Reconstructing Amelia

by Kimberly McCreight

  “Sorry I was late,” I muttered to Dylan as I walked past her. “I didn’t mean to keep everyone waiting. I ran into someone outside and—”

  “Shh,” Dylan whispered, holding a finger to her lips. She leaned over like she was checking to see if Zadie had really gone.

  “Why did she let me in the club if she hates me so much?” I asked. “I seriously don’t get it.”

  “Let you in?” Dylan asked quietly. She looked confused. “Zadie picked you.”

  “Picked me? What are you talking about?”

  “Dylan!” Zadie screamed from down the hall. “Get the fuck down here already!”

  Dylan looked up at me and smiled—calmly, sweetly. “We could ignore her.” Her grin turned mischievous. “But I think today, she might actually kill somebody.”

  “Let’s not risk it.” I shook my head and looked down the long hallway, which felt like it led to an electric chair. I wasn’t buying this whole idea that Zadie had been the one to tap me, but now wasn’t the time to press for details. “I’m pretty sure I’d be the first to go.”

  Dylan smiled playfully. “Probably.”

  And then she just stood there for a long time, smiling at me. With her smooth skin and arched cheekbones and thick, auburn curls, Dylan was the most perfect person I had ever seen. Flawless. Without flaw. It was hard to look at her, like she—like I—might shatter if I kept my eyes on her for too long.

  Dylan smiled at me one last time then turned, headed the way Zadie had gone. I watched her go, feeling the wind getting sucked from me. But Dylan had taken only a couple of steps when she came back and linked her fingers tightly through mine.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off our interlocked hands as Dylan tugged me onward down the long, dark hallway. I could hear voices now, far at the other end. There was light spilling back, too, and I could sense the distant movement of assembled bodies. I wanted that hallway to go on forever. I wanted to keep Dylan’s fingers knitted through mine. I wanted never to let her go.

  Dylan froze on the edge of the rectangle of light reflected back on the hallway carpet from that far room. She dropped my hand. Her back was to me, her arms outstretched in a low cross when I bumped into her.

  “So, the game,” I heard Zadie saying.

  “What are you waiting for?” I whispered in Dylan’s ear. Zadie was going to lose it when she finally noticed I still wasn’t in the room.

  Dylan didn’t answer. Instead, she slowly turned around. Her face was only inches from mine. I could feel her breath on my face. I could feel the beating of my own heart. I was sure Dylan could feel it, too. But the only sound was Zadie’s voice, floating up and away.

  “And this game isn’t for uptight people or hung-up people or whatever,” Zadie was saying. “So speak now or you lame asses should hit the road.”

  Then Dylan’s mouth was on mine. Her lips were so small and soft and delicate when I finally started kissing her back. Nothing like the rough saltiness of that lifeguard in Chatham I’d kissed two summers ago.

  As our mouths pressed together, Dylan held a hand against my face. And in that second, I was sure. I didn’t just want to be her friend. I didn’t just want to be like her. I wanted to be kissing her.

  Then, all of a sudden, with a gasp and a tug, Dylan was gone. And there I stood, alone in the darkness, on the edge of that small rectangle of light.

  It took me a second to catch my breath. My heart was still banging as I slid into the room where everyone was gathered. I kept my eyes down, hoping my cheeks weren’t as red as they felt. I pressed the back of my hands to my lips, but stopped short of wiping. Instead, I pressed my fingers to my mouth, trying to hold the kiss inside.

  I glanced up once to see if anyone was watching me. But the girls—some sprawled over leather, movie-theater-style chairs, others leaning against the walls or seated cross-legged on the floor—all had their eyes on Zadie, who was standing at the front of the room, behind her some sleek electronic equipment and a huge flat-screen TV.

  I looked around for Dylan as I slid down against the nearest wall. I was terrified that she was gone, that she’d somehow slipped away and disappeared. But when I finally looked at Zadie, there was Dylan, sitting on a chair to her right. And she was staring back at me, not frowning exactly, but not smiling either. She looked more surprised and maybe confused.

  But she kissed me, I reminded myself, recalling how absurd it had sounded when Sylvia hadn’t been sure if that had been the case with Ian. Didn’t she? Why is she surprised?

