by Sara Shepard
“Whatever,” Caitlin called over her shoulder. She wanted it to be true—hell, as a same-sex couple with an adopted South Korean daughter, acceptance should be their thing, right? But they sounded like they were trying to say the right lines without actually meaning them.
“Come back!” Mary Ann shouted plaintively. “We haven’t even talked about Mr. Granger!”
“I didn’t do it,” Caitlin said as she started up to her room. “That’s all you need to know.”
She glanced down for a split second. Her moms were standing at the foot of the stairs, looking so sad and confused and helpless. Caitlin knew she was putting a wall up. It was probably the same wall Taylor had put up, too. And yet, well—she just couldn’t explain herself. Not about Jeremy, because they wouldn’t get it.
And not about Granger . . . because they couldn’t know.
CHAPTER FOUR
SOMETHING SHARP SCRATCHED PARKER DUVALL’S cheek. She swatted at it, but it just bounced back and jabbed at her again. She opened her eyes and saw the world sideways, but before she could figure out why she was lying down—and why she was in what looked to be a field—her head began to spin wildly.
She clamped her eyes shut to stop the woozy motion and suddenly felt the urge to puke. Aha. I’ve been drinking. Just a little clue to the puzzle.
Slowly, carefully, she tried to open her eyes again. This time she was able to keep the spins at bay and take in her surroundings. It was light out, the sun halfway up the sky. Dry, spiky stalks of half-dead grass jutted out of the ground as far as she could see. Off in the distance, a massive building loomed. Where the hell was she?
Finally, Parker managed to prop herself up on one elbow. Moving as slowly as she could, she eased herself to a sitting position. Stale cigarette smoke wafted off her hoodie. So, I’ve been drinking and smoking. Must have been a crazy night.
She hadn’t been hungover in forever. But back when she was Beacon Heights’s golden girl, when her arrival at any party meant the event was a true hit, she’d been a pro. Downing booze with the rest of them. Matching the boys shot for shot. Waking up the next morning feeling like shit, but laughing it off, knowing she’d had an awesome time.
It was easy to reminisce about the golden days: She’d been blond and beautiful, with a gaggle of friends and an even bigger bevy of hangers-on. She’d aced all her classes without even having to try. She had Nolan Hotchkiss’s seal of approval—they were tight, one of those platonic friendships that was even closer and cooler than any couple’s. And she had a wonderful best friend in Julie Redding, their bond strong and meaningful in a sea of superficial relationships.
Her life was perfect, right? Except, oh yeah, her family. A mom that hated her. And a dad that beat the crap out of her. But whatever. Maybe that’s what made her so good at being the life of the party—because at home, she was better off dead. She would have kept up that life, too, if it hadn’t been for Nolan . . . and her father’s wrath. And now, everything had changed. Her father was locked up for life. She didn’t have a home to go to anymore. And she’d become a different girl—a harder, edgier, angrier girl, a Bizarro Parker. No one invited her to any parties anymore. Well, screw them all.
Parker shivered, suddenly realizing how cold she was. The air had a distinct morning chill, and it felt like it was going to start raining any minute. Gradually, the building in the distance came into focus—a low, wide, cheap stucco structure in dirty beige with evenly spaced brown metal doors. A teenage boy in a bright orange uniform and wearing an apron and a paper hat stepped out of one of the doors with a giant garbage bag. He tossed it into a Dumpster and headed back inside. So a strip mall, maybe? Someplace with a bunch of crappy little take-out places? But how had she gotten here?
She shut her eyes and tried to think. The last thing she remembered, though, was leaving the police station with Julie. Welcome to Parker 2.0, she thought. Complete with scars, sullen moods, and memory blanks!
Parker looked down at herself. At least she was in the same clothes, even though they were caked with dirt. She patted her pockets. Her hand knocked against a hard lump in her hoodie, and she fumbled for her cell phone. Tuesday, October 25, it said at the top of the screen, as well as the time: 10:04 AM. Okay, so she’d only missed one night—she remembered parts of Monday. She quickly dialed Julie, but it went straight to voice mail.
