Order in the Court (3 page)

I practically jogged to the study rooms on the second floor of the library, taking deep breaths all the while to calm myself. I knew exactly what she wanted to tell me, and I wasn’t going to let her. I didn’t want her to say the words. I didn’t want her to admit it. I didn’t want to hear it, to have it confirmed.

My mother was sleeping with Mr. Haywood. She was going to leave my father.

Life as I knew it was circling the drain, had been since last summer, and I wasn’t any more ready to let go of my parents’ marriage than I had been to attend the triple funeral of the three girls who had sworn to be my Best Friends Forever in the third grade. Not Best Friends for Life, Best Friends
Forever
. Not even
’til death do us part
, though apparently that vow was meaningless too, at least for my mother.

I walked into our usual study room, empty but for Abby slouched in the back corner, her books spread haphazardly around the table in front of her as she dawdled on her smartphone. She looked up when I entered, her customary smirk falling when she saw me.

“You look awful,” she said, frowning at me as I dropped my backpack onto the table and began riffling for my physics notebook. “No, really.” She reached out and touched my arm. “Are you okay? Did the doctor tell you something awful?”

“Nothing like that,” I said, tumbling gracelessly into the chair beside her and flipping open my notebook. “It wasn’t that kind of appointment. Lawyer stuff.”

She nodded thoughtfully and dropped the subject. I was grateful. Abby was one of the few people here who knew who I was and what I’d seen. She hadn’t blabbed about it to anyone yet. I could tell she had questions, but she kept them to herself. One day, maybe I’d tell her about it. The trial, the murders, the friends I’d seen lying in pools of their own blood. I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, to go over every gory detail—not on the stand, and not off it. But I’d have to be ready soon. I didn’t have any choice.

I WASN’T
ready.

I packed my backpack up with new notebooks, pens, and textbooks. I brushed my hair straight and then pulled it into a ponytail. I wore a gray T-shirt, loose jeans, and running shoes. I was as nondescript as possible. No one would notice me in a crowd, would point to me and yell “How’s it going, murder-girl?”, but still, I wasn’t ready. Would I ever be ready?

“Let’s goooooo,” my mother hollered, all voice and no substance, her tiny body at the foot of the stairs looking fully incapable of producing her authoritative lawyer voice. “Get a move on or you’ll be late for your first day!”

I slung my backpack over my shoulder and tromped down the stairs, feeling nauseated and excited and also
not ready
. My dad kissed my forehead before we left, and, having kissed my mother’s lips first, left a smudge of her lipstick on my forehead that I would have to wipe off in the car.

“Good luck, Kitten,” he said, using the same nickname he’d used on my first day of kindergarten. The expression on his face was the same too, like he was watching his tiny four-year-old climb onto the school bus for the first time of many. “You’ll do great out there!”

It was a little more than an hour’s commute into the city. My mother made the drive every day for work, so it just made sense for me to pick a school so close to home. I could live at home, drive in four days a week for classes, and not have to pay the extraordinary fees associated with living in the on-campus residences.

It had nothing to do with my crippling fear of leaving home. It was convenient. It was a good school.

I had acceptance letters from better schools tucked into the bottom drawer of my desk. They were all too far away, too expensive. My parents would have found the money if they’d had to, if I’d so much as asked. But this arrangement was better for all of us.

She dropped me off outside the library. We’d visited the campus beforehand, so I knew where all my classes were; I had a map in my pocket with the correct rooms circled just in case I forgot. My first class was an introductory English lecture. I sat in the middle of the room. It was as large as a movie theater, with a sloped floor and rows of seats leading to a stage where the professor stood, a small bald man in a tweed jacket and pleated trousers.

A girl sat next to me, sighing loudly. There were dozens of unoccupied seats, plenty of room to not sit beside strangers. I stiffened, sitting straight-backed with my notebook open on the tiny swing-out desk that was small enough to be an armrest.

“Hi,” the girl said, extending her hand. “I’m Abby.” She was tall and thin, almost gaunt in the face, but with a heaving, wiggling bosom that seemingly moved independently from the rest of her body. Her skin was pale and her hair dyed an unnatural shade of red, brighter even than her red lipstick. She had a ring through her lower lip and a stud in her nose. I shook her hand.

