“I don’t wanna pick freshmen,” Nikki says. She sips her drink and fiddles with the sliver of rose quartz that hangs around her neck. She got super into crystals after Shaila died. “I’m not ready to be the oldest.”
“I know what you mean. It doesn’t feel like it’s time,” Marla says, blowing faint vape smoke into the air. It floats above her like a halo.
The liquor buzzes in my ears. “Jared wants to be a Player,” I say.
“And you’re surprised?” Nikki asks, turning toward me. A stray leaf catches in her hair.
“Your brother?” Marla asks. “So what? He’s kind of cute.”
“Gross, dude,” I say softly. I wonder if I should have told Nikki alone.
Marla is one of us, chosen after she made varsity as a freshman and the senior boys dubbed her best ass when she arrived at Gold Coast Prep that year. She grew up with four older brothers and a near-perfect complexion, both of which made her enviable. But she was always a little aloof, off in her own self-contained world. I’ve never even been to her house, don’t even know where it is. She rarely joined our sleepovers, since she preferred, she said, to stay at home with her brothers, who all went to Cartwright and were strictly off-limits. That’s what Marla told us when she caught Nikki drooling over them after a game. They wouldn’t have been interested anyway. They were totally unfazed by Prep, probably because they knew they would never lose her, that Marla just joined the Players to ensure she’d get into Dartmouth. Field hockey would help, she said. So would her stellar math skills. But she’s shockingly bad at standardized tests. The wildly accurate study guides in the Files helped her get a near-perfect SAT score last year.
As did the morally questionable doctor who diagnosed her with ADHD so she could get extra time on the test. His kid was a Player a few years back.
Sometimes Marla’s brothers would all come to pick her up from parties, speeding down the winding, wooded Gold Coast roads in their red Jeep Wrangler. When they came to a stop, they would call out in unison from the car, never setting foot inside.
“Mar-la!” they’d howl until she emerged from whatever hazy doorway she had been inside. “Mar-la!” With a quick wave, Marla would be gone, her white-blonde hair blowing behind her as she sat nestled in the back seat of her protectors’ ride. They were ghosts to us, phantom drivers who rode in on chariots and disappeared into the night. But they couldn’t protect her from everything.
I wondered if the allegiance I felt toward Jared was burrowed inside of her, but multiplied by four.
“I don’t know,” I say. “He’s not like us. This isn’t for him. I mean, imagine him dealing with the pops?” I picture his worried little face, confused and distraught.
Nikki puts her arms around me, hugging me from behind. “It doesn’t have to be like that for him. We’re the seniors. We’re in control now.”
“I know. I just . . . He’s my brother.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Marla says. She draws one final deep drag before pocketing the plastic pen. “Like you said, we’re in control.” She pauses. “We’re changing everything.”
My phone vibrates once, and then again, burrowing itself into my thigh. Jared, I bet. Adam, I hope.
“I gotta pee,” I say, and slip past them back into the bedroom. I close the door behind me in Nikki’s en suite bathroom and plunk down on the toilet. My phone pulses again and then for a third time. I pull it out, expecting to find a familiar name. Adam, Jared, Mom, Dad. Instead, it’s a number I’ve never seen before.
I open the text and scan the words quickly but they don’t make sense.
I know you probably never want to hear from me again, but I have to tell you something.
Graham didn’t kill Shaila. He’s innocent.
It’s all so fucked up. Can we talk?
My stomach is in my throat and Nikki’s bathroom spins around me. The walls are on the floor and the sink is flipped upside down and I think I’m going to puke. Another text appears and my heart nearly stops. I grasp my phone so hard my knuckles turn white.
It’s Rachel Calloway.
FOUR
THERE WAS NEVER going to be a trial. I knew it as soon as I saw Graham Calloway in handcuffs, his face red and puffy, blown up like a balloon. Maybe it was the shock of it all, but he didn’t look like Graham then. He looked like someone disguised as Graham in pricey basketball sneakers and a Gold Coast Prep lacrosse hoodie. But when the police led him in front of us, so close that I could see the faint little cluster of moles behind his ear, the ones I stared at all through seventh grade history, I knew it was him, that he had killed Shaila.
Graham and Rachel had both been at Gold Coast since preschool. They were lifers. All the teachers, even the ones they never had, knew their names and their parents. Graham was well-liked in middle school, not because he was kind or funny, but because he just was. His last name guaranteed him entry into everything. When he asked the other boys to come over to his indoor swimming pool or ride sand buggies on the dunes, no one said no. He had big meaty hands that felt vaguely menacing, like he could knock you over with one finger if he didn’t like what you had said. In class he’d make fart noises and blame it on whichever girl had been assigned to sit next to him. He’d knock over test tubes full of chemicals just for fun. Once he even bragged about skinning a dead seagull he found on the beach.
But all that shit seemed to disappear the summer before high school. That was when Graham and Shaila started dating. I had gotten into an all-expenses-paid science camp in Cape Cod but was feeling unbearably guilty that all I really wanted to do was be at home with Shaila. She sent me handwritten letters diligently. “It’s so much more intense than email,” she said in her first one. “Plus, what if I become famous? Then someone will want to know all about Shaila Arnold: The Early Years.” I devoured those notes like they were Mom’s triple chocolate cake.
Her letters made it seem like I was away at the exact moment when everything seemed to shift. She and Kara Sullivan, her chic family friend who spent the school year on the Upper East Side, were enrolled in a Model UN course in the Hamptons. When the Calloways found out, they threw Graham in there, too.
At first Shaila’s letters were filled with stories about Kara, how she was obsessed with artists like Yayoi Kusama, Dan Flavin, and Barbara Kruger, and how Kara showed her how to eat steamers without getting butter all over your face. She seemed impossibly cool. It didn’t help that Kara’s dad grew up with Shaila’s and Graham’s dads, too. They had all spent summers together since birth. They were the same. I was the one on the outside.
It wasn’t until July that Shaila started writing about Graham, peppering her letters with little stories of them eating lobster rolls on her parents’ dock, slipping nips of whiskey into soda cans, and sneaking into the locals bars meant for yuppies escaping summer in the city.