4. Liz #2
Not that I’m as popular as Sadie. She’s in her own stratosphere at school.
People just want to be around her. I’m popular by utility.
In other words, everyone knows I can get liquor into a party, and I’m pretty cute when I actually put on makeup and try, and I’m Southern.
Somehow that’s still a novelty around here, which seems a little bit ridiculous to me.
Hell, anyone in our school could just drive a few hours and cross the border down to Kentucky and get their fill of Southern accents.
But I know Alabama sounds different, and even though I could probably kick the accent at this point—in fact, I find myself dropping out of it sometimes after I’ve spent a week with the Coopers—I know it still does me more good than harm.
And honestly, it makes me seem different.
Interesting. It’s the whole reason Sadie and I ended up becoming friends in the first place.
For that reason alone, this ’Bama girl isn’t changing a damn thing.
The rest of the day drags on, the way Fridays always do when you have something major happening over the weekend.
And a party at Trevor McClain’s definitely counts as something major.
He probably has three or four blowouts every year.
There’s always one a little bit after homecoming to sort of “kick off” the year, then one over Christmas break, then spring break, and sometimes at the end of the year, although that depends on how much trouble the other parties have gotten him into so far.
The police have been called to his farm more often than anywhere else in town if I had to hazard a guess, but somehow Trevor seems to find that more motivating than discouraging.
“What’re they gonna do?” he says whenever someone asks him about it. “Arrest everyone in the whole damn school? Impossible. There aren’t enough cops in the entire county to pull that off.”
It sounds cocky, but he’s not wrong. Our entire local police force might be eight or nine guys at most, and that’s assuming they’re all on duty.
And they’re never all on duty.
“Miss Stratton? You were saying?”
I realize I trailed off right around the moment I said I’d agreed to go over to Sadie’s after school. There’s the other stuff, sure, but Detective Norris doesn’t have to know everything, does he? Some of this is better left unsaid. Even I know that.
By the time the final bell rings, word of Trevor’s party has reached a fever pitch.
Even the little freshmen (we’re supposed to call them “first years” now, which just makes me think of Harry Potter) are talking about it, not that any of them have a prayer of being invited.
I find Sadie on the steps and sling my arm around her shoulder.
“You ready for this, Cooper?”
“Do you even have to ask? C’mon.”
We link arms and head out to the senior lot, where her pristine white Jeep is parked next to my beat-up Honda.
“Caravan to my place?” Sadie asks.
I shake my head. “Gotta stop home and get some clothes.”
“You don’t have to bother stopping at Levi’s. You can just borrow my stuff for the weekend.”
Sadie is always doing that. Letting me borrow her clothes, her makeup, her books. Sometimes I feel like I’m borrowing her life. I know she’s only trying to be nice, but every now and then, it gets to me. I just want to have my own shit, you know?
“Nah, I ordered a supercute top from Urban Outfitters that just got delivered. I want to grab that for tonight.”
Sadie shrugs and starts up her car. “Suit yourself! See you later.”
She gives a honk to the horde of seniors hanging around in the parking lot, and they scatter out of her way. I watch her drive off, her curly red hair blowing around like a tornado. Not a care in the world. That’s my bestie.
“Are you sure about that?” Detective Norris looks up from the battered notebook he’s been jotting notes in.
“Um, sure about what?”
“What you just said—that Sadie didn’t have a care in the world. Are you sure?”
I shrug, annoyed at his interruption. Reliving yesterday means being able to relive time with Sadie. It’s the only reason I’m indulging him right now. Of course, I just have to be careful about what I relive and what I actually tell him.
“I don’t know,” I say finally. “It’s just a thing people say. Like, it was a gorgeous day yesterday, I was going to meet up at her place, we had Trevor’s party that night… Watching her drive away, I guess it was just one of those moments when everything felt perfect, you know?”
Based on the look he gives me, I can tell that Detective Norris definitely does not know. This man probably hasn’t had a perfect moment since he jacked off to Pamela Anderson on Baywatch in the nineties. I bite my tongue to keep from smiling. Sadie would have loved that joke.
“I’m getting the impression you’re being selective about what you’re telling me,” he says suddenly. “And I don’t like it.”
