“Cross my heart and hope to die.” Elise draws an X over her chest, then giggles again. “Irony appreciated, of course.”
“It’s not funny.” I exhale, but the panic doesn’t dissolve; it just hardens into something more uncertain, a dark edge that sends a chill down my spine. I watch as Elise wanders over to the bar in the corner and lifts the stopper from the cut-glass bottle of my dad’s scotch. “Seriously, Lise, put that down.”
“Why?” She dangles the bottle from her fingertips. “Not up for a drink?”
“You’re already wasted.”
“Not wasted enough.”
I go over to take the bottle from her hand, but she pulls away and lifts it to her lips to gulp. I watch, feeling helpless. This is scaring me, the sudden quicksilver of her moods. She doesn’t mess around with drugs. We drink, sure, and even smoke some weed with Chelsea sometimes, but this is something new, and nothing good. “Talk to me,” I beg. “What’s going on?”
“I told you.” She spins in a slow circle, away from me. “I waited.”
“Fine, I screwed up, I’m sorry.” I hold my hands up, as if in surrender. “What can I do to make it up to you?” I ask, desperation clear in my voice. “Anything you want, I promise.”
“Don’t you get it?” she yells, her voice loud in the still of the dark house. “Sorry doesn’t matter. Not if you love him more!”
There’s silence.
“Elise . . . ?” I whisper. She meets my eyes, defiant and wounded.
“It was us,” she says. “You and me.”
“It still is!”
“But you love him more.”
“No,” I tell her, but she just looks away.
“You should see your face when the two of you are together.” Elise swallows, giving me a sad little smile. “It’s like he’s your whole world.”
“He’s my boyfriend.”
“So?” she yells. “I’m your best friend!”
“Right,” I yell back. “My friend ! So why can’t you just be happy for me?”
“Happy you’re throwing me away for some asshole who’s going to dump you a month from now?” Elise is wild and furious. “Like I’m fucking disposable? Do you even remember what you said to me? It was us, together, before anything!”
“We still are!”
“No.” She shakes her head. “Not since you gave it all to him. I never thought you’d do this to me, that you’d be such a shallow slut!” Elise whirls around and hurls the bottle at me with a cry. I leap back as it shatters against the wall, dark liquid splashing, shards of glass smashing like crystals on the floor around me.
“What are you doing?” I cry, shocked.
“You chose this!” she sobs. “You ruined everything.”
Fear chills me, sharp and wild. I don’t care about the glass or the mess, or anything but the finality in her tone. Like it’s the end. “No,” I say, shaking my head against the unthinkable. “Nothing’s ruined. I’m with him, and we’re still the same as we ever were, I promise.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“But it’s true!” I don’t know what to do to make her listen. She’s not listening. Panic floods me. I grab her shoulders and shake her, violent with desperation. “It’s still you and me; it’ll always be you and me!”
“Stop it!” Elise cries, but I don’t, I keep holding tight until she shoves me away hard enough to send me flying to the ground among the shattered glass.
I sit up, catching my breath. There’s a dull pain in the back of my head, where it cracked against the floor.
“Anna . . .” Elise takes a step toward me, her eyes wide. “Oh God, I didn’t mean . . .”
I pull myself up by the couch. For a moment, we’re suspended there, across the room from each other. Eyes locked, a canyon of fierce emotion between us. Then there’s a noise from the stairs. Elise looks away, quickly grabbing the throw from the back of the couch and tossing it to the floor, so that when my dad appears in the doorway, the mess is blocked from view.
“Is everything okay?” My dad looks between us, confused. “I thought I heard something.”
“Fine, Mr. Chevalier.” Elise forces a smile. “I was just showing Anna a video on my phone.”
“Oh, okay.” Dad blinks. He’s got that dazed expression on his face, like he’s still gone, off in whatever financial documents he was buried in. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”
“No, thank you, I have to go.”
“Okay,” He turns to me. “Call for takeout whenever you’re ready to eat.”
“Sure, Dad,” I say nervously, but he barely gives us another glance, just drifts back upstairs.
