True Blue (11 page)

Stephanie behaves through all of this, until the girl next to her asks her to stop hogging all the space on the ground sheet. She starts kicking and throwing sticks and pinecones in the fire so that sparks fly around. We tell her to knock it off. She sulks and moves her sleeping bag to a space a few yards outside the circle. We can see her still, off pouting in the shadows, so we ignore her, glad that she’s quiet. That’s where she is when Mrs. Keefer appears with a thermos of hot chocolate, and that’s where she is when I almost trip over her in the middle of the night on my way to the latrine.

One of the campers, Deanna Brown, wakes me up after that because she has a stomachache. She is clutching her right side, doubled over in pain, and she is burning with fever. I know first aid well enough not to mess around. I quickly whisper to Casey that I am taking Deanna to the camp nurse. I scoop Deanna up in my arms and run as fast as I can down the trail that leads to the Bone House. The sky is black-dark and the air has a predawn heaviness to it. I don’t notice if Stephanie is still in her spot or not. I don’t think about Stephanie at all.

I kick at the door of the infirmary. Bones answers in her nightgown. Behind her, I can see that sick kids occupy several of the beds. She takes one look at Deanna and presses her car keys into my hand.

“Get her to Emergency,” she says. “Don’t waste a second. I’ll call ahead and tell them you’re coming. I’ll call her parents, too. Go!”

Bones keeps her car right outside the infirmary. She helps me load Deanna in.

“There are quarters in the ashtray,” she says. “Keep me posted.”

I take off. I break all speed limits but there are no other cars on the road. The clock on the dashboard reads 2:00 a.m. I get Deanna to the hospital in Galloway in record time. They take out her appendix just before it bursts.

I call Bones and she says the parents are on their way in. They live a few hours away and could I wait at the hospital until they get there? Deanna might need to see a familiar face.

I sit in the waiting room, dozing over an old copy of Good Housekeeping, and finally stretch out on one of the plastic orange sofas.

“Are you Jessica?”

The voice brings me out of my sleep. Standing in front of me is a middle-aged couple wearing rumpled and mismatched clothes obviously thrown on in a hurry.

I stand up quickly, get a head rush, and have to sit back down again. “I’m Jess,” I manage to say.

“We’re Deanna’s parents,” the man says. “The doctor tells us if you had waited a moment longer to get her to the hospital, she might not have made it. We want to thank you.”

I stand back up. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s sleeping. She’s out of danger,” the man says.

“She’ll want to thank you herself when she wakes up,” the woman says. “You’re our family’s hero now. If only more teenagers were like you.”

They return to their daughter and I sit back on the plastic sofa. I rub my eyes and think about being a hero. I decide to wait around until Deanna wakes up. Today is the last day of camp, the campers will be heading home soon, and I don’t care about any one of them enough to want to say goodbye.

Maybe Deanna’s parents will offer me some cash as a reward for my quick-thinking actions. I’ll turn it down, of course, but they will insist, and to make them feel better I’ll accept. Maybe they will tell the newspapers, too. Camp Counselor Saves Child’s Life. Let my mother try to find something to criticize about that! Maybe the summer will end on a high note after all.

I sit with this thought for a while and stare out the window at the rain, which is falling in sheets. It must have started while I was asleep. I picture Casey scrambling to get the campers out of the rain and to get their gear packed and carried back down the trail. All the kids will head home today with their sleeping bags soaked and their shoes full of mud. For once, I am the hero and Casey is doing the dirty work.

The rain will get in the way of our end-of-camp plans, but maybe we can get permission to stay in one of the cabins, or maybe in the infirmary, which has loads of dry sheets and blankets. If that’s a no, then I’ll go to Casey’s house for a couple of days. We’ll still get a chance to unwind before school starts.

Finally, I decide I’d better call in to Bones.

“We have a situation,” she says. “You need to get back here right away. Stephanie is missing.”

“Of course she is,” I say.

“No, she’s really missing.”

“She’s just hiding,” I say. “She knows camp is over this morning. She’s taking one last opportunity to bug us.”

“She was gone when the rest of Cabin Three woke up this morning. We’ve been searching for two hours. There’s no sign of her and the rain just keeps coming down.”

