The Dead Queens Club, page 15
“The Howard House for Displaced Snapping Turtles.”
“You can write my commercials.”
“They’ll be really thrilling.”
“Perfect.”
Maybe it’s the impending shitstorm, but I can’t even say anything snarky about what Katie wants to do. I mean, think about her sitting in prison teaching teardrop-tattoo guys how to write a résumé. It’s the nicest life ambition I can think of.
“Okay,” Katie says, sitting up straighter. “Let’s promise. In ten years, we’ll both come back for homecoming. No matter what.”
“Zap to Lancaster High School.”
“Even if we never talk anymore.”
I nod. “Even if a militant Amish dictatorship bans cars and we have to trek back to Indiana via buggy-hitchhiking.”
“Even if we have to walk. We’ll come back for homecoming. Sit at the fifty and watch football, so nobody burns us for heresy.”
“A crime second only to treason, which is reserved for those who hate basketball.” I’m feeling weirdly sentimental about the concept of high school, given how the actuality of high school is absolutely not proving itself all that nostalgia-worthy this week.
“And we’ll remember tonight, and we’ll see what we did. And I bet it’ll be pretty great.”
“Because we’re pretty great.”
It’s raining now, tapping off the leaves that haven’t fallen yet. “Let’s go,” Katie says.
“You sure you’re ready?”
She isn’t fighting back tears anymore. “Yeah. And I’m going to talk to Henry.”
“Please note that you’re doing this against legal counsel.” We start picking our way back through the woods, and I’m crossing my fingers that Katie’s sense of direction is stronger than mine, because I couldn’t tell you whether we’re headed for the bonfire or Botswana.
“I have to.” She lifts her chin. Very proud. Very Howardy.
“You’ll talk to Henry. I’ll get Parker. And we’ll zap out of here and back to—’”
Then the rain starts for real, freezing cold and coming down in sheets. Katie shrieks and pulls Tom’s sweatshirt over her hair, and we run.
Ready or not, here we come.
Nothing Goes Wrong and Everyone Makes
It Home by Curfew
Two minutes of storm-sprinting later, we’re back to the disappointing and unfortunate reality of End of the Road. The rain’s hissing off the fire and a couple of drunk girls are spinning in the downpour. The newspaper crew is hiding under the blanket, which they’ve turned into a tent, and the football guys are drinking like they don’t even notice the rain. Which is possible, given the staggering number of beer cans everywhere.
“Oh my God, Tom!” Katie shrieks, and she leaps over the Great Wall of Beer Cans to where Tom’s slumping against a tree. His head’s bleeding and his left eye is swollen shut. “Are you okay?”
“Never better,” he rasps out.
The other football guys shoot sidelong glances Katie’s way. They’re on Henry’s side. You can tell.
It’s still pouring, but Katie’s kneeling down next to Tom, draping his sweatshirt over him. It’s a lovely moment, but it’s raining so hard we’re all about two minutes from getting washed away, plus I’m really not excited about what’s going to happen if Henry walks in on this.
“Katie!” Parker pokes her head out of the newspaper tent. She’s got somebody’s jacket over her hair. “Get out of here!”
“I can’t—” Katie looks up at me, wide-eyed, like she can’t figure out what she’s supposed to do, and I know exactly which of these roads diverging I would travel by. But it doesn’t matter, because that’s when Henry’s voice cuts through the rain and the music somebody’s phone is playing and the laugh track from one bonfire over.
“Katie.”
Just that one word.
Her whole body tenses up. Then she snaps upright, and her crown slips off and hits the ground. “Henry!” she bursts out. “I—”
“Don’t,” he says.
“Henry, I can explain, I promise, I can—”
“Don’t,” he says again. He stares at her through the driving rain, like Tom isn’t slouched against the tree and I’m not standing there panicking and some wondrously drunk couple isn’t making out next to the fire ignoring this entire scene.
He’s barely bleeding. He won the fight.
But he looks like he just lost everything.
“Henry—”
He shakes his head once, quick and curt, and then he turns and disappears into the woods. He’s not even walking. He’s running away from this damn disaster.
“Henry!” Katie shouts after him. “Henry! Please!”
“Whore,” somebody coughs from the football huddle.
Katie spins to look at them, but nobody meets her eye. Everybody’s looking and not looking at the same time, like she’s some anthropology exhibit instead of the girl they voted homecoming queen.
Her reign is over.
“Katie, come on, let’s—” I start to say.
“Henry! Wait, Henry!” she shrieks again, and then she takes off after him, stumbling in her heels.
The rain falls so hard, it feels like hail. “Does anybody have a flashlight?” I call.
One of the football guys mutters something about how Katie’s probably going to get lost down somebody’s pants on her way to find Henry, and somebody from the newspaper tent says, “Breaking: Katie’s a slut.”
Parker slides out of the tent. “You can all go to Hell. Have fun in social Siberia for the rest of your lives, because I can make it happen.”
“Not if Henry hates you for setting him up with another cheater.” It’s Eustace, as usual.
