,” I say, then realize how ridiculous that sounds. Jamie isn’t Blake’s best friend. Jamie hates Blake. But there’s no need to delve into all the nuances with Aunt Meg. “Best friend” works for now. Which makes me wonder if Blake should know what’s going on …

  Who knows. But he won’t hear it from me.

  I suck in my breath when I see Natalie at the door of the waiting room, nervously peeking inside. She locks eyes with me urgently, and I rush out into the hall.

  Once I’m in the hall, I realize she isn’t alone. A girl is with her, a pretty girl with light freckles and light brown hair. I breathe a sigh of relief. Natalie came through.

  “Hi,” the girl says to me.

  I don’t need an introduction to respond.

  “Hi, Rebecca.”

  “Please tell me what you know.”

  Rebecca fingers the straw of her drink nervously, then sneaks a glance at me.

  “Wow,” she tells me. “You really do look a lot like Cara.”

  She and Natalie and I have gone to the hospital cafeteria so we can talk privately. A few other people mill around with trays, but as is always true in hospital cafeterias, everyone is immersed in their own thoughts, their own dramas. Natalie, Rebecca, and I have complete privacy.

  “I’m really torn,” Rebecca says, still picking at her straw. “I don’t want any of this to get back to Cara’s parents.”

  “Rebecca, I don’t want you to break any confidences,” I say, leaning into my forearms on the table, “and there’s certainly no reason for me to go around talking about other people’s business. But Jamie just tried to kill himself. Whatever’s going on is hugely intense. I don’t know if I can help, but I’ve got a strong sense that things will just get worse if we don’t get all the cards on the table.”

  Rebecca takes a deep breath, exhaling through an O in her mouth, and as I sense her wavering, I lean in even closer.<
br />
  “Jamie’s life might depend on what you know,” I say gravely.

  A look of insouciance flickers across her face. “Maybe he should die.”

  Natalie and I lock eyes, then turn back to Rebecca.

  “Why would you say that? Did he have something to do with Cara’s death?”

  She considers my question, then shrugs. “It’s nothing I can prove. That’s why I never said anything. All it would have done is hurt Cara’s parents. It would have killed them.”

  My eyebrows knit together. “So you think he drowned her?” I persist.

  She thinks for a second, then nods quickly, as if to commit to it before she changes her mind.

  “Wow,” Natalie says. “I just thought you considered him a creep. I didn’t know you thought he killed her.”

  Rebecca sneaks a cautious glance at us. “Like I said, I couldn’t prove anything, particularly since she’s never been found. That’s why I planted the rumor about the body being recovered. Jamie knew that if they found Cara’s body … ”

  “If they did, then what ?” I say.

  “They’d know he had a motive for killing her.”

  The cafeteria din sounds like a discordant symphony: trays clanging, silverware clinking, drink machines whirring. But Natalie and I are totally focused on Rebecca. I feel like I haven’t taken a breath in five minutes.

  “Why? What would they have found?” I ask her slowly.

  She chews her bottom lip. “Please don’t say anything. Like I said, this would kill her parents.”

  I nod my compliance.

  Rebecca clasps her hands together, then says, “She was pregnant.”

  Natalie and I draw in quick breaths.

  “No wonder Blake freaked out when I told him people were gossiping about that,” I say.

  “No, no. It was Jamie’s baby, not Blake’s,” Rebecca clarifies. “She told him the night of the bonfire.”

  I take a moment to absorb the shock. “How do you know she told him?” I ask. “I thought you weren’t there.”

  Rebecca sniffles and blinks back tears. “She’d just found out. She and Jamie had been seeing each other on the down low for a few weeks … just a few weeks. She felt terrible about cheating on Blake, but I think she was starting to feel a little smothered. It’s like Jamie was her escape hatch. So she took the pregnancy test … ”

  “How did she know it was Jamie’s baby?” I ask. “Why couldn’t it have been Blake’s?”

  Rebecca pauses, glancing anxiously around the room. She says in a lowered voice, “Blake can’t have kids. He told Cara the chemotherapy he took when he had cancer left him infertile.”

  Natalie’s eyes widen. “Oh god.”

  “Plus, she hadn’t been with Blake in a while … not like that,” Rebecca says. “She didn’t want to hurt Blake, but she was trying to pull back a little, to get a little space. She didn’t want to hurt Jamie either. She wasn’t using him, she was just … I dunno, she was just very confused. She was a really sweet girl.”

  She stresses her last sentence, searching our eyes for validation that we believe her.

  “Still,” she goes on, “her parents would have been crushed to know she was pregnant. She didn’t tell them. She didn’t tell anybody but me. She was frantic; she didn’t know what to do. But she said she was going to tell Jamie that night at the bonfire.”

  More clanging, more clinking, more whirring. Everything going on around me is like a blur, a big, noisy blur.

  “So you think he killed her?”

  Her jaw hardens. “I think he’s a horrible, spineless coward. He couldn’t face Blake’s disapproval, and he couldn’t face being a father. He couldn’t face any of it.”

  I shake my head impatiently. “But Blake is the one who was alone with Cara when she went into the water,” I insist. “At least that’s what he said.”

