It wasn’t even about protecting my own interests, it really wasn’t.
I told you, I’m a good friend. A great one.
And when you’re a great friend, you never tell secrets. Especially the dark ones— like the fact that I know how Olivia Barron really died.
Because I’m the one who killed her.
Seventeen
SHERIDAN
The weekends are difficult for me. Glenda is off then, so I’m usually alone with the girls. It gives me a lot of anxiety if I’m being honest.
I adore them, of course. That goes without saying. They are the best kind of daughters a mother could ever hope for; kind, smart, funny, and curious. They’re two years apart and best friends, something I hope never changes.
Yet I always dread the weekends when it’s just me. I’ve never been great at being needed so much. I’m usually the one doing the needing.
Just ask my husband.
He had promised to come home that weekend, but of course a sudden work trip had pulled him away from us again. He didn’t even bother apologizing anymore, he must have sensed how empty his explanations sounded at this point.
The girls didn’t even bother whining about it because they were so used to it.
“You’re missing everything,” I’d hissed into the phone. I’d gone out onto the front porch to scold him so the girls wouldn’t hear me. I shivered as I stepped out into the chilly South Carolina evening. I regretted not putting on a cardigan.
“What do you want me to do, Sheridan?” he replied. He sounded completely bored which made me even more angry.
“I want you to stop lying to us.” I’d never said this to him before, but what was there left to lose, besides him? “I know you’re seeing someone. There’s no business that would keep you from your family every goddamn weekend when you own the company, Heath.”
He was silent on the other end.
“I can overlook it if that’s what life is now,” I continued. “You and I both know this marriage has become a farce. You can break my heart. Just don’t treat me like I’m stupid.”
“Sheridan…”
His voice trailed off and I knew he wanted me to believe he was ashamed. Or maybe that I was crazy. That was my husband’s strategy, he liked to use my own fear as weapon against me.
It wasn’t going to work this time and he sensed it.
“When I get back on Monday,” he responded, his voice quiet and soothing like he was speaking to a child. “We will talk about what’s going on with you. This alarms me.”
“You should be alarmed,” I said, looking out at the live oak that sat guard over our home, a home that had been in my family since the early 1700s. “Either you break it off with her, or I’m done. This is the third woman in five years. You promised…”
“Sheridan, you need to calm down, the girls depend on you to be calm,” he said, and his condescension just fueled my anger.
“The girls are fine. This is about you, Heath and me. Please.”
My rage had been replaced by desperation. That’s how these talks always went. I’d start out playing the part of the woman who didn’t take shit and end it begging my husband to please love me again.
And he knew that.
I started to cry, and he was quiet on the other end.
“Sheridan.” The way he said my name. It would always be that easy for him to break me down.
I still loved him, beyond articulation. I always had.
“Please,” I whispered into the phone, sliding a hand across my cheek to wipe away the tears. “Heath, please come home. I need you.”
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m not there. I’ll see you Monday.”
I started to sob. My shoulders shook.
I didn’t have to reply. He was already gone.
* * *
Mama had always told me to never love a man who didn’t love me more than I loved him.
“It’s the worst thing you can do,” she said as she dropped ice cubes into her fourth rum and Coke of the day. “Don’t ever love a man more than he loves you. It’s the mistake that will cost you everything. You’ll never be sure of a single thing in your life.”
It sounded like the rantings of a drunk, bitter woman— like someone out of a Tennessee Williams play.
“You’re silly,” I said as I folded my bare legs beneath me. “Isn’t it better if you just love someone the same as they love you?”
“No,” Mama replied. “Because men get tired, Sheridan. Even when you’re beautiful, they get so tired. It never works out. They’re always chasing that feeling they had in the beginning.”
She stared out into the back gardens of our house and watched the Canada geese pecking at the grass, looking for supper. It had been raining all week.
I knew she was thinking of Daddy then.
“Mama, Daddy loves you so much,” I said, reaching my hand out for hers. “He’s just so busy with work. That’s why he’s gone so much.”
She stared at me and opened her mouth like she wanted to say something before quickly shutting it again.
“Sheridan, go practice your piano,” she waved me away. “You’re supposed to practice half an hour a day.”
She pulled her hand away from mine and my heart fell.
“Yes, Mama,” I said, standing up and walking toward the living room to practice for my recital that would be in two weeks.
When I turned around at the threshold, she was looking out the window again, thinking.
But there were no tears. Mama always told me you don’t have to cry when you’re blue— that there is a melancholy beyond such things.
Sometimes, that’s the saddest thing of all.
* * *
I promised myself I’d never have a marriage like my parents did. One where you’re never together, where one person is always waiting for the other one.
I knew one day I would marry someone who needed me just as much as I needed him.
But we really do become our parents, even when we try out best not to.
Heath reminded me so much of my father, and I could only see that now, when it was too late.