Elise waits until he’s gone, then pushes past me, out into the foyer. I trail after her. “Elise. Wait a second, please.”
She turns, her face set, then her expression slips. She gasps. “You’re bleeding.”
I look down. My hand is cut, welling bright red. “It’s fine,” I say quickly. “I can’t feel a thing.”
Elise backs away. “I can’t . . . I can’t be here.”
“Wait.” I follow her out onto the front steps. “Let me take you home, at least. You shouldn’t be out there like this.”
I reach for her, but she flinches away. “Elise?” My voice breaks.
“I’ll . . . see you tomorrow,” she says quickly, her gaze still fixed on my bloody hand. Then she bolts. I listen as her footsteps are swallowed up by the night, remembering the knife-edge to her gaze, something damaged and hard.
Fear shivers through me. I can’t lose her, not even a little. Tate has pulled me in and wrapped me up in this new kind of love, but I’m hers, too—I’ll always be hers. If I have to choose . . .
“Elise!” I call after her, yelling. “Miles and miles! Do you hear me?” My voice echoes out into the dark. “Miles and fucking miles!”
But there’s only silence. I wait on the steps until I’m frozen through, but she doesn’t come back. We wrecked it, I realize, and it feels like my heart splits wide open. Something was ripped apart and bared to the world tonight, and we can’t ever take it back.
She’s gone.
At last I turn and walk slowly back into the warm, bright safety of the house.
Three weeks later, my mother is dead.
EVIDENCE MATERIAL 102—ANNA CHEVALIER ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT—JUNIOR CLASS
My words are a weapon,
They can cut you like glass.
Or they can smooth and soothe over gaps and cracks, dripping honey.
Sweet and safe.
They can gouge out your heart.
Carve my name into your fair skin,
Write verses in your blood.
Be careful what you say, my friend.
My words are my greatest weapon of all.
TRIAL
“And the defendant wrote this poem?”
Silence.
Dekker glares. “Miss Day, please. You’re under oath.”
Chelsea looks at me across the courtroom. I haven’t seen her since my arrest; her hair is shorter now, the beachy waves an even brown, neat and preppy. She used to be loud and languid, always laughing; now her expression is apologetic and full of regret.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “In English class, beginning of senior year.”
“And this wasn’t the only violent thing she wrote, was it?”
I feel Gates inhale a sharp breath beside me.
Again, Chelsea is silent. She looks down, toying with the woven bracelets she has still tied around her wrist, the colorful strands that she and I and Elise all bought at a store in Boston together, knotting them tightly to overlap.
Judge von Koppel leans over. “Please answer the question.”
Chelsea glances up, reluctant. “No, she wrote other things, for class. We all did.”
“Like this.” Dekker lifts a plastic-covered sheet between his thumb and forefinger. “Evidence item two one seven, a short story written by the defendant, describing the murder of a teenage girl.”
“It
was an assignment,” Chelsea says quickly. “A college girl got shot, in the neighborhood. It was a big deal, everyone was talking about it, so our teacher had us write the stories about it. I did one, Elise did too. Everyone.”
“But you could choose, could you not, whether to write from the perspective of the victim or the murderer?” Dekker tilts his head, waiting.
Chelsea exhales. “Yes.”
“And Miss Chevalier was the only girl to write from the perspective of the killer.”
“Boys did too,” Chelsea replies. “Half the class.”
“And did the defendant tell you why she chose to take on the killer’s role?”
Chelsea bites her lip, looking over at me again. “She said . . .” Her voice trails into a whisper.
“Louder, please.”
Another reluctant sigh. “She said she liked putting herself in his shoes. Imagining how it would feel to have that kind of power over someone, to end their life. But it wasn’t real,” she protests. “It was writing, that was the whole point. Our teacher always told us to get out of our own minds, and imagine being somebody else!”