I am going to suggest that Stephanie is probably up in the mess-hall pantry, warm and dry and eating fistfuls of cereal out of a box—we’ve caught her doing that before—but Bones doesn’t give me a chance. She just says, “We need you back here,” and hangs up.

I slam the receiver back against the pay phone. I am in no hurry to head back to camp. Once I arrive they’ll put me right to work, if not looking for Stephanie then helping my cabin kids pack up and get ready for their parents.

The clock says 8:45. By the time I get back, breakfast will be cleaned up and done. I decide to have breakfast at the hospital.

I wander around the wards until I see a cart full of food trays. The nurses are busy. I peek inside a couple of the trays, find one that doesn’t look too putrid, and walk away with it, tossing the name-tag into a garbage bin. I sit back on my orange plastic couch. The eggs are almost the same color.

“That can’t be good,” I mutter, but I eat them anyway, and I slather the toast with jam from the little packets. I take my time drinking the apple juice. I even wash up in the ladies’ room off the waiting room. I am sure that Stephanie will have appeared by the time I get back to camp.

This is not something I can take seriously.

The rain is coming down quite heavily and the temperature has plummeted. Summer’s over, I think, as I rush from the hospital to the car. Back at camp I get my rain jacket out of the cabin before going, as directed, to the sleep-out clearing.

Casey is standing with a group of very worried-looking people. Mrs. Keefer is talking on her cell phone. Casey is drenched, even in her rain gear, and is looking as annoyed as I feel.

“So, you finally killed her off, eh?” I ask, laughing.

Casey grins. “And I stuffed her body in a hollow tree.”

The cold silence that greets these remarks makes me wish I’d kept my mouth shut, especially when I notice that one of the frowning people is a police officer. An explanation would only have made things worse, so I clear my throat and try to get into the spirit of the search.

We search all morning, getting wetter and more miserable as the rain and temperatures continue to fall. We are in an autumn rainstorm, not a summer shower. More police arrive to join in the effort. There is talk of bringing in search dogs, but that’s not possible while it is raining so hard.

By midday, Casey and I are furious. We take a short lunch break together in the field, hot chocolate from a thermos and sandwiches brought out by the kitchen staff. We eat the sandwiches quickly but they still get soaked with rainwater.

“I hate that kid,” I say. “She’s ruined the last day of camp for everyone.”

“If she’s not dead when we find her, I’m going to kill her myself,” Casey says, then suddenly stops, her mouth open in mid-chew. She is staring over my left shoulder.

I turn around. Behind me is Stephanie’s mother. From the look on her face, I know she has heard every word we have said.

Casey became a regular topic of conversation at The Cactus. Miss Burke’s actions meant that the subject was fair game. It should have struck me as strange that they had only mentioned Casey once before, but it didn’t. I truly thought they were interested in me as a person, not just a ticket to the media circus surrounding Casey.

Okay, maybe I didn’t
really
think they were all that innocent, but I chose to ignore what I really thought. I chose to lie to myself and pretend we were all friends together.

The gang started asking me questions about Casey, about our friendship, what we did together for fun, what her family was like, what she was like outside of school. We had all known Casey since grade three, and everyone in the group had different memories of her. For days, that’s all we talked about at the restaurant, each day beginning where we’d left off the day before, as though there had been no interruption.

They asked me if I’d received any more letters from Casey. I didn’t answer right away. The fate of the first letter was still too raw.

“You did, didn’t you?” Amber said. “How is she doing? Is she falling apart?”

“She’s not,” I replied. “She’s pretty strong.”

“Well, of course you’re going to say that,” said Amber. “Of course you’re going to defend her.”

“No, really,” I said, going into my bag where I kept the letter. “Let me read it to you.”

“Not out loud,” Amber said, looking around the restaurant. “You don’t know who’s listening.” She reached across the table and took the letter from me.

Somehow, Nathan moved his elbow or something and my glass of Coke toppled over, spilling soda and ice-cubes all over me.

“What a mess!” Nathan said. “That lousy waitress better have some clean towels.”

He hustled me toward the counter, helped me mop up, and by the time we got back to the table, Amber and the others were finished with the letter.

“It’s all about the bugs with her, isn’t it?” Amber said, handing Casey’s letter back to me.

“All about the bugs,” I agreed, tucking it back into my bag.

