A Good Idea Page 3

  When I turned nine, I celebrated my birthday by hosting my first—and only—slumber party. I think I must have gotten the idea from a book or something; I had never been to one in my life. I was not the most popular kid, but I was not a social pariah, either. My mother insisted I invite every girl in my class, so no one would feel left out, and a decent number accepted, enough so I didn’t feel the need to cover my face in shame, although I did, on the evening of the actual party, have a moment of deep conviction that no one would actually show up, and when the doorbell finally rang I was overwhelmed with relief. Though we barely knew each other then, Betty had been the first to arrive, and right away I loved her for that, just a little. I loved her even more, though, for what came later.

  After my parents served us pizza and chips and soda, they graciously retreated upstairs so that our cabal of fourth graders could take over the living room. We spread out our sleeping bags, changed into our pajamas—I still remember Betty’s, a creamy flannel with a lollipop print—and sprawled out to watch a movie.

  Upstairs in their bedroom, my parents started to argue. First it was just a dull murmuring that we could only hear during the movie’s quiet parts, but their voices grew slowly and steadily louder, as if someone had trained a remote control on them and was holding down the button that turned up the volume. I couldn’t make out actual words, but when one of them—my mother, if I had to guess—slammed a door hard enough to rattle the pictures on the bookshelves, I knew I couldn’t brush it off with some joke. Instead, I stared straight ahead at the television, trying to ignore the uncomfortable sidelong glances some of the other girls were exchanging. I buried my hands in my sleeping bag so no one would see my clenched fists.

  Probably I was supposed to set my guests at ease somehow; I could shrug and tell the truth, that it was no big deal, that they fought like this all the time, that we should just keep eating our pizza and ignore them, that that was what I always did, but I suspected this tactic would fail to lighten the mood. I thought about setting the curtains on fire, to create a diversion. Upstairs, a door opened just long enough for one of Mom’s piercing shrieks to escape, like a bat had gotten into the house, and when the door slammed again I knew it was too late. No one would want to stay here now, not with that thing on the loose. All around me I heard rustling as girls shifted uncomfortably in their sleeping bags, and I wondered who would be the first to say it.

  Shelly opened her mouth. “I think maybe—”

  And then Betty came down the hallway carrying my cake and singing “Happy Birthday,” and the other girls were forced to join in, drowning out the noise from upstairs. While everybody else had been preparing their exit strategies, she had been searching my kitchen for candles and matches so that she could put an end to my humiliation. Just lifting the cake out of the freezer was practically an act of heroism; it was nearly as big as she was. She set it down precariously on the coffee table and told me to make a wish. I was going to wish for my parents to stop fighting—not forever, just for that night; even then I was a realist—but as the girls clustered around me, waiting for me to blow out the candles, I realized a hush had fallen over the second floor of the house, and that my parents had most likely heard the singing and called a truce, however temporary, when they understood that they were embarrassing me and ruining my party.

  I glanced across the low table at Betty and gave her a shy smile of gratitude, but really I was in awe. Here was a girl who could grant your wish before you’d even made it. I took a deep breath, leaned over the cake, and blew out all the candles while the girls clapped and cheered. No one was thinking about leaving anymore.

  “What did you wish for?” Rebecca asked.

  “Come on,” Betty said, pulling out the candles and licking frosting off their waxy ends. “You know she can’t tell.”

  I never did tell—not even Betty, which is too bad, because I think she deserved to know. I think I always meant to tell her, eventually, and then we ran out of time.

  I’d wished for her. For her to be my best friend, to be mine.

  • • •

  There was only one thing in the boxes that had come from Calder: a small stuffed lobster he had won for her at the county fair. She’d named it Jimmy, I wasn’t sure why, and kept it on her vanity among her vintage gloves and tubes of red lipstick, stray buttons and ticket stubs, phone numbers scrawled on scraps of loose-leaf paper—her “bits,” I had called them, all gone now, but this fucking lobster had somehow been worth saving. I squeezed it, feeling the stuffing give beneath my fingers; I turned it over in my hands, looking along the seams, as if, I don’t know, as if she might have torn it open at some point, hidden something inside and sewed it back up. But of course there was nothing. There was nothing here for me to find.

  I was looking for clues. Trying to turn something into a mystery when it wasn’t. There was no puzzle to solve, no secret to uncover. No matter how many people tried to float the story that Betty was still alive, that she’d run away, that Calder’s confession was nothing but a confused lie coerced out of a terrified boy, here in her house it was obvious that not even her parents believed that she was coming back. Betty was dead, and we all knew who had done it. Still, I tucked her copy of Hamlet under my shirt, and I took it with me when I left.

  CHAPTER TWO.

  THAT NIGHT OWEN picked me up and took me to a party in the woods. He’d heard about it at the diner and asked me, as a joke, if I wanted to go. I surprised us both when I said yes. He handed me a can of Narragansett as soon as I got into his truck; he drank wordlessly from his, steering with one hand, tucking the beer between his knees when he needed to shift gears.

  “Thanks,” I said. “For coming with me.”

  He grunted. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. Going to a high school party.”

