“It was. She called me from the ambulance—had me call your parents. We all thought you were still in your room.” She paused. “Migraine, my ass.”
“I needed to check something,” I said. “It was important.” I paused. “Do you know if they tested me? Did they find the drugs?”
“Yeah, they did. Although from what I heard, they barely needed to—they’d never seen someone that far under before. They had to pump your stomach.”
I considered this. Now that she mentioned it, my stomach and my throat both hurt as well. A lot.
“What about Charlie? Do they believe him?”
“Jess, half of the people attending the game came out to the parking lot after Mona started yelling—they all saw Charlie beating the crap out of you. His credibility is pretty shot right now.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I paused. “Is Mona here?”
“No, she was for a while, but she needed to go home. Also…”
She stopped.
“What?”
“She came here in the ambulance with you. She told me that you were talking for a while on the way here. Do you remember that?”
I shook my head. It was all gray. Sarah was watching me closely. Too closely.
“What? What did I say?” I asked.
For a second Sarah paused, her face twisting a little. Then she shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Mona said she couldn’t make out the words.”
BEFORE SARAH LEFT, I ASKED her for a favor. I wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it happen, yet two hours later there he was. Brian.
He stood in the doorway. His eyes went over me slowly, cataloging all my bruises, the lump that had formed on the side of my head. When his gaze settled on my arm, wrapped in gauze, only then did I shake my head.
“My arm is from when I smashed his window,” I said.
“Everything else, though?”
“Everything else was him,” I said. “And there’s a lot more under the gown.”
He looked surprised, and not in a good way.
“I wasn’t offering to show you,” I clarified. “I just wanted you to know.”
He nodded. He took one last long look at me before he stepped into the room, pulled a chair up to the bed.
After he sat, he looked down at his hands. They were big hands, with long, calloused fingers and blunt fingernails. They were not in any way special, yet we both gazed at them for quite some time.
Then I took a deep breath.
“Did Nick know?” I asked. “About any of it?”
Brian shook his head. “No. I knew he liked her, though. And when Charlie told me about that photo Anna had sent him, laughed about how much she regretted it…I don’t know. It didn’t feel right. He’d told me the password for his phone once, so I thought it would be easy enough to get it away from him for a while and delete the photo. I thought if I did that, and paired off Anna and Nick, then Charlie would back off—that he wouldn’t mess with her if she was with someone else on the team. That maybe he’d be pissed for a while, but he’d get over it and then everyone could just be cool again. It seemed like a good plan.”
A good plan. In theory, perhaps it had been.
“Why didn’t you stop it? When it started to go off the rails? When you saw that she was drugged?”
“I thought she’d taken the drugs herself,” he said. “I was annoyed about that at the time, that she’d do that, when I was trying to do her a favor. Honestly, it didn’t even occur to me that Charlie had anything to do with it. I mean, we practically grew up together. I thought…I knew he was an asshole, but I thought I knew what that meant.”
“Why didn’t you call the police, though? When she fell?”
Brian looked away. “I should’ve. I know that. I was in shock, I think, and so was Lily, but Charlie—he was so calm. He said we should take her back home, put her under her window. He said he’d call his dad, explain what happened. That his dad would take the investigation over as soon as he got back to town—make sure none of it came back to us.”
“So you laid her out in our yard and then went to the party?” I did not work hard to keep the incredulity and anger out of my voice.
“That’s where people expected us to be,” he said. “Charlie said that’s what we needed to do. So we went.” He paused and shook his head. “I know how it all sounds. It sounds crazy. It was crazy. But in a way, that made it easier—it felt so surreal, what had happened, what we’d done, that it was easy to start pretending that it had happened just the way everyone thought it had—her falling out her window.”
Nick’s description of Brian wandering around at the bottom of the quarry came back to me. How Charlie hadn’t had Lily’s phone number because he’d had to get a new phone. “You tossed his phone into the water at the quarry,” I said.
He blinked, surprised. Then he nodded. “I pocketed it while we were on the way to Nick’s house. But it turned out he’d changed the password. And when he began to freak out about where it was, I pretended to search for it. Figured water would destroy it.”
The phone, yes. The photo, no. Not that it mattered. Not anymore. It was just another thing that hadn’t worked out the way it was supposed to. And I couldn’t let myself go down that path—the path of how things should have happened. There were too many branches, too many ways to think about how things could have gone, how Anna could have been saved. It was a labyrinth.
I leaned back against the pillow and closed my eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” he said quietly. There was a long break, and then his voice got even quieter. “And Mona…I heard that he…”
I nodded without opening my eyes.
What he