“Grow up, Eustace.” Cat crawls halfway out and hands Parker a flashlight.
“Thank you,” Parker says to Cat. “And fuck the rest of you.”
She takes off after Katie, and then I’m running through the woods again. And let me tell you, even in heels and a dress with a jacket around her hair, Parker is fast.
“Where are we going?” I call as we cut past the first bonfire.
“The river.” Parker’s not even out of breath. “Henry’s going to get out of here, and Katie’s going to try to stop him.” She runs even faster.
I try to say something back, like, Well, we’re about to break the sound barrier, so we’ll definitely catch them if I don’t die first, but I can’t budget the oxygen. The rain’s letting up, at least, but the leaves are slick and I’m spending more effort staying upright than moving forward. Parker’s not even slipping.
In my next life, I swear I’m doing pageants.
“Do you hear that?” Parker yells.
“What?” She’s ten yards ahead of me and doesn’t seem to be on the verge of puking up two beers and half a wine cooler, like some people.
“That’s Katie.” She speeds up again, and I stop for a split second to get my hair out of my face. Then I hear it, too—Katie, shrieking something. Henry shouts back, and their voices blend together like the most disturbing opera ever. We’ve got to be almost to the river, but I can’t see a damn thing because Parker and the flashlight are too far ahead of me.
Katie’s voice gets desperate. “You can’t, you don’t understand, Henry, listen to me, listen to me!” Then there’s a clattering and clanging.
Then a scream that shuts my pulse down from a million to zero.
The scream cuts off.
Then Henry’s the one screaming. Parker bolts again, and we both dash out of the woods. Straight ahead of us, the ground drops away to nothing, and it’s just the drainpipe across the river, slick with rain, and Henry’s crouched halfway across, yelling at the water.
Katie’s nowhere.
“Oh my God, Henry, what did you do?” Parker leaps for the drainpipe, but her Barbie shoes slide straight off the metal. She shrieks, and I grab her arm before she can slip off the edge.
“You can’t go out there, Parker, you’ll fall!”
“But Katie—” She’s wide-eyed and blanched.
“I’ll go. Get your phone and call the cops. And don’t let anybody else out here. It’s way too dangerous.”
“But Katie—”
“I’m going.”
Then I’m running out onto the stupid drainpipe I never wanted to cross in the first place, and I swear my heart has dropped all the way into my feet. The metal’s so slippery I can’t believe I’m not falling, even in tennis shoes.
I finally get to Henry, and he’s still crouching there in the middle of the river, his whole body shaking. “Oh my God, Cleves,” he says, grabbing my hand and pulling us down to sit on the drainpipe. “She fell. She’s—she—she was freaking out, and she was wearing those damn shoes, and—I couldn’t get to her—”
I wrap my arms around his shoulders, thinking about the dumb drunk newspaper topic from an hour ago: Time to bet on tonight’s best story.
“We have to do something,” Henry’s saying. “We have to—What if—”
“Parker’s calling the cops.”
He shakes his head and pulls away from me, struggling to his feet. “She can’t—we have to—”
“We can’t get down there, Henry. We shouldn’t even be up here. Let’s get across to the parking lot, okay?”
He nods. He looks like an actual ghost. Like you could poke him in the arm and your hand would go all the way through.
We head for the other side. We don’t look down.
I’ve never been quite so thrilled to have solid ground under my feet. Or to see a bunch of terrible parking jobs with Lancaster-colored paint running down their windows in the rain.
Henry goes over to his car and half sits on the trunk. There’s spray paint dripping all the way down to the fender, red and white smudging together.
“She’s gone,” he whispers.
I lean against the trunk next to him. He’s right. I know he’s right, no matter how much I don’t want him to be, but there’s no damn way I’m about to go down without a fight—even if I’m fighting against actual reality. “You don’t know that.”
“She’s gone. Why the hell did she have to run out there?”
“She just wanted to tell you what happened. She—”
“I know what happened. She was cheating. She never loved me at all.”
“Yes, she did. She does.”
There’s panic in his eyes. “I’m trying so hard, and it’s all so fucked up, and now she’s gone and—”
He buries his head in his hands. He’s crying again, for real this time, and nothing I can say is going to make any of it better.
But I try anyway, because being hopelessly encouraging is the only thing left to do. “They’re going to find her,” I tell him. “It’s going to be okay.”
“I believed in her.” He looks back up. “I loved her. I’m so fucking stupid.”
“I’m not going to argue that last point,” I say, and he tries to laugh, but it comes out sounding more like he’s getting strangled.
The thing is, as much as I want to slap him for acting like it even matters what Katie did, I really just want to fix everything for him. He lost his mom and his brother and pretty much his dad, too, and then he almost got blown up. And now everything’s falling apart again.
“She’s gone. I hate this. I hate myself,” Henry whispers into the dark.
“We don’t know anything yet.”
“It’s so far, Cleves.” He’s breathing too fast. “She’s dead. I swear to God, she’s dead.”
“Don’t say that!”
“It’s true.” He drops to his knees next to the car.
“Henry, no, she’s not.” It feels more like a lie every time I say it.