  “Technically, it’s not a high school party if everyone graduated today.”

  We parked in a clearing and followed the sound of drunken chatter, Owen leading the way, holding my hand. We emerged into another clearing, filled with the graduates who had managed to escape their family celebrations; most of Williston High’s remaining students were there as well. There were a couple of kegs set in plastic garbage cans filled with ice; everyone was drinking from red Solo cups. I was glad for the flask of whiskey I had tucked protectively in my waistband. A dozen kids sat in a circle around a huge bonfire that threw out the occasional spark; someone was strumming on an acoustic guitar, and the sight of it made me cringe. It would just be a matter of time until everyone was drunk and maudlin and singing along to Green Day’s “Good Riddance.”

  Owen must have seen the look on my face. “You wanted to come.”

  It occurred to me that I had graduated from high school, too. I hadn’t gone to the ceremony, but I had passed all my classes; in theory, my diploma would arrive in the mail sometime in the next four to six weeks. In September I would start at NYU, live in a dorm, get a part-time job. In theory I had as much cause to celebrate as the rest of these people, but I did not share their jovial mood.

  I kept looking around, past the throngs of recent graduates—faces I mostly recognized from my childhood in Williston and the summers since—trying to see into the shadows beyond the trees, the darkness untouched by the blazing campfire.

  “Who are you looking for?” Owen asked.

  “No one,” I said, and he raised an eyebrow in a way that meant he didn’t believe me.

  “Whatever. You want a beer?”

  “Yeah.”

  He walked off to find the keg. I lit a cigarette, leaned against a tree, and waited. Owen was right, I was looking for someone: the pink-haired girl from graduation. I didn’t think she’d show up here, but I knew I needed to see her again.

  “Finley! You’re here!” A tall girl with red hair and freckles came barreling in my direction and gave me an enormous hug.

  “Hey, Rebecca,” I said. Rebecca had made a
big show of being devastated when I moved away, which annoyed Betty no end, as she felt exclusively entitled to all the grief and concomitant sympathy related to my departure. During the summers Rebecca worked as a counselor at a sleep-away camp, so I hadn’t seen her much. Betty had kept me up to date on Williston gossip, though, so I knew Rebecca had lost her virginity last spring at a party much like this one, to Danny, a friend of Calder’s, and that afterward she had cried.

  “How’ve you been?” she asked.

  “I’m okay. It’s always a little weird, you know, coming back. How are you doing?”

  “I can’t believe it. It’s so surreal, you know?”

  It took a second for it to register that she meant graduating from high school, not Betty’s absence. “Who was that girl? The one who flipped out this morning at the ceremony? With the pink hair?”

  “Oh, Serena?”

  “Serena?”

  She made a face. “Yeah. Serena Thomas. I don’t know her that well. She just moved here a few years ago. Not that long after you left, actually.”

  “Can I see your yearbook?” I asked. Rebecca seemed like the only person who had brought one to the party.

  “Sure,” she said, handing it over.

  I flipped to the page where Betty’s picture would have been, but there was nothing. After seeing how she’d been so completely omitted from the graduation ceremony, I wasn’t all that surprised. I went back to the beginning and carefully paged through the whole book, the candid pictures of students sprawled on the lawn during lunchtime, the posed photos of the chess club and the swim team. Finally I found the drama club—Betty had been a member since freshman year—but she wasn’t in the photo. They must have taken it after she died.

  “You looking for a picture of Betty?” Rebecca asked.

  I nodded.

  “Here.” She turned to a two-page spread in the back, a collection of pictures from Hamlet. I searched the faces of the actors onstage, caught mid-line, mid-gesture, but Betty wasn’t there. I followed Rebecca’s finger across the page, to where the crew had posed together, head-to-toe black outfits, headsets around their necks. Betty was standing on the end, her blonde hair a shapeless mess around her face, wearing a forced smile that wasn’t fooling anybody.

  “She was on the crew?” I asked, shocked.

  “Assistant stage manager. I know. It was weird. She tried out for Ophelia and didn’t get it. She didn’t get any part. Not that there’s a ton of parts for girls in Hamlet. A lot of students complained, actually, but Mr. McCartney”—the drama teacher; Betty had spoken of him often and fondly—“said he was sick of doing Midsummer’s every other year and it was time for one of the tragedies. So Betty was stuck as ASM.”

  “She never played Ophelia?” I said. I was reeling. Betty had lied to me for months. Months. “She wasn’t in the show at all?”

  “No, but you wouldn’t have known it. She would go around reciting the monologues, weaving flowers into her hair. It was actually—” Rebecca stopped.

  “What?”

  “She would talk about drowning. About what it would feel like. It kind of spooked everybody, afterward. A few people said some pretty fucked-up things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that she got to play Ophelia after all.”

  “Ophelia drowned herself,” I snapped.

  “It was just a stupid joke.”

  “Who?” I said, shoving the yearbook back into Rebecca’s hands. “Who said that?”

  “I don’t know, just some of the guys,” she backpedaled. “They were freaked out, okay? Everybody was. The kids working in the theater kept getting scared. It got so nobody wanted to be in there alone.”