And I hadn’t followed my mother’s advice— I’d loved a man too much and then married him. I’d hoped marrying Heath would make him feel like I did. When that didn’t happen, I gave him a child. It only seemed to make him push me away more.
So, I gave him another. Same result.
I kept myself thin. I slathered on anti-aging products every night, drank only water, barely touched booze if I could help it. When he was home, I offered myself in every way, doing anything he wanted in the bedroom, no matter how uncomfortable it made me and how hard it was to look at myself in the mirror after. I was so desperate to capture him the way other women clearly did. I’d smell their perfume on him, even after a long flight back to us across the country.
He didn’t even bother to change his shirts, since their scent was so strong all over him.
I had many phone conversations with him on that porch and they’d all end the same. I was the crazy one with no hard proof. And he was the man with all the power, because he held my entire heart in his hand.
I stood on the porch after our phone call for a long time, thinking about how I’d ended up in this place.
I couldn’t help but think of Hollis. And Brooke.
And Olivia.
She’d been the one that told me Heath was no good. She’d shown me as well, and I hadn’t believed it. I’d even accused her…
No. I couldn’t think of that now.
I put my iPhone in the back pocket of my jeans and took a deep breath.
I didn’t want the girls to see me like this.
Because unlike my own Mama, I wanted them to keep believing in the fairy tale.
I wasn’t ready for them to learn what all women learn eventually:
Fairy tales aren’t real. They never were.
Eighteen
AMANDA
My schedule and my life ar
e about as pre-planned as possible. My iCalendar is booked to the minute for the next three years, and sadly that’s not an exaggeration. I try not to complain about it. I’m living the dream, after all. But it makes it almost impossible to pivot when you need to.
And if I was going to be at reunion weekend, things would need to be rearranged.
“What’s going on in March?” I asked Marianne. She always meets me at the studio lot offices around 7 am to start my day and my week. I pay her well and I allow her flexibility because I know I’m a demanding boss. The twenty-six personal assistants I have been through in the last five years are proof of that.
“You’ve got filming in Vancouver for most of it,” Marianne confirmed as she handed me my iced coffee. “You have a charity function the first weekend and after that you have SXSW in Austin to present the trailer for the Netflix documentary…”
“That,” I pointed at her iPad. “Perfect. I need to cancel that. Let them know today so they can find someone else.”
“Cancel?” Marianne asked. “But you’re a producer…”
“I know,” I snapped. “Fully aware. But I don’t need to be there to present a trailer. I have somewhere else to be that weekend.”
“Okay.” Marianne’s fingers flew across the screen. “I’ll contact them today. What am I replacing that time with?”
“College reunion,” I said. “I’ll need to be there Friday night to Sunday afternoon. I’ll need a plane. Will I be in Vancouver that Friday?”
Marianne shuffled through the calendar. “No, you’ll be back in LA. What’s the itinerary?”
“Staunton,” I replied, and Marianne looked at me as if I’d just told her something in an alien language. Which, in LA, I might as well have. “It’s in Virginia. I’ll probably need to fly to Charlottesville and rent a car. The best you can find there, obviously. It won’t be like here or Vegas, but still. Can you arrange? You won’t need to be with me, obviously. If you’d still like to go to SXSW that weekend, it’s fine. I have some mileage points you’re free to use to get there.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll make sure it’s all taken care of.”
I nodded and she hurried out the door of my office to her own desk in the lobby, shutting the door behind her.
I sat down in the executive chair behind my large, oak desk, a desk I’d bid for at a Christies auction three years ago that used to belong to Princess Diana. It had cost me a pretty penny, but I thought of it as a charmed piece. Ever since I’d owned it, good things had come my way.
It was also where I did most of my thinking and introspection.
Why did I need to go to this reunion? If there was any reunion to skip this would be the one.
Yet something was calling me to it. Perhaps it was even Olivia herself.
I shook my head. What a ridiculous thought.
As famous as I was now, I’d been infamous before. It was a huge reason I’d changed my name. Not just because my real one sounded awful, but because it was my way of making a clean break the past.
When Olivia died, our lives had been upended. There’d been so many questions.
Why would a college graduate on her way to the life of her dreams jump from the top of a hotel rooftop? Olivia Barron had no history of suicidal ideation, no history of any sort of mental illness at all.
Why would she jump?
We’d all stuck to the same story, all these years. And, fairly, it was a story we all believed. I hadn’t been on the rooftop of The Brentmore the night Olivia jumped.
I hadn’t watched her do it.
But I’d seen the impact, up close and personal. So close, in fact, that I’d been the first one to see her land on the concrete sidewalk in front of the hotel, just feet from the entrance.
I’d never forget the sound. It haunted my dreams.
Why would I want to relive that night by going to the very place it had happened?
