IT’S SNOWING.
It started this morning, little pebbly flecks like grains of sugar that brushed against the window.
By French in third period, it was really snowing, collecting against the window while we wrote down what we ate for breakfast, in French.
“Je mange rien,” Carrie said. “Le breakfast c’est le big scam.”
“I don’t think ‘scam’ is French,” I said.
Carrie drew a giant face on her paper with a giant open mouth with a coffee cup hovering over it. “What did you eat?”
“Crêpes,” I said.
“You had crêpes?” Carrie looks impressed.
“Crêpes is French for pancakes,” I said. “I had pancakes.”
My dad made pancakes, because my dad and my mom are taking turns being home all day to watch Mark, who is the most grounded a person can be. They took away his television and his phone. So he spends most of his time reading. I think. Who knows what he’s really doing in his room.
The pancakes were to try and make things feel less weird possibly, but like every gesture created to make things less weird, they really just make things more weird. Like when was the last time my dad made everyone pancakes, and we all sat at the table watching him read the paper like it was Sunday? When I was six? Never?
“I’ll just write crêpes, too,” Carrie said, shaking her pen back to life. “We both ate crêpes.”
She draws another mouth dropping in from the top of the page, my giant mouth, biting into a giant pancake that takes up the whole middle of the page.
Carrie et Georgia mangez les crêpes.
After school, Carrie is at my locker. I spot the bag of money still in there but leave it behind, putting on my coat.
“Where are we going?” Carrie asks.
“I wanted to go to the park,” I say.
Carrie frowns. “The park? What park?”
“Where they found Todd Mayer.”
Carrie steps back. “Why?”
I don’t have a good reason. “I can go by myself,” I say.
“No, it’s fine.” Carrie turns, heading toward the door. “Let’s do it.”
Now it’s snowing hard. Wet flakes that stick and stack so the street is a river of slush that sucks you in with every step. As soon as we get away from the main road and turn down the little residential streets that wind their way toward the park, the snow turns into a buffer, coating everything in quiet that makes every breath a sound as big as a word.
The park is empty. Just a single line of dog prints that cut through like a zipper. Even the trees are full of snow thick like white paint.
I can’t remember where the police tape was, where they found Todd. If I did, it would probably be impossible to see anyway.
It’s like everything is being erased.
“Okay,” Carrie says quietly. “We’re here.”
Yesterday, they arrested a teacher at Albright for Todd Mayer’s murder. It was on the local news. Reporters mobbing this guy with a sweater over his face as two officers lead him to a cop car. He was wearing a Bette Midler concert T-shirt, which to me was mostly weird because it must have been freezing outside.
My mom, sitting next to me, said, “Horrible.”
“Let’s go sit on the swings,” Carrie says, pointing to the play area.
We slip-slide down into the basin of the park. Little-kid playthings all covered in ice and a few layers of snow—enough to make them mostly unplayable. The swings are stiff, and it’s a struggle to get my big, puffy coat between the two chains, but I manage.
Carrie leans back in the swing, like she’s waiting for a push or some sort of movement. “So,” she says, “did you figure out the thing about the money?”
“I’m pretty sure it was Mark’s money for paying Todd Mayer for answers to a midterm,” I say. “He told my parents he cheated, and I guess they all had to pay like hundreds of dollars. So.”
“Huh.” Carrie steps back, still in the swing, as far as the chains will let her. “Fuck.”
“Trevor Bathurst cheated, too,” I say, which I know from eavesdropping on my parents. “The whole class cheated.”
“Bet you a thousand dollars it was Trevor Bathurst’s genius idea,” Carrie says, lifting her legs so she’s airborne.
“Yeah, I don’t think it was Mark’s idea,” I say. “It’s all so fucking pathetic. It’s like actually the most pathetic thing ever.”
Carrie’s shoes skim through the snow under the swing. “What would you have done … if he was like actually involved? Like if he had something to do with what happened to Todd?”
“Is this a riddle?” I ask, twisting in my swing.
“No, it’s a moral question.” Carrie swings.
“I don’t know,” I say, honestly.
“Would you have gone to the police?”
I put my hands on my stomach. “No. But…”
I stand.
“I don’t think I could ever look at him.”
“Even though you didn’t even know Todd?” Carrie asks as her swing slows to a halt. “You would, like, disown your brother over someone you don’t even know?”
“I mean, I love my brother,” I say, stamping in the snow. “I don’t know Todd. I wouldn’t stop loving my brother. Obviously. But if he killed someone and then lied about it. Like even just lying about knowing Todd. It’s just gross.”
“I think it’s the sort of thing people lie about,” Carrie says. “That’s why police are all, like, ‘Where were you?’ because they need facts to cut through all the lies people tell.”
“Sure.”
