Little Pretty Things (22 page)

“She was really good, Jessica. And we all loved her, me, Coach, and Fitz.” We stared at each other until I knew what I wanted to say. “He’s heartsick,” I said. “That’s the kind of sick he is.”

At the break, I sat for a while on the gym stairs, letting the girls get themselves put together. When they finally filed out, lips glossed and hair smoothed, they were a different species from the ponytailed runners I’d just put through their paces. They reminded me of exotic birds in their brightness, skinny legs in over-snug pants. When I was sure they were gone, I let myself into the girls locker room before the next group showed up.

Ten years, but it smelled the same. Steamy, sweaty, like the air inside was holding tight just this side of a rain forest, but with a side of bleach disinfectant. I admired the scent professionally. If Lu and I had been in charge of keeping this space, the smell would have teetered into mildew.

A set of dark offices lined one wall. They were empty, being used for storage, since all the phys-ed classes were covered by men at the moment. What if . . . I pressed my face to the window in the door, imagining the photo Maddy had left for me framed on the wall, and some of my trophies on a shelf over the desk.

One glance through the glass, though, and I caught the trail of a fleeting memory. Me, standing in the boys’ locker room. Maddy, scrounging around in the dark in Coach and Fitz’s office.

We’d been pulling some prank. But no, that wasn’t right. Prank season had been called off before sectionals—“We’re getting serious, here, and if you’re not, it’s time to pack it in,” Fitz told us—but this night in the boys’ locker room was after we knew Maddy and I would run at state. Coach Trenton’s Coach of the Year trophy leaned against the wall in the corner, getting ready to join other awards in the lobby trophy case. And then I’d turned to watch the doors, nervous.

Rooting around in a teacher’s office, illegally inside the school after hours. More than expulsion, we gambled everything we’d been working for. My dad would have been so disappointed, if we’d been caught.

Except . . .

I couldn’t quite remember what this place wanted to tell me.

I looked around the locker room, feeling daintily at my sore lip. Maybe they’d slapped a new coat of paint on the old lockers, but otherwise it was the same: the same fluorescent lights, the same wall of mirrors, the same rolling plastic bin of wet towels. In the open shower room, the same blue tiles.

I was turning to go when the door from the pool opened and another bin banged and clattered in. Behind it came chubby, pockmarked arms, and then blue shirtsleeves, and then the janitor, Cheryl, her short, dark hair plastered into a black cap against her head. “Sorry,” she said. “I figured you’d all be good and gone. Let me grab my towels, and I’ll be out of the way.”

The shower room suddenly felt strangely crowded. I took a step backward, but the feeling grabbed at me. Me, her, one of those empty bins—we were falling into place in my mind. That night of sneaking into Coach and Fitz’s office snapped back to me, whole.

We
had
been caught.

No wonder the sight of this woman in the back hallway or here in the shower room made me shrink away. That night in the dark locker room, while I’d stood shaking in dread and hissing for Maddy to hurry up, the janitor had wheeled in one of her bins. Startled, mad, she’d hustled us out of the office and the locker room, and down the hall and across the lobby, scolding us like a grandmother and chasing us out into the night.

“I’m sure sorry about your friend,” she said now.

I looked at her more closely than I ever had. She was younger than I remembered, but had lived hard. Those scars. They must have been burns from an occasional run-in with the school’s industrial washer and drier. I was shamed by how well she kept these wet, sweaty rooms. I vowed to work harder, any place I ended up. I glanced at her arms and away again, hoping I wouldn’t end up here.

“Thank you,” I said. I let a long moment pass, trying to grab at that memory. Here we were again. “You remember us,” I said. “I mean, you remember me from—”

She waved her hand at me, pushing the empty tub over the rough tile to sit next to the full bin. The racket was tremendous. “Kids’ll be kids sometimes,” she said when the cart stopped moving. “Ain’t the kids that are the problem, you ask me. She wasn’t any trouble, was she? Spirited. But she didn’t deserve what’s happened to her.”

“No.”

“They don’t get a break, the girls. I’ve seen it.” She pulled the full bin toward her, tucking in a towel that had been left dangling over the side. “I heard another girl got hurt over there at that mo-tel. Just a little girl.”

“A student here,” I agreed.

“That should help find the one that done it, then.”

I swallowed hard. “I hope.”

Cheryl sang a little tune under her breath, flipping the wet edge of towels into the bin. “Hey, how old’s that little one now?”

Her scars were lighter than the rest of her skin. I stared at them for a long moment, then found her eyes. “The student?”

“Nah, I meant—never mind.” She spun her bin away, clucking her tongue and murmuring to herself.

“Cheryl—”

“
Shirl
,” she said, and she started the full bin bouncing thunderously toward the pool door.

“I’m sorry,” I called over the noise. “Shirl. I’m grateful that you didn’t tell anyone about us in the boys’ locker room that night. You know what would have happened to us?”

She stopped and stretched to open the door. “I’ve had to ignore a lot worse.”

“We’d have been expelled, wouldn’t have been allowed to run the state tournament.”

She mused at the room around us. “Seems like I heard you didn’t do that anyway.”

And then Maddy hadn’t finished school, and I had, but I hadn’t done a second of growing up since. So what had we gained, breaking into the school that night?

“Shirl,” I whispered, my words hissing against the tile. “Which little one?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

When the last class of girls headed toward the locker room, I bolted out a side exit and to my car. I put the keys in the ignition but couldn’t think of where I wanted to be. Out at the track, Coach was straightening a set of hurdles. He probably could have used my help today with Fitz gone again.

I rested my head on the steering wheel for a while. When I looked up, a straggling line of girls tramped from the school out to practice. Their duffels, as big as body bags, bumped against their legs.