  “We’ve got a blog—Birds of a Feather, it’s called.” Zadie looked proud of herself. “I came up with that. Anyway, everybody’s got a page with pictures of themselves up. The object of the game is to get as many people as you can to, you know, ‘like’ your pictures.” She went on and on about the pictures and how to get more people to “like” you. I wasn’t really listening. All I could think about was that kiss, and how exactly right it had felt. There was a pain in my foot a second later. It took me a minute to realize that Zadie was stepping on my toes. “Are you fucking listening, bitch?”

  “Um, uh, yeah,” came out of my mouth in a blubbery stutter. I could feel the other girls looking at me, too. “I’m listening.”

  Zadie crossed her arms and smiled, scarily. She was closer now, looming over me.

  “You in?”

  Did I have to be in anymore? After what had just happened with Dylan, maybe I didn’t. I hadn’t really been listening, but what I had heard of this game—blog, pictures, strangers—I didn’t like. I didn’t want any part of it.

  I tried to see past Zadie to Dylan, to see if she’d give me some kind of sign. But she was leaning over, talking to Bethany. It didn’t seem like she’d noticed, much less cared, that Zadie was in my face. She’d completely disappeared, again.

  If Dylan could get bored with me that quickly, how would I ever keep her attention once I wasn’t even a Maggie anymore? Once we weren’t seeing each other all the time at meetings and parties. Maybe Dylan would pretend she didn’t know me anymore. Maybe she’d take it as some kind of insult that I hadn’t stayed in the club for her. Maybe she’d be mad. If she’d just look at me, then I’d know. I thought of the kiss again, of the way that Dylan’s soft hand had cradled my face.

  “So?” Zadie nudged at my leg again with her foot. “What’s it gonna be, Crazy Eyes? You ready to pack it in?”

  I looked over at Dylan one last time. She wasn’t talking to Bethany anymore. She was staring at the ground, not looking very happy. What if Dylan secretly wanted me to go? No, that couldn’t be. It wouldn’t make any sense. She’d just kissed me. Hadn’t she?

  “I want to stay,” I kind of squeaked, then cleared my throat. I forced myself to hold Zadie’s mean stare. “I’ll play.”

  Zadie glared at me for a minute more, as if she were trying to make me change my mind.

  “I’m staying,” I repeated, but my voice was shaky.

  “Zadie, enough!” Dylan finally shouted from across the room. She’d stood up. Her arms were crossed, her hips pushed to the side in a bring-it-on kind of way that I’d never seen before. “Seriously, just leave her the fuck alone!”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard Dylan sound like that—mad, and kind of tough. And it was all because she was defending me. My heart felt like it might burst. The kiss had meant something after all. Now I was sure of it.

  On our way out twenty minutes later—after a bunch of way-too-vague “details” about this supposed “game” had been laid out—we ran into Zadie’s stepdad in the kitchen. He was tall and athletic-looking, with a thick head of dark hair. He had on a flashy European suit and a big tacky ring on one finger. He’d spent a lot of money on his clothes. You could see that. But he was still a supercheesy guy, not like the other dads in Park Slope, who were once in a while cool, but were mostly preppy and kind of dorky. They were never Eurotrash. Not even the ones who were actually from Europe.

  There was a bottle of scotch open on the counter and a
mostly empty bar glass next to it. Zadie’s stepdad was clicking through his iPhone as he stood there. He had a BlackBerry in his other hand. There was a woman in the corner, older, with graying blond hair swept up in a loose bun and faded black pants under an apron. She was fluffing the pillows on the couch. For a second I thought she must be Zadie’s mother, until I noticed that she was fluffing like her life depended on it. We had a housecleaner—most people in Park Slope did—but she looked like a full-on maid, maybe even an indentured servant.

  “Hey!” Zadie’s stepdad called with a big, booming voice. “Look at what we have here! It’s the Maggies flapping up from their secret lair.”

  He was smiling in a kind of drunk way that was sort of charming and also kind of gross.

  “Ugh, shut up, Frank,” Zadie said, but playfully, as she swanned up next to him and scooped his drink out of his hand. She took one sip, then another. “Mmm,” she said. “You are always breaking out the good stuff when you think no on else is home.”

