The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (10 page)

Yesterday, Danielle helped her narrow down her dress choice for the eighth-grade dance to a silver number with a conservative neckline and a sexier, asymmetrical piece in “oasis blue.” Charlotte was leaning toward the blue dress.

II

The four girls are the last to finish getting dressed after second-period phys ed class. They are always the last to get dressed because they take their time reapplying fragranced lotion to their ivory limbs, glinting baubles to their discriminating wrists and ears, and expensive, shimmering makeup to their delicate eyelids and lips. Ms. McCreary knows this, so she leaves them to finish preening while she prepares the gym for the next class. Mr. Pickert, their pervy third-period algebra teacher, knows this, but what Ms. McCreary calls “tardy,” the girls call “fashionably late” and Mr. Pickert calls “reasonably delayed,” as long as they sit in the front row with their long legs emerging from short skirts. Rosalee Carrasco knows this, which is why she chooses this specific time to step into the girls’ locker room at Oak View Middle School and reach into the pink, rhinestoned messenger bag at her side.
What do
you
want, skank?
Ashlee says, looking up, holding a comb with its teeth paused in her straightened, tawny hair. Rosalee pulls out a semiautomatic Smith & Wesson 40 VE. It is heavier in her hand than when she fingered it this morning in her father’s desk drawer. She points the cold black barrel at Ashlee.

III

Tomorrow, Charlotte will stay home from school, where she will lock herself in her bathroom and scrape under her fingernails with a toothpick, and then a metal nail file, and then a little Swiss Army knife. She will struggle to get the blood out from under her nails until the blood that is there is her own.

She will stay home for the remainder of the school year, and she won’t answer calls from her friends. Her older sisters will bring her homework from school, and they’ll help her complete it on the floor of her bedroom. One of them will show her how to equalize a basic equation while the other kneels behind her, brushing her hair.

When the new school year begins, Charlotte will attend high school in a new district, where nobody asks her questions.

In fifteen years, she will marry a quiet young professor from UC Berkeley, and they will have two daughters.

When they are old enough, she will tell them that they are both the prettiest princess, even though they never ask, and even though she doesn’t believe it.

I

At just five years old, Ashlee’s parents bought her a Shetland pony.

Her mother went to college with James Dewitt, Danielle’s father, and this is how Ashlee and Danielle became inseparable.

Ashlee was always second in command because her parents were not as rich as Danielle’s (her father moved around real estate, while Danielle’s father moved around stocks) and because her mother was half black, though they never spoke of it.

When other little girls asked to play with them, Ashlee laughed.

She played tennis—but only indoors because she’d learned that too much sun was costly.

It was Ashlee who noticed, last week, that the Mexican girl had begun her period and didn’t know it. She had a blossom of dark red on the back of her khaki pants. Ashlee pointed it out to the others. Someone (not her, certainly) took a picture with his or her camera phone and posted the picture on Facebook, tagging everyone in the school.

II

Rosalee is nervous and angry and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She planned this, and she planned what she wanted to say and how she would say it, but she hasn’t thought past that. She just wants them to listen to her, to be scared, to feel what it feels like to be powerless. She wants a lot of things. Tabatha takes a step toward a locker, and there’s no exit but the one Rosalee is standing in, but Rosalee says
Sit the fuck down
anyway. Danielle stands up and repeats what Ashlee said, without the epithet, and much more calmly:
What do you want?
She stands in a little rectangle of morning sunlight thrown into the room by the small, high windows above the lockers. It puts her perfect face half in shadow. Her hair is perfect and her clothes are perfect, and she was in the middle of doing her makeup, so only her bottom lip is shiny with gloss. She seems in control, even when she’s not. Rosalee hates her for this. Rosalee’s hand is trembling, the heavy black-and-silver Smith & Wesson is trembling, and when she speaks, her voice is trembling. She releases the safety, the way the YouTube video showed her.
I want you to pay
, she says.

III

Tomorrow, Ashlee will go to school. Reporters will sneak onto campus, and one will pop out of a bush like a gangly bird of prey and surprise her. He’ll poke a mic in her face and ask if she knew Rosalee was crazy. She’ll say,
I didn’t think she was crazy. I didn’t think about her at all.

She will stay friends with what remains of her clique through high school, but there will be something off-kilter, as if the shifting of elements within the group has thrown off their center of gravity. She will feel the subtle prick of exclusion when her father loses his real estate job in yet another recession, and after high school, they’ll lose touch completely.

In college, Ashlee will stop lightening her hair, and she will experiment with a new drug called Chastity. Things will unravel rapidly. She will drop out of school, and huge chunks of her life will later appear as empty spheres, or as bleary shapes viewed through a glass of water. It will take twenty years for her to clean herself up, and she will, in therapy, retrace it all back to that day in the locker room at Oak View Middle School. She won’t go any further than that.

I

Tabatha was born in October. She was a Libra.

At two years old, Tabatha would not stop eating her crayons, and her mother had to remove all crayons and crayonlike objects from the house.

Her little brother was born when she was five, and when he was two months old, she pinched his nose closed while he slept to see him open his little pink, translucent lips like a fish. Then she kissed him.

When she was six, she gained an appreciation for the proper use of crayons, and turned out to be a capable artist.

In fourth grade, she and her three new friends helped her dad paint a mural with an ocean theme on the wall in her little brother’s room.

When she was twelve, she was her brother’s hero.

Tabatha Roth was also in love with Scotty Marlowe.

Yesterday, like every Tuesday for the past fifteen years, Tabatha allowed herself to chew gently on a crayon when nobody was looking, before she went to sleep. She liked the feel of wax between her teeth. This crayon color was called “blush.”

