The Girls Are All So Nice Here

by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

  “You heard what Kevin thinks,” I say. “That someone actually killed her.”

  “Maybe he did it.” She drums her fingers. “He’s the one who found her. He went looking for her after he was with you. He saw those texts on his phone and wanted her out of the picture, then made it happen.”

  “He didn’t do it.” As involved as Kevin was, I’m sure of that.

  She feathers a piece of hair between her fingers. “Then he needs to accept that Flora killed herself.”

  “But what if she didn’t?”

  “She wanted to die. She said so herself. Why are you surprised that she followed through?”

  Her mouth darts into a smile, and I know. I know that Flora only would have followed through if somebody got into her head, and only Sully could have done that.

  She crosses her legs, her pale skin exposed through the slit in her dress. “You cared more about Flora than you ever did about me.”

  “You know that’s not true. I would have done anything to get your attention.” It’s pathetic to admit, even after all this time. Especially after all this time.

  She laughs gently. “You always had it. You were the best.”

  We’re at an impasse, the truth heavy between us. Maybe we have said all there is to say. Maybe it took the years arching between then and now for me to see that Sully was more like me than I knew. A lonely girl who wanted control. Except I let my emotions muddy everything, and her lack of them allowed her hands to stay clean.

  But we still have a shared threat. The ghost of what we did, making sure we’re permanently webbed together.

  “Somebody wants to hurt us,” I say. “I came back to find out who it is.”

  Sully places an icy hand on my arm and leans closer. “Is that it?” she says, voice soft against my neck. “Is that really why you came back?”

  I nod, but I’m not sure at all anymore.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Her tone is urgent. “We can take off. Nobody will be able to find us.”

  “I can’t,” I say quickly. I can’t leave Adrian. I don’t want to go anywhere with Sully. It would only be a matter of time before she got bored and turned on me.

  But for just a second, before prying my arm from Sully’s insistent grip, I consider it.

  THEN

  The media obsession with Flora Banning was stifling. The world loves a pretty dead girl. Wesleyan, a place where people were always protesting something, became an angry mob gunning for Kevin, faces hidden behind JUSTICE FOR FLORA signs. The Butts C girls kept up a vigil in front of our old room, flowers and teddy bears and candles that were perpetually unlit.

  The argument: Kevin was guilty. He hadn’t physically done it, but he had emotionally manipulated a girl into doing something completely out of character. Without the text messages he’d sent, Flora would still have been alive.

  But Kevin’s family hired a defense lawyer who had a different argument. Jon Diamond had a cocky smile and a square jaw and hair that must have left grease stains on his pillow. Jon Diamond, whose services apparently came at a hefty cost, argued that Flora was mentally unbalanced and had obviously been dealing with undiagnosed depression. He twisted what her parents, sister, and friends had said, along with the anonymous testimonies of “classmates” who didn’t want to be named. Flora was a young woman who was sick on the inside, according to Jon Diamond, and invisible illnesses are among the most deadly.

  “Think about this,” he told the press after Kevin’s hearing. “Think of all the times you’ve said the wrong thing to your girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife. All the times when you maybe weren’t thinking clearly because you were upset yourself. Are you responsible if that person does something to themselves? Most of you are going to say no, you’re not, the blame lies with them, because we can’t make anyone do anything they weren’t going to do already.”

  Online, groups of Kevin supporters sprouted up, mostly girls who thought he deserved better. They believed it was Flora’s fault. Sometimes I agreed with them. Flora had never felt like she needed any armor. The world had rolled her on its tongue, so careful not to bite into her delicate flesh.

  We weren’t careful. She was chewy when our teeth went in.

  I obsessed over every news update, every nasty comment under the articles. I knew my escalating paranoia had become boring to Sully, but I couldn’t stop fixating on Flora. On the part I’d played. “Somebody’s going to find out,” I repeated, ignoring her eye rolls. “They’re not done with us yet.”

