We stand inside a gated yard by the river. An expanse of scarred concrete stretches down to the water, too small to be of interest to developers. It’s empty except for various pieces of litter lying among washed-up algae and weeds, everything coated in dirty yellow foam. Totally the sort of place you could imagine finding a body.
Except there’s no body.
“Jesse was right here. I don’t understand,” Charlotte says. She’s stopped blubbering now, which is a relief. I was one sniffle away from grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her. Stop being so pathetic, I wanted to yell, although I’m not sure if it would really be aimed at her or at myself. I haven’t had the best hour, and this Jesse thing is the icing on a really shit cake that I couldn’t even eat since I don’t eat cake.
“There’s nothing here,” Grayson says, letting out a big breath. He looks beyond relieved that we don’t have to deal with a corpse.
Am I relieved? I’m not sure. It doesn’t feel real without a body. Maybe it’s not real. I kick a can, and it clatters down toward the water.
“You’re saying someone moved the body? Why?” Emma says, unimpressed. Her camera hangs loosely from one hand, its corpse-photographing potential spoiled. “Unless it was to get rid of evidence,” she goes on slowly.
“Maybe he’s at the hospital?” Grayson says. “Are you sure he was dead?”
Charlotte clutches her head with both hands. Her hair’s drying in a puffy blond thatch. “Oh no. What if I imagined it? I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
“How could you imagine an entire corpse?” I say.
“My whole world is imaginary,” Charlotte mutters through her hands. “Sometimes I go entire days without anything real happening. Who’s to say this is even real?”
“For god’s sake. Amateurs,” Emma mutters. She shakes her head.
I gaze out across the oil-black water. It’s funny. I’d planned out my entire life to revolve around Jesse, and now I’m struggling to imagine a future in which I am the center of everything. I’m a satellite untethered from its orbit, hurtling out into the blackness of space, cold and alone. It’s Jesse’s gravitational pull that I already miss. Not him.
Maybe that part will come later, when I start to remember the things I loved about him. I try to conjure them up in my heart—his warm arm slung over my shoulder, the way he’d buy me special clothes that I only wore when I was around his house, how he’d want to start a fight with any man who looked at me. Only, none of those things were really about me.
I laugh softly to myself. I can’t even pretend that I’m sorry he’s gone.
“Why would you want to kill him?” Emma says, making me jump.
“What?” I say.
“I was talking to Charlotte.” Emma eyes me suspiciously. “Charlotte, focus. Tell us everything you remember.”
“Um, I was running from the police,” Charlotte sniffles. “But someone knocked me over the wall on the riverbank, and I hit my head. It got a bit hazy after that, but I remember climbing onto one of the swans.”
“Where was Jesse?” I say.
“Well, someone climbed onto the swan with me. It was tipping over, so they wanted me to get off. I thought it was another contestant, but perhaps it was Jesse.” She focuses on her feet, shuffling her sneakers in the grime. “I don’t know for sure.”
“Why would Jesse get on a swan?” Emma says. “Why would he be on the riverbank in the first place?”
“He was operating the projector. For Rose’s appearance,” Grayson says. “I saw him before all hell broke loose.”
“Why didn’t you tell us that earlier?” Emma says.
Grayson winces. “Because my brain’s made of cauliflower?” he says sheepishly. “And there were these mannequins, and the lights went out, and—”
“Forget it. Charlotte, you were on a swan with Jesse or someone you mistook for Jesse. What happened next?”
“I kicked him and he fell in the water. Then I think I got knocked semi-unconscious because I don’t remember anything else until I woke up here, next to his body. The simplest explanation is that he was the person I kicked.”
“Is it? Because, if you did accidentally kill him, why would someone else want to cover it up?”
I think for a moment. “To protect Anton. A death during his game wouldn’t look good, not after Rose. Someone could have moved the body, hoping no one traced Jesse back to the game and to Anton.”
Emma snaps her fingers. “You could be on to something. Charlotte, did you see anyone else?”
“Beatrix was here,” Charlotte says, sniffling.
“Beatrix?” Grayson asks. “Seriously?”
Charlotte nods. “She was on the road outside. I ran out in front of her van, and she had to stop.”
“A van that she could have removed the body in,” I say.
Grayson chuckles. “I’m finding it hard to believe that Beatrix has body disposal on her CV.”
