mutter.
All around us, girls were openly crying, and even some of the boys had eyes that were suspiciously moist.
“Do you want me to make the announcement?” Zach asked Miss Emily.
She took a deep, shuddering breath as she pulled herself free of Dwight’s arm, and I watched the steel flow back into her spine.
“Thank you, Mr. Knott,” she said formally, “but I’ll do it.”
A few minutes later, her calm voice came over the intercom to report the death of yet another classmate. “Tonight’s game is cancelled and grief counselors will be in the gym all afternoon for anyone who wants to speak to them.” She closed by saying, “If you drove to school today,
Useless to pretend that none of the kids listening to her words would leave this afternoon and go straight to whatever convenience store would sell them beer or fortified wine, texting or talking on their phones as they went. This latest death would give them all the excuse they needed.
The state of North Carolina prohibits speeding. It prohibits driving with a blood alcohol level above .08, and it prohibits all alcoholic beverages for kids under the age of twenty-one. Unless you are eighteen and have driven without any violations for at least six months, you are also banned from using cell phones while behind the wheel and from having more than one other unrelated person under the age of twenty-one in the car with you, although that last is seldom enforced or adhered to, especially where there are several siblings or, as with my nieces and nephews, several cousins who carpool.
Unfortunately, the state can’t prohibit teenagers from thinking they’re ten feet tall and bulletproof.
I didn’t know any details about Tuesday night’s accident, but when Stacy Loring, another West Colleton senior, crashed his car into a tree shortly before Halloween, he would have blown a .12. There were six kids in that car. Stacy and another boy were killed instantly. Two walked away from the wreck with only superficial scratches, one remains in a coma with brain damage, and one—Stacy’s girlfriend Joy Medlin—is still on crutches. According to my nieces, her surgeon says she will probably walk with a limp the rest of her life.
Because Joy could no longer do the moves, Emma had been moved up to the varsity cheerleading squad. Mallory Johnson had been the varsity head cheerleader, and now the newly depleted squad, all dressed in their red-and-gold uniforms, were helplessly weeping on each other’s shoulders, Joy and Emma among them.
I knew that three of my nieces carpooled, as did their brothers, but the girls would be in no shape to drive after this emotional outpouring. I had ridden over from the courthouse this afternoon with Dwight, and now I told him to go on without me. “I’ll drive the girls home.”
“Thanks, Deborah,” Zach said. “It’s going to be a while before I can leave.”
The gym emptied out slowly. Some students lingered because they wanted to talk to the two grief counselors who had arrived almost instantly; others stayed because they were simply reluctant to leave their friends until they had wrung every bit of news and comments from each other. Eventually though, my nieces and nephews zipped or buttoned their jackets and trailed me out to the parking lot. This close to the winter solstice, the sun was low in the west and I could feel the temperature dropping as Jessica handed me the keys to her candy apple red car. The boy cousins piled into the pickup that my eighteen-year-old nephew A.K. drives and the girls got in with me.
I knew who Mallory Johnson was, of course. Her mom had graduated from high school a few years ahead of me and her dad even earlier. We were never close; but enough of the old community remains that we all have a loose idea of each other’s lives. They had contributed to my last campaign and Malcolm Johnson, now a partner in his father’s insurance company, occasionally shows up in my courtroom as a character witness for some of his clients or their wayward children. I knew that Mallory was a senior in high school, the younger of two children, and that her older brother was enrolled at our local community college.
On the drive back to the farm, though, I gained an even clearer picture of her from the things my nieces said. Even taking it all with a grain of salt and allowing for the shock of her sudden death, I heard that Mallory Johnson had evidently been one of the golden ones—enormously popular, a bubbly personality, bright, pretty, and musically talented. No ego and genuinely nice, despite her dad’s attempts to spoil the hell out of her.
Although a junior, Seth’s daughter Jessica had taken an occasional class with her. “We sit next to each other in Spanish class,” she said, choking back her tears. “We were collecting Spanish-language children’s books for the homeless shelter in Dobbs.”
“I might have been one of the last ones she texted before the crash,” Emma sniffled. “She reminded us to wear our uniforms today for a yearbook picture.”
I bit down hard on my tongue for that one. No way was I going to suggest that Mallory might still be alive if she had cut off her phone and concentrated on the road.
“Poor Joy,” said Emma, who still felt guilty for how she had moved up to the varsity squad. “First Stacy and now Mallory. They’ve been best friends since first grade, and even though she can’t do the moves, she still comes to all the practices and she’s really good at choreographing. Mallory kept pushing her to come up with new routines. She thought it was helping Joy get past Stacy’s death.”
As a lowly freshman, Ruth had barely known the dead girl, but that didn’t stop her from remembering that Mallory had come to her brother’s eighteenth birthday party back in the fall and how pretty she was. “I think A.K. thought she was hot.”
“Tell me a single guy in this school who
Even as the girls talked, their thumbs were busy on the keypads of their phones, the ubiquitous clickety-click that forms the soundtrack of a teenager’s life like never-silent crickets or cicadas.
“Did you get a message from Kaitlyn?” asked Emma. “Everybody’s going to bring red or gold flowers to where Mallory crashed. They’re making a cross with her name on it.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning at seven-thirty.”
As I approached a sharp curve, they suddenly went mute. There on the ditchbank, amid a tangle of dead weeds and dried leaves, were three small dilapidated wooden crosses embellished with plastic flowers. The roses had been bright red when placed there almost two years ago. Now they had faded to a pale grayish pink. The once-
