But, somehow, the fact he threw her phone away in the preserve turns my blood cold. It leads me to the next question: How could he leave her there? Make everyone believe she was somewhere else? Cover himself and hope the cops and everyone else thought she’d run away, when she was there in the woods, when her body was a mile or so from his house, day and night? Then he comes here instead of to the cops, knowing we aren’t supposed to tell anyone. It makes me furious. Chuck supposedly loved Hannah, but he was willing to leave her body to rot. Chuck Glasser is as bad as Alex, or worse. Then he comes here, like a coward, to absolve himself.
Then I think of something else that doesn’t make any sense. Why had no one found her? There must be a smell. . . . I think of the times I’ve ridden the Death Wish and how even a tiny dead animal, a mole or a mouse, could stink up the whole trail. It has been warm all week. I haven’t worn anything heavier than my flannel. Today is the first day it’s been the least bit chilly.
Martin sits at my side, rubbing my back. Maria stands next to Chuck. Cyndi, James, and Ali all stare at Chuck in silence. Chuck looks broken. His eyes are red. His nose runs. I want to scream at him. I want to pound his chest with my fists. The silence in the room feels thick and suffocating.
Finally, James speaks.
“Okay, let’s take a deep breath. I think we all are in agreement that this group is a confidential one?” He looks around and to my shock everyone nods. I feel my back stiffen and Martin squeezes my shoulder hard, like he’s giving me a signal.
We all signed a confidentiality agreement. We all broke laws. Martin had his drugs. Maria had nearly starved herself to death, and hoarded shoplifted laxatives to do it. James and Cyndi were both junkies. Maybe they knew kids who died? Had either of them watched a friend OD? Maybe they’ll want to protect Chuck.
Cyndi backs James up. “I can see why people are upset by Chuck’s confession,” she says. “Especially you, Marcelle. But none of us are responsible for Chuck’s actions. Only Chuck can make amends.” I’m grateful she says this, although she avoids looking at me as she speaks. Then she adds, “It’s for Chuck to come clean. It’s for this group to support Chuck in his continued sobriety and in his work toward an honest, sober life.”
When Cyndi finishes, Chuck, pale and hollow-eyed, nods but says nothing. Then he stuffs his papers into his book bag, like he’s got someplace to be. I think, Good, he’s getting out of here, turning himself in. But then Martin raises his hand.
“Martin,” James says. “You’ve got something?”
“Yeah,” Martin says. “I thought we were doing Marcelle today, too.”
Everyone stares. Despite James’s and Cyndi’s composure during Chuck’s confession, I think we were all figuring that was it for today. But Martin is right, at least on one count. It is only four thirty. We have forty-five more minutes of Group.
“Huh?” James says, looking at the clock. Cyndi is already turned toward me expectantly, on to the next drama. Chuck is ashen-faced. Ali and Maria both look close to tears, traumatized by Chuck’s story. There is something wrong here. Someone needs to do something. We can’t just go on as though Chuck’s confession is just another piece of Group business. Hannah is dead.
Thirty-Two
I GLANCE AT James, who nods, and I open my notebook. I take out my typewritten pages. James nods again. “Okay, guys, I know this has been a really heavy meeting already. Let’s have a minute of silent meditation. Let’s let Chuck take his load from our shoulders. Let’s take back only the burdens that are ours.”
We do it. We sit in silence, each one of us staring down at our own hands. At the end of the minute, everyone turns back to me. Weirdly, they all actually look more comfortable than before James spoke his incantation, as if Chuck’s burdens really were lifted from us all. I smooth out my pages.
“If I were a good friend, Hannah would be alive,” I say.
I have their attention.
“I believe Chuck’s story, that she OD’d or had some reaction to the blow she and Chuck did. That actually happened before. Where she shook like that. Jonas said maybe Hannah was allergic to something they mixed their blow with. It happened maybe a few weeks ago, when she and I were at Senna’s. It didn’t happen to anyone else, just her.”