“Everyone’s going to say it was me.”
“No, they’re not. That thing is a death trap.”
“They will.” He looks up. “Because of Anna.”
Somehow I want to laugh, which thankfully I manage not to do, because it would be wildly inappropriate and it’s probably a whistling-in-the-graveyard shock reaction anyway. It’s just—I don’t know. Conspiracy theories, even about fatal explosions, are a blinding bright spot compared to freezing rain and Katie being dead. But I snap out of it in roughly two seconds, because—you know. Freezing rain and Katie being dead.
“Everybody knows the Tower wasn’t your fault,” I say.
“But they won’t say it was her fault. Not the paper, and not the cops.”
I sit down next to him. “Okay, but everybody’s on your side. And tonight was an accident. And Katie’s going to be okay.”
He looks right into my eyes and says the dumbest thing possible. “I wish Jane never moved.”
“Ugh, Jane Seymour.”
He can’t even smile. “If she didn’t move, we’d still be together. None of this shit would’ve happened. Katie never would’ve died.”
I don’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything else, either. But he takes my hand, and a little jolt of electricity binds us together, and it feels like it matters.
Like there’s way more to us than fifteen days of awkward dating can explain.
So we sit in the mud and try not to think about the only thing there is to think about: Schrödinger’s ex, completely fine and completely not fine at the exact same time.
I’m not sure how long we wait, but suddenly there are voices and flashlights, everybody else from the party, finally back from the bridge since nobody’s about to cross the drainpipe anymore. Parker’s the first one into the clearing. She’s soaking wet and carrying her shoes, and there’s a gash right over her collarbone.
I stand up. Then I hear a burst of static and I realize that, mixed in with Parker and Brandon and Eustace and everybody, there are two cops with their radios yammering in little blips.
Parker’s makeup isn’t just running because of the rain.
She sprints the rest of the way to where I’m standing, like she doesn’t even feel the gravel under her feet. There’s mud halfway to her knees.
In my head I’m repeating ugh Jane Seymour ugh Jane Seymour ugh Jane Seymour because it’s the stupidest thing I can think of. I have to think about something that doesn’t matter, because I know exactly what Parker’s about to say.
Katie’s dead.
Number Six
Bad Times at Lancaster High
The cops found Katie a hundred yards downstream. She didn’t drown, thank God, because everybody’s a death expert all of a sudden, and they all say drowning’s one of the worst ways to go. Which is fantastic information to have on hand.
It was quick. The river’s shallow. She broke her neck. The cops say she didn’t feel anything.
Pretty sure nobody believes them.
November sucks so much it’s not worth talking about. I’m not going to act like it’s about me, because I only knew Katie for a couple of months. She was my best friend in Lancaster except Henry, but it’s not like we went way back. It’s not fair to act like it’s my personal tragedy.
But it really, really sucks.
Tom and Francis quit the team. Francis quits everything—he drops out of school and books a flight to Alaska to get a job on a fishing boat or a pipeline or something where you might make bank, but you’ll probably die in some heinous winching incident that’s essentially modern-day drawing and quartering. He doesn’t say goodbye to anybody. Tom moves in with his brother, outside town, so he can go to York instead of Lancaster. He only says goodbye to Parker.
After that night in the woods, Parker never looks bad again. She looks better than ever, which I didn’t even think was possible. And she and Katie have actually been friends forever, or at least since their middle school summers at the Howard-Boleyn lake house. But apparently excessive outfit-planning is the key to overcoming deathpression.
Or maybe she’s just transferring the negative shit straight to the squad, because her captaining has gotten so abusive that everybody’s calling her Tyrannosaurus Rochford. I run into her after practice one afternoon while I’m waiting for Henry, and the coach is yelling at her.
“Parker, I know you’re upset, but you can’t take it out on the girls.”
“What the hell are you saying? That it’s my fault?”
“No! You—are you even sleeping? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” She’s fifty percent Miss America and fifty percent provoked pit bull. “I’m winning.”
Then she storms off with literal daggers shooting out of her eyes.
So Parker has the approximate warmth of one of those cryogenically preserved billionaires, and Henry’s always in a mood these days. And Katie’s...you know.
Dead.
I spend a truly impressive amount of time alone.
Then, the Wednesday after Thanksgiving break—the worst Thanksgiving in Marck family history, because Dad couldn’t come home and Mom was trying to outrun some journal article avalanche and Amelie decided she was vegan and boycotted everything turkey-related—I stop in the bathroom on my way to German class and hear this exact sentence:
“She’d still be alive if she didn’t cheat.”
I freeze right there in the doorway.
“Everybody says it wasn’t the first time, either.”
“It definitely wasn’t her first time.”
The two girls at the sinks—whom I’ve never talked to before, but I’m pretty sure they’re juniors—crack up like that’s the most original joke in comedy history.
“I heard she was the school slut at York.” The first girl’s leaning toward the mirror, layering up on mascara.
“Well, she was the school slut at Lancaster, too. In like two months.” The second girl’s texting. “That’s a record.”