The conversation went on to other memories of Casey, and I thought no more about the letter until it also appeared on the front page of the paper two days later.

The Cactus gang didn’t mention it, and I couldn’t figure out how they could have done anything in the few moments I was drying myself off, so I let it go. It was easier that way.

I kept going to the restaurant with them after school. We ordered our Cokes and plates of French fries with gravy and we talked. I told them everything, every memory I had of Casey, all the fun, secret things we used to do, things that had never gone beyond the two of us. It felt good to talk about her. It felt good to have an attentive audience.

I should have been ashamed to reveal things that Casey would never have told anyone else but me, but I believed I was doing Casey a favor. The restaurant gang would welcome her as one of them when she got out of jail. Casey could sit with us at our table by the window, sharing fries and talking.

I told myself a lot of lies. I could no more picture Casey hanging out with that group than I could picture Reverend Fleet on
American Idol
. Dishonesty is a fungus, I’ve discovered. Once it settles into your soul, it just keeps growing and clinging to everything.

After two weeks of talking about Casey, I was all out of stories. It was Friday, and near time for us to leave the restaurant. It was comfortable there, with the smell of gravy and bad Chinese food in the air. I was not anxious to leave. An autumn storm was brewing, and life at home was not happy.

“It’s been really great talking with you about Casey,” Amber said.

“Yeah, very profitable,” said Nathan, chuckling.

“He means we’ve all profited by being able to understand her better,” interjected Amber, quickly. “But I have one last question for you.”

I waited, playing with my straw. When she didn’t ask it right away, I looked up.

Her expression serious, she asked, “Do you think she did it? Do you think Casey killed that girl, little Stephanie? We all think she did it. Do you?”

“No,” I replied. “You don’t know her like I do. Casey wouldn’t do that.”

“But say you were on the jury,” Amber continued. “What if you were on the jury and you didn’t know her, and you’d been told that Stephanie drove her crazy, that Stephanie’s bloody t-shirt was found in her bag, and that she walked right by the body when she searched the trail. What if you heard all of that and there were no other suspects? And let’s face it—you were not there. You think you know her, but maybe you don’t know all of her. Driven to it, we could probably all be killers.”

And I said, “In that case, yes, I would have to say that I think Casey is guilty. I think she killed Stephanie.”

A strange smile crossed Amber’s face. The others were nodding and smiling, too.

I’m embarrassed to admit it now, even to a stranger, but what I felt then was satisfaction. I’d given the right answer. I was still in the group.

Did I believe it? Actually, it didn’t much matter to me what I believed. I cared only about being asked back to the group. I was terrified that they’d drop me and I’d be all alone again, facing the world without Casey.

At two a.m., I went into the garage to get my bike. It was gone. Mom must have given it to the Whites. They wouldn’t mind if I went over there to get it, even at that hour, but I wasn’t about to do that. It was gone. I let it stay gone.

I jogged for a few blocks but it didn’t feel the same, so I went home. I sat down on the cold cement of the garage. I thought about the warm garage at Casey’s house, the garage turned bug-den and family room. I put my hand out on the spot where my bike used to be. And I cried.

June 15, 2010

I bike over to Casey’s after cross-country. Casey runs down the street to meet me, waving a piece of paper in the air.

“I’ve been accepted!” she calls out, dancing and running and jumping all at the same time. “I’m going to Australia! Four whole months!”

I smile, because I know I’m supposed to. Four months! I would be without her for four months.

“Here’s a picture of it—the True Blue cockroach. Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you ever saw?”

She shoves a photo of the ugly thing right in my face. I want to tear into it with my teeth.

“I’ll be camping out on Lord Howe Island!” She keeps talking. She hasn’t even asked about my day. “I’ll be looking for roaches, counting roaches, measuring roaches, cleaning the camp, helping the entomologists, sitting around in the bush at night with a lantern on my head, waiting for them to crawl out of their burrows—the roaches, not the entomologists! Maybe I can help keep the roaches from going extinct! Oh, this is the best day of my life!”

She keeps dancing in the street and waving that damned letter around. One of her neighbors comes out to see what all the excitement is about. While she is talking to him, I walk away.

The best day of Casey’s life has nothing to do with me.

She never asks me why I walked away.

She is too busy being happy to care.