“So, you think you should have known the girl was going to ignore her own body and keep binging like that?” Cyndi interrupts. This is a total breach. She is supposed to let me finish my whole accountability presentation before any kind of question. James shoots her a look like she’s lost her mind and she flushes, embarrassed.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s just one thing. I mean, a lot of us were there—Senna, Andy, and Andy’s brother, Jonas. Any of us could see she was taking a risk. No,” I begin again. “I mean, I should have gotten help, gone to my parents, or to her mom as soon as I knew what she and Senna were doing with Alex. She was ruining her life. Hannah kept saying she knew what she was doing. I wanted to believe her. But now I think I just didn’t want to get everyone in trouble.”
I take a deep breath.
Martin gets up, walks across the room, and grabs the tissue box from the bookshelf and brings it to me. “But she didn’t know what she was doing, really. She had just stopped caring,” I say. “It didn’t matter to her how anybody saw her. We kind of fought about it, but I backed down. I didn’t say she was wrong. It does matter. What other people see is who you are.”
I stare at Chuck because this is where he came in, when Hannah stopped trying to save herself. Before the night he left her there for dead, I had turned away from her, too. It was like something inside of Hannah had died, and I hardly knew her anymore, or maybe nobody did; maybe she was just unknowable. I turned away because I was afraid.
“I knew these guys could make Hannah do just about anything, because she didn’t have the money to be doing what she was doing. She was lost, and I gave up on her. Chuck and I are the same,” I say. “We both ran away and tried to die.”
“I used alcohol—beer and vodka—to silence my own thoughts. I thought I couldn’t live with myself sober. I knew my friendship with Hannah was just another kind of loneliness. Even when we were together, we were both chasing our own highs. I don’t know what being high was for her. But for me it was about forgetting—forgetting with my mind and my body. I wanted to live in some other world, not this one. I wanted my life to feel good, not be good. I don’t really know what a good life is, but I think that’s okay right now, even though it scares me. I’m sixteen. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know still.
“I know I wasn’t a good friend to Hannah. I want to think about that—about how I could be different. How maybe the next time, if there is a next time, that someone I’m close to can’t do it—can’t hold it together anymore—and I see that, I hope I’m brave enough to help them. I hope I’m brave enough to say no when that’s what needs to be said. I hope I can see clearly next time. I hope I can make myself heard. I hope I’m never again the person who does nothing but watch. I hope that Marcelle is dead. I think being here, being in this Group, has taught me that one thing. I can’t be someone with nothing to say.” My voice breaks. “That’s it. That’s all I have.”
Everyone is quiet. I hear sniffling and think Martin may be crying next to me, but I’m afraid to look and catch his eye. To my surprise, it’s tiny Maria who breaks the silence. She raises her white doll hand, which dangles on her marionette wrist. James nods for her to speak.
“How do you know your friend Hannah wasn’t deliberately poisoned?” Maria asks.
Cyndi shakes her head. “We aren’t here to play kid detectives. It’s not a game. Let the adults do their jobs.” Maria looks taken aback for a moment, and turns to me with her wide, innocent eyes. Chuck will confess to Perez. He has to. What will happen to him, I don’t know.
There’s an army of cops looking for Hannah. It’s only a matter of time before they find her. And what Maria says doesn’t ring true to me. No one wanted her dead. Alex and Senna wanted
to use her.
A part of me wants to shake Chuck and make him call the cops right now. I desperately wish Kevin was in his office, but on Thursdays he leaves at the start of Group for his private practice—it’s just kids in the Center on those afternoons, with the security guy, Joseph. I want someone to make things clear and right, to spell out the rules about confidentiality, to explain what, if anything, Chuck did that might get him arrested.
“Okay,” James says, looking around the room. Everyone sits stone-still. “I think that will have to be it for today,” he continues. “We’ve heard Marcelle and Chuck’s Accountability talks. If we have more questions for Chuck or Marcelle, we can ask them tomorrow, or whenever we see them next.”
We file out of the Group room in silence. I’m at the front of the line. I want to linger and talk to Martin, but I don’t want to end up face-to-face with Chuck. I stop and get my things from my cubby and head toward the exit, when I hear a snippet of conversation between Maria and Chuck. “But Chuck,” Maria says in her small, chirpy voice, “how could you tell that the girl was really dead?”
Chuck replies mysteriously, “I saw her go.” He says it as though she’d left a party, as though there had been a doorway he saw her pass through, and then an emptiness once she’d gone.
