Jenny must have seen me slip the money secretly into the pocket of my shorts as we walked down the path toward the beach. She knew my mother better than me.
“Give it up.” Jenny held out her hand.
“Give what up?” I asked, feigning innocence.
“You know what.”
“Mom gave it to me. It’s for ice cream.”
“We don’t need ice cream.” Jenny held out her palm for the money.
I handed over the crumpled note. Mom’s little gambit hadn’t worked. Sometimes it felt as if Jenny were the only grown-up in our family.
Jenny and I found a spot on the sand not far from the Morrison’s Point jetty. Her school friends arrived throughout the morning. They congregated near us in small satellite groups of teenagers, lying on towels and listening to music on boom boxes.
The boys wrestled with each other or kicked around balls on the sand. The girls rubbed each other’s backs with coconut oil and compared tan lines while watching the boys surreptitiously through the tint of their sunglasses.
Oblivious to the antics of teenagers, I built an elaborate sand castle with turrets, which I decorated with shells. When the heat intensified, Jenny’s friends abandoned their towels to cool down in the water.
The jetty was high and the water was deep, so that only the bravest dived in. The boys egged on each other to jump, hooting in derision if someone chickened out. The girls mostly waded in their bikinis into the waves, where they swam and splashed each other.
Jenny lay on her towel, reading a book and listening to music on our transistor radio. Occasionally she lifted up her head to glance wistfully at the sea.
Eventually, she asked if I was all right playing alone on the sand while she swam. I shrugged. It didn’t matter to me either way, so long as Jenny didn’t make me join her. I hated swimming. Still do. Mom and Jenny tried to teach me, but I always flapped about and swallowed seawater until I ran out of the waves in tears, vowing never to swim again.
Jenny tossed her sunglasses onto her towel and told me not to go anywhere. I nodded without looking up as I contoured a sand castle with the edge of a shovel.
Some boys who’d been jumping from the jetty wolf-whistled as Jenny walked down the sand in her coral bikini. I sensed her self-consciousness, though she tried to hide it by standing taller and pushing her long golden hair behind her shoulders.
Jenny didn’t wade into the water like the other girls. She went to the jetty and climbed to the top of the wooden rails. She balanced like a flamingo before diving into the water in a low racing dive that skimmed under the surface with barely a splash. I had the impression that it was her way of telling those boys to leave her alone. She emerged a distance away among her school friends, who were chatting as they bobbed in the waves.
I returned to working on the outer walls of my sand castle. A shadow fell across the sand. Looming over me was one of the boys who’d wolf-whistled at Jenny. He had dirty brown hair and pale gray eyes. He held a lit cigarette casually between his fingers. His friends up on the slope of the beach seemed to be watching him with rapt attention. I had a feeling that he’d been sent to talk to me on a dare.
“Nice castle,” he said.
“Thanks.” I pressed my last shells into the sand to decorate the turrets.
“My friend wants to know your phone number,” he said.
“Why? What does he want to talk to me about?”
“He doesn’t want to call you,” he said, kicking at the sand. “It’s your sister. What’s your number?”
“I don’t know. And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter because our phone’s not working,” I said.
He shrugged and walked back to his friends up on the dune, leaving a trail of cigarette ash behind. When he reached his friends, he angrily slapped the money into their hands as if he’d lost a bet.
Jenny came out of the water not long after.
“What did he want?” she asked, wiping the salt water off her face with her beach towel.
“Nothing,” I said, deep in concentration as I used my hands to compress sand into a moat.
10
Guilty or Not Guilty
Season 3, Episode 3: The Party
Lexi lives in a subdivision a few miles out of Neapolis. It’s called Crystal Cove. Sounds to me like the name of a beachfront community. Except when I visited Crystal Cove, the first thing I noticed was that the ocean was nowhere to be seen. The subdivision, with its cute nautical name, is cut off from the coast by a forest. There’s no crystal in the neighborhood, and definitely no cove.
Crystal Cove was built on scrubland by a developer with little imagination. The houses look freakishly like clones. They’re all light blue-gray clapboard with white trim. They have double garages and attic windows. Even the gardens are identical. The place feels like a social-engineering experiment gone wrong.
When I visited, there were no kids riding bikes. Nobody tending garden beds or mowing lawns. No dogs barking.
I rang Lexi’s doorbell. She opened it wearing jeans and a black crop top with a pink sparkly motif. She’s cheerleader pretty. Shoulder-length blond-streaked hair, bright blue eyes. She was friendly enough. We talked for a bit, but she asked me not to record her.
Lexi has good reason for wanting to keep a low profile. You’ll learn why later. For now, let’s just stick with the idea that Lexi is the girl next door. A pretty one with lots of cool friends and a fair bit of attitude.
When K arrived at Lexi’s house late that afternoon, they pulled the sofas out of the way and rolled up rugs to prepare for the party. They made a huge bowl of popcorn, chose a playlist, and tested out the sound system. The first ring at the door came just after eight P.M.
By nine P.M., the party was officially out of control. They’d invited fifteen people. Four times that number turned up. Half the guests they didn’t know. Many were college aged. Some were even older.
Almost everyone brought alcohol. The kitchen counter was laden with bottles of liquor and beer. Pieces of popcorn littered the floor like white confetti.
At some point in the night, someone, nobody ever knew who, poured cheap vodka into all the half-drunk bottles of soda in the kitchen. Not any vodka, either. It was a backyard moonshine that could strip paint off a wall. K drank several cups of soda. She had no idea that it was spiked. By the time she realized it, she was already drunk.
A lot of what I know about the party is taken from videos some of the kids posted on their social media feeds that night. In the videos that I’ve seen, K is unsteady on her feet. She pushes through the crowd in the living room, pausing to laugh and talk with friends. She looks visibly drunk. In the corner of the frame of one video, she can be seen losing her balance and stumbling into someone.
The person she bumped into was Lou Lowe. He’s a baseball pitcher on the high school varsity team. He’s tall, with freckles and strawberry blond hair. Lexi had dated him a few times. She considered him an ex-boyfriend. She would sometimes tell her friends that she wanted to get back with him. That he was the love of her life. Her friends say that she talked that way about all her exes. It was Lexi’s way of putting up a “no trespassers” sign.
Lou remembers that night well because of what happened afterward. Here’s what Lou Lowe said when I spoke with him earlier today.