“But the defendant had a fascination for violent imagery even out of class,” Dekker clicks a photo up on the display: the cover of my science lab binder. “She copied the words to several songs, some would even say obsessively writing the same lyrics over and over. Let me quote for you, ‘I took a knife and cut out her eye,’” he reads, voice dramatic in the still of the courtroom. “ ‘I’ll cut your little heart out because you made me cry.’ That’s a song by one of the defendant’s favorite musicians, Florence and the Machine.”
They told me not to register any reaction to his questions, but I can’t help shaking my head in disbelief. The photos were bad enough, pulled at random from our online profiles, ripped from any context or meaning, but this? I’d always thought trials were about evidence and witnesses, but those are somebody else’s words that I scrawled on my notebook during a boring class, and now he’s holding them up as some kind of proof for my “violent urges”. Why doesn’t he go further, and pull up my DVR records and all the horror movies I used to watch, curled tightly against Tate on the living room couch? Why not go through my bookcase for every crime novel he can find?
Wouldn’t we all look guilty, if someone searched hard enough?
“Relax.”
I feel a hand on my arm and look over to find Gates leaning over. “You’re scowling,” he murmurs, too quiet for anyone else to hear. “He’s grasping at straws. If he had any hard evidence, he’d be presenting it, but he doesn’t. Deep breaths, remember?”
Of course I remember, they’ve only drilled it into me every day for weeks now. But Gates is watching me intently, so I inhale a short breath and force my face into something I hope resembles a relaxed expression. I can’t let the judge see that I’m angry; I can’t let her see that I feel anything at all about Dekker’s lies.
“Or what about these submissions to the school literary magazine?” Dekker is still reading aloud from the snapshots of my binder covers and English class assignments.
“Objection!” Gates rises. “Does the prosecutor have any more questions for the witness, or is he just treating us to a public poetry reading?”
“Yes, please do stick to questioning,” Judge von Koppel agrees with an icy smile. “I believe we’ve heard enough of the graffiti.”
Dekker glares, then turns back to Chelsea. “On the days before the murder, did you notice any friction between Miss Warren and the defendant?”
“No,” Chelsea says. “They were great. Happy.”
“Are you sure? No fighting, disagreements?”
“I just said”—she glares back at him—“I don’t know why you’re even doing this. Anna loved Elise—we all did—she would never do anything to hurt her.”
She searches for me again in the courtroom. Our eyes meet, and I give her a tiny nod. It’s okay. I know she doesn’t want to be here, that Dekker’s forcing her up there, to try to slander me. She can’t help it any more than I can help the things he’s saying about me.
“So you never noticed any jealousy from the defendant?”
“No.”
“Never saw her act in any violent or uncontrollable ways?”
“No, nev—” Chelsea suddenly stops. She looks over at me, panicked. Dekker catches the gaze. He brightens.
“You did?”
“I . . .” Chelsea’s expression is conflicted.
Gates tugs my sleeve again.
“What’s going on?” he whispers.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
Dekker clears his throat. “Miss Day? Did you ever see the defendant have any violent or angry outbursts?”
Chelsea hesitates again, then nods.
“What happened?” Dekker’s whole body is alert, his face expectant.
“I . . .” Chelsea swallows, looking nervous. “It was during art class, at school. I went to get something from my locker, and I saw her in the hallway, with Elise.”
“With the victim?” Dekker’s voice is so gleeful, it turns my stomach.
She nods again. “Anna was . . . She was screaming, and yelling. Elise tried to calm her down, but Anna . . . She grabbed the display—I think it was something for Environment Week—she just grabbed the whole thing and began tearing it apart.”
I exhale. Now I know what this is about. I start scribbling a note to Gates as Dekker continues his victorious questions.
“Did you hear what they were saying, why they were fighting?”
“No, I didn’t think I should go over,” Chelsea looks awkward. “I mean, she was so mad.”
“In a violent rage.” Dekker draws the words out with satisfaction.
“I . . . Yes.”
“And what happened next?”
Chelsea shrugs. “Elise tried to calm her down, but Anna threw her off—”
“The defendant physically assaulted the victim?”
“No.” Chelsea stops. “I mean, it wasn’t like that. She just, pushed her away and took off.”
