Luckiest Girl Alive

by Jessica Knoll

  Mrs. Ross stepped back and Dr. Ross wiped one elegant hand down his face and croaked, “It was an honor to be his father.” He took the vase from his wife, and his face became inhuman again as he sprinkled his oldest son in the grass.

  Mom didn’t give me any shit when I turned the radio to Y100. After all that, she was grateful to have a spunky daughter to annoy her.

  It took some time to get out of the parking lot. I’d overheard a few kids saying they were going to Minella’s for food, and I mourned that too. That I would never again be part of some rambunctious group taking up two booths, the owners rolling their eyes but also secretly pleased that theirs was the place high schoolers came to get their grilled cheeses.

  We finally pulled onto the road, a winding single-lane carved into green horse country, the houses more subdued here. We were a little ways from the true heart of the Main Line, from the sprawling old estates with the maid’s Honda Civic parked next to the dashing Audi in the driveway. A gray mist pressed down, blurring the view from the window. Mom said, eyes in the rearview mirror, “That car is driving awfully close.”

  I blinked away the long-distance strain and looked in the side-view mirror. I didn’t drive yet, so I didn’t really have a concept of what was too close and what was normal. I recognized the car, a black Jeep Cherokee. It belonged to Jaime Sheriden, a soccer player and a friend of Peyton’s.

  “It’s a little close,” I agreed.

  Mom bunched up her shoulders, defensively. “I’m going the speed limit.”

  I pressed my cheek against the cool glass and looked beyond the side-view mirror again. “He’s just trying to drive fast to impress his friends.”

  “Moron,” Mom muttered. “After everything that’s happened, the last thing this school needs is a car full of more dead teenagers.”

  Mom kept on going the speed limit, her eyes slicing sideways every few seconds. “TifAni, they’re seriously too close.” She checked one more time. “Do you know them? Can you signal to them or something?”

  “Mom, I’m not signaling to them.” I pressed myself closer to the door. “God.”

  “This is very dangerous.” Mom’s knuckles were white on the wheel. “I’d pull over, but I’m afraid to slow down in case they—oh!”

  Both Mom and I lurched forward as the lip of Jaime’s vehicle bumped us from behind. The wheel spun frantically under Mom’s hands, and it steered us right into the gummy, pockmarked field. By the time Mom stilled the wheel and slammed on the brakes, we were thirty or so feet off the road, our tires dunked halfway in the muck.

  “Goddamn assholes!” Mom gasped. She brought a trembling hand to her chest before turning to look at me. “Are you okay?”

  Before I could tell her no, I wasn’t okay, Mom smacked the center console with an open hand. “Assholes!”

  There was talk that I should consider other options for high school. But the idea of starting over somewhere new, of having to find my ranking in a new pecking order, all of it made me want to lie down and take a long nap. Maligned as I was at Bradley, I found comfort in knowing where I stood, that I could just go to class and eat lunch with the Shark and go home to study, focus on chiseling my tunnel out of there. At one point Mom mentioned homeschooling, but she quickly retracted the offer because she said she was at the point in her life where her body was changing (“Mom,” I’d groaned), and, for some reason, I had the ability to press her buttons in a way nobody else could. Feeling’s mutual, I almost told her, but decided against it, on account of the button pushing and all.

  The school balked when Mom told them I was coming back. “I’m surprised,” Headmaster Mah said, “that TifAni would even want to come back. I’m not sure it’s the right decision for her.” He paused. “I’m not sure it’s the right decision for us.”

  There wasn’t enough evidence to charge me with any crime, but that didn’t stop the court of public opinion from trying me. There were the notes and the yearbook ramblings, my prints that turned up on the gun along with the killers’. Anita, who I’d trusted, had determined that I showed little emotion for my dead classmates, and that I seemed excited to return to school now that my “problem peers” had been extinguished.