II

Do you want money?
Danielle asks.
We can give you money.
Rosalee is confused for a moment, knits her brow.
I don’t want your fucking charity.
She’s never cussed this much, and the word
fuck
feels powerful in her mouth. She says it out loud again, just for good measure:
Fuck.
Charlotte, with her reddish curls bouncing irreverently, moves behind Tabatha. Danielle says, coolly,
Well, then, what do you want?
And she crosses her arms like she’s not scared, like nothing in the whole world scares her. She learned this from her father, who has always told her that “people are cowards, but Dewitts show no fear.” Rosalee feels that she’s losing control of the situation, so she aims at the ceiling. The girls all raise their arms and cover their heads with their hands, instinctually, as Rosalee pulls the trigger, which is harder to squeeze than she’d anticipated. She expects the bullet to strike the plaster tiles and cause a shower of white powder to rain down on them, instilling fear. But instead it makes a sharp
ping
on a pipe, and it’s several seconds before anyone notices that Tabatha is no longer standing. She is an awkward heap on the floor.

III

I

Ms. Janet McCreary was born on a small farm in Pennsylvania, where she milked goats and reveled in lightning storms from her upstairs bedroom window. She saw lightning strike the lone striped maple in the center of a field beneath her window twelve times.

She was a highly precocious child, and she read hungrily, consuming books under her blankets with a flashlight well after her mother turned the lights off. She and her friends spent their time talking about boys and books, but more often books.

Ms. McCreary studied German lit in college but found afterward that her skills were not very marketable. She began teaching PE until she found a position more suited to her.

She met her fiancé, Matthew Parker, on Match.com. Within a year, they’d determined the location and the guest list for their wedding. It would be in June.

Three weeks ago, Ms. McCreary, with much happiness, told her fiancé that she was pregnant. She rigged a game of Scrabble by hiding tiles under the table, and played words like
baby, father
, and
family
until he caught on. He was elated.

II

Ms. McCreary hears the shot from out in the gym, but it doesn’t register with her what it is. This is only a middle school, and she has never heard a real gunshot before. She moves unhurriedly toward the locker room, annoyed with the four girls she left there: What have they done now? As she turns into the locker room, she sees Rosalee from behind. She can see the girls on the ground beyond Rosalee and wonders what they’re playing at.
Strange
, she thinks.
Danielle Dewitt is on her knees.
It is then that she sees the gun. She thinks
Scheisse
, because she always curses in German. Ms. McCreary doesn’t know what to do. Her instinct is to talk to the girl, but she hesitates—maybe she should try to subdue her, or go call for help. Her eyes flicker to Rosalee’s right, where she’s certain she left a softball bat leaning against the wall. She takes a step closer, and she can hear Charlotte on the ground mumbling something over and over, but she can’t make out what it is. She takes another step, but stops, and raises her hand silently to her stomach. Charlotte moves her hand from Tabatha’s head to her own and touches her temple, leaving a bright smudge like a child’s red finger paint. She is saying,
She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.

III

Tomorrow, Ms. McCreary will spend much of the day in the police station, giving statements. She will be tired, but more than that she will be afraid she’s going to lose her job because she is never supposed to leave kids in the locker room alone. There was death on her watch.

Despite the fact that there were more students in the gym who required supervision than there were in the locker room, Ms. McCreary will be the scapegoat for Ella County School District, and she will lose her job.

In two weeks, she will have an abortion, and she will tell her fiancé that it was a miscarriage. She will tell herself she finds unbearable the thought of bringing a child into a world where things like this happened, where her children would have to play and learn and live—with children
like this.

In one year, her fiancé will leave her, and she will let him.

In six years, Ms. McCreary will relocate to Germany, where she will teach English and begin writing. She will publish an article titled “Social Violence and Accountability in American Literature” in a modest academic journal.

I

When Rosalee Carrasco is born to a French mother and Chilean father, she is crying.

Rosalee is always doing and going and performing. She is always trying, and learning.

When she is six, she is feeding her two younger brothers mashed bananas with a tiny rubber-coated spoon because her parents work overtime to pay for her private school.

When she is eight, she is buying trendy pink bracelets and standing nervously in line next to Ashlee at lunch. She is viciously ignored.

At nine, her mother is scolding,
Enfant ingrat! You have nothing to cry about.

When she is seven and eight and ten and twelve, she is asking
Can I play?

At thirteen, she is falling in love with Scotty Marlowe. At thirteen, she is understanding.

At fourteen, she is watching herself become a woman in the mirror, and then she is watching herself become a woman on Facebook, and then she is watching the custodian pull dark, bloody tampons from her locker with gloved hands. She is cowering as boys call her “Rosa-leaky.”

II

Rosalee, honey.
Ms. McCreary says, her voice hardly above a whisper. Rosalee whips around, the gun pointed at chest level, both hands wrapped around the grip. She’s been holding it up for only a minute, maybe two, but it feels as if she’s been holding it her whole life, and it is heavy. Her eyes are big and round as quarters, and Ms. McCreary can see the whites all the way around her dark pupils. Behind her, all of the girls are huddled around Tabatha’s body, and one of the girls—Charlotte—is sniffling.
Rosalee
, Ms. McCreary says again. She steps toward the slight girl, whose dark hair is pulled severely behind her head, making her look older than she is, and whose fear makes her look younger than she is. The teacher holds out her hand, slowly, slowly, her palm up. It is the universal sign for
Give me the gun.
The barrel begins to drop, slowly, slowly. Danielle stands suddenly and says,
She killed Tabatha
in a voice that is a sob and an accusation and a taunt; it is all of these things.
I didn’t
, Rosalee cries out. Her words come out high and hollow; they echo without resonance. She spins around wildly, points the gun at Danielle, and Ms. McCreary shouts,
Rosalee!