Friday night is movie night at Four Corners, and after dinner all the girls pile into the media room, half of them already in their pajamas. The DVD collection at Four Corners is pathetic and features exactly two kinds of entertainment: “recovery dramas”—bad TV movies about hard-core addicts getting to rock bottom and then having some epiphany and moving to Costa Rica to find love and do charity work—or the handful of normal features that meet Four Corners’ rules against any cursing, depictions of sex, violence, alcohol, or drugs, aka pretty much every single thing that makes a movie worth watching unless you’re six years old. The old Tom Hanks movie Big makes the cut. So does Frozen, supposedly because it celebrates the idea of self-acceptance. But I’m pretty sure it’s just because one of our counselors, Trish, loves the music.
Tonight everyone votes to turn on the local news. The big storm moving through the Northeast is supposed to reach us by midnight, and everyone’s freaking out about power outages and the water shutting off and being stranded with no AC for days.
“I didn’t even know we had TV,” a girl—I think her name is Alyssa—says. She looks kind of like a Muppet. She even has weird orangey skin. Either she really likes tanning beds or she grew up next to a nuclear power plant and is now radioactive.
“Do we have Showtime?” another girl, Monroe, asks. “Or HBO?” Monroe’s supposedly in for opiates, like me, but I’m pretty sure she might just be addicted to being the most annoying person alive. Every time she tells a story she has to include a metaphor from some dumb TV show. I felt the way that Arianna felt on season two of The Romance Doctors when she got passed over at the very last minute even though everyone thought she was going to win.
“Local news only,” Jocelyn, one of my favorite counselors, says. She punches at the remote. Input/Output Error is blinking on the screen.
“What about ABC?” Monroe asks, with increasing desperation, like this is a life-or-death, stranded-in-the-desert situation and she’s asking how much time is left before we have to start eating people. “Or the CW?”
“Local news only, Monroe,” Jocelyn repeats, and Monroe slumps back against the sofa.
Jocelyn pushes a few more buttons and the TV blinks into life, showing a reporter clutching a microphone and holding on to the hood of a rain slicker with the other hand. Behind her, trees are bent practically sideways by a hard wind; even as she’s standing there, an awning rips off from one of the stores behind her and goes tumbling down the street.
It takes the sound a few seconds to catch up to the visuals. “ . . . standing here on Main Street in East Wellington,” the reporter is saying, raising her voice to be heard over the wind. “And as you can see from the scene behind me, Tropical Storm Samantha has also arrived. . . .”
East Wellington is where Wade lives. That’s only two towns over from Twin Lakes. For some reason, it isn’t my mom and sister but Mia who comes to mind: Mia locked up in her big house, listening to the wind batter the shutters. Even though I haven’t spoken to her in five years, haven’t even seen her from a distance in maybe three, I suddenly wish I could call her and make sure she’s okay.
“Tropical storm?” Alyssa reaches for the popcorn. “I thought they were saying hurricane.”
“Shhh,” another girl hushes her.
“What’s the difference?” someone else says.
“Shhh.” Now several girls speak at once.
“ . . . Meteorologists are saying that so far wind gusts have reached only forty miles per hour, and so the storm has been downgraded from original reports predicting a historic hurricane,” the reporter says. “Still, they warn that the storm is just beginning and is expected to worsen as it meets the cold front coming off the Atlantic. It is still possible that we’ll be facing hurricane conditions—record winds, flooding, power loss, and road closures. Basically, a big mess.”
The screen cuts to another reporter, this one sitting behind a studio desk and wearing a badly fitting suit, with teeth way too square and white to be real. “Stay safe and stay home, people. . . .”
“There goes visiting day.” Rachel makes a face. Rachel is in for depression and mood disorders, a cluster that includes everyone with serious suicidal tendencies—people who’ve done far more than, say, stick a thumbtack in their arm just to see if it would hurt. (It did.) Rachel has the sharp, sweet face of a squirrel and looks like the kind of girl you’d want to cheat off during a math test—until she rolls up her sleeves and all her old track marks are visible.
“What do you mean?” I say.
She jerks her chin toward the screen. “We’re marooned. See? Flood zone number one.” Now there’s a big map on TV showing different portions of Vermont and how much water they can expect. Addison County is highlighted in a fire-engine shade of red.
“The weather reports always exaggerate,” I say quickly. “They’re just trying to boost ratings.”
Rachel shrugs. “Maybe.”
“When’s the last time we had a tornado in Vermont?”
“Like, four years ago,” she says. “Why do you even care, anyway? No one’s coming for you.”
Stupidly, hearing the words out loud like that, I get a weird ping in my chest, like a popcorn kernel has gone down the wrong pipe.
