CASS
As soon as the shock of reading the post wears off, I’m back on my motorbike, speeding away from Lamphan beach. Anger and betrayal lap at the back of my mind like waves, but I’m fully consumed with one task: finding Logan.
The words of his text sawed at the few threads holding me together these last few days. Tell me this isn’t true. I need to see him, to explain everything I should have told him yesterday. The things I should have confessed to years ago, when we first became serious. I need to make this right.
Nausea clings to my throat, cloying and threatening as I think about what all this could mean for us. The desperation from yesterday returns in full form, clutching at my throat and pressing tighter and tighter. I need him. For the first time, it starts to sink in. I barely survived losing Robin. I wouldn’t make it through losing Logan too.
I drive like my life depends on it—which it very well might—my resolve growing with every rotation of my bike wheels against the road. I’ll tell him everything. I’ll make him understand. We’ll get through this. We have to.
I barely see her as I near the house, so focused am I on the crushing disappointment that comes when I realize Logan’s bike isn’t parked in the driveway.
I look around, expecting him to walk into view. And that’s when I notice her. Her motorbike parked at the mouth of the Khrum Yai trail, her lips contorted into a smug smile.
I barely manage to park my bike before I’m running toward her, fists balled. I don’t know what it is I plan to do with them. I manage to stop with my face inches from hers, and a small pulse of satisfaction thrums in my muscles when I notice her flinch.
“How could you.” The words come out as a growl, more demand for an explanation than question.
This close, Brooke looks as if she hasn’t slept in days. Her face is awash with dark circles and broken capillaries, and the whites of her eyes are tinged red, though not enough to dampen her disdain. I suppose there’s no longer a reason for her to hide her real feelings for me.
“You really don’t remember me, do you?” Brooke asks slyly.
I open my mouth to claim she’s mistaken, that we’ve never met. But before I can, I note yet again the echo of something familiar in her voice. The flattened vowels, the slight twang. A sound I’ve only noticed in a few of our more recent conversations, when Brooke was focused or irritated.
“What accent is that? Where are you even from?” I ask with trepidation. “You said you were from out west.”
Brooke puts a mocking finger to her mouth. “Guess that Hudson education really did wonders for you, huh?” She begins pacing, swinging her arms at her sides casually. “By the way, have you kept up with your friends there, your old roomie? Eric, perhaps?” Her voice is razor sharp, eyes poisonous.
And then it comes to me. I have met her before.
It was one time, years ago, and only for a few minutes.
That skinny girl in her clearly secondhand clothes and badly dyed hair. The quiet one who spoke with a heavy drawl, her insecurity painted across her face.
The swim house, three years ago. A night that would otherwise have blended in with hundreds of others if not for the fact that it happened only weeks before my life imploded. That girl, showing up at the house, smiling eagerly at everyone. I watched her with distaste as she drowned in Eric’s attention, thinking she was actually special enough to deserve it. I knew she’d find out eventually that she wasn’t, that Eric was just using her for that stupid contest over which guy could sleep with the most women during their dry month. It was appalling, in retrospect, but at the time, I laughed along with them. I did what I needed to do for Eric and my roommate to keep me around. They, in their infinite popularity, made me feel special, the same way Brooke has in these last few weeks. Until now.
That night, after the girl went up to Eric’s room and he came back down to the living room victorious, she caused a scene. Pounding her way down the stairs, slamming the door behind her. I remember watching as she ran out of the house, embarrassed for her. She looked at me as if I did something wrong. I didn’t understand it, and I barely thought of her again.
The Brooke I know bears no similarities to that girl. She’s changed everything about herself, swapping her secondhand clothes for more flattering styles, trading her terrible black hair for soft honey waves, her bony limbs expanding into appealing curves.
But as she stares at me now through those red-rimmed eyes, her bracelets jangling as she runs her hand through her hair, I can see a flash of it in her face. That same eagerness to be accepted that wafted off her at the swim house. I think back to the few times I brought her along to hang out with the Permanents before Lucy and all the chaos that unfolded with her death. How quick she was to laugh at a joke or throw a compliment in Greta’s direction. She may have suppressed her desire to fit in—she certainly wasn’t as obvious as that girl at the swim house—but now I can see the times when her need for acceptance poked through.
“Should we go inside?” Brooke says now, three years older and much more vindictive than that freshman girl in the swim house. She nods back down the hill to where one of my neighbors is cleaning out his gutters in preparation for the impending storm while indiscreetly shooting glances in our direction. “Wouldn’t want to cause a scene, would you?”
Normally, I would agree with her. Normal Cass would invite her in, offer her a drink, and wait for her to tell her side of the story. But that’s what got me in this trouble to begin with. My willingness to please.
That Cass is done.
“What, do you think someone will overhear what you just shared with the whole goddamn world? No, this is exactly where we’ll do it.” My hands shake, and I stuff them in my pockets. But unlike usual, the tremors aren’t from nerves; they’re from fury.
Brooke raises her eyebrows slightly, and a small part of me is proud that I’ve finally been able to surprise her, which just infuriates me even more.
“So she’s finally found her voice after all,” Brooke says in an indifferent tone I’ve never heard her use. I don’t even recognize her. This person isn’t Brooke. The woman who made me feel special, even loved. The person who I was too nervous to admit had become my best friend in only a matter of weeks.
But I guess that’s the point. She is—and always has been—a complete stranger.
“Who the fuck are you? What kind of person does this?”
Brooke’s response is immediate. “The kind of person you will never have the balls to be, clearly. One who doesn’t let bad people get away with bad things.”
Her tone is scathing, fury radiating off her.
