My cell phone vibrated on the desk.
I opened my eyes. Stared down at the screen.
Courtney.
I could simply not answer it. Let it go to voice mail again. Turn off the phone for the rest of the day. But what Lisa had said kept niggling at the back of my brain. Her telling me I could use some kind of closure.
I answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Emily, it’s great to hear your voice!”
“Hi, Courtney, how are you?”
“I’m okay. But holy shit—the news about Olivia? It blew my mind. I searched Facebook for hours trying to figure out how it happened. I mean, I immediately thought about—”
I cut her off.
“So what’s up?”
“Did you listen to my voice mail?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“And . . . what?”
“Are you going to the funeral? From what I can tell, it’s like a forty-, forty-five-minute drive. If you want to carpool, I’m up for it.”
“I honestly don’t remember the last time I spoke to Olivia.”
“Me neither. But so what? She was our friend.”
The way Courtney said it—so simply, so matter-of-factly—made me realize I should be ashamed. But stubbornness won out.
“Did you say my mother contacted you?”
“Yeah, she sent me a message on Facebook.”
“You’re Facebook friends with my mother?”
“She sent me a friend request. I accepted it. That’s what you’re supposed to do on Facebook. Are you even on Facebook? I couldn’t find you.”
I checked the time on my computer. My next client would be arriving in ten minutes.
“My break is almost over. I need to get back to work.”
“Oh yeah? What are you doing nowadays, anyway?”
“I’m a therapist.”
“That’s cool. So, do you get to prescribe medication and stuff?”
“No, that’s a psychiatrist. Listen, Courtney, I need to go.”
“Sure. But what about tomorrow?”
I hesitated. “I’m not sure yet what my plans are.”
“Okay, cool, but can you let me know as soon as you can? I shot Elise a message on Facebook to see if she was going, but she hasn’t gotten back to me yet.”
I jolted at the sound of Elise’s name. I remembered seeing her less than a year ago, only for a moment, and how I’d been so embarrassed that I’d tilted my face down so she wouldn’t see me.
“What about Mackenzie?”
Courtney gave a disdainful snort.
“Remember how Mackenzie was in middle school? She’s worse now. She lives in a McMansion near Philly. Married a brain surgeon, if you can believe it.”
“If Elise and I can’t go, are you still going?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Can I ask why?”
A beat of silence on Courtney’s end.
“Because Olivia was my friend,” she said.
My desk phone rang. I asked Courtney to hold on a second, then I grabbed the desk phone and placed it to my other ear. Claire told me my one o’clock had arrived early and was waiting in the lobby.
“Courtney, I have to go,” I said, hanging up the desk phone.
Her voice took on a defeated tone.
“I understand. Let me know if you change your mind.”
“I will.”
“Thanks. Call or text when you know for sure.”
“No, I mean I will go to the funeral.”
Her tone became all at once more hopeful. “Really?”
“Yes.”
Excited, Courtney told me she would text me her address and see me tomorrow. Then she disconnected, and I just sat there with the phone against my ear.
I closed my eyes again. Saw Olivia as she had been when we were in middle school. Her dimpled chin. Her perfect smile.
The hairline scar on my palm seemed to throb. I remembered the morning: all of us in Mackenzie’s bedroom. The flash of the paring knife Mackenzie had sneaked upstairs. How we all gasped when she cut her palm and asked who was next.
6
In the beginning, there were two of us.
Elise Martin was the perky girl with hazel eyes and bright-red hair in pigtails who could talk to anyone, including the adults. I was the shy girl in OshKosh denim overalls and ponytailed brown hair who cried when her parents dropped her off at school.
It was kindergarten, and our teacher was Mrs. Miranda, and there were nearly twenty other kids I’d never met but with whom I was now supposed to be friends.
It wasn’t until recess—everyone taking turns on the swings and slide and monkey bars—that Elise approached the corner of the playground where I was hiding and told me we should be best friends.
“Best friends?”
For some reason, the concept was foreign to me.
“Best friends,” she repeated with a smile. “Your name is Emily. My name is Elise. Our names start with the same letter.”
This reasoning was utterly ridiculous, of course, but we were kindergartners, and I needed a friend, somebody I could trust. Besides, it was true: we were the only girls in our class whose names started with E.
There was another kindergarten class at our school, taught by Miss Greenham (who championed Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham as the classroom book), and it was in that classroom that Mackenzie Harper was a student. A spunky honey-blonde-haired girl with bright-blue eyes, she would have won all the beauty pageants in the state if her mother cared about such trivial things, which was something Mackenzie actually said once and which caused me later that night to ask my mom what trivial meant.
Over the next week or so, Elise brought Mackenzie into the fold. Then I had two best friends.
Courtney Sullivan was in Miss Greenham’s class too. She had green eyes and strawberry-blonde hair and had a slight gap in her front teeth that would eventually be corrected with braces in middle school. She had become friends with Mackenzie, and pretty soon I had three best friends.
Olivia Campbell showed up in the fourth grade, her parents having moved to Lanton from Harrisburg, and Elise and Mackenzie immediately decided she would be a perfect fit for our group. Same for Destiny, when she arrived at the beginning of eighth grade. We were already dubbed the Harpies then, and once she was adopted into the fold, our clique was complete.
Was there any rhyme or reason to our friendship? In retrospect, it’s difficult to say. Mackenzie’s parents had a lot of money (like, a lot). By all rights she should have gone to private school from day one, but her father had gone to public school and managed to make something of himself, and he didn’t want Mackenzie to be spoiled—or more spoiled than she already was—so her parents kept her in Lincoln Elementary and Franklin Middle School. It wasn’t until the end of eighth grade that Mackenzie’s parents pulled her out and made her promise never to speak to any of us ever again.
Elise’s parents also had money, what with her father being a Lanton County judge. Courtney’s parents were well off, as were Olivia’s and Destiny’s. Looking back, it was the common denominator among them, the one thing that made them stand out from the other students in school.
Only my family was what you’d call middle class—our two-story home in a so-so suburb, my parents only ever buying preowned cars that already had over a hundred thousand miles on the odometer, my mother clipping coupons from the Sunday paper.