THE MEETING WAS held, of all places, in a defunct church rectory, a stone building next door to St. Catherine’s Catholic Church that had been shuttered in 2008 after a pedophile-priest scandal.
It felt weird to have the meeting in a place associated with a church. As if the eyes of God were upon her. Except the eyes of God were supposedly everywhere, Rachel mused as she strolled up the walk.
To her relief, there were no protestors tonight. She entered the rectory’s long, empty hall, hit with a glary fluorescent light from the suspended ceiling. She was early, not wanting to be The Late Girl, and found herself alone.
The hall was bare except for a ring of folding chairs at the far end, near a counter that bordered the back kitchen. The stained indoor/outdoor carpet gave off the odor of damp laundry. Rachel smelled something else, too. Coffee. She walked to the back, peeked into the kitchen to see only a Mr. Coffee chugging away. A water stain darkened the ceiling. The coffeemaker belched.
“Not the tidiest locale,” a voice said behind her.
Rachel spun to see a woman blocking the doorway.
“Sorry, thought you’d heard me,” the woman said.
“My mind was someplace else,” Rachel said.
“Of course.”
The woman was perhaps thirty, with a sense of fashion, for Vermont: Smart, purple eyeglasses, black hair cut in a severe bob not unlike Rachel’s cut. It made Rachel feel self-conscious. She’d had a crazy notion she had sole claim to her new do, and that illusion was shattered now. The young woman wore a trim-fitting Patagonia fleece jacket and slenderizing, charcoal wool pants with cuffs that fit snugly over black Sorels with faux-fur collars. “I’m Jolene,” the woman said, as if this explained her presence.
Rachel wanted to squeeze past Jolene, escape into the open space of the hall. But Jolene did not budge. She leaned against the jamb, blocking the exit. “Don’t forget to sign in,” she said, nodding at a clipboard on the counter as she straightened and slipped past Rachel to the coffeemaker.
Rachel stepped out to the dining hall, frazzled. What was wrong with her?
The meeting started with three other girls joining, none older than sixteen, all of them twitchy and tense, chewing fingernails or teasing the ends of their long hair with their fingers, eyes wandering, all bundled in winter coats they left zipped as if they could not wait to flee. None of them had been at the other meeting. Why would they have been? It was an hour away.
And none was Mandy.
With all who were coming apparently in attendance, Jolene started. “You’re not alone . . .”
Halfway through the meeting, in the midst of a girl speaking of her pending abortion as if discussing having to return a dress that didn’t fit, the door blew open.
“Sorry!” a girl’s voice rang from the darkened entrance. Purple Hair. She strode in, shaking off snow and stomping her feet, the tip of her leaky nose red as a cherry. When her eyes caught Rachel’s, she froze, startled, then joined with an apologetic smile.
Rachel looked away as her mistake smacked her in the face: If it was odd that Purple Hair was here, how odd was it that Rachel was here? What reason could Rachel give to be forty miles from the other meeting just two nights before? She tried to form a plausible excuse, but her mind was a Fourth of July sparkler, spewing spastic sparks of thought that died as quickly as they were born. She had no story. She swallowed sticky spit. Purple Hair winked at her, and Rachel felt her heart flip the way it did whenever she was caught lying.
The rest of the meeting, Rachel’s mind was stuck on the wink, the other girls’ stories a muddle of background noise. She declined to tell her own story. Did other girls attend other meetings to get a rounded perspective, or preserve anonymity? Maybe attending multiple meetings was common.
Jolene was wrapping up, saying something about staying strong. Rachel eyed the exit, willing herself to breathe normally but nearly panting with anxiety to escape.
She was about to make quick flight when Purple Hair mouthed: Let’s talk.
Well, so what if Purple Hair sensed something was off? Rachel was here to investigate. Rachel was the hunter, not the prey, as her father would say.
The group was disassembling.
“Sign in if you haven’t,” Jolene said.
Rachel tugged on her peacoat as she approached Purple Hair. “Hey there,” Rachel said. Her tone was wrong. Too casual. Be serious, she reminded herself: You’re pregnant.
“Hello back,” Purple Hair said. Jolene strode over with the clipboard. “If you would,” she said, and tapped a pen on the clipboard for Purple to use. Purple Hair paused, then took the pen and jotted her name. “There’s coffee left. If anyone wants some before I throw it out—” Jolene said, and strolled into the kitchen.
“What brings you here?” Rachel asked Purple Hair, to get the upper hand.
Purple Hair shrugged. “I make it a point to come to as many as I can. Reach out.”
“They let you do that? I mean—”
“Anyone is welcome. As long as you are respectful and preggers.” She laughed.
