If the police and justice are never going to be there for me, I need to find justice myself. And now I have the tools to do this.
So, Dear Diary, what does justice even look like? Does it mean getting even? Spreading the hurt around? Forcing reparation? Demanding a confession, an apology? I’m not even sure. None of those things will take away the damage done. I am then struck by something: If Boon and others had been brave enough to speak up all those years ago, if my mom had told Annabelle to fuck off with her money, if my mom had fought to keep the cops digging, then Jon would have been stopped. Those other guys would have been stopped. Charley would never have been attacked. Maybe there are more now. Maybe there will still be more. This gives me purpose. This empowers and fires me. I don’t need justice. I need to stop him.
And her.
And others like her.
Women like me—we need to show men they will not get away if they try something like this.
“What’s wrong?” Boon asks me as we sit on a log at Jericho Beach, eating sandwiches in the sun and watching a group of swimmers in wet suits dragging bright-pink buoys behind them. The swimmers rise and fall with the swells. It’s a clear day, hardly a breath of wind in the air. Neither warm nor cold. The snowcapped mountains across the water seem bigger, closer. Monstrous, really, due to some trick of atmosphere bending the light. That mountain range stretches north, all the way to my old home, the little world-class ski resort where my mother cleaned rooms and my father processed the shit that forty thousand visitors left behind in the resort each weekend.We used to be able to tell from the stink of the treatment plant whether it had been a good weekend for business.
“What do you mean, ‘What’s wrong?’” I bite into my avocado sandwich. Boon has come to meet me at the beach during my lunch break before I go to another job. He’s worried after my call.
“Kit, you phoned and said you had to see me. I’m sorry I couldn’t come right away. But I’m here now. What in the hell is going on?”
I take another bite of my sandwich and chew slowly. From our log I can see across the water to where the Glass House is. I imagine Beulah Brown next door, training her binoculars toward me and Boon on our silvered log.
“I feel bad for Beulah,” I say. “Her son is a freak, too. Beulah spying on her neighbors is one thing. But Horton—he’s creepy. I don’t trust him.”
“You’re changing the subject now.”
I glance at him. He holds my gaze. I don’t smile. This is it. I’m going to cross this line. Our friendship will never be the same. Which is laughable that I even consider this—our friendship never was what I thought it was.
“You remember how we met, Boon? In that coffee shop?”
He frowns. He looks nervous. “Yes, why?”
“You were this random guy who asked if he could sit at my table. I said, sure, and I wondered at the time if I knew you from somewhere because you looked vaguely familiar. And then you said, ‘You’re Katarina, right?’ Do you remember that?”
“Kit, where is this go—”
“I must’ve looked like a deer in headlights,” I say. “Because at that instant I’d just realized where I’d seen you before. My school days. And I wanted nothing to do with people frommy old school or hometown. And I was suddenly mentally mapping all my possible escape routes from the mall. That’s when you said, ‘You’re from Whistler, right? You were a couple of grades behind me.’ And you sipped your hot chocolate, watching me over the rim of your cup, and you got this huge blob of whipped cream on the tip of your nose, which made me smile in spite of myself. You remember all that?”
“Dammit, Kit, just spit it out. Where are you going with this?”
“You said I’d changed. That I looked amazing. You liked the new blonde hair. You were smart enough not to say you liked my new skinny figure. You told me your name was Boon-mee but that everyone calls you Boon. We walked to the bus together, and I said, given that we both lived in such a tiny town, you must’ve been aware of what happened to me.”
“It’s why I went over to your table, Kit. I’d seen you coming into the coffee shop a few times. I always felt bad for you because of what happened. A lot of us in town did. I believed your story. I always did. I one hundred percent believe your story about Jon Rittenberg and the ski team.”
I lower my sandwich and stare at him. My heart begins to pound.
He says, “And I told you that day that I was bullied at school, too. I told you Iknewguys like Jon Rittenberg. They would single me out after school because I was gay and they could smell it even though I hadn’t come out yet, or even fully admitted it to myself. In a small town like that, with only one school, where the same class cohort goes all the way from kindergarten to grade twelve, always the same faces in that one class, year after year as you all go up a grade, you can’t escape. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. You get branded the target from kindergarten and stay the target your entire schoolcareer. Bullied. Humiliated. Disliked. You start to wear that label. You start to believe them. And when I saw you in that coffee shop, after all that time, I needed to tell you that I felt bad, that I believed in you. I-I guess I wanted to say sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to you.”
“But are you? Are you really sorry, Boon?”
He looks shocked.
I inhale deeply and turn my face up toward the weak sun. I close my eyes, just feeling the gentle rays on my skin. “You know how I told you the other day that I got new clients?”
“Yeah,” he says.
I turn to Boon. “He’s back in town. I got his house.”
“What?”
“My new client is Jon Rittenberg. I’m cleaning his house.”
Blood drains from his face.