  Her stepdad snatched the glass back when she tried to take another sip. “Your mom is going to kill me if she smells whiskey on you when she gets home. Now come on, introduce me to your friends here.”

  I was at the front of the pack. I’d been trying to get out of the house as fast as possible, and now I was right there, on full display. Zadie rolled her eyes and leaned forward, her elbows on the granite countertop.

  “Ugh,” she said, taking his iPhone out of his hands and tapping through screens. “They’re not my friends.”

  “Come on now,” her stepdad said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. He turned back to us. “I hope Zadie’s been a good host to all of you. As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome in our home anytime. I like this whole club business. I was in something like that once. Best thing ever. Those guys are still my best friends. Clubs keep life, you know, better organized.”

  “I don’t think a gang counts as a club, Frank.” Zadie smiled back at us. She was showing off. “Frank here grew up on the wrong side of Brooklyn. He thinks the Skull and Bones society is about killing people.”

  Frank’s eyes flashed once at her, then his face took back its easy smile. He shrugged.

  “Maybe so,” he said. “But a brotherhood is a brotherhood. And I was also a cop, remember? That’s the club to end all damn clubs, trust me.”

  “Oh right, it seems so impossible that anyone let you carry a gun that I hardly ever remember.” Zadie motioned to the door. “Anyway, they were just going.”

  “Good, so you can go get to work on those college essays,” he said. “Because I finally made the bet with that asshole Teddy—you get into two Ivies, and that shit owes me five thousand dollars.”

  “And who gets to keep the money if I get in?”

  “You can take the money and flush it down the toilet for all I care. I just want to be able to tell that stuck-up piece of shit to go fuck himself, excuse my French.”

  “Behold, ladies,” Zadie said with a dramatic wave of her hand. “A dad who places bets on whether you’re going to get into college. This is what you get when your mom marries a guy from the wrong side of Brooklyn.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” her stepdad said, as he tossed some of the newly fluffed pillows to the floor so he could sit down on the couch, then rested his feet up on the pricey-looking coffee table. “You get a boatload of free cash and a kick-ass good time.”

  Kate

  NOVEMBER 27

  Kate and Lew were sitting on her couch in front of the two now-open boxes, which a messenger had delivered shortly after they’d gotten back from Sylvia’s. Each was packed with pages and pages of documents. Duncan had rubber-banded them together—each a couple of inches or more high—and labeled them: E-MAIL, TEXTS, WORD DOCS.

  “There’s so much,” Kate whispered, as Lew pulled out the note Duncan had sent along with them.

  “Sounds like there’s more, too, he’s got some passwords listed here—Facebook, Twitter,” Lew said. “Looks like there was a blog she was posting to also. We’ll have to take a look at that. Hard to say yet what the primary mode of communication is for these kids. Gchat, Facebook, texting—it’s different in every school, you know.”

  At sixty-odd years old, Lew sounded much better versed in teenage modes of communication than Kate. She barely understood the point of Twitter, much less had any idea how to follow anyone.

  “So you’ve dealt with this kind of electronic history on cases before?”

  “On cases, no.” Lew smiled and shook his head. “But I’ve got six grandkids. They manage to get me on Facebook more than once a day, sending me pictures and messages and all sorts of stuff.”

  “Six grandkids?” Kate repeated quietly, trying not to let herself think of all the grandchildren she’d never have.

  “And only half of our kids have started their own families, God help me once they all get going,” he said, trying to sound annoyed, even though he obviously wasn’t. He motioned to the boxes. “I think we should divide and conquer here.”

  “Can you look at her Facebook and Twitter accounts and that blog?” Kate asked. “There’s a desktop computer on the second floor, in my office.”

  Lew nodded in the direction of the stacks of pages. “You’ll be okay down here with all that?”

  “No,” Kate said, taking a deep breath, “probably not.”

  Once Lew had disappeared up the steps, Kate pulled out the first stack of papers, Amelia’s Word documents. They seemed the least likely to plummet her into hysterics, though she knew that the real dirt and, thus, anything useful, would likely be in Amelia’s texts. But she wasn’t yet ready to dive headlong into those. Luckily, aside from the gRaCeFULLY posts that Kate had already seen, the Word documents were all school papers or stories that Amelia had written. Kate was almost done flipping through what was left of the stack when she came to a paper titled To the Lighthouse: Friendship and Feminism, by Amelia Baron. It was the paper Amelia had supposedly plagiarized. Except the title didn’t sound the same as the one that had fallen out of Amelia’s notebook.

