The Body Finder

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CHAPTER 15

THEY COULD HEAR THE PARTY LONG BEFORE they ever reached Olivia Hildebrand’s house. Music similar to what had been playing inside Chelsea’s car was booming…only much, much louder. The four of them climbed out of the tiny Mazda and trudged up the long driveway that was overflowing with cars. Violet scanned the vehicles, silently hoping against hope that she would see Jay’s mom’s car parked among the rest. But it wasn’t there, and she decided to set that impossible wish aside.

Still, Violet found herself smiling when they reached the front door, her arms filled with cheap alcohol that she probably wouldn’t even drink. The music was loud and her friends were louder. She could hear kids from inside the party calling out to them as they walked up to the front doors. Their enthusiasm was contagious.

Violet loved going to parties, mostly just so she could see what everyone was like outside of school. They became different people when they were away from campus. These were the same kids she’d gone to school with ever since she was a little girl. But here, at night and away from that familiar institution they attended five days a week, away from the cliques that governed where they sat and who they hung out with on a daily basis, they were free to be whoever they wanted to be. Of course, the booze helped to loosen those sharply defined social lines a little.

“Violet! Vi-o-let!” she heard a boy’s voice screaming to her from the other side of the kitchen as she set her load down on the counter. Swarming teens began to reach in and take what they wanted even before she’d taken her hands off the alcohol she’d carried in.

“Oh, good,” Chelsea yelled above the noise without even looking to see who was screaming Violet’s name. She set her bags on the counter with the rest. “Your fan club’s here.”

Violet looked in that general direction to see who it was, and when she saw him her stomach dropped.

Grady was there, weaving his way through the crowd of noisy teens and heading right toward her.

“Oh God,” Violet breathed, leaning in close to Chelsea so that only she could hear what she was about to say. “It’s new-Jay.”

Chelsea couldn’t contain her laughter, as Violet finally came over to the dark side, and it came out in kind of a half snort, which made her laugh even harder. “Here,” she said, grabbing Violet by the arm and practically dragging her in the opposite direction…away from Grady. “We’ll pretend we didn’t see him.”

They ducked quickly through a hallway that wrapped past the bedrooms and back around to the family room behind the kitchen. They were near the spot where Grady had been when he’d started yelling for her, and now he was nowhere in sight. The two girls were giggling as if they’d pulled off some great stunt by dodging him.

“Think we lost him?” Violet asked as they tried to blend into the crowd.

Chelsea grabbed two clear bottles of the tastes-more-like-juice, fruit-flavored drinks from the counter and handed one to Violet. She twisted off the little metal cap and then clinked the top of hers against Violet’s. “Here’s hoping,” she said and guzzled her drink.

Violet took a swallow of the Kool-Aid-like wine cooler. She couldn’t imagine why she’d thought she wanted to stay home by herself tonight. Chelsea had been right; the party had been exactly what she’d needed.

As the night went on, Violet immersed herself in the music and the laughter, letting the noise become a riotous screen that made it impossible for her to think of anything beyond the present. She couldn’t find the time to feel sorry for herself in this raucous, self-indulgent environment of kids with too much alcohol and no parental supervision.

She watched beer games in the kitchen, a fight in the front yard-which wasn’t really a fight at all, more like an overblown shoving match-and she saw two people puking before the night was over. One was Todd Stinnett, a boy from her second-period class, who had chugged one too many beers at the Quarters table. The other was a freshman girl, Mackenzie Sherwin, who wandered outside to throw up in the bushes. Unfortunately for Mackenzie, she didn’t get her hair out of the way in time and ended up walking around for the rest of the night with the matted strands dangling around her face.

A group of stoners thought the poor girl was hilarious and made puking noises at her every time she stumbled past them.

By the time Grady finally caught up with Violet, it was nearly midnight, and when he got close to her she wasn’t even sure how he was still standing upright. He was completely wasted.

“Where’ve ya been? I’ve been lookin’ everywhere for you.” His words were a slurred mess, and he wrapped an arm heavily around her shoulders. Violet wondered if it wasn’t so much a gesture of affection as it was a means of maintaining his precarious balance.

But she was worried about him, even though she played innocent, pretending that she hadn’t been avoiding him all night. “I’ve been around,” she answered with a straight face. “Besides, it looks like you had plenty of fun without me.” She tried to move out from beneath the weight of his arm. He was leaning on her so hard that it felt like he was trying to push her down to the ground.

Her sudden shift made him lose his shaky balance, and he ended up hanging on even tighter, putting most of his unstable weight on her. “Don’t go,” he pleaded, his hot breath thick with the pungent smell of stale beer and tequila.

The combination was foul.

On the other side of the room she saw Chelsea talking with a group of girls. She flashed Violet a questioning look with her eyes. Violet just rolled her own in response and then looked back at Grady. She wanted to get away from him and go back to her friends, but she didn’t want to leave him alone in his condition. He was a mess. And he was her friend.

“I think we should get you home,” she finally offered. She hadn’t had anything to drink since that sip of wine cooler earlier in the night, so she knew she was fine to drive him. “Give me your keys.”

He closed one eye as if it were easier to focus that way as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. He stared at her as he jiggled them in front of her face. “I can drive…” His mouth made his words sound like mush.

Violet reached out and snatched them from his hand. His reflexes were way too slow to stop her, and when he finally tried, he was about five seconds too late. The sudden movement nearly made him fall over, almost taking Violet with him.

Violet struggled to keep them both upright. “Come on, Grady. I owe you one anyway.”

He gave her his one-eyed squint again. “What d’ya mean?”

She didn’t bother explaining that he’d bailed her out the other day by taking her to the cemetery when she’d needed to go to Brooke Johnson’s grave. In fact, she didn’t say anything to Grady, and he didn’t ask again or argue about driving himself. He seemed to give up as he leaned on Violet and she led him out of the house. She lifted the keys up as they passed Chelsea, silently letting her know where she was going.

The air had cooled as the night had gone on and the brisk snap to it seemed to have a mildly sobering effect on Grady…which at this point was a vast improvement. His car was farther down the road than Chelsea’s was, thanks to Chelsea’s small car and her creative definition of