A PHOTO
Josh ignored me for the rest of the night. I didn't approach him, either. Whenever we were in a room together, I felt like there was a bungee cord between us trying to pull me over to him, but I resisted. I was angry. I was hurt. And there was no way I was apologizing first.
We took separate limos home, but they both pulled up at the same time. When I stepped out into the cold, Josh was standing a few yards away, staring at me. Noelle came out and huddled into me from behind, putting her chin on my shoulder. Josh's face went blank before he turned around and walked off alone. There was a huge hole where my heart used to be. "Screw him," Noelle said, slipping her arm through mine. "We had a good night. You can fix it in the morning." "You're right," I said, shaking my hair back. Dash came over and gave Noelle a quick good-night kiss before heading off in the direction of the guys' dorms. Then Kiran tripped over the curb into us and Ariana helped us get her standing up straight.
"Have you gotten your membership card from the Future Betty Ford's Inmate Club yet?" Noelle asked. "Huh?" Kiran was confused. Noelle rolled her eyes. "Forget it." Together the four of us started up the cobblestone walk that would take us around my old dorm, Bradwell, and into the quad. Overhead the stars still twinkled and winked. Normally after a night like this the Billings Girls and the boys of Ketlar would have been rolling in as the sun came up, but the dean had stipulated an early night as part of his deal with Cheyenne and her dad. It was barely even one in the morning. "Hey! Let's look at the pictures!" Kiran announced suddenly. She lifted her bag and attempted to open the clasp five times before it finally came free. "Here. Let me," Noelle said. She grabbed the bag and fished out the phone, which Kiran promptly snatched back. "You don't know how to work it." "Fine," Noelle said, impatient. She looked at me and shook her head, and I laughed. Up ahead, the rest of the girls were crowding through the front door of Billings. "Here! Look!" Kiran said.
All four of us huddled around her as we walked, the better to see the tiny screen. Kiran jabbed the arrow button with her thumb repeatedly, scrolling through the shots. There was one of me and Noelle hugging. One of Ariana and Kiran lounging on the bed. One of Noelle, Ariana, and me with our heads cut off, clearly taken by a less-than-sober Kiran. "You suck!" Noelle said, smacking Kiran's arm. "That should have been a great shot." "Hey! I'm a model, not a photographer," Kiran replied. Ariana and I laughed. There was Ariana in her blue gown, a shot of Noelle's tiara, Kiran and me on the bed. Ariana, Noelle, me, Kiran, Noelle, Ariana, me, and-- A naked torso. A guy's torso. Stretched and bound. A guy with a black bag over his head, tied to some kind of pole. A blindfolded, half-naked- Thomas. Everyone stopped moving. The world stopped moving.
"What--?" My vision blackened from the outside in, blocking out everything until all I could see was that image. I knew Thomas's body. Would know it anywhere. It was him. It was him. The image shook in Kiran's hands. Her skin was actually gray. "Omigod. Omigod." She hit a bunch of buttons, but nothing worked. Nothing cleared the horrifying image that was burning itself into every corner of my mind. "What is that!?" I shouted, backing away. The pain in my stomach was so intense I doubled over. Ariana stared straight ahead as if in shock. Kiran blubbered. Noelle, cool as ice, slowly reached over and took the phone out of Kiran's hand. She clicked a few buttons. "It's nothing," she said firmly. "It's gone."
"I'm sorry," Kiran blurted. Her whole body trembled. Even her eyes seemed to shake in their sockets. She gripped her own arms and backed away from Noelle and Ariana like she was afraid they might pounce. "I'm so, so sorry. I thought I deleted it. I thought--" "Who the hell told you to take pictures?" Noelle demanded. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We just thought... a goof. It was a goof. I thought--" "Shut up," Ariana said through her teeth. I could see her jaw working. The anger she was smothering was boiling just below the surface. Kiran was desperate. "But I thought I deleted it--" "Shut up, Kiran." "Ariana, please! It didn't seem like a big deal at the time! I just--""Shut the hell up!" Ariana roared.