Body bags. Now that I’d seen one up close, this was my point of reference. I pounded the steering wheel with my fist. Then again.

Again, and again until I could feel the pain. I cradled my hand to my chest and listened to my own ragged breath.

Maddy’s little one, of course. That was what Shirl thought I’d known and hadn’t wanted to tell me.

One of Shirl’s jobs had always been to clean out gym lockers at the end of each semester, when everyone popped off their padlock and cleaned out their hair bands and dirty socks. Girls were creatures of habit. We used the same lockers semester after semester and left things in between, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not.

Ten years ago, when a used pregnancy test turned up in the back of one of the girls’ lockers, Shirl tossed it but took note and watched. The test had come from Maddy’s locker.

“It was a plus sign,” Shirl told me, giving me a look. “You know what the plus sign means, right?”

I didn’t want to believe it. “Could it have been someone else’s test?”

Shirl leveled me with a look of pity. It could have been. But it wasn’t. She’d never said a word to anyone. When Maddy hadn’t run state, Shirl had all the confirmation she needed. But she didn’t know then or now what I knew, what I understood at last.

On the morning of the state tournament she’d worked for four years to run—and probably win—Maddy had miscarried a baby.

Now, sitting in my car cradling my sore hand, I believed it. I felt for that thin girl sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, clutching at her gut. Seventeen, scared. She’d gotten dressed in the bathroom. Why had I not noticed how strange that was, for a girl who got dressed in front of other girls for gym and at meets every day of the week?

Maybe I hadn’t wanted to notice. I only wanted to run, while my best friend convulsed in pain a few feet away.

Of course she hadn’t said anything, and I wondered why she hadn’t confided in me. I would have been shocked. I was shocked now. I would have been pissed, too. Well, I’d already been mad, but at least I could have been mad about the right thing. My surprise might have eaten away at some of the anger, and I could have . . . helped, or insisted she get help.

We could have stayed friends. I wouldn’t have left her to face the aftermath of a miscarriage alone. I wouldn’t have considered leaving her in that room to run state, not for a second.

At least I hoped I wouldn’t have.

I knew a couple of things, though. I knew I wouldn’t leave her now.

And I knew that Beck deserved a piece of my mind.

I turned the key in the ignition and pointed the car toward Beck’s end of the county.

He’d never been good for her. At best, he could have been a waste of her time, but instead he’d ruined everything she hoped for. Now I could see how she’d so easily let state go, how she’d finished with school before school was technically finished with her. How she might have gone off on her own instead of to college, and started a new life where she didn’t have to answer old questions or be compared to old ideas of herself. So much made sense. So much and nothing.

Beck must have made her promise not to tell me. Well, he’d run out of luck keeping his secret. I had to tell Courtney. This was relevant. This was motive.

Unless . . .

Unless he hadn’t known.

This lightened my foot on the gas pedal as I passed around the edge of town.

In any case, my anger seemed to me ridiculous, pointless. What would I say to him, even if he had known?

My pride was at stake, that was all. She hadn’t told me. She hadn’t even told me she’d had sex. All those phone calls, and late nights staying at my house, the subject came up all the time. I was innocent and stupid on the topic, and she was pregnant.

And when Maddy told me not to leave her alone with Beck, was that some joke they shared?

Maybe that was the part that stung the most. Always behind, always left in the dust. But then she’d left him behind, too, hadn’t she?

At a stop sign, I let the car idle and looked around. The cornfields were green, but low. They went on forever, like the framed prints in each Mid-Night room. No markers, no houses, just long, dusty roads. The car driving off the edge of the print was mine.

I had to think about where I was going. I’d been to Beck’s house once, long ago, when Maddy had dragged me along to a party there. But the party had not been what we’d expected. Instead of other people from Midway High, most of the guests had been Beck’s friends from around town, mostly older guys who worked at some plant in Lafayette. Maddy and I got tired of how they stared at us and left, back to my house. We always went back to my house, never hers.

Never to hers.

That terrible puke-green sweater.

It sideswiped me. I fumbled with the gearshift, then my seat belt, and the door, and barely made it to the weeds at the side of the road. I threw up until I was empty, and then stayed in position, dry grass and dirt caught in my fists.

I missed the sound of the approaching truck until it was upon me.

Beck leaned out the window. “You praying?”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Shut up.”

He got out of the truck and came around. “What? Ah, man. You OK?” He looked around the way Shelly had, as though whatever afflicted me might attach itself to him.

I found my feet. The scratches on my palms from the day before were raw again. I dusted the gravel from them gently. “I’m fine.”

“Uh, huh.” He glanced toward the puddle I’d left on the side of the road. “A little late in the day for morning sickness, isn’t it?”

I opened my mouth to say something sharp. Nothing came out.

If Maddy had been pregnant by her own father—well, I couldn’t say that. And if she’d been pregnant by Beck but never told him, was it my place to fill him in? And if he’d known all along . . .

“What?” he said. He already seemed like a different person than the one I’d always hated.

Standing alone with him on the side of a gravel road, I couldn’t decide which way to go. The countryside seemed so vast and empty.

“What are you doing all the way out here, anyway?”

“Driving.”

“Driving to see me?” he said.

“Why would I be coming to see you?”

“Thought maybe something had happened. You know, with Maddy’s, uh, case, or whatever.”

He’d hear about it sooner or later. Midway was like that. “The fiancé showed up,” I said. “Vincent. I ran into him downtown. And he wigged out over Maddy’s ring being kept at the bank.”

“Why does he care about Maddy’s ring?” he said.

“Maddy’s ring probably doubled the bank’s net holdings. You should see—”

“I mean, why does he care about Maddy’s ring and not Maddy’s
death
?”