BEER IS REVOLTING. WHICH HAD come as a shock. I’d really thought it wouldn’t be so bad. I’d figured it would be like mustard greens or radishes—foods you won’t touch when you’re little and then later you find out are actually delicious. Or at least not as terrible as you’d thought.
Beer wasn’t like that.
Still, between the two of us we’d made it through both bottles.
It had been an unusually warm autumn night, and our parents had gone out to the movies. We’d been bored and hot, so Anna had snuck two bottles of beer from the fridge. We’d drunk the bottles one by one, trading them back and forth. And there was something that had felt…cool about sitting on her bed, the warm night air flowing in through the window, trading the cold bottle between us, letting its neck dangle from our fingers.
Anna kept asking if I felt anything. I’d felt looser, maybe, my limbs less tense. When I asked her, she’d smiled and said she thought she might feel a little buzzed. We’d laughed a lot, at even sillier things than usual, but that could have just been from nervous energy, the edge of worry that our parents might suddenly show up again, their movie canceled, to find us with beer on our breaths and guilty expressions on our faces. And sometime after the second beer, we’d both fallen asleep on her bed, too warm to bother with blankets.
Early the next morning, Anna had stashed the bottles in her closet so our parents wouldn’t see them. She’d said she’d sneak them down to our recycling bin once enough other bottles had accumulated that two additions wouldn’t stand out.
I’d offered to do it instead, certain she’d forget about them, but she’d insisted she’d remember.
Obviously, she hadn’t.
MY MOM’S SIGNATURE WAS CLEAN and smooth, each letter easily decipherable. My dad’s was little more than a line with a couple of small bumps in the middle, mere upward twitches of the wrist. It was his signature I forged on the autopsy request form.
On the rest of the form, I tried my best to infuse my handwriting with his particular style of borderline unreadable scrawl, to tick the necessary boxes with the kind of flick I’d seen him use.
While I wasn’t sure if I thought, like Lauren, that the police were morons, I was pretty sure they weren’t all the brightest lights in town. Also, they’d mislaid Anna’s things before, so it was no major leap to think they could have misread or misinterpreted toxicology results—made incorrect assumptions. They might have glanced over the report and come to the easy conclusion, the one that matched the bottles they’d already lifted from her room.
I needed to see a copy of the autopsy report myself to confirm whether it truly said what my parents had told me. So I’d mail in the form I’d downloaded from the county medical examiner’s website and wait for a response.
In the meantime, I had to revisit all my preconceptions about Anna’s death. I’d assumed, like everyone, that Anna had fallen leaving the house. If she’d had alcohol in her system that night, though, that pointed to an entirely different story. In that version, she’d had no problem at all leaving—the problem had been getting back up to her room. Which would mean that there was unaccounted-for time. Time when Anna had been out in the world, alive, while I’d been asleep. Time when she’d been with someone. Time when things had happened.