Celeste
There are two dreams set on perpetual pause in my subconscious, the Play button waiting to be pressed whenever my life hits a moment of upheaval and stress.
You think what’s happening right now is bad? That’s nothing. Remember this?
I am sixteen, waking on a Sunday morning to the sensation that someone is in my room. I startle up and see my mother in my doorway. She orders me out of bed. I’m past the age of obeying without at least a snarky comment, but that morning, I’m too sleepy to argue. I roll out of bed, and then, with the unreality of dreams, I’m already downstairs in the living room, where two uniformed officers wait.
“Where were you last night?” the female officer asks. In the dream, they are amorphous shapes, distinguishable only by a male and a female voice.
“Uh . . .” I blink. I’m still in the doorway. No one has asked me to come in and sit down.
“She was out with her friends.” Mom twists that last word, contempt dripping. “She got in after we’d gone to bed.”
No, I was back by ten. My parents had been in the living room with the neighbors. I try to say that, but the words won’t come. They don’t come because they won’t help. In the real version, I had argued. I’d pleaded with my mother to remember seeing or hearing me. If she hadn’t noticed me come in, she could have pretended. She did not.
“Tell us about your evening,” the female officer says. “You were out with friends between what hours? And what did you do?”
Nothing. I did nothing.
That was the problem, wasn’t it?
Someone laughs across the room. With a start, I turn to see my friends at our kitchen table, Starbucks cups in hand. I glance quickly at my mother and the officers, but they don’t see them.
I stare at the trio. Three girls whose names I no longer even remember, but they’d been so important to me then. My new friends, the popular clique who’d seen fit to admit me when Denny Lamar said I’d come back from summer “hot.”
Now they’re at my kitchen table, which isn’t my kitchen table at all. It’s our regular corner spot at Starbucks. They’re bored and shit-posting on a school message board about their current favorite voodoo doll, a girl named Jasmine Oleas. I wasn’t into it. By no means did I defend this poor girl. I just didn’t see the point in tormenting someone like Jasmine, whose only “crime” was being poor and bused into our school on a scholarship.
“Hey, you,” one of the girls says, waving across the room at me. “You’re in two of her classes. Are there any guys she likes?”
I should shake my head. I want to shake my head. Instead, I call over to them, saying, “Brad Moore.”
“Seriously? That geek?”
I shrug. “He’s nice to her.”
“Post something about Brad,” one says to the girl with the phone. “No, post it from Brad. About her.”
“No!” the third says. “Text Jasmine. Pretend to be him.”
Beside me, the female officer asks, “Do you know a girl named Jasmine Oleas?”
My friends keep chattering at the table. They’re asking Jasmine to meet Brad. She agrees, and they set up the meet on the old pier, the one where kids used to hang out until the cops blocked it off.
“Do you know a girl named Jasmine Oleas?” the officer asks again, in the same tone, as if on a loop.
“Sure, she’s in my algebra and chem classes. I don’t know her well, but she seems nice.”
The male officer turns to face the girls at the table, who keep chattering and texting. He speaks in droning recitation, as if he’s on a true-crime show. “At 11:14 last night, police received a call. A witness reported seeing a group of girls on the old pier. According to the witness, it seemed to be some kind of hazing ritual. Three or four girls tormenting another one. We responded to find the pier empty. Two hours later, Mrs. Oleas reported her daughter missing. Mrs. Oleas had gone into Jasmine’s room at midnight and found it empty. Calls to Jasmine’s phone went unanswered.” He pauses there, and I wait, unable to breathe. “At 5:11 a.m., we pulled Jasmine Oleas’s body from the water cove.”
In reality, I’d freaked out. In the dream, I stand motionless, as if on trial.
The male officer continues his TV-show recitation to my three friends, who are still giggling at the table. “Her mother says she was being bullied by four classmates. These four.” He points to the three girls at the table and then at me. “We found her cell phone, and we traced those calls to one young woman’s phone. We believe these four lured Jasmine to the pier by pretending to be a boy she liked.”