  I wasn’t wrong. Because eventually, they searched Kevin’s computer and found our emails, and Felty was able to prove that I’d lied to him about Dartmouth.

  “Miss Wellington,” he said when I found myself at the Middletown Police Department again. “Or do you go by Amb? That’s what Kevin called you, right? In your emails.”

  I was going to pass out—I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. Some people, the ones who hadn’t been paying attention to the growing rumors, might have assumed I was dealing with grief over my roommate’s suicide. In reality, my fear took up too much space. The fear that I would end up exactly where I was that day, with Felty across from me, smug in his uniform.

  “It sounds like you and Kevin had a very friendly relationship. A real love story for our time. Is that what you believed? You had such a connection.”

  I was incapable of speaking. I would never make it as an actress if I couldn’t deliver even a basic line.

  “It seemed like you both wanted the same thing: Flora out of the way. How far did you go to make that happen?”

  I squeaked out seven words, a sequence I had heard in the movies, on TV, happening to people who weren’t real. “I want to speak to a lawyer.”

  In the end, I didn’t need one. The emails didn’t prove anything. They were Felty’s attempt to break me. All the emails showed was that Kevin McArthur was an asshole who lied to his girlfriend, and I was the bitch who went along with it. His inbox and text history were a treasure trove to the prosecutors, who smeared him in the media as a serial cheater who didn’t care about Flora’s well-being.

  Felty’s last words to me were permanently stamped inside my head. The truth has a way of catching up, eventually.

  Which meant I had to run fast.

  After Felty reluctantly let me go, I knocked on Sully’s door. I needed her. I needed everything to go back to how it was. We ended up at a WestCo party, where a bump of cocaine and one drink sent me into a fevered tailspin. My demons weren’t gone. They were still attached to me, hanging by thorny tails. The pair of guys Sully wanted us to hook up with found an excuse to disappear when I vomited into a plastic cup.

  “It was the scariest moment of my life,” I slurred on our walk back to the Butts, grabbing Sully’s arm, which she quickly pulled away. “You have no idea what went through my head. Felty isn’t giving up. He knows. Did I tell you about his sister?”

  “You told me,” she said. Her hair was tucked up under a slouchy knit beanie and I couldn’t read her face.

  “Kevin wasn’t that drunk,” I said. “He’s going to put it together. What would you do? I mean, he must know we were the only people who could have taken his phone. It’s not like he believes he sent her the messages.”

  “How do you know?” Sully shoved her hands in her jacket pockets—it wasn’t even her jacket, but one she had stolen from some guy—and didn’t look at me. “A guilty conscience makes people believe all sorts of things. When you don’t want to deal with what you actually did, your brain can convince you that you’re somebody you’re not.”

  We weren’t talking about Kevin anymore. It was the distance hovering there, the breadth of a hair multiplying into inches.

  “What if he’s protecting us?” I had never said it out loud before.

  Sully sucked in a breath, swallowed part of the 2 a.m. sky. “There is no us.”

  She said it so quietly that I wasn’t sure I’d heard her. “What?”

  She stopped and cr
ossed her arms. “There is no us, Amb. You were the one who sent those texts. Yeah, I took the phone. But only as a joke. You’re the one who did the rest.”

  You’re the one. There it was, yawning between us. She was cutting her losses. I was her losses.

  I had no argument, because what she said was true. I was the one who’d typed those messages and hit send. She hadn’t been whispering in my ear, telling me what to say, and the truth of that was like a block of ice lodged somewhere between my throat and my stomach that would never melt. I had to believe somebody else was the bad influence so I could live with myself.

  But it was me all along.

  NOW

  To: “Ambrosia Wellington” a.wellington@wesleyan.edu

  From: “Wesleyan Alumni Committee” reunion.classof2007@gmail.com

  Subject: Class of 2007 Reunion

  Dear Ambrosia Wellington,

  Don’t forget to sign the guest book at dinner. Write an inside joke, a favorite anecdote, a sentimental memory. We’re sure you learned during your years at Wesleyan that words truly are the most important currency.