Parker swallowed hard. It was rare that Julie didn’t pick up her phone. Had something else happened? Something to do with the Granger investigation? All at once, she remembered the serious-looking file she’d found at Granger’s house when they were looting it for clues. It had said JULIE REDDING across the envelope, and it didn’t look like a folder full of old essays. Did it have something to do with her mom’s hoarding, their quick and shameful exodus from California? It was a secret Parker had known for a while, something she’d worked hard to keep safe. Before Parker had realized what she was doing, she’d slipped the file out of Granger’s drawer and stuffed it into her pocket.
Or had it been about something else? Parker was sure she’d read the file—while still in Granger’s house, in fact—but she had no memory of what it said. Typical, she thought, patting her pockets, wishing she had the file with her now, though she’d undoubtedly left it back at Julie’s place. Her brain only worked half the time and remembered the least important of details, courtesy of her dad’s last beating.
She stood up and started to walk to the front of the strip mall, her legs feeling heavy and useless. The shops were open for business, their lights on, a little easel advertising a daily deal sitting in front of the Verizon store at the end of the strip. Then, she jammed her hands into the pockets of her sweatshirt and felt a stiff scrap of paper in the left-hand side. It was Elliot Fielder’s business card, with his cell phone number scrawled on the back. Call me anytime, he’d said to her at their first meeting, which was also Parker’s first-ever visit with a therapist.
But that was before she’d caught him stalking her. And that was before she confronted him and he grabbed her arm roughly, saying she needed to listen. Listen to what? Julie had hissed in Parker’s ear when they left. And Parker had felt like an idiot—she’d let Fielder into her inner circle, decided she’d trust him, and told him everything about her life. And then he’d betrayed that trust by following her.
Parker turned the business card over in her hands. Call me anytime. His words tugged at her. She remembered his caring voice. But she couldn’t call. No freaking way.
Someone gasped, and Parker looked up. A pimply guy in his early twenties in a Subway tee stood just outside the door, smoking a cigarette. He stared at Parker, then looked away. Parker gritted her teeth and turned around, heading in the opposite direction—but not before her reflection in the nail salon next door caught her eye. She was dressed in dingy black jeans and a dirty black hoodie pulled tightly around her head. Her blond bangs had grown out and fell over her eyes. Then her gaze traveled to the taut, ropy knots of a scar on her cheekbone. It was just like all the others that formed a disgusting web back and forth across her face.
Shame welled up in her throat, and she choked back a sob. No wonder that Subway worker had flinched: She looked like a monster. Then again, everyone looked at her that way these days—like she had no business being here on earth, like she should just crawl back under the rock from which she’d come. It hurt every time. Only two people in the world didn’t flinch when they saw her: Julie . . . and Fielder.
Ducking around the corner and out of view, Parker pulled out her phone and looked at the keypad. Mustering up her courage, she punched Fielder’s number into her cell phone and hit SEND. Julie would be so pissed, but she needed to talk to someone.
The phone rang once, and Parker’s breath came fast and shallow, her heart pounding.
The phone rang a third time. Finally, the line clicked, and she heard a familiar voice on the other end. “Is this . . . Parker?” Elliot Fielder said, sounding surprised.
Parker blinked. She hadn’
t expected him to recognize her number. “Um, yeah,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Fielder answered. “Are you . . . okay?”
Parker drew her bottom lip into her mouth. Suddenly she felt ridiculous for reaching out to someone she barely knew—and someone who had tricked her. She would find her own way back to Julie’s, then they would figure everything out together. “You know what,” she decided. “Never mind. I’m cool.”
“Listen, Parker—I know why you’re calling.”
She almost dropped the phone and looked around. Had he followed her here, to this crappy strip mall? She tried to spot him in the distance, but she didn’t see anyone around.
“I know about your dad.”
The hair on the back of her neck stood up. “What about him?” she asked harshly.
Fielder exhaled slowly. “Wait, you don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?” There was a long pause. “Don’t know what?” Parker practically growled.