There is a moment of silence. Carrie leans back in her swing. “Do you remember in grade six? The cards Shirley and I handed out?”
“Yeah.”
Of course I do. They were little cards with all our faults written on them. Shirley Mason’s neat handwriting, little white cards. We all had to line up at the swing set to get them. So we could improve ourselves, Shirley said.
Mine read: Everyone hates it when you talk about yourself all the time.
“It was Shirley’s idea,” Carrie says, still swinging. “I can’t remember why. I think her mother is kind of fucked up and critical, which is why she’s like that. Like she hates herself so she has to be mean to everyone else. And she was like, ‘Oh, okay, we can tell other people what’s wrong with them.’”
“Okay.” I don’t know what else to say.
Carrie abruptly stops swinging. “It was her idea but I helped her and that’s fucked up. But like, at the time I just thought, like, I was supporting my friend. Like there’s so much of my life I fucking regret, and it’s all stuff I did for someone else.”
I still don’t know what to say. “Okay.”
“So, I’m sorry,” she says. “For one. That I was, like, a part of that.”
“Thanks. But.” I’m confused. “My brother didn’t do this, Carrie. I mean. He cheated. So I guess—”
Carrie stands. “I’m just saying. I know he didn’t do it, and that fucked-up teacher killed Todd Mayer. Just. Like, maybe with this cheating thing, give your brother a break for doing something stupid for Trevor Bathurst. Like. Shirley Mason is the strongest person I know, and she would basically walk on glass for him. I’m just saying we’re all … pathetic.”
It’s still snowing. Flakes are collecting in Carrie’s hair.
I lean on the cold pole of the swing set. “You’re not pathetic. You’re just a toothless school girl who refuses to wear proper winter boots.”
Carrie smiles, then looks at her phone. “I gotta go; it’s, like, almost six.”
By the time we leave the park, ours are the only two sets of footprints leaving the scene of the crime.
At dinner, we’re all sitting together eating Chinese takeout when my dad’s phone rings and it’s the guy who runs the driveway-clearing business who can’t get ahold of Mark because Mark’s phone is in a drawer somewhere.
“Mark!” My dad comes back in the dining room and slaps his phone down on the table. “Get your gear on.”
Mark, who’s been totally quiet the whole dinner, looks up. “What?”
“Get your coat. That was Mr. McNally. They need you to help clear a couple of driveways.”
Mark puts his chopstick on the table, quiet. “I can’t.”
My mom, who’s been on her phone for most of dinner, partly because she’s rescheduling the release of her next book, sits up. “Why not?”
“I’m grounded,” Mark says.
“You can still shovel a driveway,” my dad says.
I slide a greasy spring roll off the plate and dip it in orange goo. Which seems like a very weird thing to be doing given the metric tonnage of eye-staring weight that’s happening over the table.
Mark shoves his chair back from the table. “Fine, I don’t want to shovel driveways.”
“Then go to your room,” my dad says.
What’s more awkward than watching someone who isn’t a little kid go to their room? It’s like watching Mark fold in on himself. Which is pretty much how he’s been all week. Like a big shadow of a person who both takes up the amount of space he takes up but somehow that space weighs nothing.
After dinner, I walk up to his door with a spring roll in a bag as a peace offering, and knock.
“Can I come in?”
“Yeah.”
Mark sits up in his bed, which is a sea of books he’s supposed to be studying from. “Thanks, but yeah, I can’t eat that.”
“Right,” I say, putting the bag behind my back. “Uh, Mark?”
I lower my voice. “I have the money. For the exams? I found it. In the … house? I can bring it back.”
I don’t know what I’m expecting him to say. I don’t know if I’m expecting him to be mad. I think about the kid who showed that angry man in Florida our pile of quartz. It’s like I’m that kid now, but I’m not that kid?
“Yeah,” he says, with equal quiet.
“It’s your money,” I say. “I don’t know why I took it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Mark says. “It’s not my money.”
“Okay, well, I’ll bring it back.”
“Okay.”
I walk away with my cold spring roll in its greasy bag.
I take out the trash to be helpful and to stand in the snow for a second under the light of the moon eating the cold spring roll that isn’t against my training dietary restrictions. I can hear my parents in my mom’s study arguing, which they generally don’t do in front of us.
I am that super dense Molly kid in the book. All I have are questions that maybe aren’t even the right questions.
Like who cares if Mark lied about Todd? Kids are shitty and mean. People are friends and then they stop being friends with the shitty people that made them do shitty things, and that’s just how it is, right?
But then …
Why did Todd die? Like, really just because of some teacher? Why would his teacher kill him? It’s like there’s always some whole other layer of fucked up you don’t even know to ask questions about because you don’t even know it’s there.
I stomp back inside. The house is almost as quiet as the park now as I kick off my boots and line them up with the rest of the boot family in the hallway.