hard enough.
“What did you get, Allie? A butterfly?”
“Please. Butterflies are so yesterday.”
The dopehead girls want me to join their clique just as much as the jockettes do, and for pretty much the same reason. They figure my being fit and coordinated makes me their poster girl for all the perfect body, perfect mind crap they puff out the window with every drag on the weed they smoke to prove they’ve cornered the market on inner peace. They are so lame. I think it was their lameness that made me tell them I’d gotten a multi-coloured tattoo on my tush, just to see how many of them would pull a lemming and get an even more daring tattoo in a more private spot. I’d bet Dex that at least a dozen would show up at Eddie’s Tattoo Shop by next Tuesday and turn my hypothetical act of bravado into a total cliché.
Anyway, having the dopeheads staring at my tush made me even more interested in getting out of my swimsuit and into my jeans so I could go home and have a long bath out of Mom’s way. And, judging by the purple toenails on the feet sticking out of the bottom of our only stall, Caitlin was still in there, which was bad news for me. She always did hog that stall. Looked like I’d be changing in the toilets.
Then I had to look closer, because I couldn’t figure out why there’d be all that thick red stuff on the floor around her feet. Caitlin’s red cotton swimsuit was too old to bleed out colour like that. Not to mention that this stuff didn’t look like water. I didn’t like it. I knocked on the stall door and asked if she was okay. She didn’t answer. I pushed it open and looked at Caitlin sort of wedged on the bench inside, and what I saw wasn’t very nice. Teenaged girls shouldn’t have big knives sticking out of their chests.
“You.” I pointed at Heather Lane, who was the closest to being dressed. “Go to the office right now and get somebody to call the police.”
After that, you can imagine what happened. School was closed for a couple of days, and all the kids went around kind of shocked, and some social workers came out to talk to us about our feelings. And of course, right away the police were turning up, asking a lot of questions about Caitlin. Please.
“Caitlin didn’t kill herself,” I told the cop who interviewed me, Detective Stewart. He’s a tall weedy guy with a big nose, kind of like a picture of a monk I saw once, except the monk had more hair.
“I didn’t say she did, Allison. But now that you mention it, there was some fresh graffiti on the inside of the stall, and it suggested that Caitlin had been doing bad things with one of the boys.” I got the feeling that if I pushed, he’d start coming up with some more super hilarious ways to protect my virgin ears, but I had other things to do.
“You think she carried a knife around in her gym bag so that if her reputation got ruined one day she could just end it all right there, huh? Which boy?”
Stewart coughed. “It said ‘Dex’. I understand there is a Dex Monaghan in this school?”
“Sure, and there’s a Serious State of Denial in this school, too. Dex is the best athlete this town has ever had, so practically all the kids here pretend not to know he’s gay. I mean, the guys need him to win their games for them, so they just act like he’s joking when he makes passes at them, which he almost never does because the guys here are so lame. And the girls don’t understand why a guy would want to do it with another guy anyway, so they keep thinking he just needs to meet the right girl. If he’d fooled around with Caitlin, she would have been totally in with the jockettes. They’d want to know how she got him.”
“I see.” Stewart looked totally confused. He probably wasn’t old enough to have any teenagers of his own.
“I’ll make this simple for you, Detective Stewart. Caitlin Anderson was a fringe girl. Even if she was going to kill herself, she would never have done it at school.” Stewart didn’t seem to be getting it. “Look, just last month she tried to get in with the jockettes by bringing a bunch of marbles to school from her mother’s glassblowing studio. Thought she could get them to sit down on the ground like fourth-graders and shoot marbles for fun. Social suicide.” Bad choice of words, Allie.
Detective Stewart must have thought so too, because he got all soothing on me. “All we’re trying to do is figure out how Caitlin ended up in that stall. So far, the only thing we know for certain is that she’d been a little down this year.”
“Of course she was down. She was an unpopular fringe girl, and her parents just split up. But there’s no way she’d decide to off herself, and then do it with a knife wearing her oldest swimsuit while she’s in a crummy change room stall surrounded by a lot of people who didn’t like her.
“Here’s how I see it. When swim class is in last period, Caitlin had permission to get out of the pool ten minutes early so she could make her piano lesson. Today Coach Flannigan kept me back to talk about some new team thing, and I was super-bored about it and I was watching the door to the change rooms. I can tell you that all the other girls went through it in clumps. Nobody in our swim class could have stabbed Caitlin without all of the girls being in on it, and that just wouldn’t happen, because most of the class is made up of two cliques, and they’d never side together on anything. But I figure there were maybe five minutes when somebody could have gone into the change room from the hallway, stabbed Caitlin, and gone back out before anybody noticed.”
I didn’t expect the guy to give me a medal, but I sure didn’t expect him to flash me a look like I’d handed him a squawking turkey in church or something. Then he stood up to let me know I was dismissed, which I thought was pretty rude considering.
“Thank you, Allison, this is very helpful. As I said, we’re looking into many possibilities.” Yeah, I’ll just bet he was. The way I saw it, the cops were so busy figuring out why the local jewellery stores kept getting robbed, they practically had to write off a kid like Caitlin as some crazy teenager.
Boy, I was ticked. I mean, it was bad enough that Caitlin died in the first place, but to have to sit there while Detective Stewart got snotty and told me he was wasting time on possibilities? That really burned me.
It burned Dex, too. I saw him the night before school opened again, in Walters’, our local department store, mostly because he saw me first.
“Can you do me a favour, Allie, and take this stuff through the cash for me?”
Geez. I still don’t get how Dex can say he’s all comfy about being gay and then go and ask me to buy his silk undies for him when he decides to get experimental. Hasn’t he figured out yet that anybody who single-handedly beats the Panthers five games in a row can pretty much do anything he wants in this town? I vetoed the yucky stuff he’d picked out and took him back to the ladies’ department. He shouldn’t have been asking the jockettes for fashion advice.
“I am so cheesed about Caitlin,” I told him while we looked for a leopard print thong in his size. I’d just told him about the stupid police thinking she might have done the depressed diva dive. “What did you do to get your name lined up with hers on that change room stall, anyway?”
“Nothing. Well, I helped her with her math homework a few times. Last time was the day before she died.” He looked really sad, and I knew how he felt. We were probably the only two kids in school who’d even bothered to get to know Caitlin.
“Who could have seen you together? Where did you study?”
“In the library, after last period.”
Well, that ruled out most of the planet. The library
