“But we’ll get in trouble!” Melanie whines.
“Then stay here.” Elise scoops up her bag. “Cover for us, okay?” She turns back to me. “Coming, Anna?”
NOW
The chaplain in prison loves to talk about turning points. The moment we chose the wrong path; the point of no return. It’s supposed to help us, to take us back to the place it all started. We’re supposed to know better now, you see, understand the error of our ways. So, we pick over our past, tracking back crimes and consequences through our short lives until we find the lynchpin. That one decision that could have changed everything.
This was mine.
I can see it as clear as the moment I was standing there myself: the three of us in the jumbled athletics office; midday sun through the windows and the sounds of the lacrosse match drifting in from outside. An invitation. An adventure. Elise’s eyes, bright with friendship and possibility. Melanie’s round face guarded with jealousy. And me, wavering there between them.
If I’d said no that would have been the end of it. Elise would have gone back to hovering quietly in the folds of her shiny, perfect clique, and I’d have eaten lunch alone in the library, been tormented by Lindsay until graduation. Our worlds would probably never have collided again, merely passed in the hallways and spun off on our different orbits, to college and first jobs, white-confetti weddings, and babies nestled, safe and gurgling on our hips.
She’d be alive. I wouldn’t be accused of her murder.
CUSTODY
My cell is ten feet by twelve. It has bare concrete floors, and chalky whitewashed walls, and orange paint peeling from the bars.
I’ve been here twenty-two days.
There are two hard bunkbeds set with thin mattresses, and a metal toilet in the corner bolted to the wall that makes me ill with the smell. Everything’s bolted down, smooth, too; no sharp edges to catch accidentally against our clothing or wrists. I have a thin blanket, and sheets that make me itch, but it’s still too hot and I still can’t sleep, surrounded by the strange, ragged pace of other people’s breathing.
Their names are Keely and Freja and Divonne. They’re older, or maybe just look that way, and after the first stare-down, have paid me little attention at all. They strut around the place with their shirts tied high and contraband lipstick on their faces, bumping fists and calling to cellmates across the aisle. They’ve been here a while, and will be for some time, bantering and laughing with each other in their foreign tongue. I don’t understand a thing except the bitter note in their voices, and the suspicious looks they send my way when they’re talking about me and my many terrible crimes.
I never thought I’d miss the pounding silence of isolation, but some nights, I do.
They wake us at six for bed-check, then herd us to showers, and then the dining hall. We line up for trays of flavorless oatmeal and bruised fruit, eat at long metal tables. “Like school,” the young assistant from the American consulate told me during our weekly visit, trying to sound cheerful. Not mine. Hillcrest had salad bars and off-campus privileges; my group would gather at the far right table in the cafeteria, reigning over for all to see.
I’ve lost at least ten pounds. There was a time I’d think that was an achievement.
After breakfast is free time, then lines in the dining hall again for lunch, and dinner—so many lines, I half expect us all to join hands, like the crocodiles in nursery school, snaking across the playground. I’ve been told I’m lucky there’s no work duty, just long days I fill by watching TV, reading the dog-eared paperback books in the makeshift library, and trying not to catch someone’s eye in the rec room. I walk for hours in the yellowed grass of the exercise pen, trying to memorize the sprawl of blue sky to take back inside the cell at night. The prison is set on the edge of a cliff: the stretch of blue ocean beyond the walls on one side, an expanse of barren earth separating us from the rest of the island on the other. But we can see neither, of course, just the solid walls and barbed wire penning us in, and the guard towers stationed, always watching.
I can make calls from three to three thirty p.m., but I have nobody to talk to. Dad is back in Boston, trying to remortgage the house and keep a lawyer paid. My friends were swept home by their parents the moment the police allowed them to leave; now they talk to reporters and newscasters, spilling stories and theories about the three of us, Elise and Tate and me. Lamar sent me letters the first few weeks, but even those have stopped now—the only time I see his face is scowling in the back of paparazzi shots, his hand blocking the camera as he enters the school gates. He and Chelsea broke up, before summer; her and Max’s parents are talking about moving them back to California, away from everything.
And then there’s Tate. He’s somewhere across the island now, in the safe cocoon of his parents’ money: waking up alone behind a door he can lock, taking showers behind the privacy of frosted glass, eating cereal straight from the box before he wanders out onto an ocean-view balcony, and meeting with his five assorted lawyers to plot his defense.
He hasn’t come to visit me. I don’t know if I would see him if he did. I can’t forgive him for what he did—for leaving me to face this all alone.
They say the trial will begin in four months. Three, if I’m lucky. Every day, I wonder how I’m going to make it that long.
But of course, I don’t have a choice.
TRIAL
The photo clicks up on the display projector overhead. Although everyone must have seen it a dozen times over, I still hear the gasps of shock ripple through the courtroom.
“Objection!” My lawyer leaps to his feet. The judge sighs, staring over her thin wire-rimmed glasses. “Your objections have been noted, counselor. Many times.”
I sit silently in the witness box. They’ve been trying to bring up the photos for weeks now, and for weeks, my lawyer has been fighting. They’re unrelated. Out of context. Prejudicial. If there was a jury, then maybe he would have won, but here in Aruba, there’s no jury deciding my fate. It’s just Judge von Koppel, and as she’s told him every time, she’s already seen them. Hell, everyone has. From the day some journalist browsed our profile pages and hit the tawdry jackpot, those photos have been printed and reprinted, emblazoned across every newspaper front page in the world.
“Miss Chevalier, if you could look at the first photo . . .” He clicks again, making it larger this time. “Can you tell us, when was this taken?”