Page 1 of Mad Girl

LETTER ONE

100 WEEKS LEFT

Just picture it, Casey: a world where you and I had never met.

I picture it sometimes. Actually, now that I have nothing better to do, I picture it a lot.

I picture where I might be right now if you’d never befriended Michael.

Or become so close to my dad.

Or ended up living in my house.

I often wonder how the last three years might’ve unfolded if you’d never walked through my front door. Never cracked the carefully laid foundation of my life.

You once told me people get life wrong sometimes—that no one ever gets it exactly perfect—and you know what? In this alternate world, where we’d never met, my track record wouldn’t have been anything close to perfect, but at least I wouldn’t be writing to anyone from jail.

If it hadn’t been for you.

I can tell you think so, too. You think you’re responsible for where I am now, for what I’ve done. It’s eating you up inside—the guilt. It’s there on your face, etched so deeply you can’t hide it, every time you visit me in here.

The first time you visited—the first time our eyes met across that awful, fluorescent-lit room—all the color drained from your face. You looked close to losing your lunch down the front of your sweater. I guess knowing someone’s going to jail and seeing the reality of it are two very different things.

But facing your guilt isn’t the worst part of every Tuesday.

It’s the way we sit there—for the better part of an hour—staring at each other over a grimy steel table.

It’s the way your voice catches when you beg me to talk to you, to say something, anything.

It’s the way you look at me. Like you’re trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

And I could tell you.

The condensed version of my story goes something like this:

Crazy rich girl had to be kept on a leash, so crazy rich girl’s father kept her leashed to you. But crazy little motherless rich girl wasn’t leashed securely enough, and that bitch broke loose. Again.

For most people, it’s no surprise that I ended up here. After all, I’m the girl who stabbed a boy at her eighth birthday party, and a person doesn’t do a horrible thing like that unless they’re seriously unhinged. A problem. Too dangerous to be free.

So to say I wouldn’t have ended up here if it hadn’t been for you isn’t exactly true, now is it? The reality is, I’ve committed a crime or two that probably should’ve landed me in handcuffs well before the one that finally did.

But if I know you—and I definitely do—you think you’re entirely responsible for what I did that night.

If only you’d stayed home like I asked…

If only you hadn’t left with Hal…

If only you hadn’t struck me with those venomous words…

I’d be heading to college in the fall after taking that waste of a gap year. Not sitting behind bars.

The irony, though? The irony’s the real bitch of this story, because the irony behind the truth and me following you that night is the same.

My dad did everything within his power to keep me from turning out like this girl—you know, the cautionary-tale kind, the regretting kind, the if-only-I’d-chased-my-dreams-instead-of-a-guy cliché. After what happened with my mom, Nic had hoped to do better by me.

My dad and I, we had a plan: I’d graduate summa cum laude from his alma mater, I’d go to business school and intern for the biggest real estate development firm in Boston, and when he decided I was ready, I’d work alongside him at that firm—at our family’s firm—Bancroft Property Group. He’d teach me everything he knew, and when he retired, I’d take his place.

Nic had hoped for this outcome from the very beginning, from the moment I slipped from my mother’s womb a girl instead of a boy. I may not have been what the sonographer said I’d be, but Nic didn’t let a case of mistaken gender kill his dreams. He’d still named me Elliot James Bancroft—after my great-grandfather—and having a girl was better, my dad said. Having a girl was great. Not only was I the first girl born to a Bancroft in more than a hundred years, I’d be the first female president of the firm, too.