Ecstasy (40 page)

She sat there smoking for a while, blowing gray clouds out the open window. When she finally started talking, she was still
looking away.

“It was the last night of the fest,” she said. “We were having a great time—I mean
great.
Everybody was talking about how it was the best year ever. And the guys, they decided they wanted to go for a swim in the
creek. It was kind of cold, so the rest of us blew it off.

“But after a while, Trish decided she wanted to go find them. She… she kind of had this thing for Alan back then. She really
liked him a lot, but he didn’t even notice. Far as he was concerned, Trish was just one of the guys. But she really wanted
to hang with him, ’cause it was the last night and all. So even though she didn’t really feel like swimming, she went down
there anyway. And”—she took a long drag of the cigarette—“she really wanted me to go with her, but I wouldn’t go. I just met
Axel the day before and I wanted to, you know… hang with him. Some best friend, right?”

“You and Trish were best friends?”

“Back then, yeah. Not so much anymore.”

“Tell me what happened next.”

“Trish went off to find the guys. I went looking for Axel.” She exhaled another smoky contrail. “Never found him, though.”

“But what happened to Trish?”

“I don’t know everything. She wouldn’t tell me. I went over toward the creek looking for Axel, and Trish came running up the
hill all messed up. She looked
awful
—her clothes were all wet and she was crying like crazy. And she told me …She said that all four guys did her. At least she
thought they did—she was still pretty high.”

“She took ecstasy too?”

“Yeah. And Trish was never as into that shit as the rest of us, probably because of her dad being a cop and all. But I guess
she wanted the guys to think she was cool, so she took it. And it must’ve been pretty strong, because she was all”—she shrugged—“…
I don’t know how to describe it. I just never saw anybody on E be so wacked. She was practically…What’s the word?” She thought
about it for a few seconds.
“Catatonic.”

“And that’s not normal?”

Her look said I was an idiot. “Of course not. E can make you all manic—you talk a mile a minute sometimes—or else kind of
mellow, like you’re crazy about the whole world. But Trish was totally… just out of it.”

“She was probably in shock.” Dorrie didn’t answer. “And she told you… what? That she was attacked by all four guys?”

Her eyes welled up again. “She said …I mean…I knew… Trish never did it before, okay?”

“You mean she was a virgin?”

The word sounded as oddly Victorian as ever, and I immediately felt stupid for saying it. Dorrie didn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah. And… she said she didn’t want to do it, that everything just got crazy and they were all just
on
her, and everybody was laughing and she told them no, but they wouldn’t stop….” She squeezed her eyes shut, either to stop
the tears or to blot out the image. “She said it was like a big joke to them, that they just laughed and laughed. And she
said”—Dorrie finally shifted in her seat to face me—“it was like she wasn’t even there, like they fucking raped her, but they
still didn’t notice her. Can you believe that? Can you fucking
believe
it?”

“Did you take her to the hospital?”

She shook her head again, then pulled some Kleenex out of her backpack and blew her nose. When she pulled it away, there was
a bubble of goo stuck to her nose ring.

“She wouldn’t go,” she said. “I tried…I told her she had to see a doctor—that, you know, it would be a good idea if she got
the morning-after pill. But she wouldn’t even talk about it. And the worst thing was… she was just so fucking calm.”

“How do you mean?”

“She was talking about all this awful stuff that just happened to her, and she was like… like a robot, you know? It was …I
don’t know, just really scary, okay? It was way worse than if she’d been all crying and upset. It was like she was half dead
or something.”

“Then what happened?”

“She took off.”

“What?”

“I tried to get her to come back to our tent, but she was afraid she’d run into Lauren or Cindy—she said she didn’t want anybody
else to see her like that. And then she said she was really thirsty from the E, so I went to get her some water. When I got
back, she was gone. I told her to wait for me, that I’d be right back, but she just… left.

