Trigger (26 page)

“That would be fun. Just have to check with—” Victor’s gaze moved to something behind me and he broke into another of those ear-to-ear grins. “Well, hello there, missy. Long time, no see.” He turned back to me. “Excuse me. I just need to greet my niece.”

Victor got to his feet and spread his arms wide. A tall, blond girl rushed up and threw herself on him, disappearing as the big man squeezed her close. He let go of her and put her hands on the girl’s shoulders, looking at her as though sizing her up.

“So it’s all work and no play for you these days, Elisa?” he said. “Not a minute over to call and say hello to your old uncle, eh?” You could tell that there wasn’t even the slightest bit of anger in Victor’s voice, only pride and warmth.

“
Sorry
,” Elisa said. “I know I’ve been terrible, but I’ve really been swamped. You know how the first year it’s all about proving yourself. I barely have a life any longer.” She turned toward Dylan and me, pointing at Dylan. “Ask my brother. He knows how it’s been.”

I stared at the girl with the excited face and I stopped breathing.

It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be
.

But when Elisa’s gaze found mine and the excitement left her face, her expression turning pale instead, I knew it was the same girl I had thought it was.

One of the twelve girls who had chased me and Hannah to that aircraft hangar so many years ago and almost killed me.

Dylan

“Nina. Are you okay?” I said. All color had left Nina’s cheeks and she was staring at Elisa. My gaze moved to my sister and I discovered that she was looking as ashen as Nina.

What the hell is going on here?

Nina got to her feet then, slamming down the plate in her hands on the coffee table with a loud
bang
. She bent down to grab her handbag beside her on the floor. Squeezing it close, she swiveled around and dashed out of the sitting room.

I was so taken aback by Nina’s abrupt departure it took me a few seconds to process what had just happened. When I had, I got to my feet myself and turned to my sister. “Can you explain what just happened there? The way you two were staring at each other it’s obvious you had something to do with it. Or am I wrong?”

Elisa had let go of Victor and her hands hung limply by her sides. Mom appeared next to her, a tray of wine glasses in one hand and an ice bucket containing a wine bottle in the other. She looked from one person to the next, confusion printed all over her face.

“What is going on here? Where did Nina go?”

The faint sound of the front door closing reached everyone’s ears. I felt I should be running after Nina, but I couldn’t make myself move. I needed to know what had prompted her to leave like that in the first place before I did anything. I looked at Mom.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “But I think your daughter has an idea why she felt compelled to suddenly run out of here.” I stared at Elisa, who seemed to be crumbling before my eyes.
She definitely knows why Nina left like that.
What was worse, I suddenly realized that I, too, had an idea what this was all about. More than an idea. Which was why I had been so incredibly uneasy after speaking to Ricki at Nixon’s party.

How could I not have known before, put two and two together sooner?

The photo of fourteen-year-old Hannah that had accompanied the newspaper article about the bullying at the Harvard Westlake School, leading to her death, flashed through my mind. Except for not smiling wide on that photo, Hannah looked exactly like she did on the photo in Nina’s apartment.

How could I not have figured out what had happened at my sister’s school was what Nina had been talking about all along? Having seen Hannah’s photo at Nina’s place, knowing that she had been Nina’s friend and that she was dead, should have made me figure it out much sooner. Hannah had the kind of face you didn’t easily forget.

True, Nina had told me she graduated high school from Beverly Hills High, not Harvard Westlake. Still, even if she hadn’t told me straight out she’d transferred to a different school, I should have come to that conclusion on my own. Why would she want to continue at a school where she’d gone through such horror?
Of course
she had transferred elsewhere to finish high school.

But from what I remembered of the incident, Elle had been the one who made sure it all
ended
, saved the life of the other girl involved. Who just happened to be Nina. At least this was what she had told me and our mother… But I had always known my sister hadn’t been entirely truthful, hadn’t I? Yes, I had, even if I hadn’t wanted to deal with it at the time, ignored her evasive gaze as she told me what had happened. I hadn’t wanted to get to the bottom of the story then. I’d wanted to believe every part of the story Elisa had been feeding me. It had been so much easier. Now I had to face the truth. And suffer the consequences.

