In one note, Shaila wrote that Kara had begun making out with some other kid named Javi from Manhattan, which basically forced Shaila’s hand. She and Graham were dating now. That was that.
By the time I got home in August, they had become inseparable. Even Nikki was shocked. It was as if Graham had become a different person. He had shed his kiddie skin like a snake. All of a sudden, he was sweet, asking me questions about the bioluminescence in Cape Cod or suggesting I tag along with him and Shaila to play mini golf. He was nicer, too, actually calling me Jill instead of the nickname he coined back in middle school, Newmania, because he once saw me cry after bombing a bio test. I hated that so much. But his good streak only lasted a year.
The morning they took Graham away, we were still at the beach outside Tina Fowler’s house. His sister, Rachel, trailed behind him. She was a horrified tornado, aware of her complicity. I remember her outstretched arms reaching toward Graham and the tears streaming down her face. Her voice alternated between a warble and a wail. I shivered when she shrieked. The police pushed Graham’s head deeper into the back seat of the car and he was gone. That was the last time I saw him.
After the car drove away, Rachel turned to us and pointed a shaking finger. “You all believe this?” she screamed. Her eyes were red and her hair was a frizzy mess. It was the one time she looked less than perfect.
No one said a word.
Rachel pleaded with Adam to come with her to the station. But Adam shook his head. He was the one who called the cops when Shaila disappeared. They found Graham half a mile down the sand, almost at the entrance to the Ocean Cliff lookout, with Shaila’s blood still sticky on his fingers and stained all over his chest. Flecks of sand clung to him like sprinkles to frosting.
“You’re a coward,” Rachel snarled, trying to pierce his skull with her eyes. “You’re a coward!” She screamed it that time. And with a quick crack of her hand, Rachel slapped Adam across his cheek, leaving a bright red patch on his pale skin. I gasped.
He blinked but said nothing.
“After everything I’ve done for all of you . . .” Rachel whispered. “Fuck you.”
No one moved. Not Tina Fowler, her best friend since kindergarten, nor Jake Horowitz, who she drove to the hospital the night his appendix burst during one Player party. No one followed her, and soon the Calloways were gone.
Rachel didn’t walk at Gold Coast graduation. Instead she left for Cornell a few months early, and the Calloways sold their house on Fielding Lane for $6.2 million, according to the listing I saw online. Their Hamptons house went for more. They traded up for a duplex in Tribeca. No one knew exactly where Graham went. We all just heard he was sent away to some place for Bad Boys who did Bad Things but were too young and too rich to go to real jail.
Rachel and her parents didn’t come to Shaila’s funeral, obviously. Not that the Arnolds wanted them to. It would have been gauche, as Mrs. Arnold liked to say.
Shaila was buried during a frenzied, testy storm, the kind that could only happen at the start of summer when the ocean crashes violently before sputtering to a halt. It was almost too on the nose. A funeral in the rain. How sad.
I woke hours before my alarm bleated and stayed in bed until I heard a faint knock on the door. I pulled on the black sheath dress Mom picked out for me and tried to stand up straight in my small frame. My chest was still so flat, there was no way I would fill it out.
Jared coughed. He stood in the doorway dressed in a dark suit.
“You coming?” I asked, and turned back to the mirror. He’d only seen death up close when Grandpa Morty kicked the bucket two years before. But he was eighty-nine. Old people are supposed to die. Children are not.
“I want to, but Mom won’t let me,” he said, fiddling with a button on his dress shirt.
“For the best, probably.”
Jared padded toward me in his socked feet and wrapped my stomach in a loose hug. I was still taller than him then, but only by a few inches and only for another year. Even with my new identity, my new label, I wanted to be young like him, to shield him from all of this. But I felt old and tired. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice soft and quivering.
My guts ached and there was a strange tug in my chest, as if my heart were trying to free itself from my ribs. “Me too,” I said. His shoulders were putty under my touch. Jared held me tighter and I could feel the wetness from his face spreading over my dress. His body heaved just once.
The service was short, no more than thirty minutes, and ended with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which Mrs. Arnold said was Shaila’s favorite song. Maybe when she was six.
The church was packed with hundreds of people from Gold Coast and out east. Dozens of people in fancy suits stood in the back, clutching their Blackberrys. Analysts at Mr. Arnold’s hedge fund probably. Kara Sullivan, dressed in all black all designer, sat off to the side with her art dealer mom. She wept silently into her hands, clutching a piece of paper, likely Shaila’s last letter to her. Shaila was always writing letters. That must have been how she kept in touch with Kara during the school year, when she was in Manhattan and Shaila was here. I wonder if Kara’s letters would be included in Shaila Arnold: The Early Years, too.
More like The Only Years.
I took my place in the second row with Nikki, Marla, Robert, Quentin, and Henry. The first time we were together as six. Quentin sniffled into his shirtsleeve and squeezed Marla’s hand every now and then. I sat still with my gaze down, drilling polka dots into my lap, just trying to ignore the guilt swelling in my heart.
We were there. We were all there. And we didn’t save her.
At the funeral, Adam was right behind me, sandwiched in between Tina Fowler and Jake Horowitz. I sat up straight and looked forward, trying not to fidget in front of him. During Mr. Arnold’s eulogy, Adam reached up and squeezed my shoulder, his fingers spreading over my bare skin. I was raw and cracked open, filleted like a fish and ready to be devoured.
* * *
—
The morning after Nikki’s party, I wake with a start, my face cold and sweaty. Another nightmare. They used to be predictable. Teeth falling out. Being paralyzed during a test. All stress-related, Mom told me. But after Shaila died, I started seeing her all the time. Her bitten nails, her face, her long limbs. They all crept in. So did visions of that night. Wind whipping. Bonfire roaring. Her golden hair swinging as she marched into the moonlight. The stars on my ceiling helped sometimes, when I woke in the hours before dawn. But I always kept the desk light on, too.
Last night’s horror show was new, though. I squeeze my eyes shut and Rachel Calloway’s perfectly symmetrical face barrels toward me with narrowed eyes and a stretched-out mouth. My chest seizes and I flutter my eyes open. It was just a dream.
Rachel’s reappearance in my life, however, was not. I pat around the comforter until I find my phone nestled in between the pillow and the headboard. I open her texts.