“My cousin’s coming,” I say, which is mostly true. Wade Turner is actually my mom’s cousin’s son, which makes him once removed or twice baked or whatever you call it. For the past five years, he’s run a conspiracy site dedicated to the murder at Brickhouse Lane. He’s convinced, for reasons I don’t completely understand, that he can find the truth and clear my name. For twenty bucks in gas money—half of what my mom gives me for the month for incidentals, like candy bars and recovery-themed sweatshirts and postcards—he’ll drive an hour and a half from East Wellington to Four Corners to drop off bottles of dirty pee. He’d probably do it even if I didn’t pay him, just for the chance to grill me on what happened—not that I ever have anything new to say.
Wade is weird as hell, but at least he’s someone. My mom hasn’t visited Four Corners at all, and my older sister—her face narrowed so much it has achieved the look of an exclamation point—came only once, still wearing scrubs, to drop off a stack of magazines I hadn’t asked for and tell me that I was disappointing everybody. And my dad has been out of the picture forever, a fact that has never much bothered me but has been used time and again by therapists and bloggers and the state-appointed attorney who argued against my transfer to criminal court to explain everything from my supposed juvenile delinquency to the fact that I don’t like math.
My system with Wade is simple. Once every ten days, he makes the seventy-four-mile drive from East Wellington with a bottle of yellow Gatorade rattling around on the floor of his old truck—a bottle that just happens to contains pee he snuck out of the state-sponsored clinic for junkies and drunks where he works during the week. He gets to Four Corners and signs in at the lobby. Then, pretending he’s desperate to use the bathroom after the drive, he ducks into the visitors’ bathroom and drops the Gatorade bottle in the toilet tank, which only occasionally gets checked for bags of pills or floating vodka bottles.
Later, after Wade and I do our obligatory chat—the most painful part of the whole process, as far as I’m concerned, since I have to pretend to actually be happy to see him and he just sits there with a dopey smile on his face, like a kid in front of a mall Santa Claus—I walk out with him to say goodbye, carrying an empty plastic soda cup from the cafeteria, fitted with a lid and straw. There are always so many people signing in and getting waved through security or blubbering while they talk to the counselors, it’s no big deal to use the visitors’ bathroom without anyone noticing. The pee goes in the soda cup, and then in the shot-glass-size containers the counselors distribute with my name written in Magic Marker on the label. Just in time to flunk my drug test and land myself a very late checkout.
Maybe I’ll get to stay for ninety days this time.
“Thank you, Ellen,” the fat guy in the badly fitting suit says, and then puts on his bad-news voice. “In other news, the town of Twin Lakes is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the tragedy at Brickhouse Lane—”
All the air goes out of the room. Half the girls turn to stare at me. The rest of them go still, as if they’re worried the slightest motion will cause an avalanche.
“—in which, on a seemingly normal Tuesday afternoon, thirteen-year-old Summer Marks was viciously murdered.” A picture of Summer flashes and my heart closes up, fist-like. She looks so young. She was so young: our thirteenth birthdays, only three days apart, had passed two weeks before she was murdered. And yet when I imagine her, and when she comes to me—which she still does, in quick impressions, popping in and out of dreams or running through my memories the way she used to run through the woods, suddenly full of light and suddenly plunged into shadow—she’s always my age. Or maybe I’m her age, back when she was my everything.
“Suspicion quickly fell on Summer’s then-boyfriend and two best friends, who had been obsessed with a little-known and especially violent children’s book—”
Please don’t show the picture. My lungs feel as if they’re being flattened to paper. Please don’t show the picture.
“Turn it off,” one of the counselors says sharply. Jocelyn is looking for the remote on the carpet, where it has become lost in the tangle of legs and blankets and soda cups. And it’s too late, anyway. A second later, the picture is on the screen, the infamous picture.
In it, Mia and I are dressed up for Halloween like the Reapers of Lovelorn, wearing black hoodies and lots of eyeliner that Summer pocketed from a local CVS and carrying homemade scythes fashioned from tinfoil and broom handles. And Summer, standing between us, is the Savior: in all white, her blond hair pinned and curled, her lips bloodred and pulled into a smile and a matching circle of red around her neck, too. The news has fuzzed out my face and Mia’s as if with a giant eraser, but Summer’s face is perfectly clear, grinning and triumphant.
I didn’t even want to be a Reaper. I thought we should dress up as the original three—Ava, Ashleigh, and Audrey—but Summer said that would be boring. It was all Summer’s idea.
“So wait. Which one is you?” Zoe asks, turning to me. Zoe is new. She got out of the detox unit only a few days ago and since then has done nothing but sit sullenly in group, chewing on the sleeve of her hoodie or staring at the ceiling fan as if it’s the most fascinating thing in the universe.
“The remote.” The buzz is building among the counselors. Jocelyn is shoving people aside, rolling other girls onto their hips, trying to find the lost remote.
“The case against the two girls was soon dropped, and Summer’s boyfriend was ultimately acquitted, due largely to objections by the defense that the investigation had been mishandled.” He pauses and lets this sink in for a minute, staring at the camera sadly, as if to say that this, the failure to put us in jail for the rest of our natural lives, is an absolute travesty.