I glared at Elisa. “You lied to us about what happened at your school, didn’t you?” My sister seemed to have shrunk in size suddenly. My cheeks flaming, I repeated through clenched teeth, “
Didn’t you?
”

When she didn’t respond, I continued, “You lied to me about what happened at your school. You were as bad as all the other girls, weren’t you? How
could
you? How could you do such a terrible thing?”

My uncle and our mother looked back and forth between me and Elle. Victor walked over to me and placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Calm down, son.”

I shrugged off the hand, not about to calm down any time soon. I turned to him. “If you knew what your sweet little niece is capable of doing—what she did to Nina—you wouldn’t tell me to calm down. You would tell me to go over and slap her silly. Just like she and her friends did to Nina and her friend. Who they beat so much she died. Fucking
died
!”

Victor looked at me with uncomprehending eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“You heard me. Your niece is a disgusting bully.” I turned to Mom, who looked nearly as pale as Elisa now. “Your daughter is guilty of beating another girl so much she ended up in a coma. She could have died, too, if she was really unlucky. But she survived. And she was just a guest in your house.”

I squeezed my fists, itching to go over and slap Elle hard across the face. But I knew I would never be able to do such a thing, no matter what she was guilty of. She was still my little sister.

“I didn’t beat her,” Elisa mumbled, staring at her feet. “All I did was chase her together with those other girls. I swear, that’s all
I did. And then, when the other girls got really bad, I was the one who made them stop. They’d have kept beating and beating her just like Chrissy and the others did to Hannah. So I did save her in the end. I really
did
.” Tears were streaming down her face now.

“Stop your fucking lying and at least own up to what you did,” I hissed at Elle. “Stop pretending to be something you’re not.”

“Dylan,” Mom said in a flat voice. “That’s enough.”

I swiveled my head in her direction. I was about to ask her if she actually meant that—-she, too, must want to hear her daughter take responsibility for what she had done—-when the words got stuck in my throat. My mother wasn’t able to hold my gaze and her face looked as ashen as Elisa’s now. I could tell she was struggling to keep it together, her chest heaving.

My gut dropped and all the air in my lungs left me in a choked gasp.

Oh, God.
She knew what Elisa had done… She had known all along. As I was about to ask my mother to confirm this, my sister dashed out of our big, beautiful sitting room.

Nina

I ran along North Elm Drive, the street where Dylan’s mother lived, not able to get away from Dylan’s horrible sister fast enough. My heart pounded like a jackhammer in my chest, my lungs burned and my legs hurt, but it didn’t matter. I had to get back home, far, far away from these people. I should have known that first night that Dylan was bad news from the way I’d reacted to him. I should have told him to go to hell when he came to see me at Bliss, certainly not have emailed him to accept his dinner offer. If that first night hadn’t served to warn me enough, what happened up on that cliff definitely should have. Could my body have rejected him any more clearly? Hardly.

How could I not have guessed him physically repelling me to such a degree had all to do with that one day in the aircraft hangar? Now, in hindsight, it seemed obvious I should have. As I had laid eyes on Elisa today, I’d immediately noted how striking their resemblance was. Their facial features were almost identical, both of them pretty like Barbie dolls. It was like they were twins, not just brother and sister.

Then again, at the time we were in school together, Elisa had insisted on coloring her blond hair light red, a shade darker than Ricki’s strawberry blond hair, so maybe it wasn’t so strange. And now that I thought about it, I had never known Elisa’s last name.

But still…They were so similar.

An image of Elisa’s face among the other grimacing ones right before my conscience slipped during the beating materialized in my head. I clearly saw how her strong eyebrows were pulled together into that now familiar V-shape, her turquoise eyes narrowed and her lips parted as she gasped. A rush of intense discomfort went through me and I made myself push away the disturbing image.

