silly because Jasper is a boy, but I think they look good with his black fur. He’s really cute. Also another doggie moved in next door and Jasper is always talking to it. It’s making Mommy irritated though, she says, because now they’re always barking. But I said it’s cute because it’s like 101 Dalmatians and they’re doing the twilight bark. You know, when all the dogs talk before they go inside for bed? Anyway, Daddy is doing that thing with his finger that means ‘wrap it up’ so I have to go. Oh—wait, here’s Daddy, he wants to talk, too. Bye!”
My eyes were burning now. “I just walked in, I’m not sure how long she’s been talking or if it cut her off.” I heard Lily in the background saying she had just called me. “Anyway, we miss you and can’t wait until you come home. Love you, talk to you soon.”
And that was it. I used to hear every one of those voices every day, and took them completely for granted. I couldn’t even mentally utter the old saying about “knowing what you’ve got.” I just missed them, even after this short period of time. I was so incredibly nostalgic for a life I knew I’d never, ever have again. But at this moment, I wanted nothing more than to give up on this stupid place and go back home. I looked at the weather app on my phone. It had been eighty-three degrees back home. The next two days were sunny, and the third had thunderstorms. I loved thunderstorms.
As for Manderley, the weather was anticipated to be overall gloomy, with a temperature of sixty the next day, with cold rains and a low of forty-three. Cold rains are really, really different than warm thunderstorms.
I tried home once more. When there was no answer, I left my own voice mail. “Hey, everyone, um …” Here it was. My opportunity. If I told my parents I hated it, they would let me come home. I could be home in forty-eight hours, sitting in the living room with my mom. She’d listen to my woes sympathetically and without judgment. I could be back at my high school in time for Homecoming. “I miss you all so, so much. I—It’s …”
If I left, everyone would know why. If people talked about me, they’d say, Remember that new girl? No, not Becca, the short one with the stupid freckles.
Becca left here, alive or not, and left behind a legacy. I wasn’t as good as her, only because she was so … whatever she was. If I walked out now, I’d be telling everyone they were right. If I left now, I’d be a coward who runs scared from the ghost of a girl who haunts the halls.
“Manderley is amazing. I can’t wait until you can see it in person. The classes are pretty hard, but not worse than I thought they’d be. Love you all. Lily, give Jasper a paw-shake and a hug for me, okay?” I briefly envisioned how good it would feel just to scratch his ears and give him a squeeze. “Love you. Miss you. I have to go turn my phone back in now. I still love it by the way, thanks so much for getting it for me.” I was rambling. “Okay, bye now.”
I texted each of my friends, giving them a brief and respectively varied miss you, wish I was home, xoxo, and then turned the phone off. It felt like saying goodbye to my visitors and returning to my jail cell.
The only way I could think of to extend the visit would be to go to the library, to the one computer equipped with the ability to do anything but look up journal articles and other scholarly things, and log on to Facebook for the first time since I’d left home.
I really shouldn’t have. It was just more of the same torturous happiness from my old life. My friends wrote to say they missed me. It was really flattering and nice, but it just hurt. It hadn’t been long since I’d left, but it felt like it had been so much longer. Leah wrote, Already forgotten about us, huh? Ugh! Fine, go make your new friends … what do I care? Haha, just kidding. Miss you, come visit!
I looked at the pictures from the cookout, and everything else my friends had been up to lately. It was like digging into my own flesh to find a bullet. I couldn’t even get through the whole album of all of my friends wearing sweatshirts with shorts and flip-flops, still sporting sunburns at the cookout. Leah had tagged me in one picture as an extra marshmallow on a stick and her and Emma pouting.
I glanced at the other albums, of them just two days before, swimming in Lucy’s aunt’s pool in the afternoon and then in the hot tub at night.
Then I thought of something. I hesitantly typed her name into the search box. And then there she was.
Rebecca Normandy. Her profile was restricted so that I couldn’t see anything but her profile pictures and the comments on her wall. It was really kind of disturbing. She’d been missing for almost five months, and there were still comments from the past few days, from people whose names I didn’t recognize.
Miss you, beautiful.
I love you and miss you every day. Please come back soon.
XOXOOXO
Hey, remember that one time with the shoelaces and the Barbie? Oh, my God, the look on his face … Bahahaha come back, slut, I miss you!
They were all writing to her like she was checking her Facebook regularly. I wondered, with a pang, if she was. What had Dana suggested the other night? That she was off “handling” something.
I kept scrolling, and found Dana’s most recent post: I know you’re not gone. I know it. So stop. Come back. Or at least contact me.
There were tons more comments like those and like Dana’s. It was creepy. Spooky.
And it made me really wonder what had happened. Maybe she wasn’t even missing. Maybe everyone knew where she was, and she was just … hiding for some reason. That would be crazy … but maybe that’s what it was.
But if she wasn’t … what had happened? Blake had said something about a boat that went missing that night in the storm. Had Becca taken it out? She couldn’t have. It was pitch-black down there at night, and in a storm? She could have just called a cab, like Blake had said, on the payphone in the lobby and … left.
To make my brain strain more, I clicked on her pictures. I could only see a few, but they were enough. In the one she had set as her default, Max was kissing her on the cheek, and she was smiling. In the next few, she just looked pretty. She looked like she was trying to look pretty, but she was undeniably succeeding. All the comments on her pictures confirmed it.
A sudden jab of uncharacteristic jealousy struck me. She’d been new at Manderley last year. How had she managed to make so many friends here, made such an impact, while I was greeted with only hesitance quickly followed by disinterest? Madison and Julia made some kind of an effort with me, and Johnny was nice. Max was … something. Blake was nice, too, I guessed. But Dana …
There was only a handful of people I’d even talked to, and all of them—except maybe for Cam, who rarely spoke—seemed morbidly and irreversibly affected by Becca. They all knew her. It’s not like each of them talked only about her, but somehow that seemed more significant.
I don’t know what happened to me, then. I was depressed about being away from home and jealous of Becca one moment, and then the next, something shifted in me. It was as if my skeleton turned to iron—I was strong, and I would not have my happiness and fate decided by some popular girl who had reigned before I got there.
It wasn’t up to Becca or Dana how I lived my life.
chapter 9 becca
BECCA LEANED ON MAX, WITH HER DRINK IN hand. His arm was around her, tightened a little