Tears blurred my vision. This wasn't happening. This could not be happening. Thomas. Thomas. Thomas. He was half naked. His arms were lashed behind him. His head was covered. He couldn't see. There was no way he could see. Thomas was murdered. Thomas was murdered. And they had a picture of him. Like he was being tortured. Like they had-- "What did you do?" I heard myself say. My head was shaking. I couldn't focus. Tears streamed down my face. "What the hell did you do?" Noelle took a step toward me. Nothing about her had changed. While Kiran deteriorated into a blathering mess and Ariana turned steely, Noelle was perfectly in control. She still held the phone, the screen now blank. "Reed, calm down. It's not what you think." "What do I think?" I practically screamed. Maybe Josh was right. Maybe she was pure evil. Ariana and Noelle looked around at the deserted campus as my voice echoed against the ancient walls. Kiran cried quietly into her velvet gloves. "Okay . . . okay," Noelle said, holding a hand out. "We're going to explain. We're going to tell you exactly what happened, but you have to calm down."
"We don't have to explain a thing to her," Ariana snapped. Her fingers were curled into fists at her sides. She looked smaller somehow, but powerful. Like she'd pulled herself into her protective shell, primed for a fight. Noelle ignored her. "Just calm down and listen to me, Reed." Trembling from my very core, I somehow managed to reach into my coat pocket and pull out my cell phone. Noelle's expression changed for the first time. She looked at my phone as if it were a bomb. Something shifted inside of me and I found a tiny little bit of control. Something to grasp on to through all the bedlam roiling inside. "You have five minutes," I said through my teeth. "Five minutes to convince me not to call the police." Ariana glared at me. She wanted to punch me. I could tell from the malice in her eyes. Miss Manners herself, salivating to throw a right hook.
"Fine," she said. "But not here. We go inside." "I'm not going anywhere with you. You ki--" My throat closed up over the words and tears spilled out of my eyes. "We didn't, Reed. I swear to you," Noelle said. "Please. You said you'd give us five minutes. Just please. Please, let's go inside." She was begging me. Noelle Lange was standing there begging me. Her brown eyes were desperate, pleading. She was scared. She was scared and she needed me to believe her. I had never thought I'd see the day. And in the end, that was what got me to follow them. Into Billings House. Into our home. Into a place I'd soon wish I'd never set foot inside at all.
THE WHOLE STORY
They killed Thomas. They killed Thomas. I sat on the edge of Noelle's messy bed with that one thought repeating itself over and over and over again. They killed Thomas. Killed him. Dead. He was dead because of my. . . my friends.It was the only explanation. Why else would they have that picture? Why else would they all have freaked so badly at the sight of it? As I sat there, it all started to make sense. No wonder Noelle had brightened each time a new suspect had been brought into custody. Each time the blame was thrown on someone else, she was that much safer. And Kiran. She'd been all meek and edgy after Thomas's body had been found, but had returned to iiber-bitch form after Josh and then Blake had been arrested. Even Ariana had been in a weirdly good mood lately.Why? Because they thought they'd gotten away with it. They thought they'd gotten away with murder.
I was going to be sick. Just tonight I had ditched Josh for these people. I had thought they were my friends. But they were murderers. Murderers.Over in the corner Noelle and Ariana whispered, casting furtive glances in my direction every so often. Kiran sat on Noelle's desk chair, staring at a spot some three feet in front of her on the floor. Which one of them had actually done it? Which one of them had landed the blow that finally killed him?And what the hell was I still doing here?"That's it. I'm gone." I stood. I had thrown my coat off to keep myself from suffocating, but now I grabbed it from the bed and made for the door. Difficult to do without turning my back to them, but I did it. I wasn't taking my eyes off of them for a second."Reed! No," Noelle said.
I stopped. My hand was on the doorknob. All I had to do was turn it and run."You
said you would let us explain." Noelle took a couple of steps toward me. "Just sit down for five minutes." My grip on the doorknob tightened. My fingers hurt. My palm hurt. Every single inch of me hurt. "Why should I? We all know what happened," I spat. "No. You don't," she said. "Let us at least tell the story and then if you still don't believe us, you can go tell whomever you want. We won't try to stop you." I stared at her. At Ariana and her cool eyes. At Kiran, who was now looking at me, pleading silently. I don't know if I really wanted to believe them, or if I just wanted to know--finally know once and for all--what had happened to Thomas that night. But whatever it was, something inside of me made me walk back to the bed. Made me sit down. Made me listen.
