She arrived at the café twenty minutes late. I didn’t even recognize her at first. Not until she sat down at my table and pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse in place of a greeting.
“Okay,” she said, lighting one, right in the middle of the café. “So what do you want?”
It took me a minute to find my words. Her once long blue-black hair was now cut into a chin-length bob, bleached into an almost white blond. She’d replaced her thick eyeliner with a pair of black square-framed glasses. Her lips were painted a dark purple, and the black lines of a tattoo poked out from under the collar of her T-shirt. It also looked like she’d gained about thirty pounds, mostly noticeable in the new roundness of her face and fullness of her chest.
No one who had watched the news three years ago or reading the true crime message boards today would recognize this woman as Kellie Gaynor of Virgil County Massacre fame. And maybe, I thought, that was the point.
“Hi,” I finally managed, once my surprise had worn off.
“Hi,” she repeated, a hint of mocking in her voice. “Now what do you want, Lee?”
“Oh, I, um … I wanted to see how you’re doing.”
She took a drag from her cigarette, then narrowed her eyes at me as she let out a puff of smoke. “You sent me a dozen emails and left five voice mails—and I don’t even want to count all of the text messages—so you could find out how I was doing? Really?”
I coughed and tried to wave the smoke away. Honestly, I don’t know how she can still smoke those things. The smell reminds me too much of the bathroom. Of the moments right before the shooting started. Before the world changed. Sitting in that café, I could already feel my heart rate speeding up, and my skin began to itch as every movement out of the corner of my eye turned into something sinister.
When an employee came over to our table, it startled me so much that I nearly jumped out of my chair and bolted for the doors. I managed to keep calm, though, and I was relieved when he said, “Miss, you’ll have to put that out. There’s no smoking in here.”
She sighed, took one last drag, and put it out without a word to the man, who glanced at me with an is-she-serious? expression. I wondered if he’d ever had to tell someone to put out a cigarette before. Smoking in restaurants had been illegal for so long, I couldn’t even believe she’d tried it.
When he walked away, Kellie said, “So you want to know how I’m doing. Fine. I’m good. Aside from this weirdo who keeps harassing me.”
“Someone’s harassing you?”
She gave me a pointed look.
“Oh.” I swallowed. “Sorry. I just really wanted to talk to you.”
“About?”
I chewed on my lip and fiddled with the straw in my iced coffee. “Did you hear about Sarah’s parents?”
“What about them?”
“They’re writing a book.”
She shrugged. “Good for them. What’s that got to do with me?”
I blinked at her, baffled. “I mean … it’s going to be about Sarah. About the shooting and what happened in the bathroom that day. You know, the necklace? I’d imagine it’s going to mention you.”
“Seems likely, yeah.”
“Doesn’t that bother you? That people are going to be talking about that again? That they’ll think … that that story …” I was struggling to find the right words. Kellie was staring at me from behind her glasses, looking at me like I was the most annoying, foolish person on the planet. Maybe I was. Finally I blurted out, “Don’t you want people to know the truth?”
She stood up. “I need coffee.”
I watched her walk to the counter, listened as she ordered a large black coffee. Honestly, I was relieved to hear the same amount of disdain and exasperation in her voice when she talked to the barista as when she spoke to me.
When she came back and sat down, cup in hand, she ignored my last question. Instead, she said, “I go by Renee now.”
“Uh, okay.”
“It’s my middle name,” she said. “I also legally changed my last name. Hyphenated both of my parents’ names. Gaynor-Marks. Mom went back to Marks when she and Dad got divorced. Anyway. Almost everyone knows me as Renee Marks now.”
“I, um … I like it. It’s a nice name.”
Yes, I know. I sounded painfully ridiculous. But I had no idea what else to say to this. What is the protocol when someone tells you they’ve changed their name? Was I supposed to call her Renee now? Was that what she was trying to tell me? Still, if I hadn’t been so anxious, I probably could have come up with a better response than “It’s a nice name.”
Kellie—Renee?—didn’t even seem to hear me, though. She just kept talking, like I hadn’t said a word.
“My friends know I’m from Virgil County,” she said. “The close ones, anyway. Everyone else just thinks I’m from Illinois since that’s where we moved for my senior year. But even the people who know, they don’t know I was there. I tell everyone I moved before the shooting happened. They don’t ask me questions about it. Why would they? I doubt most of them even remember who the hell Kellie Gaynor was. And if they did, well, they don’t know her. The only person from Virgil County they know is Renee.”
“You mean you haven’t told any of your friends the truth?”
She took a sip of her coffee. “What is the truth, Lee?”
“I … I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just know the necklace wasn’t Sarah’s. I know that she didn’t say anything to him and that whatever Ashley overheard—”
“Ashley? Is that bitch how that stupid rumor got started?”
I cringed a little. “She’s not as bad as you think. She’s actually a really good person.”
Kellie rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I don’t really care what kind of person she is. But you’re right. It wasn’t Sarah’s necklace. And I am the one who talked to the asshole. That’s at least part of the truth. But no. I haven’t told any of my friends. I haven’t told anyone—or talked to anyone—about it in three years.”
“But don’t you want people to know? What really happened?”