His voice was shaky when he finally spoke. “I didn’t think I’d have to be the one to tell you. Parker—” He paused. “There was an accident in the prison yard. Your father . . . well, he’s dead.”
CHAPTER FIVE
TUESDAY EVENING, AS AVA JALALI sat at the kitchen table, agonizing over her physics homework—she was in AP, much to the amazement of her only-interested-in-their-looks, fashionista friends. The problem sets were just getting harder and harder with each unit. What was also making the work practically impossible was that she was out in the open so her father and stepmother could keep an eye on her—their idea, not hers. After her latest scrape with the police, they’d kept eyes on her almost 24-7, as if she was a ticking, juvenile-delinquent time bomb.
Not that her father or her stepmother, Leslie, was watching her particularly closely. Her father was reading some work documents at the island while sipping tea. And Leslie was hurrying back and forth through the room, her bouncy, Drybar-styled curls barely shifting as she moved, and her cashmere dress floating gracefully around her knees. First she opened this cabinet, then that. Took out some candlesticks, frowned, then rifled through a drawer for some place mats. Amazingly, Leslie was doing all this while carefully balancing a glass of chardonnay in her hand. By Ava’s count, this was glass number three—and it wasn’t even five o’clock yet. Classy.
“Damn it,” Leslie muttered under her breath as the Vitamix blender she was trying to pin with one hand and her chin—God forbid she put the glass of wine down—almost slipped from her grasp. She shoved it inside a different cabinet and shut the door with such force that Ava jumped in her chair, her pencil scribbling across her physics homework. Ava tried to meet her father’s gaze, but Mr. Jalali was doing a really good job of feigning obliviousness. What the hell was Leslie so worked up about, anyway? Wasn’t wine supposed to relax you?
Leslie clomped into the dining room, still muttering. She returned balancing a stack of silverware in one hand, her wine glass clenched in the other. “These need to be polished,” she barked at Mr. Jalali.
He shifted uncomfortably on his stool. Clearly he realized she was acting like a freak, right? And yet all he said was, “I’ll let the housekeeper know.”
“Maybe you can have Ava do it.” Ava could feel Leslie’s eyes on her. “Silver polishing is a useful skill.”
Mr. Jalali put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Darling, we have almost a week to prepare. There’s plenty of time.”
Ava couldn’t help but look up from her problem sets. “Prepare for what?”
Ava’s father smiled kindly. “Leslie’s mother is visiting us from New York. She’ll be staying with us for a few days, and Leslie has decided to throw a party here at the house.”
“And I want everything to be perfect.” Leslie barged in, flicking at a crumb on the countertop with a crimson, talon-like fingernail. Then she shot Ava a look. It said, very clearly, Which means I don’t want any trouble from you.
Ava shrugged, though inside she was seething. Leslie had never shown her an ounce of kindness, and after Ava’s recent trip to the police station for Granger’s murder, she’d become downright witchlike. Ava glanced at her father, but he was looking at his newspaper again as if he didn’t sense the tension. Ava was astonished at how different her father had become in this woman’s presence. In the old days—the good days—he and her mother used to care about her deeply. There was so much laughing and cheer in the house. None of this frantic cleaning. None of these dirty, hateful looks.
The phone rang, and Mr. Jalali excused himself from the kitchen to answer it in his office. Leslie began counting wine glasses, pulling down a few and placing them roughly in the sink. She mumbled something under her breath about them being too spotty. She looked like she was going to have a brain hemorrhage right then and there.
Ava shut her textbook and looked at Leslie. “I’m sure everything is going to be perfect for your mom.”
Bad idea. Leslie whipped around and stared at her, her nostrils flaring. “You don’t have the right to speak right now.”
Ava pressed her pencil nub into her paper. “I’m just trying to help. Too much stress can make you sick.”
Leslie moved closer to Ava in one swift movement. Ava could smell the fermented grapes on her breath. “I rush around to make things perfect because they are so imperfect. And I’m talking about you, first and foremost.” She waved her hand at Ava. “You dress like a whore.” She gestured at Ava’s skinny jeans and, yes, maybe slightly revealing top. “No wonder no one respects you. What were you really doing in that teacher’s house before you killed him, getting him off?”
