After Mia drops me off, I track exactly five minutes across the face of an enormous clock behind the juice machine, then duck out of Toast again, before the barista side-eyeing me can harass me about placing an order. For half a second, I feel guilty about ditching out on an imaginary date with my sister to visit my mom in her imaginary hospital room.
That’s the problem with lies. They aren’t solid. They melt, and seep, and leak into the truth. And sooner or later, everything’s just a muddle.
It isn’t hard to track down Jake Ginsky’s address. That’s the promise of a place like Twin Lakes. No one’s ever really a stranger. Which means: there’s no place to hide.
Ginsky’s mom ran an acupuncture and massage therapy business out of a converted room above their garage; I remember because once Summer and I had a fight about it. It was December of seventh grade, and surprisingly warm: I remember we strung Christmas lights on the house in T-shirts that year.
Summer told me Jake had told her he’d give her a massage one day after school, and when I made a joke about whether she’d end up handcuffed to a radiator in the basement, she scowled.
“Jake’s not like that,” she insisted. “He told me he wants me to be his girlfriend.”
“That’s what all guys say,” I responded.
And she tilted her head back to narrow her eyes at me, just like Hank Ball did. “How would you know?” she said. Then she sighed and stepped closer to me, staring up at me through her lashes now. “I’ll make you a deal. I won’t go to Jake’s. But then you have to give me a massage.” And, just to bug me, she made a show of touching her shoulders, rolling her neck, running her fingers along the sharp promise of her clavicle.
“What are you doing?” I wanted to look away. I knew she was just messing with me. But I couldn’t. Her T-shirt was old, washed practically transparent, and I could see the dark edge of her bra beneath it.
“Come on,” she said, and laughed when I tried to pull away from her. “It’s not hard. All you have to do is touch me. . . .”
Katharine Ginsky Massage still operates out of Jake Ginsky’s house, and the address is listed right on the website. But it doesn’t occur to me until I spot the Volvo with the University of Vermont sticker that Jake Ginsky must have graduated by now. Somehow, in my head, everyone’s simply stuck, turning like a car wheel through a slurp of mud.
But I ring the doorbell anyway. It’s summertime. And I’m here. Might as well keep pedaling the gas.
Someone’s home—I can hear a baseball game going inside. Soon enough I hear footsteps cross to the door, and at the last second I get the urge to bolt.
But it’s too late. The door is opening already.
I remember Jake Ginsky as a skinny kid with teeth just a little too long for his mouth and the skulking look of a raccoon you surprise going through your garbage. Five years later, he’s practically unrecognizable. It looks like someone’s taken an air hose to his mouth and inflated him: six foot four, biceps the size of my thighs, a jaw that looks like a shovel. Even his beard is overgrown.
He freezes. For a second he looks like he’s thinking about slamming the door shut. “I heard you were in rehab,” he says. Then: “What are you doing here?”
His voice is flat. Not hostile, exactly, but definitely not friendly.
“Part of my twelve-step program. I’m on number nine. Make amends to all those you’ve wronged. Heard of it?”
Jake squints like my resolution is all fuzzy. “You’re here to apologize to me?”
I shake my head. “Hell no. I’m here so you can apologize to me.”
He lets out a sharp bark of laughter. Maybe he thinks I’m kidding. But after a second, the smile swirls right off his face, bottoming out in a look of disbelief. “Wait—you’re serious?”
I let a beat of silence pass so that he knows I am. Then I say, “Did you kill Summer?” No point in dancing around the dead elephant in the room.
He stares at me. “Do you seriously expect me to answer that question?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Then no.” He looks me up and down. “Did you?”
“Hell no,” I say.
“Well, now that we got that out of the way,” Jake says dryly, “are we done here?”
“No, we’re not done.” I almost add: we’ll never be done. “Your alibi was bullshit.”
His face closes up, like a pill bug when you poke it. “What are you talking about?”
“You told the cops you were hanging out with the other freshmen on the team. But you weren’t, were you?” It was in Mia’s car, when we were talking about Owen and where he was that day, that I got to thinking about alibis and what Mr. Ball had said: that Summer was playing a few freshman football players against one another. Maybe she did it deliberately, or maybe not. Either way, she was tearing that team apart. Those boys were at each other’s throats, he said. Fighting over her like she was a trophy.
“We were hanging out, Brynn,” he says. But the lie sounds tired by now.
“You weren’t,” I say. “You weren’t even speaking.” I watch Jake closely, watch the way his face contracts ever so slightly, like I’ve reached out and hit him. “When did you decide to lie?”