“I used to,” she said. “I told everyone I could when I was sixteen, when I thought it actually mattered.”
“It still matters, though.”
“You didn’t seem to feel that way three years ago.”
“I … I know. Kellie, I’m sor—”
She raised a hand to silence me. “It’s fine. I’m not mad about it.”
“You’re not?”
“I was back then,” she said. “I was sure that if you’d spoken up, people would listen. They seemed more likely to believe you than me. I was sure that if just one person—the only other person in that bathroom who was still alive—spoke up, everyone would apologize to me. God, I was naive.”
“But maybe they would have.”
She shook her head. “No. That story was more powerful than either of us, Lee. And I get it. It’s a damn good story. The sweet, pretty dead girl, dying a martyr for her beliefs, is way better than the angry emo chick, stuttering out answers in a panic because she doesn’t know what the maniac with the gun wants to hear. Maybe if I’d died it would be a better story. Maybe not. Not sure I’m great martyr material.”
“I still should have said something.”
“Yeah. You should’ve. But then there’d probably be two families chased out of that hellhole of a town instead of just one. Like I said. It’s a good story. And you know what people like way more than the truth? A good story.”
She said all this so casually. No passion. No bitterness. Complete apathy, with maybe just a hint of resignation. These were the facts, at least as far as she saw them. No need to get worked up. Not anymore.
“I was so stupid back then,” she said, almost laughing. “I tried to tell everyone the truth. Not because I wanted people to worship me the way they did Sarah. I didn’t care about that. I just … I don’t know. I thought the truth mattered.”
“It does,” I insisted. “The truth does matter.”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because … because it’s the truth.” I was having trouble articulating what I wanted to say. I kept thinking of Miles, of our argument in the parking lot the night before. It seemed like such a simple concept to me. The truth was important. Facts were important. Why couldn’t these people understand that? Hadn’t we been told since childhood that you should always, always tell the truth?
I’d failed at that three years ago. I’d kept my mouth shut, and it was a horrible mistake. Why, now that I was trying to fix it, couldn’t Kellie and Miles be on the same page as me?
She took another long sip of her coffee, her eyes turning toward the window off to our left. People were walking past the café. Mothers pushed babies in strollers. Couples held hands. Outside, no one knew that two of the survivors from a national tragedy were sitting in this rinky-dink café. Heck, they probably hadn’t even thought about the shooting in ages. They had moved on so long ago that we were just …
A story.
“Did you know I used to go to church?”
I looked back at her, but Kellie wasn’t looking at me. She was still watching the window.
“This tiny little Methodist church in the next town over. It’s where my grandparents went, so I didn’t mind making the drive. No one from school went there. I thought … I thought that made it safe.” She pressed her lips together. “I told my preacher the truth. And the next week, he wrote a whole damn sermon about Sarah. Said we should all strive to be more like her. My grandma said it was the best sermon he ever gave.”
“He didn’t believe you?”
“Nope. And when I tried to tell Grandma the truth, she said, ‘Now quit that, Kellie Renee. Lying to get attention is not becoming of a young lady.’ Sometimes, I wonder if my parents even believe me. They said they did but …” She raised a shoulder and let it fall. “I have a feeling they were both relieved when I stopped talking about it after we moved. They got almost as much hell as I did, you know.”
“I’m so—”
“Stop trying to apologize,” she snapped, turning to glare at me. “That’s not why I’m telling you this. I’m not trying to guilt you. I don’t give a damn about your guilt, Lee. My point is that telling the truth hasn’t done anything but make things worse for me. So while you’re sitting there telling me the truth matters, I’m telling you—it doesn’t. Not to me. Not anymore.”
“But—”
“Every time I spoke up, I got shouted down. My voice was stomped out. I was turned into a freaking cartoon villain by my own friends and neighbors. That’s what the truth did to me. They hurt more than that gunshot ever could. So Sarah’s parents can write whatever book they want. That’s their choice. Mine is to try like hell to put this behind me. And that’s really freaking hard when you keep emailing and calling constantly just so we can sit here and talk about how important the truth is to you.”
The weight of her words began to sink in, and a slow realization dawned on me. She hadn’t just been avoiding me—the girl who didn’t speak up—for the last few weeks. She’d been avoiding the past. She’d built a new life for herself, and here I was, harassing her, hoping to convince her to write a letter for my collection, hoping she’d share the truth with … whoever I decided to give these letters to when I was done. And that was the last thing she wanted.
Maybe I was no better than Brother Lloyd.
She stood up, grabbing her purse from the floor and taking a final sip of coffee. “I need to go. Campus is half an hour away, and I promised my friends I’d meet them to study for finals. So if that’s all you wanted to talk to me about …”
I nodded. I had to work to bite back another apology. It kept creeping onto the tip of my tongue, nearly pushing through my lips, but I fought it. She didn’t want an apology from me. She’d made that clear. And the least I could do now was to listen to her about what she wanted.
“Good. Then I’m going to go. I’d say ‘See you later’ but, let’s be honest, I kind of hope I don’t. No offense.”
I nodded again.
And then she was gone. And I stayed in that café for another hour, staring out the window and wondering what I was supposed to do next.
I’m still trying to figure that out.