“So I spent the whole night looking for her, but I couldn’t find her anyplace. And after I got home from Melting Rock the
next day, she called me and said the whole thing was a big mistake. She said she wasn’t really raped after all, that the whole
thing was her fault. And she swore me to secrecy about it, made me promise never to tell anybody what she told me. I didn’t
see her again until school started.”

“And did you tell anyone?”

The look in her eyes turned from anguished to offended. “Of course not.”

“Not even Lauren or Cindy? Not anyone?”

“I told you,” she said. “Trish swore me to secrecy.”

“And did you believe her?”

“About what?”

“Did you believe Trish when she said it was all a mistake?”

“Are you crazy?” Dorrie spat out. “I
saw
her. She was fucking
traumatized.
”

“So why did you let it slide like that?”

Less fury, more tears. “What was I supposed to do? She tells me it didn’t happen, and then she hardly talks to me for weeks,
and then she practically starves herself to death and she has to go away to some treatment place.…”

“Didn’t you even try to get her to talk about it?”

“Yeah, a couple times, but she… she pretty much acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about.” She focused on the glowing
end of her cigarette for a while, like she found it hypnotic. “And maybe…” Her voice trailed off, eyes still on the burning
butt.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe I wanted to believe her,” she said. “Maybe I wanted to believe it more than anything in the whole goddamn world.”

Y
ou mean, it was better than believing that the four of them had… assaulted her?”

“Yeah,” Dorrie said to her cigarette. “Billy and Alan and Tom and Shaun… they were my friends too, you know.”

“You know, Dorrie …it’s pretty obvious that Trish isn’t the only one who was traumatized.”

She finally looked at me again. “What are you talking about?”

“You see Trish completely messed up. You find out she was raped by four guys she trusted. You can’t confide in anybody about
it. You don’t even know what to believe. And to top it off, you lose your best friend. No wonder you—”

“No wonder I
what?
”

I reached over and pulled her sleeve back up. She pulled it down again and just said, “Fuck you.”

“You really ought to see a counselor.”

“Like it’s any of your business.”

“Tell me something,” I said. “When it came out that those guys didn’t die by accident, didn’t you think it might be connected?
Didn’t you think you should say something?”

She stared down at her lap. “Trish swore me to secrecy.”

“For chrissake, didn’t it occur to you that maybe the reason they were killed was—”

“I didn’t really think about it.”

“Well, you goddamn well better think about it now.”

“Hey, where do you get off—”

“Dorrie, those three guys are
dead.
So’s Axel. Alan’s probably crippled for the rest of his life. And what about that poor girl in Baltimore? She almost died
too, and she didn’t have a damn thing to do with any of this.”

She lit another cigarette, hands less than steady. “So?”

“So who the hell is responsible? Lauren?”

“
Lauren?
Are you crazy?”

“Think about it. She’s really protective of Trish. She knows chemistry. She can get into the labs at Benson. She slept with
Axel. She—”

“She
what?
”

“You didn’t know?” Dorrie shook her head. “I don’t think it was anything serious, just—”

“For Axel, there was no such thing as ‘serious.’ ” She laughed, again without a trace of humor. “Can you believe I gave it
up for that guy?”

“You—”

“He was my first, okay? I thought he was this supercool musician, and… this year, right after the fest, I let him fuck me
in the goddamn dugout at the JHS baseball field. He said he saw it in a movie once and he wanted to try it in there, said
it would be all romantic.” Her voice rose an octave. “And you know what? It
wasn’t
romantic. It fucking
hurt.
And I didn’t even make him use a rubber or anything. I was lucky I didn’t… I was just lucky, okay?” She shook her head. “What
difference does it make? Sex always sucks for girls anyway. And besides, what happened to me was a hell of a lot better than…”

She let the sentence dangle. I finished it.

“Than what happened to Trish?”

She took another drag, hand shaking on the way to her mouth. “Yeah.”

“Dorrie,” I said after a minute, “did you get Axel the key to Deep Lake Cooling?”

She exhaled a plume of smoke. “Fine, all right, yes. How the hell did you know?”

“I figured since you’ve been around campus all your life, you probably know your way around.”