  At least, most of you did.

  Sincerely,

  Your Alumni Committee

  When we get back into the ballroom, Sully trailing behind me for once, we’re pinned by dozens of suspicious eyeballs—all of the girls at the table, clearly using our absence to fuel their dinner conversation. Adrian barely even looks up. This time, he doesn’t ask me where I’ve been. After sitting down, I push a medallion of beef around before depositing it on Adrian’s plate, a gesture he usually thinks is cute.

  “No, thanks,” he says. He’s still mad. The drive home will be tense and I’ll probably get a We should talk, except we never will. I’ll apologize for leaving him alone for most of the afternoon but never tell him the real reason, and in a few days he’ll be back to normal again and so will I.

  The emcee for the evening—Braden Elliot, who lived with two other guys in a wood-frame near the one I shared with Hadley and Heather—gives a speech while dessert is served, something chocolate in haphazard squares. A grim thought flits bannerlike through my head: This is my last meal. Whoever wrote those notes won’t let us get away so easily.

  Braden calls out the winners for a ceremony I didn’t know was happening, a throwback to awards we gave at graduation—apparently, the idea is to see which predictions we voted on back then align with our guesses now and whether they came true. Most Likely to Appear on a Reality TV Show. Most Likely to Win an Oscar. It should be my name being called for that one. In another world, one where I wasn’t Flora’s roommate, where I didn’t meet Kevin or Sully, maybe it would be me. Most Likely to Get Arrested Protesting. Most Likely to Be Found Naked in Olin. Everyone laughs appreciatively, while I want to disappear.

  “Most Likely to Get Away with Murder,” Braden says now, followed by a stilted laugh. “Wow, this one’s morbid. Ambrosia Wellington?”

  My name being called, the drumbeat of blood in my ears. All eyes in the room on me, like sets of daggers. Nobody is laughing this time, nobody is clapping.

  “You should go get your award,” Ella says. She probably voted for me. Adrian is focused on his plate, his jaw hard. As much as I want to run away, I stand up and walk toward the stage, sucking in my stomach, rolling my eyes like a few of the other winners did. Except when I get to the front, Braden doesn’t give me a cheap plastic trophy and shake my hand like he did with everybody else. He opens the box where the votes were placed, several little flags of paper, with confusion furrowing his face.

  “This is so weird, but it’s like this category didn’t really exist,” he says, away from the microphone. “There’s a box and all these votes, but no record of the category, and no trophy. I’m really sorry. I don’t understand.”

  I gape at him, unable to laugh it off. “Let’s just pretend,” he says with an apologetic smile. I accept his hand when he stretches it toward me, but instead of going right back to my seat, I open the box and pull out a handful of the votes.

  They all have my name on them. Dozens of Ambrosia Wellington, written in neat calligraphy. One of them sticks to my sweaty palm, flutters onto the floor as I walk back to the table. I don’t look at Sully or Adrian, at Hads or Heather, at the Butts C girls. Onstage, Braden clears his throat and moves on to the next category. Most Likely to Invent the Next Facebook.

  I didn’t get away with murder, I want to scream. I didn’t kill anyone. I did something unforgivable, but I didn’t go that far. I don’t have the stomach for it. I didn’t even have my room key, and Flora would have locked the door—

  I didn’t have my room key, because Sully did.

  There was something on her top—suddenly it slices through my memories from that night. Something on the mesh, a dark strip, almost black. And her choker was missing. I see it like I did earlier today—Sully showing up, playing nice, offering to make Flora a hot chocolate.

  Sully, taking the Best mug and smashing it against the bathroom floor.

  Go ahead and do it. You want to.

  But Flora didn’t want to.

  What did Sully say to me tonight? You can’t make someone do something they weren’t going to do already.

  She didn’t convince Flora to cut her wrists.

  She did it herself.

  I don’t know how Sully didn’t end up with blood all over her. She must have been very careful. She must have known exactly what she was doing. How deep to cut. How to make it look like the shard was held in each hand. How to keep a girl from screaming.

