Envy

Kingston High cheer outfit. The dress was red, trimmed in gold with a narrow white edging. It was a color combination left over from the days when cheerleaders were wholesome and when it didn’t matter what color their pom-poms were—as long as they shook them with enough persuasive vigor when the team put some numbers on the scoreboard.

It was clear that no one back then took into consideration what a girl like Starla Larsen could bring to the uniform.

Starla knew.

White and black would be better, she thought as she turned in the mirror. White and black don’t compete; they enhance.

She had a point. Starla usually did. She was that kind of a girl.

Because of her looks and somewhat overly seductive personality, Starla was an easy target for the B-word. If gossip ever got back to her, Starla merely looked blankly at her informant.

“Really? Wow, I never even noticed her. Wonder why she feels that way?”

It wasn’t easy for most girls to look as hot as she did, and Starla almost felt sorry for them. It was true that she was blessed with her mother’s and father’s good looks, but it took more than genetics to change things in the physical world.

She was good at embarrassing girls, teasing boys, and making things worse. Those, along with her undeniable in-your-face beauty, were her gifts.

Starla’s teeth were white, her eyes glacial blue, and her hair spun gold. Those things were easy to alter. Sure, teeth could be whitened, and she routinely did that. Her eyes, thankfully, were the right hue of blue. Not blueish. Not gray. Intense icy, icy blue. Certainly, her hairstylist mom helped her with her hair. That was more out of convenience than the fact that Starla thought her mom really knew what she was doing. Starla read enough fashion magazines and watched enough Style TV to understand that the cut was more important than the color.

Her mom almost never cut her hair.

Starla had it all, and she was only a sophomore. That, she was certain, had to be some kind of a freaking record.

The only downside in Starla’s world, besides her anxious little brother, Teagan, and her omnipresent stage mother-wannabe, was her mom’s boyfriend, Jake Damon. Even at almost thirty, Jake was eye candy, to be sure. He had a decent chest—pecs, not boobs—and arms that looked muscled but not overly gross when he purposely flexed around the house doing some chore that Starla’s father would have done without making such a show of it.

Yeah, she thought, Jake is the perfect guy for Mom. She still thinks she’s in her twenties, and Jake is stupid enough to go along with it.

Starla’s mother came into her room and planted her four-inch pumps into the floorboards like she was nailing something down for posterity. Mindee was a sight as always. Her hair was gooped up with so much product, Starla wondered how her mother’s pencil neck could support it. Mindee wore a simple black dress, her asymmetrical hair clipped with a questionable matching black bow, but Starla didn’t say a word about it.

This time it was Mindee’s turn to be critical.

“You’re wearing that to the memorial?” she asked, indicating the cheerleading uniform with a jab of her fingertip.

Starla faced the mirror again and carefully reglossed her lips. “The squad is going to be there. All in uniform.”

Mindee shook her head disapprovingly. “I don’t know about that, Starla.”

“We aren’t going to do a cheer, Mom.”

Mindee pulled her heels from the floorboards and walked closer, touching Starla on the shoulder.

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I was thinking, you know, about how Katelyn felt about you being a cheerleader. It seems inappropriate.”

Starla pulled away. She wanted to say something about her mom’s boyfriend being inappropriate, but she held it inside. After all, the day wasn’t about her, her mom, or Jake. It was about Katelyn Berkley and her suicide or accident.

Or whatever. Starla didn’t care. Dead was dead, no matter how someone got there.

Teagan, a preteen with the pink flush of emerging acne and a modified Bieber haircut, wore black jeans and a sweater. He’d been unusually quiet for the past week, and Starla took his hand. It was clammy, but she didn’t mind. She liked having Teagan around to use as a human shield between her mother and her boyfriend.

“Let’s go. Let’s go say good-bye to Katie,” she said.

“I guess so,” he said, dropping her hand. “I don’t need you to drag me there.”

Starla and Teagan started down the stairs, their mother behind them. At the landing was Port Gamble’s answer to a jack-, or in his case, a Jake-of-all-trades, master of none. Jake Damon was the town’s handyman. Until he took up with Mindee Larsen, most women would have said he was reasonably handy—with or without his toolbox.

Or something like that.

Jake smelled of beer, which was how he usually smelled. He looked Starla up and down and raised a brow in that creepy way he had when he was drunk and thinking he was sexy.

“Go, Buccaneers,” he said, nodding like a dashboard bobblehead.

Starla wanted to ignore her mother’s squeeze, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. “Why don’t you go off somewhere and buccaneer yourself?”

Jake clinched his fists. The large veins on his arms stretched against his skin, and Starla thought he was a bigger jerk than she ever could have guessed.

“Did you say what I think you said?” he asked, stepping closer.

“You heard me,” she said, giving proof to all doubters that pretty could also be tough. “I said Bucc You!”

Mindee yanked on her daughter’s hand. “Starla! What a mouth you have.”

“Let go of me,” Starla said, twisting away. “I didn’t say anything that bad.”

Mindee looked at Jake, pleadingly. “She’s grieving; let it go.”

“She’s a pain in the ass,” he said in his Bud breath. “But sure, I’ll let it go.”

The four of them slipped on their coats and started out the door. The church was only a short distance away and they decided that, despite the cold weather, they’d walk. There wouldn’t be any conversation—just hurried steps through the cold led by a very pissed-off cheerleader.

WHILE KATELYN BERKLEY’S FRIENDS AND HER PARENTS waited patiently for the cause of death to be determined—and for grandparents Nancy and Paul to return from a four-day cruise to Ensenada they refused to cancel—her body had been kept on ice under Birdy Waterman’s watchful eye. Finally, two weeks after Katelyn’s death, it came time to bury her. Her casket was fuchsia and ivory, a color combination more appropriate to an ice- cream store than to the final resting place of a girl who eschewed such colors in favor of the drab tones that she wore in the months before her death. Behind the casket, on the church altar, were photographs of the dead girl’s life: Baby, Girl Scout Daisy, and Sullen Teen. All of Katelyn’s iterations of life stages were on display, along with a few things she’d made: a candy dish she’d glazed in purple and black at one of those coffee and pottery shops, a painting of a forlorn moon over the tar-colored waters of Port Gamble Bay, and a letter opener made in shop class that looked suspiciously like an old-fashioned barber’s razor blade.

No one said anything about that. How could they?

The church was full, though not particularly because of Katelyn’s popularity in the community. It was true that she was well known because of her omnipresence at the family’s restaurant, busing tables, helping the cooks, sitting at the counter reading a vampire novel with a half-naked boy on the well-turned cover. Indeed, the swelling size of the crowd at her memorial service had little to do with Katelyn specifically. People were there because of her youth. Nothing, all ministers know, brings out mourners like the death of a child. Katelyn might have been more than halfway to adulthood, but she was still a little girl.

A very dead little girl.

Hayley, Taylor, and their parents sat in the third row, two rows back from the Berkley family. Colton James sat behind the Ryans, and three rows farther back were Beth Lee and her mother, Kim. The order was as it had been the night of Katelyn’s death: the closer the relationship with the deceased, the nearer to the casket.

Occupying the seats across the aisle from the Berkleys were Starla and her family. Next to them mourned the rest of the Buccaneers cheer squad.