For a long minute, Jake just stares at me. His eyes are the kind of puppy-dog brown that makes straight girls go puddly. And now I can kind of see why Summer went so crazy for him—even though back then Jake looked a little bit like a wet towel, all stringy and wrung-out-looking, he had the same eyes, the same adopt-me vibe.
Finally he lets out a big huff of air, like he’s been holding his breath this whole time. “After we found out she was dead,” he says, “I heard the cops wanted to talk to me, and I panicked. It’d been months since we last hooked up—it was Moore right after me, but that didn’t last. Still, I figured they’d think I was crazy jealous or something.”
“Were you?” I ask.
He glares at me. “We hung out, like, eight times. Maybe less. Most of the time we were in a group. Besides, I was home that day. But my mom had clients all afternoon. And my dad didn’t get home until late. So I couldn’t prove I was home.”
“Right. So you guys covered for each other.” I have to force myself not to feel sorry for him. He probably thought he’d put Summer behind him. He’d left her behind about a hundred pounds of muscle ago. And here I am, like the ghost of Crap-mas Past.
Still, if Jake’s alibi was bullshit, it means the other boys’ alibis were bullshit, too.
Which means: maybe, maybe, we’re actually getting somewhere.
“It wasn’t like it mattered. Everyone knew who did it,” he says. At least he has the grace to look embarrassed. “At least, we thought we knew.”
“Right. I forgot.” Now it’s my turn to be sarcastic. “The Monsters of Brickhouse Lane.”
“I’m not talking about you.” He frowns like I’m being difficult for no reason. “I meant that guy Waldmann. He’s guilty, right?”
“Maybe,” I say. I think of surprising Owen yesterday, the way he tugged on his lip with his teeth, the look on his face when he asked about Mia. Like even saying her name was some kind of mortal wound. “I don’t know.”
Jake frowns again. “Who else could it have been?”
“You sound just like the cops,” I say. “Just because they couldn’t figure out who did it doesn’t mean that he did.” I don’t know why I’m defending Owen—only that guilt isn’t supposed to be determined like one of those school superlatives, Most Likely to Succeed, Most Likely to Bash Girl’s Head In with a Rock.
“I’m sorry,” Jake says in a quieter voice. “Really. I am.” He manages a smile. “See? You got your apology after all.”
“Lucky me,” I say. Suddenly, I’m exhausted. I shouldn’t have come. Even if we are making progress, so what? It doesn’t change what happened. It won’t bring Summer back.
And it won’t change what she did to us.
“It was stupid of me to lie,” Jake says. “It was stupid of all of us. But I guess we were all just in shock. I never in a million years expected things to turn out the way they did. I always figured she’d be the one who got in trouble.”
“She did get in trouble,” I say.
“You know what I mean.” Now the smile drops, leaving just his eyes screwed up around a wince. Suddenly, he blurts out, “I was a little scared of her, to be honest.”
I must be giving him a look, because he coughs a laugh. “I know. She was, like, half my size. But you know how she was. Intense. I hardly knew her. But I saw it. Glimpses of it, anyway. That’s all she’d let me see.” He takes a deep breath, like he’s run out of air. “Am I making any sense?”
“Yes” is all I can say.
“Like sometimes she’d open a door, just for a second, just a crack, and what you saw inside was . . .” He trails off, clears his throat, obviously embarrassed. Now I know he really was afraid of her: he’s telling the truth.
“She hurt someone, you know,” he calls out when I’m already halfway across the lawn. I turn and see him handling his long limbs like they’re part of some old Halloween costume he’s embarrassed to be wearing, trying to tuck them into hiding. “At her last foster home. It’s why she got moved. She—she burned one of the other kids with a fire poker. Did you know that?”
I shake my head. My throat is too full of feeling to speak. I remember another thing Mr. Ball said about Summer: She’d been bounced around some bad places. Some real bad places, with some real bad people.
“One time we were messing around with a box turtle we found on the road. Heath Moore said he was going to keep it as a pet. Then Dunner said we should make turtle stew. It was a joke, obviously. But then Summer went inside and came out with a kitchen knife.”
He looks up at me. Face raw. Open. As if years and years have been cut away. As if he’s looking not at me but at that moment, the shock of it, the turtle on the ground.
“I swear to God, I really thought she might kill it.” Suddenly, he blinks. Tries a smile again, settles for a quick flash of his teeth. “It sounds crazy now.”
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t.”