  The most damning claim came from Dean, who insisted Arthur handed me the gun and told me to kill him “just like we’d planned.” Of course Arthur never said that, but no one was going to doubt the popular, six-packed soccer star, paralyzed from the waist down, his promising future wrenched from him at the starting line of what would have been a charmed life. The media sniffed around, wailed for a few weeks about how terrible it was that not all parties responsible for this tragedy would be brought to justice. Plump housewives with gold-plated crosses hidden in their heavy cleavage came in from all the over the country to lay cheap drugstore flowers on Dean’s front lawn, then went home to write grammatically incorrect hate mail to me: “Your going to be judged for what you did in the next life.”

  Dan took Headmaster Mah to task, said the school would have an even bigger lawsuit on their hands than the one they were currently battling if they didn’t allow me to return. Some parents were suing. Peyton’s led the charge. The sprinklers in the old part of the cafeteria had never activated. Had they worked, they could have prevented the fire from spreading to the Brenner Baulkin Room. The coroner determined that Peyton died from smoke inhalation, not the gunshot wound. With medical attention and plastic surgery, Peyton could have lived a relatively normal life. Instead, he was still conscious when the fire swept into the room, his raw face absorbing all that smoke like a hunk of bread in hot soup. I’ll never not hate myself for leaving him there.

  Dean was shipped off to a boarding school in Switzerland, a few miles from a progressive hospital specializing in experimental treatments for spinal cord injuries. The goal was to get him to walk again, but that never happened. Dean found the upside though. He wrote a book, Learning to Fly, that became an international bestseller. One speaking engagement lead to another, and Dean found himself a famous and well-regarded motivational speaker. I go to his website sometimes. There is a picture on the homepage of Dean, leaning forward in his wheelchair, embracing a pale bald child in a hospital bed. The grossly staged empathy on Dean’s face reminds me what I might have been capable of doing if Arthur had actually handed me the gun.

  Hilary didn’t return to Bradley either. Her parents moved her away to Illinois, where her father’s side was from. I wrote her a letter once, and it was returned to me, the envelope pristine and unopened.

  To Anita’s point, it was kind of unbelievable that everyone who had made my life so miserable was gone when school resumed for the spring semester. The cafeteria wouldn’t be rebuilt for another year, and, in the meantime, we ate lunch at our desks. A lot of pizza was ordered in, and no one complained about that.

  That first month after Bradley resumed, I dry-heaved every morning before school. But I needed to build up my loneliness tolerance, was all. The loneliness became like a friend, my constant companion. I could depend on it, and only it.

  I worked hard like I promised myself I would at Liam’s memorial service. Junior year, we took a trip to New York City, to visit tourist hot spots I would later despise, like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. At one point I was climbing off the bus and I bumped into a woman in a crisp black blazer and pointy, witchy shoes. She had a bulky cell phone pressed against her ear and a black bag with gold Prada lettering hooked around her wrist. I was a long ways off from worshiping at the Céline, Chloé, or Goyard thrones, but I certainly recognized Prada.

  “Sorry,” I said, and took a step away from her.

  She nodded at me briskly but never stopped speaking into her phone, “The samples need to be there by Friday.” As her heels snapped away on the pavement, I thought, There is no way that woman can ever get hurt. She had more important things to worry about than whether or not she would have to eat lunch alone. The samples had to arrive by Friday. And as I thought about all the other things
that must make up her busy, important life, the cocktail parties and the sessions with the personal trainer and the shopping for crisp, Egyptian cotton sheets, there it started, my concrete and skyscraper wanderlust. I saw how there was a protection in success, and success was defined by threatening the minion on the other end of a cell phone, expensive pumps terrorizing the city, people stepping out of your way simply because you looked like you had more important places to be than they did. Somewhere along the way, a man got tangled up in this definition too.

  I just had to get to that, I decided, and no one could hurt me again.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  I used to hold down the doorbell to annoy Arthur. Over the ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong I would pick up his muttering path through the house. “Jesus Christ, Tif,” he’d huff, when he finally wrenched the door open.

  Today I knocked. I don’t think I could stand to hear the loop of that bell ever again.

  The camera was behind me, my bra bulge directly in the shot. Barely seven hundred calories a day, and still I had that little lump of skin protruding beneath the harness of my bra. How was it possible?