His tone has changed. For a split second, I wonder if he read my mind and knew I was laughing at him in my head.
I shrug, trying to mask my anxiety with indifference.
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
Of course I’m not telling him every little thing that happened. But I’m telling him all the important parts.
“You think this is a casual conversation, Miss Stratton?” Detective Norris leans forward, so close that I can smell the stale coffee on his breath. His voice is suddenly low—too low, I realize, to be picked up by whatever recording devices they have in here. And I think that’s the idea.
“This feels like a conversation because I’m trying to make this as easy for you as possible,” he says quietly.
“I understand that your friend is dead, and you’re upset.
I’m trying to be sensitive with you, but that stops right now if you won’t tell me what I want to know.
Do you understand? This will turn from a conversation into a goddamn interrogation, and I promise you, that is not something you want to happen.
I know all about you, Miss Stratton. I’m aware of your situation.
And either I can make it better for you, or I can make it worse. Your choice.”
There he is. I knew this guy was a complete asshole the moment I met him. I was waiting for this side to come out. Now that it has, at least I can stop trying to figure him out. I know exactly who he is, and I should have trusted my gut from the second he walked into this room.
I take a deep breath, trying to figure out how to play this. If I guess wrong, it’ll be an expensive mistake.
“Okay,” I say finally.
“Okay what?”
It takes me a second to realize what he wants me to say. God, grown men are pathetic.
“Okay, sir.”
I emphasize the word, and I can practically feel him smirking inside. If Sadie were here, she would roll her eyes so far back in her head, they would stay there forever.
Can you believe this asshole? she would say.
I seriously cannot, I would tell her.
Absently, I find myself wondering if I’m going to have conversations with her in my head for the rest of my life. Every moment we were supposed to have together, all the milestones I’m going to hit alone… Will I always hear her voice? And even worse, what if one day I try to hear it, and I can’t?
Sadie Cooper is the kind of girl who demands to be remembered.
I’m a little later getting to Sadie’s than I meant to be, but my stepdad and Mel had left me a note with a list of chores (apparently Mel is now qualified to decide what chores the nearly grown daughter of her boyfriend should be doing), and I figured loading the dishwasher and folding the laundry were not that big of a sacrifice if it meant being left alone for the remainder of the weekend.
My phone pings for what feels like the millionth time since I left school.
I glance down at it just before I walk through the door of the Cooper house.
It’s Ben. I have him saved in my contacts under someone else, obviously.
At this point, he should probably be added to my favorites, too.
But that’s a secret no one else needs to know. Definitely not Detective Norris.
See you at the party tonight?
I decide not to answer. “Hard to get”—isn’t that what they call it? Deleting the message and tossing my phone back in my bag on silent, I step through the door.
“Oooh, okay, let’s see!” Sadie screeches when I emerge into the Coopers’ kitchen with the Urban Outfitters package in my hand.
We tear it open together, and she makes sounds of approval at the red crop top.
“Supercute,” she says. “And I have just the necklace for that! You can layer it with your bestie necklace. We’ll have to grab it before we go to Trevor’s; remind me.”
I make a mental note not to remind her—anytime I borrow something from Sadie when we go out, she always ends up mentioning it to someone.
Like, they’ll compliment a pair of her shoes I’m borrowing or a top, and she’ll make sure they know that it came from her.
If I get any compliments tonight, I’d rather be able to take them for myself without feeling like I owe her one.
And anyway, I have the only necklace I’ll ever need.
My hand goes up to the smoothed edges of my half of our little broken-heart charm.
“Hey, girls.” The sound of Jayne’s voice from the foyer elicits an eye roll from Sadie.
“She must have gotten a whiff of the word ‘fun’ and realized she was the only one in the world who could stop it,” she mutters to me. I smile, always grateful to be on the receiving end when Sadie makes jokes about her twin. It’s a reminder that she and I are closer than she and Jayne will ever be.
“We’re in here, J,” Sadie calls back, and I slide my new shirt back into the bag. The best we can hope for is that either Jayne hasn’t heard about Trevor’s party or, more likely, she’s heard about it and is utterly, totally uninterested.