“And now I know, your sister and your father, all that from the past, that wasn’t all you’ve been capable of, was it?” Brooke continues, venom dripping from her voice. “I heard your conversation with Logan about the Xanax and his little indiscretion. And I found Lucy’s phone. That was really smart, Cass, keeping it under your bed. I mean, how dumb can you be?”
Her fury seems to dissipate as she says this, replaced with a smugness that’s somehow worse. I feel my forehead scrunch in confusion. It was the one part of her post I couldn’t piece together—why she claimed I had Lucy’s phone, why she lied—but she rushes on before I can question it.
“So was that it?” Brooke continues. “Is that why you pushed Jacinta from Khrum Yai? Because your boyfriend was cheating with her? And Lucy? All he did was talk to her, but you were too jealous to even stand that. Daniel—I bet you were just covering your tracks with him. Gotta give it to you, murdering him was ballsy. But how exactly did you do that? I mean, he was so much bigger than you. Did you surprise him from behind and slit his throat? I’ve noticed those scuba knives you keep in the dive shop. Is that what you used?” She leans toward me mockingly, her fist beneath her chin as if she’s begging for gossip. “Do tell. I would love to know.”
I shouldn’t be surprised by these questions. I know her suspicions. She made them quite clear in her post. But my mind halts on one thing she said. I heard your conversation with Logan.
I knew there was someone in our house last night. I don’t know where she could have been hiding, but she was there, watching and listening to all the things I didn’t want anyone to know. And it all makes sense.
“You’ve been following me.” This time, there’s a waver in my voice that I can’t attribute to anger. Despite everything—the post, the threatening notes she left on my doorstep—this realization seems like the worst thing she’s done to me. I’ve felt crazy these last few days, feeling eyes on me everywhere I’ve walked, the stifling paranoia that I could never verify. All that time, it was Brooke following me, the woman I thought was my friend.
“Wow, you really are slow. Welcome to the party, Cass.” Brooke’s lips are turned upward in a self-satisfied smile that makes the nausea return with full force.
“But why?” I force the words out, laced with frustrated confusion.
“Why? Really?” That harsh laugh comes again, but then Brooke’s tone changes, as hard and sharp as a knife. “He raped me, Cass. Eric Verrino, your friend. And you just sat there and let it happen.”
“N-no,” I stammer. That didn’t happen. I would have known. Sure, the game Eric and the other swim guys were playing was disgusting, horrifying even. But he wasn’t a rapist.
“Y-yes,” Brooke stutters mockingly. But despite the sarcasm, I can sense something has changed in her. “You could have stopped him. Warned me from going up to his room, but that wasn’t even the worst part! Afterward, you lied about it. You covered for him.”
I stand there, stunned, not fully grasping what she’s implying.
“You know how hard it was for me to get a lawyer? How many people I had to call and tell my story to over and over and over, just to have them tell me it was my fault? How horrible that was? And then, when I finally found her, the one lawyer willing to go to bat for me, she came to you directly, Meghan.” She spits out my name—my real name—like a curse word. “She asked you point-blank if you knew what happened that night. And you lied. You fucking lied.” A sob rises in her throat, her anger bubbling into sorrow. She tries to overcompensate for it, her voice getting louder and louder. “You told her I was obsessed with him. That I came over there for sex. That I was only mad because I realized I had been a number in a stupid game.”
I remember now, a moment that was quickly replaced in my memory by the events that happened in that hotel room soon after. A stern-looking woman in a black trouser suit cornering me and my roommate outside our dorm. She asked us both rapid-fire questions about where we were the weekend before, how well we knew Eric. It was clear she was trying to pin something on him. And then she asked if he raped that girl from the swim house. That made me and my roommate stop walking.
My roommate turned to the woman, her voice steely. “Eric is a good guy. If that girl is saying that he raped her, then she’s probably just jealous.”
The words sounded wrong as they hit my ear, but my roommate looked over in my direction, silently urging me to back her up. So I did. “Yeah, that girl came over for one reason. She wanted to have sex with Eric. She was just mad because she realized that he didn’t really like her.”
The memory hits me like a slap in the face.
“You told her I wanted it.” Brooke is yelling now, and I see my neighbor out of the corner of my eye. He’s given up all pretense of clearing his gutters and is staring at us, open mouthed. “What kind of woman are you? What kind of person are you?”
I try to grasp her questions, but the answers slip through my fingers.
They’re the same questions I’ve been asking myself since my conversation with Logan last night. What kind of person am I? Why would my ring be next to Lucy’s body?
“Look,” I say, my voice shakier than I would like. “I’m sorry I did that, but we were in college. And I didn’t know what he did to you. How could I? And why me? Eric is out there living his best life.” I think of all the times I’ve wandered to Eric’s profile after posting an Instagram photo on the dive shop’s account. Scrolling through the endless shots of him and my roommate and their perfect life. “You talk about what kind of woman I am, but what kind of woman are you?” I’m gaining momentum now. Her story threw me, but my anger comes rushing back. “You target me and what? Dedicate years of your life to tracking me down and ruining me? You don’t think I already went through enough hell after college? You know what happened to me. You know what everyone said about me. But you don’t see me hunting down the people who said it, do you? God, you really are crazy.”
Brooke’s eyes flash, and I prepare for her to yell, to scream. But when she finally speaks, it’s steady, with an icy rage.
“Yeah, that’s what they said at the hospital.” She looks down at her wrists. “You asked me about my bracelets when we first met.”
The words aren’t what I expected, and I feel myself pull back. I watch as Brooke pushes the bracelets up her arm, raising her arms to expose her wrists.
I suck in a mouthful of air as I realize what she’s showing me. Ghostly white slices cut diagonally across both of her wrists, fragile, puckered skin stretched together like two ethereal bracelets.
“You,” she says. “You did this.”