When I reached Wilshire Boulevard, I stopped. I’d wait for the bus that ran there, all the way to where I lived, instead of walking home like I’d originally planned when dashing out of the Whitman residence. Not only did my feet ache, but my gorgeous strappy sandals would fall apart if I continued much farther.

Drenched in sweat, I sank down on the bench at the bus station and waited for the bus to come. I’d be damned if I’d let Elisa destroy my great new shoes the way she and her band of disgusting friends had almost destroyed my life.

The fury that filled me at the thought of what they had done to me and Hannah made me feel slightly better. They may have succeeded in killing one of us, but I was still standing strong and intended to do so for the rest of my life. I’d show those bitches that I wasn’t someone you broke down easily. As Leslie kept telling me, I, too, was sure now that Hannah would have wanted me to keep living with my chin up, make something out of myself so she could be proud of me, not beating myself up for surviving. A defiant smile curled the corners of my lips. But it didn’t take long until the reality of the situation returned to me and the smile was gone:

I may keep living with my chin up, but my life could no longer contain Dylan. Not because I thought he had known about what his sister had done and chosen to turn a blind eye, but because each time I saw him now, I’d think about what had happened. And I wanted to think about it as little as possible.

Wait,
could
he actually have known about it…? I stiffened where I sat on the bench. He and Elisa seemed very close after all. Elle, like he liked to call her, this girl who he kept telling me was such a
great person
… I couldn’t stop myself from snorting loudly with revulsion, drawing attention from the other people waiting for the bus. I shook the thought out of my head. No, I didn’t think he could have known. Not the way he had been talking about how much he loathed bullies, with such passion I had felt it deep in my chest. No one was
that
good a liar. Still, the idea of having anything to do with someone related to a person like Elisa was too much to even consider. I could barely make myself think of the two at the same time, so how could I ever be Elisa’s brother’s girlfriend? It was impossible.

A few minutes later, the bus pulled up and I stepped inside, doing my best to keep the tears from streaming down my cheeks.

Dylan

“I’m coming in, Elisa,” I said, standing outside my sister’s childhood bedroom. I didn’t care whether she wanted me to or not or that our mother had told me it was best to talk about this another day, when I wasn’t as upset about it. I was coming in and learning the truth about this matter once and for all, the entire truth, not just bits and pieces. Maybe Elle had in fact been truthful when claiming only to be guilty of having chased Hannah and Nina. Maybe she had in fact done something to stop the other girls from beating Nina to death in the end. I really hoped this was so. It was still bad, but not as bad in that case.

I turned the door knob and walked inside the room. My sister was lying face-down on her big bed that was loaded with throw pillows and stuffed animals. I walked up to the bed and took a seat on the edge. Elisa’s body stirred, but she remained turned away from me.

“Elle, turn around.” I was a little calmer now, the fury brewing inside me still there but not nearly as intense. “I need to know what happened. What
really
happened at your school. Everything.”

Slowly, Elisa rolled around and faced me. Her skin was pink and mushy. Her eyes were rimmed with red, making her irises an electric blue-green. She sniffled and pulled herself up to a half sitting position.

“All you originally told me was that you stopped the girls in your basketball team from beating a girl to death,” I said. “But those girls were really your friends, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” Elisa said, her voice weak. “But I didn’t really like them. At least I didn’t like Chrissy and Tara. I was dead scared of those two.”

“You were dead scared of them?” Confusion filled me, further calming the fury in me. “Why were you scared of them?”

“They could be
so
mean. They could turn on you so easily if you did something they disapproved of. We’d all seen it happen many times.” She sniffled, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Hannah was a great example. She used to be Chrissy’s friend up until junior high. But then Chrissy completely turned on her because a guy they both liked told Chrissy she’d never be as pretty as Hannah. That she was just a poser, nothing special. That’s how Hannah came to be a pariah, while Chrissy joined the basketball team and began to hang with Tara.”