  Mrs. Finnerman opened the door. Age and loneliness had converged on her, like allied countries during wartime. You get one side, I’ll get the other. There was gray in her hair that would never be tended to, extra skin pulling the corners of her mouth low. Mrs. Finnerman had always been short and formless (Arthur’s heft came from his father). It seemed especially cruel that a person who had to deal with what Mrs. Finnerman had to deal with was as naturally weak and defenseless as she was. Jell-O muscles, legally blind, prone to debilitating headaches and sinus infections.

  Sometime in the spring of freshman year, when things finally settled enough to reveal what life would be like now that it had a big fat line drawn through it—before the slaughter, after—I received a letter from Mrs. Finnerman. Her handwriting appeared unstable on the page, like she’d been a passenger in a car flying down a potholed road when she wrote it. She wanted me to know that she was so sorry for what I’d had to do. She had no idea the rage and the hatred simmering in Arthur, her own child—how could she not have known, she berated herself over and over.

  Mom forbade me from writing her back, but I did anyway (“Thank you. I would never blame you for what he did. I don’t hate him. Even miss him sometimes”). I folded the piece of paper in half and slipped it under her door on an afternoon I noticed her car wasn’t in the driveway. I wasn’t strong enough for a tête-à-tête just yet, and I sensed Mrs. Finnerman wasn’t either.

  After I graduated college, Mrs. Finnerman sent me the occasional card, and an odd sort of relationship developed. She reached out when the news trickled down that I’d gotten engaged, and when she read an article she liked in The Women’s Magazine. She ripped out one in particular, “Does Facebook Make You Sad?” Sent it in an envelope along with an article from The New York Times, titled “The Depressive Effect of Facebook.” She circled the date on each—mine written in May 2011, the Times’s version on February 7, 2012. “You scooped the Times,” she wrote. “Brava, TifAni!” It was the cheery correspondence of old friends, and that was a mistake, because Mrs. Finnerman and I weren’t friends. This would be the first time we’d seen each other since before the shooting.

  I smiled shyly. “Hi, Mrs. Finnerman.”

  Mrs. Finnerman’s face wadded up like a wet paper towel. I stepped forward, unsure, and she frantically fanned her hand at me, waving off my hug. “I’m all right,” she insisted. “I’m all right.”

  The coffee table in the living room was piled high with photo albums and old newspapers. The choice placement of a coffee mug altered a headline in a yellowed copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer, POLICE THINK GUNMEN DID WORK ALONE. Mrs. Finnerman picked up the cup and the word “not” reappeared, righting my fate.

  “What can I get you to drink?” Mrs. Finnerman asked. I knew she drank only green tea because I’d come across her stash once, stoned and searching for a jar of Nutella.

  “Yeah,” Arthur had said as I marveled at it. Green tea seemed very exotic to someone like me. Mom drank Folgers. “My mom is really anti-coffee.”

  “Tea is fine,” I told her. I hate tea.

  “Are you sure?” Mrs. Finnerman’s bulky glasses slid forward on her nose, and she pushed them back with her index finger, just like Arthur used to do. “I have coffee.”

  “Maybe coffee then.” I laughed a little, and to my relief Mrs. Finnerman did too.

  “Gentlemen?” Mrs. Finnerman addressed the crew.

  “Please, Kathleen,” Aaron said. “Like I said, pretend we aren’t even here.”

  For a moment I thought Mrs. Finnerman would unravel again. I held my breath, bracing, but she surprised everyone by throwing up her hands. “Like I could do that.” She laughed, wryly.

  Mrs. Finnerman disappeared into the kitchen, and I heard cupboard doors clapping open and shut. “Milk and sugar?” she called.

  “Just milk!” I called back.

  “What’s it like being here again?” Aaron asked.

  I looked around the room, at the faded fleur-de-lis wallpaper and the harp hulking in the corner. Mrs. Finnerman used to play, but now the strings peeled back like split ends in need of deep conditioner.

  “Weird.” As soon as I said it, I remembered Aaron’s instructions from earlier. I should answer his questions in a complete sentence, since they would edit out his voice and what I said had to make sense on its own. “It’s very strange to be back here.”

