All Unquiet Things (2 page)

I cleared my throat. They stopped talking about me and looked up.

“Oh, Neily, you’re awake,” my mother clucked, getting out of her seat and wrapping her arms around me. I swayed a little, still unsteady on my feet. She pressed her hand against my forehead. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

My father didn’t say anything. He just stared at me like he didn’t know who I was. The house seemed smaller with him in it; his self-righteousness was crowding us out.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked, opening the refrigerator and getting a carton of orange juice. My parents had divorced when I was seven, and I could have counted on two hands the number of times my father had visited since he’d moved out. They had joint custody, which was strictly enforced by my
mother. She insisted I visit my father every other weekend and sometimes on major holidays, but I don’t think either of us enjoyed our time together much.

“I called him. I was worried.”

“Well, I’m fine. He can stop pretending to care and go home now.”

“Neily, he’s your father—”

“Would you two stop talking about me like I’m not even here?” my father shouted, pounding his fist against the table. “I’m in the goddamned room.”

“Sorry, I guess we’re just not that used to it,” I snapped.

“Well, our son’s being an asshole. I think that means he’s back to normal.” My father got up and stood behind my mother. He had almost a foot and a hundred pounds on her, but since the divorce, whenever we were together, he’d started putting her between the two of us, as if daring me to try something. I wasn’t huge, but I was agile and strong—I could’ve taken him.

“Kevin, don’t.”

“I guess I can be going now, since he’s awake.” My father picked up his suit jacket and tossed it over his arm. “Glad you’re not dead, Neily.”

“That would be more convincing if you weren’t looking at the door when you said it!” I shouted after him. The front door slammed. I slumped against the refrigerator, suddenly too weak to stand on my own.

My mother rushed over and put her hand under my arm. “You’re too hard on him. He rushed right to the hospital when I called.”

“I’m
too hard on him? Why is it that the only time you ever stick up for him is when I’m the one who’s mad at him?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re always bitching about him, but the one time I need you to back me up, you rush to his defense.” I shook her off. “I don’t need your help.”

“Maybe you should take another sedative. Sleep a little longer. It might make you feel better.”

“No.”

“Or you could eat something? I could make you toast? The doctor said nothing heavy for a while after you get up, but I could make soup?”

When she’s worried, my mother speaks only in interrogative sentences. “You know what, Mom? I’m fine.” I headed toward the stairs.

“Suit yourself. But if you’re fine, then you can go to school tomorrow. Senior year. Go, Gaels!” My mother made a halfhearted fist in the air and gave me a small smile.

Senior year at Brighton Day School. Go, Gaels.

We lost a classmate last year, but you wouldn’t know that from the way everyone was acting. It was all business as usual, laughing and showing off after a summer of leisure and pleasure. The big news on the quad was that Cass Irving got a new car, a black Mercedes SLK, and Lucy Miller had hooked up with a college guy down in Cabo San Lucas. Adam Murray, the tough, good-looking son of a cardiothoracic surgeon and his bombshell second wife, was the center of attention as always. The go-to guy for drugs at Brighton, Adam took top billing on the roster of the school’s popular crowd. He seemed to command the school without ever really having
any interest in it. He cared about nobody and nothing but himself.

Carly Ribelli, the girl who died, had been many things. She had been my first friend at Brighton, and my first girlfriend. It had ended badly, and I had never forgiven her for it. Carly had been smart, the brightest girl in our class. But she had also been reckless and damaged and lost, and the people she trusted to fix all of those problems had only made them worse. When I first met her, I had known none of those things, saw none of it coming. In retrospect, it was all there, down in the dark, cavernous part of the heart where anything might lurk, but when I met Carly she was, for all intents and purposes, an entirely different person than she was on the night she died, and I blamed Adam and his crew for that.

I would say that Carly fell in with the wrong crowd, but the truth is that there was no falling, no tumbling, no deceit on the part of the wrong crowd involved. Carly sought them out.
She
wooed
them
, anxious for something more than after-school study sessions and People with No Problems. Overnight, seemingly, she developed an affinity for kids with sharp edges. For Carly, this sort of social mobility involved ascension rather than collapse—these wastrels she wanted so desperately to befriend were not the gutter junkies teetering on the brink of expulsion, or the emo hipsters who sat behind the library at lunch smoking clove cigarettes and wanking about bands no one had ever heard of. Her target was Brighton royalty.

My classmates disgusted me most of the time, now more than ever. I knew that it was hypocritical—after all, I was one of them—but I couldn’t help it. I felt bad for the Brighton Fund kids, students whose grades and standardized test scores were their free ride into the school but who were teased mercilessly
for their lack of status. Every day at Brighton was a reminder of what I didn’t want to be, what my father had tried so hard for years to make me become. By the time Carly died, I was already straining at my ropes, desperate to escape but incapable of finding a real way out, or too cowardly to try.

Brighton was in the foothills, with Empire Valley proper spread out beneath it. The rich kids all lived in the mansions bought with medical millions. Their fathers cured the sick in the valley, then scurried like cockroaches to their brightly lit palaces at the end of their shifts. My father, however, was an executive at a local software company, not a doctor—it was one of the many ways I didn’t quite fit in.