I open my mouth to protest that I wasn’t there. Nothing comes out.
The officer continues, “The coroner’s preliminary report says someone held Jasmine’s head underwater. These four girls lured her out there, and then killed her.”
The spell breaks. I spin on my mom. “I was in by ten. Tell them.”
She just stares at me, and in that stare, I know what she’s thinking. What she’s already decided. That I did this. I helped kill this girl.
The male officer continues his droning report. “Witnesses place the four teenage girls at that Starbucks until nine thirty p.m. They can identify all four girls. They saw them climb into a car and leave together. That same car was seen parked near the beach an hour later.”
“But I wasn’t with them. They dropped me off at home.” I turn to my mother one last time. “Mom, please. You must have heard me come in. Or Dad did. Or one of the neighbors.”
“I told you not to hang out with those girls. I told you they would get you into trouble.”
“I wasn’t there!” My voice rises to a wail. “I swear it. I was here, in my bed!”
Mom turns to the officers. “My daughter was not responsible for this poor girl’s death.”
My breath catches, heart fluttering with hope.
Mom continues, “My daughter is a follower, not a leader. She’s easily led. Easily manipulated. If she was there, it was as an observer only.”
I stare at her, open mouthed. “Mom?”
“We’re going to need to take your daughter down to the station for further questioning,” the male officer says.
“Of course.” Mom rises. “I presume I should contact our lawyer?”
“Mom?”
“We aren’t quite at that point yet,” the female officer says. “But yes, that is your right.”
She walks past me. Straight past me, her gaze ahead, as tears pour down my cheeks, and I’m left whispering, “Mom?” like a little girl, as she continues on into the next room.
I bolt awake, my face damp with tears. That last moment—the one when my mother gave up on me for good—lingers, making me struggle for breath.
I’d been accused of helping murder a girl, and nothing I said or did ever convinced my mother that I hadn’t been there. Even when the police declined to press charges, it hadn’t helped. They’d decided against charging any of us. Not enough evidence. In other words, they didn’t believe I was home in my bed; they were convinced all four of us did it but just couldn’t prove anything. That condemned us as much as an actual conviction. To the community—to the entire city—we were killers. Mean girls turned murderers.
My so-called friends didn’t help. They sure as hell weren’t going to say I hadn’t been there if it meant admitting they had. Nope. According to them, we all left that coffee shop together, and we’d been dropped off one by one, starting with me. Sure, they texted Jasmine, but they never actually went to the pier. That was the prank—to have her show up alone. Having a bit of fun at her expense, and we were all in on it. Hell, I gave them the name of her crush, didn’t I?
Two of my friends’ families moved away within a month. The third one went to live with her grandmother. That left me to stand trial in the court of public opinion. To be the target for other bullies. To be kicked out of every school club on the vaguest of excuses. To become the most hated girl in town. That’s when I started noticing a kid following me around. A thin-faced girl of about ten. Jasmine’s sister. Stalking me. Staring at me. Leaving notes wherever I might find them.
I know what you did.
I hope you die.
I hope someone holds you under the water until you drown.
I fell apart, and Aaron swooped in as my savior. The one who understood. The one who knew I hadn’t been there that night. The one who believed me.
Three months later, I took that stack of notes from Jasmine’s sister, and I burned them. Then I shoved everything I owned into my dad’s biggest suitcase, and I walked out the door and climbed into the cab Aaron had called for me, a cab that would take me to the bus station, onto a bus that would take me to him.
What resurrected that nightmare tonight? Is it because I’m thinking of using Daisy to escape Liam? Does she remind me of Jasmine in some way? I suppose, subconsciously, I’m feeling guilty. I can’t, though. Jasmine died, and that wasn’t my fault. Daisy can look after herself. I have no reason to feel guilty.
No reason at all.