  “Here we go.” Mrs. Finnerman stepped carefully into the room, handing me a mug so misshapen it had to be handmade. I caught the engraving on the bottom, “To: Mom, Love: Arthur 2/14/95.” There was no handle, and I had to transfer the cup from hand to hand every few seconds, when the heat became too much for one side to tolerate. I took a scalding sip. “Thank you.”

  Mrs. Finnerman was rooted to her spot beside the couch. We both looked at Aaron, desperate for direction.

  Aaron indicated the open seat beside me. “Kathleen, why don’t you sit next to Ani on the couch?”

  Mrs. Finnerman nodded her head and muttered, “Yes, yes.” She walked around the coffee table and settled into the far end of the couch. Her knees pointed at the front door, away from the kitchen. I was closer to the kitchen.

  “It will help the shot if you can scooch in a little closer.” Aaron pinched his fingers together to show us what he meant.

  I couldn’t look at Mrs. Finnerman as I “scooched” toward her, but I imagined she had the same polite, mortified smile on her face as I did.

  “Much better,” Aaron said.

  The crew waited for us to say something, but the only sound was the hush of the dishwasher running in the kitchen.

  “Maybe you could go through the photo albums?” Aaron suggested. “Talk about Arthur?”

  “I’d love to see,” I tried.

  As though programmed by the two of us, Mrs. Finnerman leaned forward robotically and picked up a white photo album. She swept away a whisper-light dust bunny. It caught on the edge of her pinkie and reattached itself to the laminated cover.

  The album creaked open on her lap, and Mrs. Finnerman blinked down at Arthur, maybe three years old. He was mid-scream, clutching an empty ice cream cone. “We were in Avalon here,” Mrs. Finnerman murmured. “A seagull swooped down”—she swished her hand through the air—“knocked the whole scoop right off the cone.”

  I smiled. “We used to go through ice cream by the carton here.”

  “I know how he did it.” Mrs. Finnerman flipped the page, forcefully. “But not you. Tiny little thing that you are.” There was something menacing in her voice. I didn’t know what else to do but pretend I didn’t notice.

  “Oh, this.” Mrs. Finnerman brought her chin to her chest and sighed longingly at a picture of Arthur curled around a yellow Lab, his face burrowed in her buttery fur. Mrs. Finnerman tapped the dog’s snout. “This was Cassie.” Her smile was all lip. “Arthur loved
her. She slept in his bed every single night.”

  The cameraman moved behind us, his long lens closing in on the picture.

  I reached out to hold the page down, to deflect the glare obscuring my view, but Mrs. Finnerman brought the album to her chest and tucked her chin over its leather ledge. A tear rolled, clung to the edge of her chin. “He sobbed when she died. Sobbed. So he couldn’t be what they say he is. He had emotions.”

  What they say he is. A psychopath. Incapable of experiencing true human emotions, only mimicking those he observed in others: remorse, grief, compassion.

  A lot of time and energy went into dismantling the dynamic between Arthur and Ben, identifying the leader of the pack. Understanding their motives would bring closure to the community, and the information could prevent a recurrence at another school. The country’s most renowned psychologists examined the evidence collected in the aftermath of the attack on Bradley—Ben’s and Arthur’s journals, their academic records, interviews with neighbors and friends of the family—and every single one arrived at the same conclusion: Arthur called it.

  I arranged my face to signal sympathy, like Arthur had done for me so many times. “Do you know what I remember about him?”

  Mrs. Finnerman plucked a tissue out of a box on the coffee table. Her face went maroon as she blew into it. She folded the tissue in half and wiped her nose. “What’s that?”

  “I remember that he was kind to me on my first day of school, when I didn’t know anyone. I remember how he was the only one who stood up for me when a lot of people turned on me.”

  “That was Arthur.” His name trembled on her lips. “He wasn’t a monster.”

  “I know,” I said, not sure if this was a lie or not.

  The thing that everyone said Arthur was—I do believe it. But the report Dr. Anita Perkins submitted to the police acknowledged that even psychopaths can show flickers of real emotion, genuine empathy. I like to believe he experienced some for me, even though Dr. Perkins rated Arthur using the Hare test, a twenty-item inventory of personality traits and behaviors used to detect psychopathy, and Arthur scored off the charts.