Ava shot to her feet. First, she hated that Leslie knew about the rumor Nolan had passed around about Ava trading sex favors with teachers for As. She also hated that the cops had included Leslie in the conversation they’d had with her father about why she was under suspicion for killing Granger. “I didn’t touch him!” she protested.
Leslie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
Ava couldn’t believe it. Nor could she take this another second. She slammed her textbook closed, grabbed her notebook and pencil, and ran upstairs, where she threw herself onto her bed and pounded the Persian silk bedcover with her fists. It had been a gift from her parents after their last trip to Iran, not long before her mother died.
Ava missed her mom. And she couldn’t stand living under the same roof as this woman. Why did she hate Ava so much? Was she jealous?
Downstairs, she heard the muffled sounds of her father speaking to Leslie. He was probably asking where Ava had gone, and Leslie probably made up some story about how Ava had made a sassy, bitchy remark and then fled upstairs like the spoiled brat she was. After a moment, Ava heard the front door open and close, then the sound of Leslie talking nonstop in harsh tones in the driveway. There was a car door opening and closing, and then the rumble of an engine. Ava peeled back the curtain and watched as her father’s Mercedes pulled out of the driveway. They were gone.
She sighed and rolled over, staring at the ceiling. All at once, she felt suddenly and painfully alone. Who could she turn to? Not Dad, who’d been her rock for so many years. Not Alex, the boyfriend she loved—they hadn’t spoken since that night he saw her leave Granger’s and called the police on her.
Alex. She still couldn’t believe he’d done such a thing. Yeah, she knew what it had looked like—he’d seen her run out of Granger’s house, disheveled and flushed, her dress half-buttoned.
It pained her that Alex would assume exactly what Leslie did—that she’d gone to Granger’s for a booty call. Alex knew Granger had hit on her, and that he’d actually hooked up with his other students. Why couldn’t he have just asked her what was going on? She would have told him. Not the whole truth, maybe—but close to it, perhaps. Even about what they’d done to Nolan.
That was the thing, though: Alex hadn’t asked. He’d just called the police and told on her. Her boyfriend. She didn’t know whether to be hurt or angry or both. Did he really think she wa
s capable of killing someone? Did he know her at all?
She wanted so badly to ask him why he had done such a terrible thing. Because underneath all the hurt and betrayal, she missed Alex, so badly it ached. Not talking to Alex, not seeing him—it felt so weird. It was like she’d lost half of herself.
Her phone bleated, and she jumped up. Maybe it was from Alex. She’d texted him twice asking to talk, but he hadn’t answered.
But it was only from Mackenzie. School has been weird, huh?
Ava heaved a breath. That was an understatement. Everywhere she turned, kids were sobbing in the halls. Granger’s door was festooned in flowers, and a couple of hippieish girls sat in front of it all day long, playing songs on their guitars and tambourines about flowers and meadows and Heaven—and the Beacon staff, who was usually so anal about attendance, let them. There had been several announcements for prayers around the flagpole—why the flagpole, Ava never knew, but the prayer sessions always seemed to gravitate there—and announcements had already been made that Granger’s funeral would be Thursday, and attendance was mandatory. Worst of all, kids at Beacon had to know something—maybe just that Ava was at Granger’s before he died, or maybe the whole enchilada—that she was under suspicion for killing him. Some bitch had trashed her gym locker, spilling out all the makeup, deodorant, and hair products she stashed there. She was left high and dry after running around the track and had to spend the rest of the day looking like a sweaty mess.
Weird is an understatement, she wrote back.
Have you heard from the cops? Mac asked.
Nope, Ava said. You?
Mac said she hadn’t, either. Ava had to admit she was surprised—she’d expected another visit by now for sure. Especially if they found out about Ava’s history with Granger—she’d met him at his house not so long ago for help on her paper, and he’d come on to her. She’d sat nervously all through school today, waiting for an officer to appear in the classroom doorway, but no one ever had.