Dekker beams. “No further questions.”
He steps back to his table, and I pass the note to Gates. He glances over it, then nods, rising to approach the witness stand with a confident saunter.
“Miss Day, when was this altercation you witnessed?”
She pauses, thinking. “Um, before Christmas break.”
“Does December tenth sound about right?” Gates suggests.
“Yeah. I mean, I think so.
“Did you know about Anna’s mother?” he asks.
“You mean, that she was sick?” Chelsea nods. “She didn’t like to talk about it, but, yeah. Elise filled us in, so we wouldn’t say the wrong thing.”
“Objection, relevance?” Dekker yells.
Gates turns to the judge. “The defendant’s mother had breast cancer,” he explains, “that recurred in the fall of last year.”
She nods. “Continue.”
Gates turns back to Chelsea. “So you weren’t aware of the state of her mother’s disease or how Anna was coping.”
“No, not really.” Chelsea sends me a look. “She was pretty tough about that stuff. She didn’t like to bring us down.”
Gates nods. “So you had no way of knowing that on December tenth, the day you witnessed Anna having an emotional breakdown, she’d just been informed that her mother was refusing all further treatment, and was, in fact, preparing to die?”
Chelsea’s eyes widen, and I hear the intake of breath in the courtroom. “No. No, I had no idea.”
Gates turns back to Judge von Koppel with a frown. “Far from being a violent fight between Miss Chevalier and the victim—as Detective Dekker would have you believe—what Miss Day witnessed was the perfectly natural reaction of a girl facing the devastating loss of a parent. Any outburst was a result of grief, not violent rage.”
The judge nods. “Noted.”
I feel her eyes on me, all of the rest of them too. Watching, judging,
speculating. Wondering what I felt and how I took the news. The truth is, I can’t remember, not clearly—it’s smudged with grief and rage and pure, dark disappointment, as if I’m staring at an out-of-focus photograph taken on a gray, rainy afternoon. There are only glimpses left now: the way my mother didn’t even have the courage to tell me; my father’s gaze sliding to look at the wall behind me when he broke the news.
She’d given up. On herself, on me.
It would have been different if she’d been terminal, even late-stage, but the doctors said there was a 40 percent chance that another round of chemo would work. Forty percent. That was almost half. A half-chance of beating it again, a half-chance at life. With me. And instead, she gave up. Said it was unnatural, that she didn’t want the chemicals in her body over and over again. Said that it might work this time, but it would only come back again. Said that this was her time, and that she wanted to go gracefully, with dignity and love.
Except there was nothing graceful about the way she wasted away, a thin skeleton dwarfed by covers and cushions and bathrobes, sitting propped and delicate in bed. Nothing dignified about catheters and bags full of urine, and yellowed skin, and choking pain.
Nothing loving about choosing to leave me.
I sit, silent, as they discuss my dead mother, my grief, my desperation. I dig my fingernails into my palms, and wonder when this will ever end.
AFTER THE FIGHT
They put me back in isolation, saying it’s for my own safety, but I know—this is for their sake, not mine. They don’t care that I got hurt in here, only that it makes them look bad, makes me more sympathetic to the outside world, maybe. So they take away what little freedom I could pretend I still had, and condemn me to silence, and dark nights, and long days with nothing to do but think. Slowly, my strength drains away, my earlier resolve and determination waning under the brutal onslaught of day after day of loneliness. Those bleak thoughts I’ve pushed away come creeping back, whispering in the night, slipping their cold arms around my body and their slim fingers around my throat, until the panic is so fierce I double over where I stand, hardly breathing.
I never realized what a privilege it was to get up and leave my cell in the mornings. Now they bring me all my meals, delivered on hard plastic trays, and take me to use the showers late in the morning once everyone else has already had their turn. I still get my few hours in the exercise yard—Gates and my father saw to that—but now I’m escorted out by two guards to a thin strip of land on the far side of the prison, divided from the others by barbed wire and barricades, away from the entertainment of the pickup basketball games and slouching, sullen cliques.