I had a half hour to kill before first period (physics, advanced placement), so I headed to the library. There was a corner where nobody ever went, with a table and chairs. I’d been using it as my makeshift study since I started at Brighton four years before. Carly used to sit there with me; we became friends over that table. Like every other place on campus and in town, it reminded me of her. I could imagine her sitting there without even closing my eyes, hunched over a notebook, her face a mere inch or two from the page, long dark hair spilling over her shoulders.

This morning, Audrey Ribelli had beaten me there. Audrey was Carly’s cousin, and was in the same year as us at Brighton. Shortly after Carly’s murder, Audrey’s father, Enzo, had been arrested for the crime. Audrey’s maternal grandparents—with whom she was now living—had pulled her out of school. They were afraid, I’d heard, that she would be tortured if they forced her to return, which was probably what would have happened. As it was, I couldn’t believe she was sitting here as if no time had passed, as if we were friends.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. Audrey and I hadn’t been on good terms since the end of our freshman year. There was no reason—at least, none that I could think of—for why she was sitting at
my
table, waiting for
me
. It had to be some sort of joke.

“I’m back.” She closed her book, putting a yellow note card in as a placeholder. “Try not to look so disappointed.”

“You have no idea what you’re in for,” I told her. “They’re going to crucify you.”

“I’m not afraid of them,” she said.

“Well, you should be. If you think they’re going to let you forget whose kid you are, you’re delusional. You’d be better off anyplace but here.”

She looked at me squarely, unafraid, and for a moment I wondered if she really was prepared for how she would be treated.

“I don’t understand you,” I told her, shaking my head. “If I were you—”

“You’re not me,” she snapped.

“Thank God.”

“I had to come back.”

“I don’t see why.”

“That’s what I came to talk to you about.”

“Not interested. It’s your problem. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Which was probably more than I owed her.

She hesitated. “I heard about your … weekend.”

“How?”

She shrugged. “People talk.”

“Not to you.”

“They’ll talk to anyone with ears to hear. Word gets around. Are you okay?”

“I don’t know why everyone is making such a big deal out of this. I’m fine.”

She gave me an exasperated look. “Picked up by the police, Neily? Taken to the emergency room? In case you can’t see them, those are red flags.”

“I have a mother. I don’t need you to worry about me.”

“If you say so.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a chain-link bracelet, placing it in front of me on the table. “I thought you might want this.”

The bracelet was silver, with a tag the size of a quarter inscribed with the initials CCR in a Gothic script. It had belonged to Carly; it was the gift I had given her for her fourteenth birthday.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“It was in the box of personal effects the police returned to my uncle Paul after the trial,” Audrey said. “Carly was wearing it the night she died. You didn’t notice that?”

“That’s impossible.”

“Not impossible,” she said, getting up out of her chair. “True. Keep it. She would’ve wanted you to have it.”

“Why would she … ?” I sat down, fingering the bracelet almost absently, lost in thought.

“I don’t know. I thought
you
might.”

I shook my head wordlessly. I couldn’t imagine why Carly would have been wearing the bracelet on the night she died; she hadn’t worn it, that I knew of, since we’d broken up the year before her death.

Audrey started to walk away. I looked up sharply and asked, “That’s it?”

“That’s it.” Audrey looked as if there was something else
she wanted to say, but apparently thought better of it. “See you around, Neily.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, still clutching the bracelet in my fist.

“See you.”

When I got to my locker, it was almost time for the bell to ring. I had shoved Carly’s bracelet in my pocket, aware, however obscurely, that it had no answers for me. Instead, there were only questions: Why had Carly been wearing it the night she died? And why had Audrey returned it to me now, under the pretense of simply wanting me to have it? I was sure it was a pretense, that there was an ulterior motive to her appearance in the library. I considered that maybe she had not come to give something to me, but to receive something—assurance, perhaps, that her decision to return to school had been the right one. Or that, even though her friends may have deserted her, I was someone she could count on.

Most of the other students were already in their first-period classrooms. My locker should have been empty except for a couple of books, but there was a folded piece of paper at the bottom. I held it up as if it were wired with explosives, carefully unfolding it.

It was a bad scan of a newspaper article that ran a year ago to the day. The picture that accompanied the item, Carly’s last yearbook photo, was blotched and wrinkled, as if somebody had hurriedly shoved it into a copy machine. The bell rang, but I didn’t feel like going to class. I shoved my books in my locker and sat down on a bench to read the clipping. I had read it
before; I had read it about a hundred times. I was familiar with the details, but I couldn’t help it.

EMPIRE VALLEY TEEN SLAIN

EMPIRE VALLEY, Calif.—Police are looking for any witnesses who may have information regarding the murder of 16-year-old Carly Ribelli.

The victim died of multiple gunshot wounds to the chest on Empire Creek Bridge late Sunday night. Authorities place her time of death at approximately 8:45 p.m.