After Lucy, Mom sent me to therapy a few times. A nice middle-aged lady with frizzy blond hair and a thick gold wedding band that she twisted around and around while she waited for me to talk. The first time, the silence wasn’t so bad. The second time, it was uncomfortable and kind of boring. The third time, I waited until Mom pulled out of the parking lot and then wandered the neighborhood for an hour. Mom looked so disappointed when I finally came home, but I was used to that by then. There was no fourth time.
I pass a display of student artwork. I lean in to examine a still life of a breakfast spread: coffee, toast, eggs.
Those three gunshots ring in my ears.
I shouldn’t be here today. I could text Cass. She’d leave with me in a heartbeat. She’d understand. Reschedule her audition or something.
I sag against the wall. I have no idea what I want or need right now. The least I can do is let Cass have her day. I’m not so screwed up that I need to ruin that for her, right?
Footsteps down the hall. A whirl of blue-green hair disappears through a door.
I recognize that hair. I follow it into the photo lab.
“Hey, Lainie.” I ease the darkroom door shut behind me.
Lainie Andrews, Ava’s best friend and the photo editor for the school paper. She looks up from her trays of chemicals. Tears track down her cheeks, glittering in the hazy red light.
“What do you want?”
I flinch. Lainie and I aren’t friends, but we usually get along.
Last spring, she was accused of plagiarizing a bunch of essay assignments. One of the other reporters on the school paper was also the lead in the spring musical, and he didn’t like Lainie’s review of his performance. He stole a bunch of her papers from her backpack and uploaded them to the school’s anti-plagiarism software under a different name, so it would look like she copied someone else’s work. Ava, Lainie, and I set up a sting operation involving a fake essay left lying on Lainie’s newsroom desk as bait, and we caught the guy in the act.
On the day we closed out the case, I stood around talking with the two of them until Lainie left, and then it was just Ava and me. At the time, we hadn’t spoken since freshman year. We kept filling the space with chitchat, neither one of us wanting to leave, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I pulled her into the darkroom and kissed her against the door.
This very darkroom.
Lainie’s still watching me warily.
“People were talking about Ava in my English class,” I tell her.
Lainie turns back to the negatives in front of her. “Yeah, me, too.”
On a normal day, I would ask her some questions. She knew Ava better than anyone. I lean back against the door. The same door that I once pressed Ava against. Twisted my fingers in the hem of her shirt.
Lainie sniffles, dragging me out of my memories again. “Was”—she chokes on her words—“was she scared?”
The question catches me off guard, and suddenly I’m ripped open all over again.
The blind terror in Ava’s darting eyes. The air thick with the smell of her blood.
How do I tell her best friend any of that?
“I don’t understand how she can just be gone.” Lainie grips the edge of the table. “I saw her Friday afternoon, and now she’s dead?”
She curls her chin to her chest and tries to hold back the sob, but a tiny cry escapes her.
I’m paralyzed. Do I hug her? Console her? Cass would know.
“You were there with her,” Lainie says, and a note of accusation cuts through her suffering. “Why were you there?”
Her blood under my hands, flowing and flowing no matter how much I tried to stop it.
I force the words out. “Ava called me. She asked me to meet her, but when I got there…”
“Why?” Her voice cracks, and she swipes angrily at a fresh wave of tears. “Why did she call you? Why did you get to be the one with her, when sh-she—” Lainie can’t hold it back anymore. Her body goes rigid with pain as she sobs and gasps, beyond words.
Hesitantly, I lay my hand on her arm. She tenses but doesn’t move away.
“I tried to help her,” I say. Lainie squeezes her eyes shut. I ache with the kind of hurt you feel when you look at a wounded animal, but I keep going. “I didn’t get there fast enough, but I stayed with her. She wasn’t alone, at the end.” I don’t know if that matters at all, but it’s the best I can offer.
Lainie takes wet gulps of air. “Why would someone hurt her? The cops are saying some guy took her wallet and then shot her anyway. How does that make any sense?”
I don’t know. The police’s theory sounds even weaker in the face of Lainie’s overwhelming loss. Again, I feel the urge to untangle the knot. If I could get answers, maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much—for all of us.
But I’ve been here before, with Lucy, and I only made things worse for everyone. There are a lot of people who could get hurt if I fuck up another murder investigation. Not just my people, like Gramps and Cass, but people like Lainie, or Ava’s family. Do I trust myself to get things right this time?
Lainie hugs her arms to her chest, her shoulders hunched and shaking. In the tiny, close space of the darkroom, her every whimper is magnified until it rings in my ears.
“I don’t know why,” I tell her, then hesitate before asking, “Does ‘Wes Grays’ mean anything to you?” Ava’s last words, if that’s even what they were, have been playing on a loop in my head for days. I tried googling it this morning while I was waiting for Cass to finish getting ready. There are more than a thousand Facebook profiles for people with some variation on Wes Grays, but only twenty within a thirty-mile radius of here, and zero with an obvious connection to Ava. Oh, and there’s an architecture firm in California.
Lainie wipes her damp face. “No. I don’t think so. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s something Ava said to me that night. She didn’t know anyone with that name?”
“No. I mean, not that I know.”
“Had she been acting strange at all lately?” I ask.
Lainie looks at her shoes. “Yeah. She’d been weird for a while now. I was gone last summer, doing this photography program at Yale. When I got back, Ava was different. She was never around.”
Her words make the hairs on my arms prickle.
Lainie’s voice is still thick with tears, but it steadies as she speaks. “She said she got a job as a messenger for her dad’s office. He works for the Whitley Gazette. I thought that was kind of weird, because she didn’t tell me until after she’d started, but I didn’t ask a lot of questions.” She makes an ashamed grimace at the floor. “I was jealous. I’ve always been into journalism stuff, and Ava never really cared about it.”
I thought it was me. For months, I thought Ava was avoiding me because I’m such a disaster. But maybe there was something else going on the whole time. From the sound of it, the changes began right around the same time she ditched me. New, mysterious job. Pulling away from friends. It all started last summer.
“You couldn’t have known,” I say. “It might not even be related.”
Am I comforting her, or myself? How did I not realize Ava was in trouble?
Those are messier thoughts than I have time for now. “What about more recently? Anything else?”