He doesn’t say that the cops never even cautioned us before dragging us down to the police station, so nothing we told them would have held up in court. He doesn’t say that Owen’s defense turned up evidence of insane police incompetence: the DNA sample that supposedly showed his blood intermingled with Summer’s at the crime scene had actually been left in the back of a police van for forty-eight hours and was so broken down by heat that it was ruled inadmissible.
“That is you, right?” Zoe repeats, now looking hurt by my refusal to acknowledge her.
“Five years later, this small, tight-knit community is still shattered by the incomprehensible horror of this crime, and on Sunday plans to host a memorial to—”
The TV goes blank. Jocelyn has at last found the remote, and she sits there panting, like a dog that’s worked too hard to find a bone. There’s an electric silence, somehow louder than any sound. Everyone is watching me, or deliberately not watching me, as if they’re afraid I’ll scream or throw something or maybe just start crying.
Or maybe they’re just afraid.
“Well.” Trish springs to her feet, false cheerful, clapping her hands. “What’s it going to be tonight? Last week there was a vote for Tangled—should we watch that?”
No one answers. The room is still laced with tension. I stand up, slightly dizzy, not caring that this will make it worse. No one says anything as I force my way out into the hall, stomping over popcorn kernels and plastic cups, stepping on a girl’s hand. She yelps and then goes quickly quiet.
The hall is empty and cool—an AC thrums somewhere in the walls. As soon as I’m alone, my eyes start to burn and blink fast; I’m not even sure why I’m crying. Maybe it was seeing Summer’s face on TV—that crazy-beautiful heart-shaped face, all big eyes and thick lashes, smiling like she always had a secret.
The pay phone at the end of the hall is etched with initials of previous patients. The receiver smells like bubble gum, and it’s always coated with a thin moisture-film of sweat and lotion. I try to keep it far away from my cheek as I pull out my phone card—sold in the Four Corners store next to racks of stuffed animals and motivational T-shirts—and punch in Wade’s number.
He picks up on the first ring.
“It’s Brynn,” I say, instinctively lowering my voice, even though there’s no one in the hall to eavesdrop. “You’re still coming tomorrow, right? You’re not listening to all this bullshit about a hurricane?”
“Brynn! Hi!” Wade always speaks in exclamation points. “I’m still . . .” His voice fades out and I have to wrench the phone away from my ear as a brief series of cracks and pops explodes through the line.
“What?” I knuckle the phone a little harder. “I can’t hear you.”
“Sorry!” Another series of cracks, like the sound of someone balling up tinfoil, disturb the line. “The wind’s bad already. They say we’re going to get maybe three feet of rain. River’s supposed to . . .” His voice fades out again.
“Wade,” I say. I can still hear him talking, but his words are hopelessly distorted. “Wade, I can’t understand you. Just tell me that we’re on for tomorrow. Promise me, okay?”
“I can’t control the weather, Brynn,” he says. Another annoying thing about Wade is that he comes out with deeply obvious statements as if they’re major pieces of wisdom.
“Listen.” At this point I’m pretty much desperate. I need Wade. I’m not leaving Four Corners. I’m not going back into a world of people who stare at me or, even worse, choose to ignore me altogether—push past me on the sidewalk, refuse to serve me at the diner, look straight through me, as if I don’t exist. “Just say you’ll be here, okay? I have something I want to tell you. It’s important.” All bullshit, obviously, and like I said, I’m not a liar by nature. But I’ve learned to look out for myself. I’ve had to.
“What kind of something?” His voice turns suspicious—but also hopeful.
“Something I remembered,” I say, making it up as I go, trying to keep it vague.
“It’s about Summer,” I add quickly when he says nothing. “You still want to help me, right?”
There’s a long stretch of quiet, disturbed only by the faint pops and buzzes on the line.
“Wade?” I’m gripping the phone so tightly, my knuckles hurt.
“If the roads are open,” he says. It sounds like he’s talking through a shitty computer speaker. “I’ll be there.”
I say, “They’ll be open.” I don’t even say goodbye before hanging up.
The rain gets to us just before lights-out, beating so hard on the roof it sounds like a stampede. Half the girls scream when lightning rips across the sky, and a moment later, the lights flicker.
Monroe finds me just after I’ve brushed my teeth, planting herself in front of the bathroom door so I have no choice but to stop.
“Hey.” She flicks her bangs out of her eyes. “I’m sorry about what happened before. The whole news thing. No one knew what to—” She breaks off, sighing. “Look, I think it’s cool, okay?”
“You think what’s cool?” I say automatically, and then wish I hadn’t.
She blinks at me. “That you killed someone.”
At Four Corners there’s this thing called T.H.I.N.K. Before you speak, you’re supposed to make sure that what you have to say is Truthful, Honest, Important, Necessary, and Kind. In principle, it’s a nice idea. But principles and practice are very different things.
“You’re an idiot,” I say. “And you’re in my way.”
The wind is so loud it keeps me up for hours. It screams like someone lost and desperate in the dark. But finally I do sleep. And for the first time in years, I dream of Lovelorn.