She suddenly flashed a thin smile, and it struck me that it was the only time I’d ever seen her look remotely happy. “I’ve
got a key to the room where they keep all the keys. And Axel… he said he found out some people got paid off a while ago not
to fight Deep Lake, but he didn’t get a penny of it. So he and some of his buddies… they wanted to do something really wild,
something that’d get everybody’s attention even more than the Jell-O thing. So I helped him out.”

“Listen, Dorrie… about Lauren. Do you think there’s any chance she—”

The smile disappeared. “Killed those guys? Are you serious?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Look, Lauren’s never been my favorite person, okay? The princess act gets old after a while. And lately… she kind of treats
me like I’m some sort of sad freak, you know? But I can’t picture her ever doing anything like that. I mean, how would she
even know about what happened to Trish in the first place?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Trish probably told her.”

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“I told you, Trish is in total denial about the whole thing. She won’t even admit it to
herself,
okay?”

“So who—”

“Look, I gotta go.”

“But—”

“Christ, I just spilled my guts to you. Do you have to get me in deep with my parents too? My curfew’s in, like, five minutes.
So can I please have my car keys?”

“Okay.” I handed them over and got out of the car. “But we’re not done talking about this.”

“Maybe you aren’t,” she said, “but I sure as hell am.”

I’d barely shut the door when she peeled out of the parking lot. I went back to my own car and grabbed my cell to call Cody—and
was intensely frustrated to discover that this far out in the hinterlands there was no service.

So I headed back toward Jaspersburg. I’d barely gone two miles when I saw flashing lights in my rearview mirror.
Damn.

I pulled over, rolled down the window, and was summarily blinded by a high-test flashlight beam.

“Hey, what the—”

“Get out of the car.”

“What for?”

“Just get out of the car.”

I put a hand up to block the glare. “Did I do something wrong?”

The next thing I knew, the car door was being yanked open and I was being hauled out by somebody strong enough to do it with
one hand. Before I could even start to figure out what was going on, my hands were cuffed behind my back and I was tossed
into the back of a squad car—something that had been happening to me far too often of late.

It wasn’t until we were speeding down the road that I recognized the man behind the wheel.

“Chief Stilwell? What’s going on?”

“You’re under arrest for violating the terms of your bail agreement.”

“What? How?”

“The nature center’s on the wrong side of the county line.”

“But how…”

I’d been about to ask him just how the hell he knew where I’d been, but something in his tone made me keep my mouth shut.

We kept going, him never once taking his eyes off the road to look at me—and me starting to wonder if I’d been very, very
wrong about Lauren Potter.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“To the station.”

“In Gabriel?”

“Jaspersburg,” he said.

He still didn’t look at me, not even a peek at my reflection in the rearview mirror. The icky feeling in the pit of my stomach
was starting to spread.

He must’ve been driving damn fast, because it was only a minute or so later that we got into town. I guess I expected him
to pull up in front of the town-hall-slash-police-station, but he drove around the back. He left me inside the car for a second
while he unlocked the door, then hauled me up again and propelled me inside.

The place was deserted. Stilwell led me down a hallway, through another door, and down a flight of stairs. We went through
yet another door, beyond which was pitch blackness.

He flicked a switch and some fluorescent lights came on, giving the place a sickly greenish yellow glow—and, by the way, revealing
a pair of jail cells.

He opened one of the doors, shoved me inside, and clanged it shut behind me. Then he told me to turn my back to him so he
could unlock the handcuffs. Since I didn’t know what else to do, I complied; imagine my relief when he actually liberated
my wrists.

By the time I turned around again, he was gone.

I looked around the cell, which offered exactly one place to sit: the bare mattress of the spare steel bed. I plunked myself
down and tried to figure out just what the hell I was supposed to do.

Was there any chance I
wasn’t
in the gigantic amount of trouble I thought I was? Could Stilwell have actually picked me up on some stupid technicality?
But then …how did he know I’d been at the nature center unless—at this point, the icky feeling kicked in again with a vengeance—unless
he’d been following me?