  The realization, the absolute certainty, hollows me. Kevin was right. Somebody did kill Flora.

  “It was her,” I say in a tiny voice.

  When I look up, Sully and Adrian are gone.

  THEN

  Kevin McArthur’s investigation never went to trial. There was insufficient evidence to pursue the case further or define the extent of his involvement. Too many factors made Flora’s suicide solely her own doing. There was her history of so-called depression, the text messages sent from her phone showing a crescendo of paranoia, her browser search about how to tell if you’ve been raped—a rape nobody had any information about, if it even happened. Kevin disappeared as the media frenzy finally died down. The girls from Butts C sent nasty emails to his lawyer and letters to news stations in an attempt to keep the case alive, but none of their pleas made a difference.

  It was over, and I could breathe again. Except the air was different where I lived now. Wesleyan had become hostile, not just the people but the campus itself, an animal wanting to buck me off its back. Sometimes on my walk back to the Butts from the CFA, music would leak from the chapel, bells not chiming church music but contorting into songs Flora used to listen to in our room. I later learned that students were allowed to play the chapel’s bells, but I never knew who decided on those songs. Or if they only existed in my head.

  I had avoided going to hell, but the rest of freshman year was my own personal purgatory. I had what I had always wanted—attention. But it was the wrong kind. At best, girls were cordial, smiling politely when I sat next to them in lectures or perched on the end of a table in MoCon. At worst, they were downright brutal.

  I saw Sully around campus and even in classes occasionally—Wesleyan made it hard to hide, and sometimes it felt like the campus was trying to shove us together, chess pieces on a board. I didn’t get close or let myself know if she was watching. The only thing worse than being under Sully’s constant gaze was being cast out of it. She was perpetually flanked by girls like her but lesser. Baby Sullies, my replacements. There was no shortage of people to worship at her golden altar. The same rumors that became my yoke were shiny jewelry around her neck.

  I still couldn’t let go, so I replayed on my laptop the same clip of Flora’s mom leaving court after the hearing, shielding her face from the cameras with a trenchcoated arm, Flora’s sister, Poppy, trailing behind her, half a foot taller than she had been last year. Not a little girl anymore. Poppy’s fa
ce had already hardened into a scowl. Pissed off at the world. Poppy had a reason to be pissed off. Her sister had been taken away from her.

  And the boy who took her was free. In the eyes of the law, Flora was disturbed, a mentally ill young woman who couldn’t handle the pressures of being away at school, and after an argument with her boyfriend, she made the tragic choice to take her own life. That was what it was—a choice.

  I ignored an email from Poppy that came two weeks before the end of freshman year. A plea to talk about her sister and Kevin. I couldn’t bring myself to answer it and lie, so I deleted it instead but never forgot what it said. Did something happen to Flora before that night? Did Kevin do something? Please, I need to know, and you knew her better than anyone at school. She said she trusted you.

  I didn’t sleep for days, and I bombed my final exams. She trusted you.

  That was the last mistake she ever made.

  NOW

  To: “Ambrosia Wellington” a.wellington@wesleyan.edu

  From: “Wesleyan Alumni Committee” reunion.classof2007@gmail.com

  Subject: Class of 2007 Reunion

  Dear Ambrosia Wellington,

  You never ended the night early back then—why start now? Make your way to Andrus to dance under the stars at our annual All-Campus Party. We hear the dance floor will be killer, and we expect to see (almost) everyone there!

  Sincerely,

  Your Alumni Committee

  “Where are they?” I ask Ella. “Where did they go?”

  She raises a glass of wine to her lips, clearly savoring my stress. “How should I know? Sloane said something about not feeling well. Adrian said he’d make sure she got back to your room. She had, like, five glasses of wine and didn’t eat a thing. Just like back then. Of course she feels sick.”

  Adrian’s suit jacket is gone. If he took his jacket, it means he doesn’t plan on coming back. “I need to go.”