She didn’t have your Teflon talent.
I wonder if you chose me because at first you wanted to be seen.
Your Teflon took many forms over the summer—calm, charm, flirtation, evasion, fibs, stories, diversions, lies—but you never used it to protect yourself from me. Not until the end, until our big fight about you and Jackson, when you promised and apologized, hugged me, agreed, and shut me out.
It was the subtlest shift, but I felt it. Saw the light flick off in your eyes. You looked at me like I could be anyone.
That still hurts as much as the rest of this.
Here’s another thing I don’t get. All summer long, you wrapped us all around your little finger, tugged the strings in such a way that no one even minded having a puppet master. Everyone. Including me.
Except Jackson. He had you hook, line, and sinker—and every time he practiced catch and release, you swam back, begging to be hooked again.
Why did you ever let a guy like that take control of your heart?
You were so smart, Lainie. You were so everything. And you let him turn you into nothing. It’s almost like you believed, deep down, you never deserved anything more.
You deserved so much better than this. I wish I could have made you see that, before it was all too late. I wish I still could.
I would give you the world if I had it.
Love,
Kayla
August 31, still (sort of) (I guess technically September 1, but it never feels like the new day before dawn)
(I am not getting my beauty sleep. Here’s hoping dark circles are in this year.)
Dear Lainie,
It’s 2:53 a.m. and I have to get up for school in a few hours, but I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about you and Jackson. Not the end of you and him, but the beginning. I’m still trying to understand how this whole horrible thing started, and why. Why you needed him like that when you had me.
I can figure out the when. It must have been a Saturday, because we were signing up for electives, and I guess it would have been the start of week four, since it most definitely was after the Fourth of July, but not right after, because that’s the week you told people that outrageous story about the townie and the leftover fireworks and our late-night adventure at Burps and Brews, which never happened. But if it had, it would have been in the middle of week three. And Jackson wasn’t part of our stories yet then.
I didn’t notice the date because I didn’t find meeting him significant. It was just a random day and he was just a random guy who you talked with while we waited for sign-ups.
He was behind us in line, but was Nitin with him? I don’t remember. We might have met Nitin later. I think you asked about Jackson’s shirt and he answered and we started talking, but I was only half paying attention to it all. I was distracted by bug bites and humidity and needing to pee. I probably noticed the basics: messy hair, hipster glasses, jawline mole (beauty mark!), southern accent. Kind of nerd hot, I guess, if you like scrawny guys in sci-fi T-shirts. Which apparently you did. Or at least, you liked this one. Maybe the cheekbones?
He asked what we were signing up for. “Tennis,” you said, deadpan, though you hadn’t touched a racket in your life.
He laughed and you were mock offended. “What, you don’t believe me?” you said. He held up both hands, palms out, an apology. You backed down. “What are you signing up for?”
“Tennis,” he said earnestly.
You both grinned. I scratched my ankle.
“Well, when it’s our turn to volley, you’d best believe you’re going down,” you said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He stuck out his hand. This was a boy who liked a challenge—in that way, you were evenly matched. “Game on,” he said. You shook on it.
It was our turn at the sign-up and of course all the pens were gone, but I’d brought one, having learned this might happen. I wrote my name and our cabin, put improv for my first choice and silk-screening second, dropped the slip in the box, and stepped aside for you to do the same. But you took my pen, wrote TENNIS in block letters, and turned it in, leaving the second line blank. So much for signing up together, like we’d discussed.
You handed my pen to Jackson, satisfaction mixed with a dare in your eyes, and walked away without bothering to see what he’d write. I stood there, torn between following after you and waiting to get my pen back. Jackson was staring at me, or through me. I shrugged and walked off.
I knew what he would write. I couldn’t imagine anyone resisting you.
By the time I caught up, you’d forgotten him.
It was hot out. We went to the lake to swim.
Fin. (If only.)
You never think someone you know will get murdered like this, let alone that someone else you know will be the primary suspect. It’s almost as unfathomable as killing someone yourself.
I mean, sure, I’ve had moments of panic when my parents were late to pick me up and my brain spun on every possible worst-case scenario, including picturing them bleeding to death from a robbery gone wrong. Or times when I made myself cry, thinking what it would be like if my brother got hit by a bus or caught in a school shooting. But I never really thought one of those things might happen. Imagining something awful in such morbid detail is supposed to make you safe from it actually coming true. I don’t know how the science works, but it’s like picturing disaster somehow prevents it.
Maybe my mistake was a failure of imagination. I completely failed to imagine on that day that Jackson would become significant. I didn’t think to picture any of us ending up injured or heartbroken, let alone dead. And therefore, I failed to protect us.
When should I have seen it coming?
I watch a lot of true crime, but even that didn’t prepare me for this. What I got from TV is: Women and girls are victims, and it is always, always the boyfriend.
But Jackson wasn’t your boyfriend; he was someone else’s. He’d told us early on about his girlfriend back home.
The Monday after your sign-up whim, you said only that tennis was “fine” but “too hot” before you changed the subject to the rumors about Chef Beverly, and I didn’t know to notice. (There’s no way a camp could hire a cook with a criminal record, though . . . is there? Even if it’s just a small misdemeanor?)
On Tuesday you reported that Jackson was hilarious, and the two of you were planning a tennis revolt: new rules for the unathletic, which I listened to in detail, laughing along, though the nuance went over my head.
By Wednesday you were bubbling over about Terrible Tennis, the brilliant new game you two had invented, and how clever and amazing Jackson was. (“You’ll love him. He’s like me but a rich boy. Creative and super dark.”) He and Nitin sat with us at campfire that night—Nitin and me toasting our marshmallows patiently, evenly, while you and Jackson stuck yours right in the fire, then dealt with the flaming mess.
I didn’t love the new pairings suggested by our s’mores habits (you and I already seemed like a perfect set: one steady, the other ready to burn it all down), but I honestly wasn’t threatened or worried. You told Jackson my weird skill of being able to hum while I whistle, and he kept trying to do it, and I kept trying to teach him, until we laughed so hard we nearly fell into the fire, and if anything, you were the one left out.