Frankie’s expression darkens. “He saved my life,” he says. “In prison.”
I raise my hands as if surrendering. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I mean, I’m glad he did. Save your life. I just …” I let my hands drop, a gesture in futility. “What happened?”
Frankie takes a sip from his juice, then slowly replaces the cap. “Couple of years ago,” he says, “this guy, another inmate, he was annoyed I wouldn’t give him my lunch tray, so he threatened me with a shiv. Caesar stopped the guy, did something to his wrist and made him drop it. A week later, the same dude and one of his buddies try to jump Caesar, and I was there and helped fight them off. Got six extra months for it, but from then on Caesar and I had each other’s backs.” He shrugs.
This makes me feel even worse. Even in prison Frankie was loyal and brave, while I am neither. I’m a yard away from Frankie, but we might as well be on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon. It’s been eight years since he went to prison, almost three thousand days. Every one of those days was another opportunity for me to reach out to him, another chance I threw away.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I’m sorry I stopped coming to see you, sorry I didn’t keep in touch. Sorry I’m a shitty friend.”
Frankie screws up his mouth, like he is chewing on my words, and he is on the verge of saying something when Caesar calls out, “Done.”
We return to the workstation and stand behind Caesar, peering at the screen. I can feel my pulse in my head, a quick throbbing against my eardrums.
“These are the most recent texts sent to this phone,” Caesar says. “I wanted to see if she mentioned her location.”
On the screen, I read the texts Marisa sent to me on her own phone, starting on Saturday: Ethan if u have my phone give it back. I want my phone ethan. PHONE BACK. PHONE MFer. Ridiculously, I feel a slight embarrassment that Caesar and Frankie are reading these.
I’m going to eat your heart.
You should check out Twitter
I know who killed your parents
I’m not going anywhere, Ethan
“Lovely girl,” Caesar says.
“She knows who killed your parents?” Frankie asks, eyes wide.
“I don’t know,” I say. “But now you see why I want to find out?”
“You don’t know where she lives?” Caesar asks.
“With her parents, in Buckhead.”
He raises an eyebrow. “But instead of driving to her house and knocking on the front door, you want to break into her phone?”
“She’s not home. I called. She didn’t show up to work today either.”
Frankie asks, “What does she mean about Twitter?”
“She was pretending to be me on Twitter,” I say. My stomach burns with acid. “She was bullying students.”
Caesar opens a window on his laptop and pulls up Twitter. “What was the handle she used?”
“EthanF8,” I say. When Caesar and Frankie both look at me, I say, “I know. It’s not me, it’s her.”
Caesar finds the account, and he and Frankie read Marisa’s tweets about the naughty picture.
Frankie lets out a low whistle. “You must have pissed her off.”
I close my eyes briefly, as if waiting for someone to stop shouting at me. When I open them, I see what she tweeted to Sarah Solomon:
You write beautiful essays but you hide behind those cat-eye glasses like the world’s youngest virgin librarian
Maybe that’s why you sent this pic
And now Sarah is in a hospital. As is my sister. Both women recovering from attempted suicides. Both impacted by Marisa.
I realize Caesar is saying something to me. “What?” I say.
“Her tweets were all posted from Atlanta,” he says. “So she hasn’t left the city. Or at least she hadn’t before her last tweet, which was”—he checks on the screen—“just after four PM on Sunday.”
I frown. “When was her last text to me? On this phone?”
Caesar checks the screen. “Six seventeen PM on Sunday. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Ethan.’ ”
She didn’t text me anything else about my parents, or about who killed them. An idea strikes me. “Can you figure out where the texts she sent me came from?” I ask Caesar. “Location-wise?”
Caesar shakes his head. “Not from here. If I had the phone she used to send these texts, I could. Or access to that person’s cell records.” He pauses, considering something, then shakes his head. “Let’s see what else we can find,” he says. He types and pulls up two windows on his screen. One is apparently her call history, and a string of phone numbers appears, calls Marisa either made or received over the past month. I see my own cell number on there, as well as Archer’s main line, and one called Home seems self-explanatory, but I don’t recognize the others. The other window shows Marisa’s Safari history. Caesar scrolls down past various shopping sites and restaurants, and then he says “Hmm” and pauses on one item from last week: Fulton County Jail.
“Why would she research the jail?” I say.
The website she visited just after going to the jail’s website seems even odder: Our Lady of Mercy Monastery.
“A monastery?” I say. “That’s the last place I’d imagine her being interested in.”
Frankie pulls out his phone and Googles the monastery. It’s outside Dahlonega, about an hour north of Atlanta. “Place holds retreats,” he says, reading his phone. “Maybe she went to one of those?”
“Like I said, it’s the last place I’d imagine her being interested in. At all.” I shake my head. “Might just be something she had to look up for work, one of the history classes she’s subbing for.”
Frankie raises his eyebrows slightly. “Probably not why she’s got the Fulton County Jail up here, though, right?”
“Ethan,” Caesar says. “You might want to look at this.”
I look at the screen, and when I read the headline, my stomach shrinks into a hard ball: DEADLY HOME INVASION—PARENTS KILLED, CHILDREN IN ICU.
“What is