Noelle stood in front of me. She took a deep breath. "Okay. This is what really happened. Do you remember the night before Thomas disappeared? How we were all up in the woods?" "Yes." Of course I remembered. I would remember every detail of those few days for the rest of my life. "Do you remember how he treated you?" Ariana asked. "All those horrible things he said in front of everyone?" My heart twisted and a wet sob welled up in my throat. I nodded. "Well, we were all really pissed off after that little performance of his," Noelle said, starting to pace. "So we decided to teach him a lesson. You know, mess with his head a little bit. Show him that's no way to treat a Billings Girl." "But I wasn't a Billings Girl then," I said.
"You were. You just didn't know it yet," Ariana told me. "Exactly," Noelle agreed. "So that night, the first night of parents' weekend, we sneaked over to Ketlar to grab him." "Grab him?" I asked. "How?" "We knew it wouldn't be a problem, considering how wasted he was, and we were right," Noelle said. "He was so trashed he practically fell into our arms." She almost laughed then. As if this part of the story was somehow funny. I gripped her silk comforter in my sweaty palms. "Then what?" I said through my teeth. "Well, Josh conveniently was not there, but his car keys were," Noelle said. "He'd used it earlier that day and we'd all seen it parked over by the circle." "So it was close," Ariana said. "So we took it," Kiran put in. Suddenly the realization hit me. How Josh's car seats and mirrors had been all out of place on the day of the funeral and he couldn't figure out why. How Taylor hadn't wanted to take Josh's car back to Easton. She'd seemed almost afraid of it. How broken up she'd been that day and every day after that and how I'd never understood why. Constance had theorized that Taylor had been secretly in love with Thomas, but that wasn't it at all. Taylor had killed Thomas. She'd been there when it all happened. Of course she had lost it when the body was found--she was wondering when the police were going to figure out who'd done it.
"We got Thomas in the backseat and we drove out to this farm on the outskirts of Easton. ..." Noelle trailed off. The muscles around her mouth twitched. She didn't want to go on. "What did you do to him?" I said. My voice sounded cold and strange, like it was coming from somewhere outside myself. "All we wanted to do was humiliate him, Reed," she said. "We just wanted him to feel how you felt that night, so he would understand." I couldn't believe this was happening. That I was sitting here, in the room I had once so longed to step into, listening to . . . this. "What did you do, Noelle?" I demanded. "We ...we..." Noelle's eyes filled with tears. "We took his shirt off. ..." This wasn't real. This was a nightmare. A horror movie. A horror movie about a nightmare that I was never going to wake up from. "We-" "Oh, for heaven's sake," Ariana said, stepping into my line of sight. "We took his shirt off and put this black mesh bag over his head. Something one of Kiran's many purses had been wrapped in."
"Versace," Kiran whispered, still half out of it. "Then we dragged him over to this old scarecrow pole and tied him up there." Ariana's voice sounded crisp and detached, like she was telling a story about how she'd changed a tire to someone who was too stupid to understand the mechanics of it. Like people tied other people to scarecrow poles every day of the week. The cruelty of it--the very incomprehensible callousness- brought bile into my mouth. I tried to swallow and glanced at Noelle. She wiped under her eyes and shook her hair back. "We woke him up," Noelle continued. "How?" My voice wasn't there, but my mouth formed the word. "Josh had some bottled water in his car," Ariana said. "We dumped it over his head and shoulders." A few tears squeezed from my eyes. "So he wakes up with a black bag over his head, tied to a pole," I spat. "Yes. I know. It sounds bad--"
"It sounds bad, Noelle?" I said, standing. "It sounds like you tortured him!" "Shhhhh!" Noelle put her hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me down again. "We didn't torture him. He was just a little scared, that's all." "Oh, really?" The tears flowed freely now. "I wonder why."I thought of Thomas tied up out there in the middle of the night. Drugged. Confused. Unable to defend himself. He must have been so scared. So alone. Petrified. These people were evil. I was sitting here letting three evil people describe their crime to me. All the misery, all the confusion, all the bone-crushing sorrow of the past month and a half--it was all thanks to them.
