“Are you sure?” Hayley asked, pushing only a little. “Can I help?”
Katelyn turned away to answer a text message. “There’s no problem,” she said, without looking up. “No one but me.” And then she walked off, toward her class, toward the cafeteria.
Somewhere away from Hayley.
Hayley let it go that day at school and regretted it years later. She hadn’t pressed her further because it just seemed too private. Later, when she heard that Katelyn was cutting herself, she assumed what everyone who watched daytime TV did about cutters and their motivation to selfmutilate. They did it to control their pain, to let out the hurt one slice at a time.
Hayley hadn’t dug deep enough to think about the root cause of Katelyn’s problems.
She thought about how middle-school hierarchy ensures that a good number of kids are relegated to loser or outsider status. Katelyn, the cutter, was never really viewed by anyone as a loser. Few knew that secret. Katelyn was engaging. She was pretty. She still had her funny, bright side. And most of all, she still had the ear of her best friend, Starla.
Starla’s friendship, no matter how tenuous, was nearly a guarantee that Katelyn could still get a passkey into something better than her miserable life back home or in the restaurant where she worked.
Still mulling over those memories, Hayley looked up as her sister entered her bedroom.
“What’s up?” Taylor asked, finding a place on the corner of her sister’s cozy bed.
“I was just thinking about Katelyn,” she said.
Taylor ran her fingers over the old chenille bedspread that instantly, tactilely, reminded her of their grandmother on their mother’s side.
“I know,” Taylor said. “Me too.”
Hayley studied the folded paper held in her fingertips. Taylor’s eyes landed there, taking in its contents, and she wondered out loud, “Do you think we could have saved her?”
Hayley shook her head. To think that they could have done something but didn’t was an immense burden. “I don’t know,” she responded. “But maybe Starla could have.”
VALERIE GLANCED DOWN at Hedda’s water and food dishes. There was still some reduced-calorie kibble in the dog’s white ceramic dish, but it was stale. So was the water. She often complained that she was the only person in the family who thought to keep things fresh. It was only a flash of a thought, the kind that came and went with the bruising realization that Hedda had vanished.
The dog had been a part of the family for almost ten years. The day she had come to the Ryans was a day wrought with unthinkable tragedy and heartache. Valerie had returned home from the hospital for a change of clothes, when Kevin phoned her to say he’d seen on the news that they were recovering the bus. She drove over to the crash site, out of curiosity and the need to be there. She parked the car on the east side of the bridge and made the long walk toward the center of the span. The wind was blowing softly and the craggy Olympic Mountains lifted the sky. It was beautiful, but she barely noticed. In fact, Valerie was in such a state as she stood behind a barricade watching the recovery of the short bus that when a young deputy officer handed the dog to her, she took it.
“She’s one scared pup,” he said, “but now that she’s back with you, look at that tail wag!”
Valerie didn’t even think to say the dog didn’t belong to her.
The Ryans loved Hedda, though no one else seemed to. They weren’t sure of her age, but a vet in Kingston put her at five or six when she was found on the bridge. The suggested age made the Ryans sad, as they knew that under the best of circumstances Hedda would be theirs for only a short time.
And yet, the tubby little dachshund kept going. She was fifteen or sixteen and really no worse for wear than a dog half her age. Her fur had grayed quite a bit and her hearing had dulled, but her eyes were bright and unmistakably alert.
Valerie picked up the water dish and rinsed it in the sink. She washed out the food dish too. Instead of putting them away, she refilled both and set them on the place mat that the girls had bought at Petco in Silverdale. The mealtime mat read:
Valerie disregarded the words and smiled for the first time in a long while.
chapter 26
TALKING WITH STARLA AT SCHOOL would never, ever happen. Even though she was only a sophomore, she was always surrounded by gatekeepers, wannabes, and hangers-on. Hayley and Taylor knew they had to go over to her house to see her, which always meant the risk of running into Port Gamble’s resident sleaze. Not Mindee Larsen—though a case could be made for that—but Jake Damon, a man who left footprints of slime in his wake.
At least, that’s what most Port Gamble teenage girls thought whenever he was brought up in casual conversation. Even a blind girl with a halfway decent service animal could detect how Jake’s hooded eyes traveled over a female’s body, as if he were taking a tour of what he’d like to touch. They noticed how, at the first hint of warmish weather, he’d plant himself along the edge of the bay to smoke and watch the girls as they lay out on blankets to suntan Washington-style—which usually meant a bad sunburn under overcast skies. No one could argue that Jake wasn’t good-looking. He was. He had nice eyes and straighter teeth than most handymen, with their picket-fence grins. He had a better body than those whose stomachs overhung dinner plate-sized belt buckles. Jake never wandered around town in butt-crack-revealing, lowslung jeans.
Taylor and Hayley, however, didn’t think Jake was hot in the least. In fact, behind Jake’s back the twins referred to Starla’s “momster’s” boyfriend as “Mr. Yuk,” because of the smiley-face tattoo on his right bicep. That undoubtedly was meant to be ironic, as it looked more like a poison-control sticker when he flexed, which was constantly.
When the twins arrived at the Larsen house a few days after Katelyn’s funeral, they were relieved to see that Mindee’s car, a late-model red Cabriolet with a ragtop she’d repaired herself with duct tape after her husband ditched her, was gone. Also missing was Jake’s Toyota Tacoma, a dumb name for a small pickup truck if ever there was one. Who, Beth Lee once wondered aloud, would ever want to drive a pickup named after Tacoma?
It made as much sense as calling a sexy sports car a Boise.
Starla opened the door. She was wearing a pale pink top and darkdyed jeans. The top, like most of the things she wore around the house, was her mother’s. Mindee could be trashy, but she had good stuff among the crap that she’d collected from the middling boutiques at the Kitsap Mall. Starla wore whatever she could hustle from her mom’s wardrobe because it meant less wear and tear on her own things.
“Are you two collecting for something?” Starla asked.
Somehow Starla could always manage a few words that rubbed their recipient the wrong way. Next to mounting the top of the human pyramid on the football field, it was one of her best talents.
“That was last year,” Hayley said. “By the way, we never did get that money for the breast cancer walk. But that’s not why we’re here.”
Starla made an annoyed face as she one-handedly clipped her tangle of long hair into a messy bun.
Another skill.
“You want to come inside?”
Taylor pushed past the cheerleader. “It’s super cold out here. Thanks for inviting us in.”
The Larsen house was as it always was—a total mess. Mindee wasn’t a hoarder, per se. But she was an incorrigible collector of the kinds of things that Valerie Ryan liked to call “dust catchers.” On the table next to the front door was Mindee’s collection of Scottie dogs. She seemed to embrace the concept that if one was good, fifty was awesome. Her kitchen was done up with more chickens and roosters than a KFC. The living room was less cluttered, save for the sofa table and its clutch of glass egg-shaped paperweights.
Teagan was playing a video game on the computer in the family room. He brightened a little when he saw Hayley and Taylor.
“Double trouble,” he said, trying to be cool.
“Hey, that’s clever. Let me write that down,” Hayley said, pretending to smile. “You are so funny.”
Taylor smiled, trying to defuse her sister’s annoyance at the kid she’d babysat a couple of times—and never