Charlotte, Emma, and I look at each other. He’s so naive. Taken in by a pretty face. None of us know Beatrix, not really. The kooky act for the cameras is as put on as my own plastic persona.
“Beatrix wouldn’t,” Charlotte says. “Would she?”
“She’s Anton’s sister, and she’d do anything to protect him,” I say.
Everyone is silent, thinking their own dark thoughts. I take advantage of the quiet to run through what I know about Jesse’s involvement in this big mess. It’s pretty clear he’s been working against Anton and helping stage the Rose shit. Which explains why he was hanging around the abandoned hotel when I tracked him down.
I squeeze my phone so hard in one hand that I think either the screen or my fingers will break. He set me up. Jesse positioned those mannequins to look like me and my mother. Pinned her taped-together bank statements to the walls. Tucked a photo of me into a carriage clock, ready for anyone to find it. I never told him about those photos.
I’m tearing myself apart inside, wondering what else he lied about. Did he genuinely care about me, or was it all about how he could use me to make money? It doesn’t matter now, I guess. The important thing is that Jesse wasn’t working alone. Someone was paying him to set up this whole charade.
The question is who?
I’m hit by an abrupt surge of nausea. “I have to go,” I say. “Don’t follow me.”
At the gates, I look back. They’re all watching me, but no one has moved. No doubt they’re waiting until I’m out of sight before they laugh at me. Emma will add this to her story. Princess Erin, selling dirty photos to protect her mother, heartbroken at her boyfriend’s death. It’s the climax everyone wants to see. The pretty, famous girl brought down a peg or two.
I angrily wipe at my eyes. They’re not my friends, I remind myself. I don’t give a shit about them. Not Charlotte, with her mean comments giving way to kindness when it actually mattered. Not Grayson, always trying to make me laugh even when he’s suffering inside. I don’t care what they think of me.
I slide down against the wall of an apartment building and put my head on my knees. I’m alone and that’s a good thing. I can depend on myself. I don’t need anyone else.
It’s a few minutes before I hear footsteps. Part of me is hit by this surge of desperate hope that it’s Grayson or Charlotte coming to check on me. Only it’s neither of them. It’s Emma, and Emma isn’t one of us.
“Everyone’s wondering the same thing.” Emma leans casually against the wall. Her shrewd expression gives her away though. For someone so young, she’s as cold and determined as a shark. “Did you kill Rose, Erin? You must have been scared those photos would come out.”
“Rose was never going to tell anyone,” I say quietly.
“Maybe you killed her to protect your mother’s secret, then.”
I stare her down. I don’t have to justify myself to her.
“You know, you’re going to have a starring role in my article, so you should use this opportunity to put across your side of the story.”
“You have no shame, do you? This story of yours could destroy my mother’s reputation.”
“It’s sweet how you still care what happens to her. From what I’ve seen, she hasn’t been much of a mother to you.”
I can’t argue with that.
“Couldn’t have been easy, growing up with a parent like her. Then you finally find someone you think is on your side, only for him to die.”
“I split up with Jesse earlier tonight,” I say before I can stop myself.
“You did, huh? Was it a big argument?” She takes a hand out of her pocket, and I notice she’s holding a voice recorder. “When did this happen, exactly? It must have been right before he died?”
I narrow my eyes at her.
She smiles with all her teeth, revealing the colorful elastic stretched between her braces. “On the way here, I started going through my photos from tonight, looking for him.” She takes her phone from her pocket. “This one from the embankment is interesting.”
I squint at the picture. “Jesse’s not in it.”
“No, but Charlotte is.” She zooms in on a blurry figure with short hair and a bright orange hoodie.
I take the phone. It’s Charlotte, all right. She appears to be crawling across the mud toward a swan boat, which matches the story she told us earlier. There’s no sign of Jesse anywhere in the shot. There is, however, another boy down on the banks. He’s smaller than Jesse, with curly blond hair. He looks a bit like Sean23 from the museum.
“I’m wondering if Charlotte was confused and it was actually this boy on the boat with her,” Emma says. “Or was she lying?”
“Why would she lie?”
“Guilt makes people irrational. Perhaps she really did murder Jesse and made up the story about accidentally kicking him to convince us that it wasn’t murder.”
“Why would Charlotte want Jesse dead? I don’t think she even knew him.”