  I gestured to the party. “Everyone seems just fine to me.”

  Rebecca looked at me, annoyed. “It’s graduation night. Cut them a little slack.”

  Owen came back with the beers just as Rebecca was walking away, tightly hugging her yearbook, chin tucked to her chest.

  “What did you do?” he asked, handing me a red cup.

  “Nothing.” I chugged the watery beer and refilled the cup with whiskey from my flask. “Want some?”

  He shook his head. “I’m driving, remember?”

  A group of guys were standing around the fire pit, throwing those little bang-snap firecrackers into the flames and then leaping back when they exploded, laughing like idiots. I drank my whiskey; Owen brought me another beer. A lot of people nodded at me from a distance, lifting a hand to wave across the clearing, but after Rebecca no one else approached. They didn’t want to be reminded of Betty tonight, but she was all I could think about. If she were here, I would probably be doing the exact same thing—leaning hostilely against a tree, smoking cigarettes with Owen and getting lit—but I’d be watching her, too, gamely doing a keg stand or trying to rally a group into a game of spin the bottle, drunkenly doing cartwheels to prove how sober she was, getting dirty looks for flirting with somebody’s boyfriend, pleading innocence with those big blue eyes.

  Betty had told me she was playing Ophelia. I had even offered to make the trek up to Maine to see her perform, but she’d talked me out of it, told me to wait until I could visit for longer than a weekend. Now I understood why she hadn’t wanted me to come. But why had she lied?

  Across the clearing, I saw a boy—he looked too young to have graduated today, I pegged him for a rising junior or senior—catch Owen’s eye, nodding at him and gesturing to a cluster of trees set apart from the rest of the party. Owen nodded back.

  “I have to go talk to somebody,” he said.

  He threaded his way through the crowd until he reached the boy, following him until they both seemed to feel they had relative privacy. I didn’t need a clear view of the proceedings to understand what was happening; the boy’s face betrayed his urgency, though Owen remained expressionless. The actual shake-and-trade took less than a second, an impressive sleight of hand that would have fooled anybody who hadn’t clocked quite so many hours in Washington Square Park. Owen put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, leaned over and whispered something in his ear. The boy nodded; I could see how eager he was now, to get away from Owen and sample whatever it was he’d just purchased. Owen stopped at the keg to refill his cup, then joined me under the tree from where I had watched the whole thing.

  “So,” I asked him, “when did you become the town drug dealer?”

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “Just a little something I’m doing on the side.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you find whoever you were looking for?” he asked.

  “I don’t think she’s coming.”

  “You’ll run into her sooner or later. It’s a small town.”

  “Tell me about it.” I gestured to his pocket. “What have you got, anyway? Anything good?”

  “Nothing for you, that’s for sure.”

  “Come on. How about a little welcome home present?”

  “Forget it.”

  The boys around the campfire had moved on from bang-snaps to bottle rockets; the girls shrieked, jumping up and leaping away. Owen put his hands on my waist, and I tipped my head forward so it rested on his chest. I breathed in his familiar scent, Old Spice and cigarettes and beer, his denim jacket rough against my cheek. He was right; Betty had been gone since November, and the town had moved on. What had I expected, to show up and find them all grieving? Stopped clocks, sheets over the mirrors? Why would they bother? They didn’t even believe she was dead. I looked up at Owen, and I guess he saw the intentions in my eyes, how badly I needed a distraction, because he took my hand and led me away from the party, deeper into the woods until he was sure we were alone.

  “I think I have a better way to welcome you home,” he said, slowly unzipping my hoodie.

  The temperature had dipped considerably since the sun had gone down, and I shivered as Ow
en slipped the sweatshirt off my shoulders, but not just from the cold. I reached inside his jacket, wrapping my arms around his waist and pulling him closer. His kiss was as rough and familiar as Owen himself. My winter of discontent, and the subsequent spring, had been incredibly solitary, and as Owen’s fingers traced the skin around the waistband of my jeans, removing my flask and tossing it to the ground, something inside me stirred for the first time in many, many months. Sensing my urgency, he dispensed with the formalities and got down to the awkward business of trying to pull my jeans off over my sneakers.

  “Shit,” he whispered, and laughed for the first time since I’d seen him, a low, throaty chuckle that reminded me why I had been on the verge of falling in love with him for essentially my entire life.

  He took off his jacket and laid it on the ground, gently easing me on top of it, and pulled a condom out of the same pocket that had earlier held the knife and the joint. We left my jeans as they were, and I opened my knees, ankles bound together, underneath him like a butterfly, pinned. His brief moment of mirth evaporated with an abruptness that unnerved me; suddenly his face was buried in my neck, teeth pressed against my skin as if he were grimacing in pain, his breath hot and jagged and loud in my ear. I stared up at the sky, at the stars wheeling overhead beyond the trees—twigs snapping beneath my hips, the distant roar of the party and the campfire smell and the hot lick of bourbon at the back of my throat—and tried to ignore the feeling that I was no closer to Owen now than I had been a week ago when I was still in New York. And then, almost like he was remembering I was there, he lifted his head and kissed me again and brought me back to him.