Thirty-Three
WHEN DAD PICKS me up, I’m exhausted. My legs ache and my neck feels stiff. It’s foggy and he has the windshield wipers on.
I gaze out the window. Hannah is out there. I know where she is, or at least where Chuck says he left her. Chuck has to tell the police what he did, I tell myself. He has to tell them what he told us: that he watched Hannah die. I’ll meet with my lawyer as soon as I get home. I’ll tell her what I know, and what I heard from Chuck. My chest aches so bad I think it’s true what they say—hearts do break. Who knows why? I only know I’ll never forget this searing pain. I picture Hannah alone in the darkness—I think how she’s been out there night after night—her poor body, a few leaves kicked over it, as if she were nothing—as if her life never meant anything to anyone.
“So how you holding up?” Dad asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, too softly for him to hear. He pulls into the driveway, puts the car in park, and lets out a heavy sigh. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to explain what I’ve just heard. My parents know only that I drank too much. They know nothing of the drugs my friends have been doing. How do I tell my father I know where Hannah’s body is because Chuck Glasser watched her overdose in the woods by the reservoir Sunday night?
We sit there in silence until a black Porsche pulls in behind us. I assume this is the lawyer, Barbara Fine.
As soon as Dad and I get into the house I run upstairs to the bathroom. My stomach is in knots, and at first I think I’ll puke, but instead I have the runs. I hear Mom and Dad greet Barbara Fine. On the toilet, I start to cry even harder. I think for sure they will hear me but no one comes up. After about five minutes of gagging and shitting, I leave the bathroom. I wash my hands and face, sure some putrid odor clings to me.
When I get downstairs, Barbara Fine and my parents are sitting across from each other in the living room. Barbara Fine sits with her knees pressed together. She speaks to my father in a deep, quiet voice. She could be fifty or sixty, I can’t tell. She’s heavyset with gray hair in a poofy, combed-back, old-lady ’do. Her neck has neck wattle. But her eyes are like the eyes of a cat, bright green and slanted.
Mom introduces me. Barbara Fine fixes me in her gaze. Her skin is pale, almost translucent. She has a large, hooked nose and a pert mouth. I trust her instantly.
After we shake hands and sit, Mom and Dad leave. At first, I just cry. Barbara Fine says nothing. She waits a minute or two, then pats me on the knee, indicating it’s time to pull myself together.
I take a deep breath, and I barely pause until I tell Barbara Fine everything, including the part about Alex grabbing me at his apartment, and how I froze then and could think of no way to defend myself. I tell her about the webcam business, the coke, and how Hannah and Senna failed to make any money, how they just sold enough to buy more coke. Once I finish my whole story, including Chuck’s confession at the Center, she purses her lips thoughtfully and asks me to repeat a lot of what I’ve already said. She takes notes as I speak and shakes her head occasionally. She doesn’t seem particularly shocked by any of it, although her eyes widen at the part about the porn site and narrow when I tell her about Chuck.
“And Marcelle, on how many occasions were you present when your friend was performing for this webcam?”
I shake my head. “Never,” I say.
“So, it is just the wig and Hannah’s own account of this business?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Okay,” she says. “And were you present when these meetings with Andy’s brother took place? Their cocaine connection?” I shake my head. “Not really. I was around when Jonas delivered stuff, and when Alex came to Senna’s, but I stayed away from Alex after the first night at his place.”
“Well, everything you tell me is privileged, so I can’t go to the police with the information from Chuck. But you need to,” she says after a moment.
“But what about the Group?” I ask. “James and Cyndi say everything there is confidential.”
“That, my dear, is a load of bullcrap. Just irresponsible to put those misguided kids in charge of each other. What is this place? Sounds like something out of Lord of the Flies. Loads of legal precedent here—like that gentleman arrested on a rape charge twenty years after the fact, after he came clean at AA!” I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I am relieved she does. Gradually, I feel my stomach begin to settle.
“You know, there’s one other thing. Something Maria said that I overheard.”
“Yes?” she asks.
“Well, on our way out of Group, Maria asked Chuck how he even knew Hannah was dead when he left her. And I started thinking, why didn’t anyone smell her? These dogs or people who run by there? I was thinking just now, what if? What if she’s just there? Alive, but she can’t move? Like in a coma? What if Chuck is wrong and we’re sitting here talking and she’s out there alone, alive?”