“Perhaps he saw something at that party. The one where Rose died.” Emma takes the phone back, smiling knowingly. “Or someone else entirely killed Jesse. Someone with a reason to hate him.”
I meet her eye defiantly. “I didn’t hate him, and I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
Her smile widens. “I wasn’t insinuating anything, only stating the facts. Either way, I’m going to look at my photos from the party and see if I can’t spot him in the crowd. Maybe it will turn up something incriminating.”
My mind drifts to that night. Rose’s last party and the first time I met Jesse.
I went there looking for Rose. It was a few days after our big argument, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how she knew about the photos I’d been selling and Amber’s financial situation. I was convinced she was planning to call a social worker, which would have spelled the end of Amber and Erin Love…
And it would have destroyed my mother.
My plan was to confront Rose more calmly than during our previous discussion and persuade her to let it drop. Things obviously didn’t work out that way. For starters, I couldn’t catch her on her own. I saw her talking to Charlotte at the buffet table, but afterward, she headed over to speak with Amber, then disappeared for a while. At some point, she must have argued with Matthew, overheard by Emma. I didn’t see any of that though.
I spent half the night hiding from boring conversations with Anton’s acquaintances, all of whom either wanted to book me for jobs or ply me with alcohol. My reply to everything was, “Ask my mom,” which was always enough to put them off on both counts. Mostly, I sat on the patio by myself and waited for Rose to reappear.
When I saw her next, much later in the night, she was talking to a small group of crew members I didn’t recognize. One was a tall white boy with bleached hair. The second was a scowling Black girl with a shaved head. The third was Jesse. He didn’t look like much to me at that point. Skinny, serious, messily dressed. He was also a lot older than me.
I waited for Rose to stop talking, and then I followed her. Only, when I rounded the garden studio, she was gone.
“Lost something?” Jesse stepped out from the shadows, a bottle of beer lazily hanging from his fingers.
“No, I… It’s nothing,” I said.
“What’s a nice party like this doing with a girl like you?” he said, smiling like he knew what a crappy line it was.
I rolled my eyes at him. But I had to admit to myself that he was better looking up close, especially when he smiled. There was this confidence about him. He didn’t need designer clothes and perfectly styled hair to feel comfortable in his own skin. It fascinated me in its alienness.
“Want a beer?” he said, offering me his half-drunk bottle.
I immediately revised everything I’d been thinking and decided he was disgusting. “Your mouth is home to a billion bacteria. So, no. I don’t want to drink your backwash-contaminated beer.”
He laughed like he wasn’t expecting this response. His laugh was real. I was used to people being weirded out by the strange things I’d say, but he didn’t seem put off at all. It felt like he was intrigued by me, and not just by my looks.
He eyed me with interest. “What about kissing?”
I shuddered. “Kissing transfers like eighty million bacteria. I’m not kissing you either.”
“I wasn’t going to try to kiss you,” he said with a wry grin. “Take you to movies, maybe. But you’re totally out of my league, so…have a nice night, I guess.”
I was about to leave, but I hesitated. Strange men hit on me all the time, but his mixture of confidence and self-deprecation felt different. Most boys I met hid their lack of self-confidence behind an arrogance as overwhelming as Matthew’s aftershave. I wanted to find out more about him.
“I like movies,” I said shyly.
“Guess you could give me your number, then?” he said hopefully.
I was typing it into his phone when his face changed. His serious, grown-up expression was back as he noticed something over my shoulder. “I need to have a word with someone.”
“Who?” I said, but I couldn’t see anyone.
“Just so you know, I’m a very good kisser,” he said, taking his phone from me and rushing away. “Bacteria and all.”
The memory dissipates, and I’m left grappling with the realization that it was Jesse’s adultness that attracted me to him. I didn’t have a dad, and Amber wasn’t exactly much of a mom. I was desperate for someone to look after me for once, and he took advantage of that.
Emma is holding out her voice recorder, waiting for me to speak. But I have nothing left to say. I clamber to my feet. When Emma doesn’t move her arm out of my way, I swat the recorder out of her hand. It clatters into the road.
“You don’t know who I am or what I’m capable of,” I snarl. “You’ll leave me alone, if you know what’s good for you.”
“What the hell?” Emma says as I walk away, but I keep my eyes forward. The past can’t catch me. I won’t let it get close.