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 NEVERgoing 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 justwas. 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 blameit 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 moreintensethan email,” she said in her first one. “Plus, what if I become famous? Then someone will want to know all aboutShaila 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.
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, withShaila’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 beengauche, 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 inmy 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.