"Reed, we did all of this for you," Ariana said angrily. Angrily. As if she was annoyed by my horror. "We were trying to help you." "Gee, thanks, Ariana. So when did you start beating him to death?" Her eyes flashed, and for a split second I honestly thought she was going to strangle me. But then, Noelle stepped in front of her. "Reed, get this through your head. We did not kill Thomas Pearson," she said. I stared up at her and I wanted to believe her. God help me, I really wanted to believe her. "Then what did you do?" I managed to say. "We taunted him," Kiran said, her voice full of exhaustion and tears. "Disguised our voices and asked him how it felt to be exposed. Humiliated. Asked him how he liked it. We wanted to freak him out, so we poked him with some branches and . . . and ..."
"And Josh's bat," Noelle said. My stomach heaved and my hand flew to my mouth. "But that was all we did, Reed. I swear to you," Noelle said. "We did not hurt him." Kiran looked up at us blearily. "He said he wanted to get down. That he couldn't breathe in the hood--" "But that wasn't true," Ariana said, crossing her arms over her chest. "There were so many tiny holes in that bag he could breathe just fine." "He was fine when we left him there," Noelle said. "We even loosened the ropes so that he could get free. Once he sobered up some, he should have gotten out of there. He should have been able to find his way back to campus." "But he never came back," Kiran said.
There was a long moment of silence. I had no idea what to say. What to believe. I just wanted to get out of there. Get away from these people. I just wanted to get away and be able to think. "There was a while there when Taylor and I thought we might have been responsible," Kiran said. "You know, maybe he really couldn't breathe. Maybe--" "But then they found the bat and determined that it was the murder weapon," Noelle said. "That was when we knew for sure that it had nothing to do with us." "Somebody must have found him out there after we left," Ariana mused. "Somebody who really didn't like him." "Or somebody who was just psycho," Kiran added.
"We could never have killed him, Reed," Noelle said, her expression disgusted. "You know that, right?" "Let's say I believe you," I said. "Let's say I believe that you didn't actually kill him. That doesn't change what you just admitted to. How could you do something like that to another person? Drag him out of his home ... scare him like that... leave him? What kind of people are you?" "We're the kind of people who care about you," Ariana replied. "We're the kind of people who would risk everything to do this so that you wouldn't have to be disrespected and spat upon by the guy who was supposedly in love with you."My head shook. "I never asked you to do this. Don't act like this was somehow a good thing. You took him out there. You left him there. Whether or not you swung the bat. . . it doesn't even matter. If you hadn't done what you did, he wouldn't have been out there to get killed. He would still be alive right now!"
Tears spilled over onto my cheeks in waves. I grabbed up my coat and turned to go, but Ariana grabbed the hem and I nearly tripped. "None of that changes the fact that we only had you in mind," Noelle said, stepping in front of me. "You have no idea what the last few months have been like for us. We did all of
this for you, Reed." "Stop saying that!" I shouted. "But it's the truth," Noelle continued. "We did it for you. And now you're going to do something for us." "Oh, am I?" I blurted sarcastically. "Yes. You are. You are going to keep your mouth shut," Noelle said. "You're not ever going to tell another living soul what you saw, what we just told you."
"No one will believe you even if you try," Ariana added. "Noelle deleted the evidence." "Don't forget who we are, Reed. What we can do," Noelle reminded me. "If you go to the police or anyone else, you're just going to sound like an insane liar with an active imagination. No one will ever believe that we could do something so heinous." I glared at her, wishing more than anything that she was wrong, but we both knew that she wasn't. No one would believe me. No one would care. "I have to go," I said finally. Noelle smiled kindly, almost pityingly. "Go ahead. Get some rest. We'll talk about this more later." I took my coat and walked out of the room, knowing that for once, Noelle was wrong. We weren't going to talk about this later. I was never going to speak to any of them again for the rest of my life.