“Corey,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Listen,” Abby said immediately, leaning in toward me as if we were conspiring. “I’m new and I don’t know many people yet, so I’m just going to put myself out there. You look like you’re here for a purpose, sitting all alone. You’re not the kind of girl who’s going to party all the time and fail out. I’m not that girl either. We should be friends.”

Before I had time to respond, she was waving to someone who had just entered the back of the class. A boy in a black beanie and baggy black T-shirt jogged up the rows and sat on my other side, smiling brightly.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Corey, this is Sasha. Sasha, Corey.” Abby made the introduction in a rapid, no-nonsense kind of voice. I shook hands with Sasha too. I noticed that his nails were painted black, and on his thumbs he’d added the anarchy symbol in fine-tipped silver sharpie.

“It’s friendly for Aleksander,” he said, meaning the nickname. He had a vaguely European accent. Ukrainian? Slavic? Russian? I couldn’t tell. “Yours?”

“Short for Corinna.”

Sasha nodded and pulled out a laptop computer, balancing it on his lap without opening his tiny armrest-desk. I was sandwiched between them for the whole lecture. Abby, not taking notes, Sasha typing so fast his fingers blurred, transcribing the entire lecture from start to finish. It was an introductory lecture, so my notes were sparse.

Abby and Sasha followed close behind me when I left the lecture hall. “Are you in any science courses? Can I see your schedule?” I had it in my hand, and Abby leaned over my shoulder to read it. “We’ve got the same intro physics lecture this afternoon! Nice!”

I’d barely said two words to her. Sasha walked me to my next class, introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, as Abby ran off to make it to a history lecture in another wing of the university. Sasha had an hour before his next class.

“I met her during dorm orientation,” Sasha supplied, answering one of my unspoken questions. “She’s loud but she’s all right. A little dark, though.” I raised my eyebrows at him skeptically.

“Says the guy in the black nail polish,” I said, my first words to him since our introduction.

Sasha laughed and slung an arm around me, as if we’d been friends for a long time. I felt instantly uncomfortable. “You do what you’ve gotta to stand out from the herd,” he said, leaning in close to my ear. I flinched away, and he dropped his arm. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to flirt or anything. I’m incurably homosexual.”

I blinked at the phrasing. “Incurably?” I asked, finding the word strange for such a declaration. Sasha nodded solemnly, as if it were a deadly diagnosis, and then smiled brightly, all crooked teeth and joy an instant later.

“Yep. Sorry, pretty, I’m off-limits.” He ran his hands down his chest and wiggled his hips. “Can’t touch dis.” He started humming MC Hammer and skipping just as we made it to my next classroom, his hips swinging to a beat that was only inside his head. People were staring at him, but I was instantly amused. I couldn’t help but smile.

“Careful, you might set off the fire alarms with all that flaming,” I said. He stopped dancing at once, his smile dropping from his face. I felt my smile fade away too, suddenly terrified that I’d accidentally insulted the first potential friend I’d made.

Sasha looked at me, and then, after a moment, began to laugh hysterically, drawing stares from even more students as they hurried to their first or second classes of the school year.

“Oh God, oh God,” he wheezed, clapping me on the shoulder with one of his wide, flat palms. “You’re my new favorite. You win this round, Corey, you win. Your name this week is Corey Win.”

I shrugged. “That’s my name every week,” I said, and then waved good-bye as I followed the pulsing crowd of freshmen into the next lecture hall. He wouldn’t get the joke yet, not knowing my last name became the word
win
in the mouths of most people who spoke English, but I’d tell him some other time. Ricky had always gotten a hoot out of it, trying so hard to wrap her tongue around the
Ng
sound that didn’t exist in her language except at the end of words. I had a feeling Sasha would be the same way. Though maybe not. I’d never heard Ukrainian.

Somehow, inexplicably, and completely accidentally, I’d made friends while desperately trying not to be noticed by anyone. So much for low profile.