This question echoed in my mind as I heard the phone ringing in the background. Marianne picked it up and was chattering away.
But I was still lost in the memory of that night. This happened every now and then— I’d let myself go back.
To punish myself.
It was what I owed Olivia, after all.
PART FOUR: JUNIOR YEAR
Nineteen
HOLLIS
Freshman and sophomore years flew by. Really, all of college did, but those years especially. After a slow first few weeks of getting adjusted, everything seemed to accelerate.
That summer before junior year was a weird one. I wasn’t used to being away from my roommates so long, and life in Atlanta with my parents had become unbearable. I spent most nights getting drunk off whatever I found in my parent’s liquor cabinet, typing on IM all night with everyone.
In retrospect, lubricating IM conversations maybe wasn’t the best way to go through a bottle of 1946 Macallan Select Reserve, but my parents were so disconnected from reality and the value of things that they never noticed the empty bottle of $25,000 Scotch I purposely left on the kitchen counter. The maid swept it into the trash with everything else. It took me just over two July days to drain it once I opened it. I kick myself for that one. Back then, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between that and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black.
Amanda had gotten a summer job as a camp counselor in the Poconos to avoid going back to West Virginia. Her communication with all of us was sporadic. They had a computer lab there, but their Internet was dial-up and spotty.
Brooke was home in Manassas, working as a lifeguard at the local pool, saving up money so she wouldn’t have to work at all junior year, at least first semester. She was always signed on AIM and constantly active. It made me wonder if she lived at her computer.
“You’re a lifeguard, you must work with some hot guys,” I’d type to her. “Get laid, Brooke!”
“Yeah right,” she’d type back. “I’m not you. They barely notice me.”
Sheridan was back in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Like me, she didn’t have to work. She’d mostly just been hanging out with the girls she’d gone to high school with and sounded bored most nights. She also obsessively stalked AIM for this guy she was obsessed with named Heath at SMI. He’d been roommates with a friend of mine (with benefits) named Winston, and for some reason Sheridan thought he was amazing even though he came off as a pretentious douche to me.
But what did I know? Heath was like all the guys I’d grown up with. The most interesting thing about them was what their father did.
Olivia had been the real enigma. She was barely online due to traveling, she said. Her parents had brought her with them to the South of France and then she was spending the rest of the summer in LA with her half-sister on the set of Friends.
It was, by far, the most glamorous summer any of us were having.
I missed her terribly. I missed all of them terribly.
I was ready to be back in Staunton. That was my home now.
Atlanta wasn’t that place for me anymore.
* * *
By the time August finally rolled around, I was desperate to be back in Staunton and away from my mother, who I was starting to suspect suffered from a personality disorder. I volunteered to help with Freshman Orientation along with Amanda.
We were in a new dorm this year, but still in a triple connected to another double, so everything would stay the same for the most part.
I would also have a car on campus that year, thankfully. My parents had bought me a brand-new Audi with enough room for the five of us to go anywhere we wanted on the weekends. We were no longer a prisoner to Martha Jefferson. We could have some adventures and not depend on anyone else to drive us to them.
“How was camp?” I asked that first day as Amanda and I unpacked our stuff and began the process of decorating the white cinderblock walls of our room.
“Not so bad.” Amanda pushed thumb tacks into a poster of Tupac Shakur that hung over her bed. “I met a guy.”
“Oh?” I flopped down into the papasan chair and turned the box fan on, dust from it flying around the room for a moment making me sneeze. “You didn’t mention this on IM.”
“It kind of happened the last couple of weeks,” she said, smiling. “He goes to UVA, so that’s good news too.”
“Nice!” UVA was less than a 40-minute drive from Martha Jefferson, just over Afton Mountain. “So, tell me about him.”
His name was Alec and he was going to be a junior too that year.
“He says they call them third-years there though,” Amanda added as she folded her tank tops and gingerly placed them in the top drawer. “Anyway, he’s a political science and English double major. He wants to go to law school after.”
“Dick size?” I inquired and she burst out laughing.
“Solid. Solid.” She smirked. “I’m just getting to know him, but so far so good on that end.”
“How tall?”
“I don’t know… pretty tall. Over six-feet. He played baseball in high school.”
We continued talking about the amazing Alec and Amanda’s summer among the pre-pubescent until the sun started to set.
“Want to grab dinner?” I asked. “Dining hall is open until 8.”
“Yeah.” Amanda wrapped her arm around my shoulder. “I missed you.”
“Me too, slut.” I grinned. “More than you know.”
Twenty
BROOKE
I’d never been so ready to be back in Staunton as I was that August before junior year.
I’d been stuck in the back of my parents’ minivan for over two hours before we finally reached Staunton. The renowned white Greek revival buildings of Martha Jefferson stared at me from the hills above us, welcoming me home.
The Girls On the Hill: A Psychological Thriller Page 6
