STARS DANCED across the ceiling of Abby’s bedroom, projected from a slowly rotating nightlight in the corner. I watched them raptly, trying to identify the constellations from my astronomy book. Abby leaned against the wall as Libra wandered across her closed eyelids.
There was nothing to say, really.
“It still doesn’t feel over.”
I had said it so many times the words had lost their meaning. Dustin Adams was going to prison. He was a convicted mass murderer, because his victims totaled four. His name had already joined the Wikipedia page, according to Abby. I never wanted to hear his name again, but it was everywhere: in the papers, on the Internet, whispered on the street. I couldn’t go ten minutes without seeing it, hearing it.
“I know.”
Abby had washed all her makeup off. Without her customary red lipstick, her mouth looked smaller, younger. Her cheeks were naturally ruddy, mild rosacea usually hidden under a cake of foundation.
The projected stars whirled silently around us, over our bodies and the soft shapes of stuffed animals piled on the bed, the bookshelves, and the floor. I could hear the faint sounds of her parent’s television over my own breathing.
“I don’t know what to do now.”
Abby nodded again, Virgo catching on the corner of her mouth. “You go on as you did before, I guess. You go to school, make friends, find a pretty girl, and ask her out.”
My heart jumped into my throat, same as it always did when someone mentioned dating. “I’ve tried that,” I said. Although, had I, really? “I can’t just go on like it never happened. Things are different now.”
“Then do different things,” Abby said placidly, tipping her chin up as though feeling sunlight on her face instead of the faint points of light from the rotating nightlight. “Skip class, get a job, date a boy.”
The suggestion was so ludicrous as to sound credible. Why couldn’t I change the way my life was going? I was in control of my own future, after all, without a gun to my head or a trial looming.
There was a boy, a very sweet and handsome boy, the thought of whom filled me with a nervous flutter. But there was the wrong, wrong, wrong feel of it too, of the idea of dating anyone again, let alone—
“I might declare a prelaw major,” I said, as if that were the change of the century. It was practically expected of me now, with the legacy of my mother and my involvement in the murder trial.
“Criminal law?” Abby asked, her eyes still closed.
I shrugged and closed my own eyes. The wavering light created nebulas on the insides of my eyelids. “Child advocacy, maybe. Or a master’s in social work… that’s possible after prelaw, right?”
It was something that had been sitting, half-formed in the back of my mind—homeless youth, foster children, abused minors, juvenile delinquents with petty crimes on their records. Maybe forming a network of safe houses for youth in trouble, like LGBT kids put out on the streets by homophobic parents.
Abby let out a noncommittal “Hmm,” and then we lapsed into comfortable silence, sitting on her bedroom floor in our pajamas. I hadn’t had a sleepover in more than a year. Memories of Kate and I sitting on the bathroom floor exchanging lazy, intoxicated kisses came to mind.
I didn’t hear Abby stand up, but the lights flicked on and when I opened my eyes, she was on her feet by the door, her hand on the light switch.
“I’m not going to tell you how to feel,” Abby began seriously, and I blinked stupidly in the sudden light.
“Good. That would be ridiculous,” I interrupted, trying to rub the stars from my eyes.
“But…,” she continued, and I sighed, feeling the weight of that but. “It’s not psychologically healthy to go on letting something feel unfinished. Your grieving process is nowhere near over, and I get that, but you need to bring some closure into your life, or you’ll never move past it.”
“And how exactly am I supposed to get closure?” I demanded, feeling defensiveness igniting in my chest. “None of this feels finished, but it is. Dustin—” His name tasted sour in my mouth. “—is convicted. It’s over.”
“From the way you describe it, the trial created more questions than it answered.” Abby flopped onto her bed and pulled her knees up to her chest, looking, in her cat-covered pj’s and hair in two braids, more like a serious psychology student than I had ever seen her. “That’s not closure, that’s opening all kinds of new avenues for obsession.”
“Well, I can’t do anything about that, now can I?” I asked bitterly. “Trials are not about finding out the truth. They’re about two sides presenting conflicting stories and a jury picking which one sounds more convincing. I didn’t even stick around to hear his side, because I know it was all a story.”
I had become cynical over the last few weeks, critical of the process. And why shouldn’t I? Being a part of it had disillusioned me of the grandness of the judicial system.
“He’s being transferred on the sixteenth, right?” Abby asked.
“Yeah.” I didn’t bother to ask her how she knew that. I knew, from my mother’s updates, which facility Dustin would be moved to and when, now that he’d been convicted and sentenced. He had just over two weeks left in the county jail, barring any unforeseen consequences. “So?”
“You’re eighteen on the tenth.”
My birthday was creeping up on me, a daunting X on the calendar. The day you become an adult, I’d think with a twist in my stomach. The birthday Ricky and Kate never made it to, the one Jessa had only just passed. You’re growing up without them.
“Yeah, so?” I repeated, trying not to let my unease show.
Abby made a face at me, as if I should get it by now. “You’ll be eighteen, and he’ll still be in county. You could go… talk to him. Get your answers. Hear his side.” She bit her lip and hugged her knees a little tighter to her chest. “Or, you know what, never mind. You never want to see him again. But if you could stand it….” She sounded wistful in a way I didn’t want to analyze, as if the idea of talking to a murderer were somehow appealing.
“That’s a terrible idea” is what I said, but my thoughts were racing. I wanted, needed, the truth about what happened… not the fairy tale of the defense, nor the horror show of the prosecution. The Truth, with a capital T, about why Dustin Adams picked up a gun that night and ended four lives.
“Yeah, of course. Sorry,” Abby mumbled, and we fell into silence again, although the silence was more charged than before, an undercurrent of unease having entered our comfortable bubble of safe “girl talk.”
All that night, while Abby slept, my brain ran over the possibilities of how such a visit would go. Would he even agree to see me? To answer my questions? What if the answers weren’t what I wanted to hear, if he gave them?
I fell into a restless sleep after I decided, once and for all, that no, I was not going to pay a visit to the man who murdered my friends in cold blood. I would not. The temptation to know what had really transpired was not enough to make myself endure my name in his voice, his eyes meeting my eyes. I would not. I could not.
It was never going to happen.