“Oh. I…” She paused and looked away, so that all I could see was her hair and the curve of her cheek. “I’ve been trying to understand something.” She looked back at me after a moment, a blush spreading across her face. “I know she didn’t…I know it was an accident, what happened to her. But when I first heard, I thought…I thought maybe she and I had something in common.”
I stared at her. It took a second for the implications to register.
“You thought she jumped?”
“It was stupid. The police were pretty vague about it at first, and I…It was just me projecting, I guess. I’d—I’d been having a hard time. I am having a hard time. And she’d started hanging out with people who…I thought…I don’t know.”
I could see her hand around her arm, clutching it tight.
“What happened to you, Mona?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I do know, but I don’t. I…”
I sat, waiting for her to keep going, but she didn’t say anything else.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
She took a deep breath. “There was a party last spring. Me and Brian had been having stupid little fights all week—whose friends to hang out with, what movie to watch, if we should even go to the party or do something different. Nothing big, nothing I thought was all that important. Then, at the party, Brian wanted to leave early, and I wasn’t ready to go. We had another fight about that, I think. I don’t remember, really.”
She stopped.
“You mean you don’t remember what you fought about?”
“No, I mean I don’t remember anything. That’s the problem. There’s this vague memory of us fighting—me being upset, him being upset—and then after that…” She closed her eyes. “After that, there’s me waking up alone in the middle of the football field, my shirt wide-open.” She paused. “They took a photo of me like that. Took it using my own phone and left it for me. Like a reminder. Like a warning.”
“ ‘They’? You mean Brian?”
Mona shook her head. “I don’t know. I think it must have been—I don’t know who else I would’ve gotten into a car with—but it’s all a big blank. I tried asking a couple of people if they saw us leaving together, but they’d all been busy getting hammered. I don’t even know what happened between me being at the party and being left in that field. It’s a just a big gap.”
“I’m so sorry. That’s…” I didn’t know how to express what that was. “Did you report it?”
Mona laughed, low and hoarse. “I went to the police that very morning, sure that they’d want to get to the bottom of it, that they’d believe me. Instead, they acted like I was insane, or worse, just a stupid drunk whore making up stories. They kept asking me if I was sure, if maybe I’d just had too much to drink and gotten confused walking home—took off my shirt for attention or because I was making out with my boyfriend. If maybe I was just trying to get Brian in trouble because we’d had a fight. I probably shouldn’t have expected anything else. After all, Brian’s dad is the police chief’s best friend. No one wanted to know; no one wanted to look into it.”
She looked away. A long silence followed. Someone else would have known how to fill it. Someone else might have been able to say something that might make her feel a tiny fraction better.
“I don’t know if I really wanted to jump, you know,” she said eventually. “I just want it not to have happened. Just want whole minutes to pass by when I can feel like everything is still simple, when I can pretend I’m still who I thought I was before: a cheerleader in love with a guy who’d never hurt me.”
“You were in love with him?”
She finally turned back to look at me. “Yeah, I really was,” she said. “And the messed-up thing is, part of me still is. I can’t even ask him about it, because I’m afraid I’d believe anything he told me, and then we’d be right back together.”
“Like magnets,” I said quietly, a distant echo.
“Yes,” she said. “Like magnets.”
Texting him that photo was a mistake. I knew that as soon as I hit the send button. The stupid thing was, I liked how I looked in it. Tough, like the kind of girl who knew what she was doing. A girl, I thought, so different from my former self.
And even as I regretted it, I thought I understood what I’d risked. Thought I understood the worst-case scenario.
ON SUNDAY, I SET OFF earlier than usual for my run with Nick, circling the park three times before he showed. When he did, I didn’t even slow down, just nodded at him and made him scramble to keep up.
Ever since I’d talked to Mona, all I wanted was to run. Run and run and run and not stop until things made sense again. Mona had been drugged and assaulted, and she clearly wondered if Anna had experienced a similar trauma, and a similar despair in its wake. While I very much hoped she was wrong, I had to wonder if there might be some connection between them after all. Had to wonder if Brian had Anna’s number in his phone not because they were lab partners, not because they were friends either, but because they were something altogether different. It would fit, I thought. Fit with Lily’s text: And the boys may stop by first. Charlie and Brian, a logical duo. One for Lily, one for Anna.
Nick
