“Okay.” I pulled my coat tight around me. Dad gave me a last worried look before he got out.
I leaned against the dash of our truck. In the blinding, dizzying red and blue, I saw the shadows of my parents meet two other shadows, ones with radios at their shoulders and guns at their hips. One of them held up an empty square bottle. Then my parents disappeared down the trailhead, following the police.
They found my sister at the bottom of that trail.
They wouldn’t let me see her body.
We had a closed-casket funeral. I never got to say goodbye. The last memory I have of her is the rusting Hyundai, parked on the edge of the ravine. One rev of the engine from flying over. For a long time I wondered why she bothered to get out.
I wish I knew more. I know she was found full of whiskey and uppers. I know her bank account was emptied, presumably to pay off her dealer.
And . . . I know that Emma thought she knew more about the case than any of the detectives from Fort Collins or Denver. Lizzy was Emma’s peer mentor when we were freshmen, and Emma worshipped her. She clearly couldn’t accept that some girls fall. She couldn’t accept that Lizzy just wasn’t the girl she’d been. She couldn’t let it—well, die. Emma became obsessed.
Fucking Emma.
MUÑEZ: So you and Emma didn’t get along?
GWEN: Honestly, no. It wasn’t just the Lizzy stuff and the Devino Scholarship. Emma was . . . How do I put this? Performative. For example, the day of the bullying seminar. She got up, did her little song and dance, got the attention of the whole school, and waltzed out. I wanted to rip her throat out. My family, we can’t mourn for five minutes. Everyone’s always tossing our grief out for the whole world to see.
MUÑEZ: It’s understandable that Emma’s actions at the seminar angered you. Did she ever tell you why she did it? Are you still angry with her?
GWEN: No. Yes. I don’t know.
I wanted to confront her, but as soon as she broke the seminar, Garson and Mendoza hauled her away, and I only saw her making a pinched face as she followed them down the hall, looking so scared that for a moment, she had me convinced. But like I said: she’s performative.
Anyway, I got to go through a day of Poor Gwen and people treating me like a broken doll. “Don’t talk about Lizzy. Don’t mention Lizzy.” And I finally caught up to Emma as she hurried down the concrete steps that bridged the front of the school with the parking lot, right after school was over. I grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around.
She’d been crying. Her whole face was blotchy and her short blond hair hung limp and greasy. She looked like a mouse—trembling and harmless and terrified. It made me feel bad for a second. But she’d lied to the whole school and exposed my pain. The least she could do was face me now. “What is your problem?” I demanded.
Emma stared at the ground. “Nothing,” she whispered.
I got closer. “Bringing up my sister? Contradicting the police? Humiliating me? If you’re going to make up stories, you can have some respect for the dead.” I almost shoved her, but I made myself move away. I didn’t want detention. I have a perfect record. “And if you think it’s going to get me off my game, you’re wrong about that, too,” I added. Because she was always at my throat. Way more competitive than people realized.
Emma still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I know. I just—I cared about Lizzy. She was like a big sister to me, too.”
My hand clenched, ready to throw a punch. How dare she? How dare she act like they were sisters, like she cared more than me? Like she could solve a nonexistent mystery because she loved Lizzy more? I stood, trembling with rage, unsure of whether I should cry or scream or hit her. . . . She just turned away and hurried down the stairs, and I went to yearbook and tried to ignore all the extra sympathy I got. And that was that.
See, I know this about Emma—she loved stories. She was always working on one. Whenever I saw her, she had her notebook out and she was writing. Before class got started. After she finished a quiz. Even when the teacher was talking. She wrote like she’d never be able to get it all out of her head. So when she started going on at length about my sister? It was obviously another story. Maybe she had some compulsion to do it, I don’t know. Or maybe she wanted to distract me from focusing on the Devino Scholarship, and she didn’t mind using dirty tricks.
Most students can’t hack the schedule we kept for the competition. Emma’s in AP Physics, AP English 2, AP Comparative Government, and AP Calculus. Last year we were in AP English 1, AP United States History, and Spanish together. If there’s an Advanced Placement class, she takes it. And she’s never gone below a 93 percent. I lost a couple of percentage points to her on the last physics test, but I got a perfect score in APCoGo and she only managed a 97. Add to that all the extracurriculars—last year, Emma and I both had speech and debate, National Honor Society, the Jefferson-Lorne Inquirer, and yearbook club. We both worked as student administrators for the office. And she had cheer, while I did mathletes and community service at the Lorne Maternity Ward. This year she’s only doing the paper, cheer, and Honor Society.
MUÑEZ: You seem to know a lot about Emma.
GWEN: Look, it was clear from sophomore year that we were both going for the Devino Scholarship. Maybe that doesn’t seem like much to you, but here’s what it meant to me: one of us would be going to college for free, and the other wouldn’t be going to college at all. Do you get that?
I’m not going to let sentimentality get in the way of my future.
MUÑEZ: So you think that both Emma and Lizzy died the same way, by accident?
GWEN: I don’t know. It doesn’t have anything to do with me. The police are the ones who said Lizzy’s death was accidental. I read the report. Didn’t you?
MUÑEZ: You read the police report?
GWEN: Everyone in Lorne has read that fucking report. The redacted one, of course. The police said it was standard procedure, and that they’d cut the most gruesome details for our peace of mind. And honestly, if I ever find the person who leaked that report . . . well, maybe I shouldn’t be saying that sort of thing to you. But it hurt my parents so bad.
Anyway, are we done? Because calculus started ten minutes ago, and I’m supposed to present to the class.
Sorry, it’s just, in case you can’t tell, I’m a very busy person. I have a lot going on. It’s not easy having to be the best at everything.
Diary Entry
Emma Baines—September 9, 2017
Way back when, Lizzy took me for a drive to commemorate the end of our mentorship. We sat on the bridge over Anna’s Run and she took a little book out of her backpack. Her diary, she said as she threw it as hard as she could into the water. Every time she ran out of pages and had to get a new one, she came out here and gave the old one a Lorne Burial. “No one deserves to know my secrets but Anna,” she said.
I don’t think I deserve to know her secrets. But maybe the police need to. There wasn’t a diary among her effects, but what if the police didn’t know to look for it? If there is some afterlife, Lizzy, and you’re watching me, I hope you’re not mad.
Maybe I should’ve visited the Sayers before now. It just seemed so—so trite to show up after Lizzy died, with flowers and an insipid card. And then I didn’t know what to do instead, and then I started wondering what had really happened to Lizzy, and all that led to me staring down their front door like it was going to open onto the mouth of hell. The paint was half white, half rust from where it had washed off in the weather, and the door hung crooked on a swollen frame.