They didn’t understand at all, either of them. Because they thought I meant I didn’t want it to be true, that I didn’t want to face the idea that Anna might have, even in some small way, contributed to what happened to her. And maybe I didn’t, but that wasn’t what I meant. Because it wasn’t that I didn’t want her to have drunk those beers that night. It was that I knew she hadn’t.
I knew because we’d drunk them together, five months earlier.
BEER IS REVOLTING. WHICH HAD come as a shock. I’d really thought it wouldn’t be so bad. I’d figured it would be like mustard greens or radishes—foods you won’t touch when you’re little and then later you find out are actually delicious. Or at least not as terrible as you’d thought.
Beer wasn’t like that.
Still, between the two of us we’d made it through both bottles.
It had been an unusually warm autumn night, and our parents had gone out to the movies. We’d been bored and hot, so Anna had snuck two bottles of beer from the fridge. We’d drunk the bottles one by one, trading them back and forth. And there was something that had felt…cool about sitting on her bed, the warm night air flowing in through the window, trading the cold bottle between us, letting its neck dangle from our fingers.
Anna kept asking if I felt anything. I’d felt looser, maybe, my limbs less tense. When I asked her, she’d smiled and said she thought she might feel a little buzzed. We’d laughed a lot, at even sillier things than usual, but that could have just been from nervous energy, the edge of worry that our parents might suddenly show up again, their movie canceled, to find us with beer on our breaths and guilty expressions on our faces. And sometime after the second beer, we’d both fallen asleep on her bed, too warm to bother with blankets.
Early the next morning, Anna had stashed the bottles in her closet so our parents wouldn’t see them. She’d said she’d sneak them down to our recycling bin once enough other bottles had accumulated that two additions wouldn’t stand out.
I’d offered to do it instead, certain she’d forget about them, but she’d insisted she’d remember.
Obviously, she hadn’t.
—
MY MOM’S SIGNATURE WAS CLEAN and smooth, each letter easily decipherable. My dad’s was little more than a line with a couple of small bumps in the middle, mere upward twitches of the wrist. It was his signature I forged on the autopsy request form.
On the rest of the form, I tried my best to infuse my handwriting with his particular style of borderline unreadable scrawl, to tick the necessary boxes with the kind of flick I’d seen him use.
While I wasn’t sure if I thought, like Lauren, that the police were morons, I was pretty sure they weren’t all the brightest lights in town. Also, they’d mislaid Anna’s things before, so it was no major leap to think they could have misread or misinterpreted toxicology results—made incorrect assumptions. They might have glanced over the report and come to the easy conclusion, the one that matched the bottles they’d already lifted from her room.
I needed to see a copy of the autopsy report myself to confirm whether it truly said what my parents had told me. So I’d mail in the form I’d downloaded from the county medical examiner’s website and wait for a response.
In the meantime, I had to revisit all my preconceptions about Anna’s death. I’d assumed, like everyone, that Anna had fallen leaving the house. If she’d had alcohol in her system that night, though, that pointed to an entirely different story. In that version, she’d had no problem at all leaving—the problem had been getting back up to her room. Which would mean that there was unaccounted-for time. Time when Anna had been out in the world, alive, while I’d been asleep. Time when she’d been with someone. Time when things had happened.
I wanted to be responsible, in at least one way.
The nurse I met with at the clinic called me “honey,” and her eyes were kind as she pressed the sample box of birth control pills into my hands.
I must have looked sad as I stared down at the box, because she asked what should have been a simple question.
Is he nice to you, this boyfriend of yours?
I didn’t know how to answer. Didn’t know how to tell her that he wasn’t exactly nice, and he definitely wasn’t my boyfriend.
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY THE TRACK team had its first meet of the season.
My first race was the 100-meter. Longer distances could involve a certain amount of strategy, decisions about whether to try to take the lead at the beginning and hold on to it or save your energy for a burst at that final stretch, but the 100-meter was all about pure speed—strategy only got in the way.
I was positioned four lanes in. The girl on my left slowly cracked each of her knuckles, ignoring my pointed glare as she finished one hand and moved on to the other one. I wanted her to fall flat on her face and later develop early arthritis in all her finger joints.
Then I put thoughts of her and her hopefully unpleasant future aside and focused on taking deep, deliberate breaths. I could do this. It was running, and I was a runner. This is running and I am a runner.
“Ready!”
Inhale. Exhale.
“Set!”
Inhale. Exhale.
The starter pistol fired.
My feet hit the track. One, two. One, two. One-two, one-two.
My arms pumped, my legs reached forward, and everything else followed.
This is running and I am a runner.
I was only dimly aware of the other people on the track. It wasn’t about them anymore. It was only about me.
One-two, one-two, one—
I hit the finish line in first place.
I came to a halt, feeling light-headed.
“Great job, Jess!” my dad yelled from the bleachers. My mom held his arm and beamed at me. I