“What’s that called, infiltrating?”
Purple Hair’s eyes went cold. “Where’d you get that language?”
Rachel felt panic leap into her chest. “I read somewhere online that—” She’d done her due diligence. She and Felix had researched how radicals did this sort of thing.
“That’s not me. What about you? Why are you here?”
“It, the other place,” Rachel began. “It was too close to home. I thought, what if someone sees me? It was our conversation that made me think of it.”
“Really?”
Rachel nodded, getting hold of the thread of truth in the web of lies. “We were talking about my going to Middlebury, and one of the reasons I didn’t go to a meeting there was I didn’t want to be seen by friends or professors.”
“Mmm.” Purple Hair cocked her head like: Go on, I’m listening. I don’t believe a word, but I’m listening.
“And when we came out of the last meeting, I saw someone I knew. Luckily before they saw me. And I thought, this town is way too small.”
“Mmmm.”
“You act like you don’t believe me.”
“Why should I not believe you?”
Rachel glowed with panic.
“I wouldn’t want to be seen if I were you either,” Purple Hair said, her voice metallic.
“What do you mean?”
Purple Hair cast a look to the last two girls heading for the door. “I have to talk to those two,” she said, and charged after the girls. What did she mean? Rachel realized she was alone with the list, took her iPhone, out and clicked a quick pic.
Outside, the winter wind bit Rachel’s face. She spied Purple Hair across the street under the pulsing light of a streetlamp, speaking to one of the girls.
As Rachel advanced on her, the other girl shuffled down the walk, her head down.
Rachel came up, ready to assail. But Purple Hair smiled, and said, “Oh good, you haven’t trucked off just yet.”
“I’m parked over there,” Rachel said, angered. She’d come alone tonight. Felix had been swamped with a lab and two papers due the next day. He’d not wanted her to come alone, but she’d insisted. What could possibly happen? “Look, I—”
“I was rude. I apologize,” Purple Hair said, her voice soft as kitten fur now. “If I were you, I’d have changed meeting places, too.”
“Why do you keep saying, if you were me—” Rachel said.
“Who you are.”
“Who I am?” A bright star of fear stabbed at the front of her skull.
“Yeah, who you are.”
Purple Hair looked at her, quizzically.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rachel said.
“If what had happened when you were a baby had happened to me, I’d be even more ashamed about killing my baby, keep it a secret at all costs.”
Before she knew what was happening, Rachel had Purple’s wrist squeezed in a pit-bull grip and was twisting.
“It’s all right to be angry,” Purple said, her voice steady, tranquil. “I’d want to hurt someone, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What happened to your parents when you were a baby. How lucky you were to survive it.”
Rachel’s grip eased, her fingers sore from clutching so hard.
“I didn’t survive anything,” Rachel said. “I wasn’t even in the car.”
“Car?”
Rachel felt something inside her shift; her guts wormy. Recently, the idea to find out more about her parents had slipped into her brain. She’d gone through old photos and watched old videos, heard her mother’s voice, her laughter. She’d studied her mother’s face, set to memory her expressions. She’d watched the video of her mother in the hospital minutes after Rachel’s birth, cuddling Rachel, who was all kicking legs and pumping fists. And, just before Rachel had left for school, she’d wanted to ask her father about the details of the wreck. Felt that the gnawing emptiness inside her would go away if she knew more. She’d typed her parents’ names into Google but had never hit SEARCH. In the end, as much as she needed to know, she did not want to know. She’d turned her parents into romanticized idols. Victims. But what if the crash had been their fault? What if they’d been drunk? Or killed someone else in the crash? In the end, she hadn’t wanted to taint her ideal with fact.
Rachel’s eyes teared in the stinging cold. “Right,” she said. “It’s not like I was in the car.”
“The house, you mean.”
Rachel felt the ground turn to quicksand.
“Your parents didn’t die in a car crash,” Purple Hair said.
The wind was howling in Rachel’s emptied skull.
“They were murdered,” Purple Hair said, “stabbed to death by a monster.”
RACHEL STALKED DOWN the sidewalk blindly, tripping and falling, picking herself up, buttoning her coat up tight for once against the sudden cold she felt. She sensed a sob working in her chest, wanting out, but her mind had not quite grasped what she’d been told. Not quite believed it. Every time she thought of what Purple Hair had said, she grabbed the sides of her head and squeezed, as if trying to rid herself of a migraine. She called Felix and got his voice mail, left a brief but babbling message. She tried to calm herself, breathe deeply.
From behind her she heard Purple Hair calling after her.
Rachel hurried along.
What Purple Hair had said rooted in her mind like a malignant tumor. She wanted to take a knife and cut it out.