  Kate took the paper downstairs to the kitchen, to the drawer where she’d dumped all those mean little notes when Adele had shown up at her door. She’d slid Amelia’s paper into that same drawer. She tugged it out now and looked at the title page: Representations of Time: To The Lighthouse, by Amelia Baron. Not the same, not even close.

  Kate turned to the kitchen table, setting the papers out side by side. She flipped through the pages, skimming. The papers had nothing in common as far as she could see. Why would Amelia have two different papers on the exact same book? Kate stared down at them, tracing her fingers over the titles. It was proof Amelia didn’t cheat. Kate felt sure of it, even if she couldn’t explain how.

  Kate left the papers on the table and headed back up to the living room, where the seemingly endless stacks of documents remained. She pulled the e-mails out first; a Post-it on top read: “Only printed out last 4 months. You want more let me know.” All those messages in four months.

  The first e-mail was from George McDonnell. YOU GOING TO CHLOE’S PARTY THIS WEEKEND? HEARD SOMEBODY’S BRINGING E. E? As in ecstasy? Was George McDonnell the mystery boy whom Amelia had gone into the house with? Kate was still trying to accept the whole sex thing, and now there were drugs involved, too?

  Kate ripped the stack of e-mails apart, praying Duncan would have thought to include Amelia’s outgoing messages. Sure enough, about three quarters of the way through there was a flag and a note: “Sent File.” Kate raced through Amelia’s messages until she laid her hands on her daughter’s reply.

  E? WHAT ARE YOU LIKE A DRUG ADDICT ALL OF A SUDDEN OR SOMETHING? Amelia had written. NOT COOL, BRO. ANYWAY, I CAN’T GO, I’VE GOT AN EARLY PRACTICE SUNDAY A.M.

  Kate closed her eyes and clutched the e-mail to her chest. Thank God. Maybe she was right about some things after all. Kate looked at Amelia’s next sent e-mail, and it was to her lacrosse coach, Ms. Bing. IS THE TRAINING CAMP GOING TO BE OVER SPR
ING BREAK AGAIN THIS YEAR?

  Maybe it wasn’t all lies and bad surprises. But then, about a dozen pages in, Kate got to an e-mail that stopped her cold.

  I’m sorry, Amelia. I was out of line. Can we talk about it? Please.

  —Phillip

  Whoever this Phillip was, something had happened between Amelia and him. Some kind of fight. Kate looked up at the e-mail address: p_woodhouse@gracehall.edu.

  Phillip Woodhouse, the headmaster of Grace Hall? Kate blinked at the e-mail, then looked again at the address. What was Phillip Woodhouse doing e-mailing Amelia with that kind of tone: I’m sorry? I was out of line? When did a headmaster ever apologize to a student? And what kind of line, exactly, had he drifted across?

  Kate startled when she heard Lew on the stairs. When she turned up, he was ashen.

  “What’s wrong?” Kate asked. First the e-mail from Woodhouse and now that awful look on Lew’s face: it was too much. The adrenaline was making her hands shake. “What did you find?”

  She waited for Lew’s expression to lift, but instead he just paused some distance away and gripped the back of the armchair.

  “I think you should come up and see for yourself,” he said finally.

  “What—no. Why? Upstairs?” Kate felt queasy as she looked toward the steps. “Just tell me what you found. Something on her Facebook account?”

  He shook his head. “Like I said, you need to see it.”

  Kate felt light-headed as she looked back down at the e-mails on her lap.

  “But I found another paper,” she said finally, trying to buy herself time. “Two different papers for the same assignment. The one they said Amelia cheated on.”

  “Huh,” Lew said, not sounding very interested. “That bears looking into.”

  “And I found this.” She stood up and held out the e-mail to him.

  He glanced down at it.

  “Who’s Phillip Woodhouse?” he asked. “We think he could be our mystery boyfriend?”

  “He’s the headmaster at Grace Hall.”