I LOOKED
at the jury critically for the first time after my big statement. It was divided pretty equally in gender, men and women of varying ages and races. I surveyed them, trying to figure out who was on my side. Was it too soon to know? A black man, older, with graying hair and horn-rimmed glasses, sitting in the back row, had stopped taking notes in order to stare at me, wide-eyed. Next to him was a Korean woman my parents’ age, her hair pulled back into a tight knot on the top of her head. She looked bored. Two white men came next, one about my parents’ age, the other looking barely older than me, perhaps a university student—

“Corinna,” Haywood said, and I turned to him, remembering where we were in my testimony. This was the important part, I couldn’t lose focus now. I bit down on the inside of my cheek, rough and sore from repeated gnawing. “Where were you on the morning of June twenty-seventh?”

“We were coming home from prom—” Always specify. Don’t assume that they know. “Ricky, Jessa, Kate, and I had rented a limousine with two boys for the night. After the dance was over, the driver dropped the boys off first, and then we asked him to let us off at Sparky’s Diner on Main Street.”

“Why did you go to Sparky’s Diner?” Haywood asked. “Why not go home?”

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “Ricky said she was hungry. It had been hours since we’d eaten, so we agreed to stop for food. Sparky’s is close to the O’Brien’s house and open twenty-four hours. We were going to walk to her place afterward to have a post-prom sleepover.” The idea seemed ludicrous now. But how could we have known then?

“What happened after the limousine dropped you off?”

“We went inside the diner and ordered pancakes. It was just after one o’clock, so there was only one employee working. Jacob Hastings took our orders. When he left the table to go to the kitchen, I told them I had to go to the bathroom. I asked if anyone wanted to go with me.”

Haywood tapped his chin. “Was it a normal thing to ask if your friends wanted to go to the bathroom together?” he asked. I nodded.

“Yes. We almost always went to the bathroom in a group. It’s just a thing girls do.”

“But you did not go to the bathroom as a group the night in question?” Haywood continued, filling in his parts of the rehearsed conversation naturally. “Why is that?”

“I don’t know. We were all tired, and they had already made themselves comfortable in the booth, I guess. I remember Ricky asked me if I needed help holding my skirt up because it had so much tulle, and when I said no, she told me to go on my own, then.” I shook my head. “It was a joke. I laughed. And then I went to the bathroom on my own.”

“What happened next?”

“I was washing my hands when I heard the first gunshot.”
Boom!
I could still feel it in my chest, the reverberation of the shot, the echo.

“You could hear the shot from inside the bathroom?”

“Yes. It was muffled, but it was clearly a gunshot. I was… startled, to say the least.”
My hands gripping the sides of the sink, white-knuckled, all the color draining from my face, my reflection in the mirror with terrified eyes.
“I could hear screaming. Ricky and Jessa were screaming. And then there was a second shot, and it was just Jessa screaming.”

I didn’t dare look out into the audience. I didn’t want to see Phillip O’Brien’s face as I described his daughter’s last moments on earth. My hands were shaking, still clutching Haywood’s white handkerchief. I shut my eyes tightly.

“What did you do, Corinna?” Haywood prompted gently. “What happened after the second shot?”

“There was a third shot before I could do anything. And it got so, so quiet.” I held my breath for a moment, recreating the stillness. Nobody in the courtroom made a sound, not even a cough. “I went to the bathroom door and went down on my knees, opening it just a little, tiny sliver. And I peeked out the crack. I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

“What did you see when you looked out of the crack in the door?”

“I could see into the hallway that leads to the kitchen,” I said. I closed my eyes again and pictured it.
His face, unmasked but in profile, bare but for the flecks of blood across his cheeks, his lips. There was a gun in his hand, a sawed-off shotgun. His baseball cap turned backward, Cincinnati Reds.
“Jake had come out into the hall. He fell to his knees and put his hands up. He said, ‘Please.’ And then Dustin raised the gun and pulled the trigger. Jake fell. There was so much blood.”

There were gasps and little noises from the audience and the jury. Someone was crying, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t look to see who it was. I kept my eyes on Haywood, my voice even and confident. Haywood stopped pacing back and forth in front of his table to stand right in front of me.