Barbara Fine stares hard at me for a second, raises her finger, then rests her hand on my shoulder and takes out an ancient flip phone.
Detective Perez arrives at our house a half hour later along with the dark-haired guy, Connelly. It takes an hour and a half for me to tell my story while Perez sits nodding and writing. Up close, his eyes are a yellowish-brown and he’s much younger than I thought, maybe only in his late twenties. He calls me “honey.” When I get to what Chuck said at Group, and how Maria asked him how he knows Hannah was dead, Perez is pacing the room, on his cell with I guess the cops who are out searching for Hannah with a hundred people going in the total wrong direction.
I tell Perez every detail I can remember Chuck mentioning in Group. I tell him about Hannah’s seizures a few weeks before. He nods. “They put nasty shit in this street blow. Boric acid. Ketamine. Some people don’t take too well to it.”
At the end of the interview, Perez looks me in the eye. “You did good, kid. You did real good.” I hang my head. I know I’m not a hero. I should have done much more, much sooner. But I know part of the reason I didn’t help Hannah was I was afraid of her. I was afraid she would hate me for trying to stop her.
When Perez leaves, Barbara gives me a light hug. “So far, so good,” she says. “Perez is one of the good guys. Good instincts. And you, my dear, are a good witness. You stay on point, focused.” I nod, still not feeling worthy of praise.
“Are they going to arrest Chuck?” I ask. She nods.
“I believe they will. They’ll need to determine cause of death first, assuming she is dead, which as you point out, we don’t know. But Chuck is not in a good position. He’s likely looking at manslaughter. Or felony endangerment.”
I see why something should happen to Chuck. He let her die, or thought he did. He admits h
e hit a dying girl. But I want someone to know about Senna, too.
“None of this would have happened without Senna,” I say. “In a way, Chuck was just unlucky. He was obsessed with Hannah.”
Barbara looks at me and tilts her head. “Obsession is almost always narcissistic. The person can’t accept rejection. They have too fragile a sense of self. It is not a genuine caring for another, but I agree that Chuck is a scapegoat here for some pretty nefarious characters. But I think Perez is your guy. No one likes a boyfriend who pimps out a girlfriend, or dealers branching out into sex work, or grown men assaulting teenaged girls.”
I nod. It’s true that I’ve done what I can. I’ve given them all I have.
However bad things have turned out for Chuck and Hannah, however they might unfold for Senna, I know there were times, lots of them, when they all looked down on me and Andy, and thought we were the losers, the followers, the leftover people. I definitely envied all of them—Hannah and Chuck for their beauty, Senna for his strange power over everyone. I idolized Hannah, it’s true. But although I didn’t do what I should have to help her, and although I may have even wanted to see them all crash, I never foresaw anything this terrible happening to any of them.
Thirty-Four
IT’S BEEN WEEKS since Hannah was found. Senna and Chuck are both being charged by the police with felony reckless endangerment. I’ve heard from Barbara that Senna has agreed to give evidence against Alex in exchange for parole and community service, as well as, of course, treatment. Senna is back at school. He keeps to himself. He passes me in the hall as though I don’t exist.
Chuck is going away to a treatment school upstate. He still has to go to court, but for now the judge has accepted a therapeutic educational facility that is locked down at night. He leaves in a few weeks. He is like a ghost. I see him when I go to the Center for counseling with a new therapist there named Angie. I don’t go to the Group anymore. Kevin and Group are now just one part of the Center. They’ve hired two more traditional therapists and have another meeting with grown-ups as mediators, which is the one I attend. The police put pressure on the administration at the Center to provide more options for the kids who are sent there by the department. The police chief was not so pleased to hear about kids confessing in peer groups and advising other kids to conceal felony acts. Kevin called a meeting for all staff and kids, and explained the principle of peer counseling. “Kids understand kids. Especially these days, it’s important that committed kids, kids who are truly sober, hear from other kids. The world is just changing too fast, and we can’t always know all that’s out there. That said, kids don’t understand the law, or really the consequences of their actions, so all groups will have supervisors present once a week, and all kids can choose to attend only supervised groups.” Kevin looked directly at me during certain parts of his speech. I’ve become one of the important kids.
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