  Rebecca ponders my words, then says, “I’ve always wondered if Blake was covering for Jamie. It’s hard to believe … he loved Cara so much, and he wouldn’t have known about the baby—Jamie sure wouldn’t have told him—but maybe Jamie killed her, then convinced Blake that Cara had died in some kind of freak accident and begged Blake to keep his secret.”

  “No. No,” I say firmly. “I was with Blake at the beach yesterday, right where it happened. He told me everything. Who knows if it’s true, but … if he did tell me the truth, then he and Cara were alone when she went into the water. Jamie was still at the bonfire with the others.”

  “And maybe Blake is telling the truth,” Rebecca says. “Everybody else believed it. I figured people would ask questions, you know, the police or whoever, and I knew I’d tell the truth if anybody asked. But … ”

  Her eyes fall. “Nobody ever did.”

  “Everybody believed Blake,” I say, more to myself than anyone else. Uncle Mark’s words ring in my head yet again: almost too smooth.

  “Still,” Rebecca adds, “as soon as I heard that Cara died that night, I thought, ‘That bastard. She told him and he killed her.’ He could have gotten her alone on the beach, you know. I’m sure there was lots of coming and going. Nobody would have noticed if they’d slipped off together; it was just a big crowd of people. Deep down in my heart, that’s what I thought when I heard she’d died. I thought, ‘Jamie killed her.’”

  I shake my head. “I know I’ve only known Blake a few weeks,” I say, “but I’ve seen lots of different sides of him. He can fly into a rage on a dime. He can be very manipulative. He can be controlling.”

  “Controlling,” Rebecca says, looking intrigued. “That’s how Cara started describing Blake toward the end.”

  “He doesn’t like to lose,” I say, in such a quiet voice that the other girls lean in.

  “What did you say?” Natalie asks.

  I pause, then answer:

  “Jamie’s not the only one who had a motive to kill Cara.”

  Twenty-Six

  “They think he’s gonna make it.”

  Rebecca, Natalie, and I glance up, disoriented at the sound of a new voice jumping into our intense conversation.

  Melanie is standing at our cafeteria table with Lauren and two adults. “The doctors said they’re pretty sure he’ll pull through,” Melanie says, her face easing into a relieved smile.

  “Oh, Mel, that’s … that’s wonderful,” I say.

  “These are Jamie’s parents,” she tells us, and we all smile and murmur condolences.

  “We’re headed right back up,” his mother says. “He’s still sedated, so he won’t wake up for a while. We thought we’d take a moment to grab a cup of—”

  “Who’s with him now?” I ask anxiously, then blush for seeming so presumptuous. “I mean … ”

  “Blake’s sitting with him now,” his mother says. “He got here as soon as he—”

  I spring from my chair and run out of the cafeteria.

  “Come on, come on, come on … ”

  I stare at the elevator lights, practically willing the doors to open. I considered taking the stairs, but running six flights would probably take longer than waiting on the elevator. Still, the wait is killing me …

  Ding!

  The light flashes and the doors open. It takes every ounce of self-restraint I have to keep from pushing past the people getting off, but I manage to wait.

  Well, almost … When the last two people are about to exit, I squeeze past them into the elevator. One of them gives me a dirty look, but I ignore it. I push six.

  “Come on, come on, come on … ”

  I’ve never noticed before how slowly elevators move, especially when stopping at other floors. I feel like begging the newcomers to hurry up, hurry up, but of course I just stand there fidgeting instead, pressing my parents’ rings against my chest.

  Finally, finally, the elevator reaches my floor. A couple of ot
her people are getting off here too, but at this point I dispense with all formality and simply run out of the elevator, pushing past them.

  And I just keep running.

  I run down the hall, past the waiting room I was in just a few minutes ago. By the time I reach the nurses’ station, I’m breathless.

  “Jamie Stuart’s room, please,” I say, panting.

  As the nurse presses a few computer keys, I see someone familiar in my peripheral vision. I turn my head for a better look.

  “Garrett—”

  “Room 626,” the nurse tells me.

  “Anne. What’s going—”

  “Let’s go!”

  I grab his arm and bolt toward Jamie’s room, pulling Garrett in my wake.

  Once I get to his room, I fling open the door and see Blake.

  He’s holding a pillow over Jamie’s face.

  Twenty-Seven

  “No! ”

  My scream is guttural, primal, more tortured than any sound I’ve made since I learned my parents had just been killed.

  “Get away from him! ” I screech at the top of my voice.

  Blake looks at Garrett and me, startled for a nanosecond, then indignant.

  “For god’s sake, I was just adjusting his—”

  A couple of nurses run into the room and I point at Blake. “He was trying to kill him,” I say breathlessly. “He was holding a pillow over his face.”

  Blake’s jaw drops dramatically. “Are you crazy?”

  “It’s true!” Garrett tells the nurses. “I saw it too. My brother was trying to smother him.”

  “Call security,” one nurse tells the other as she bustles to Jamie’s bedside. “I want you all to leave immediately,”

  she tells the rest of us.

  Blake sputters, “This is the most insane accusation I’ve ever —”

  “Out!” the nurse barks.

  Blake glares at me as we walk out the door, and I glare back.

  Once we’re back in the hall, he holds his composure for just a second before his eyes start darting around.