Chapter Fifteen
The bed-spins are somehow making Jules see more clearly.
As she sits up, the family dog Kyle lifts his head lazily.
After her friends lured her out of the porta potty, after Brad gave her a look that can only be described as disgust for yakking on his private parts, after her thoughts turned to a sweet boy off to serve his country … she sees it now.
She needs to stop. To stop feeling guilty about not going to the police. It’s not her fault that he took the girl in Ralston today. She needs to stop dwelling on it.
There’s a knock on her bedroom door. Her mother peeks her head in. Just an hour before, she’d been holding Jules’s hair as she threw up again in the toilet.
“Feeling better?”
“Not really.”
“Your friends are worried about you.”
“Are they?”
“Miranda seemed really concerned.”
Jules says nothing, knowing Miranda is just thrilled to have Brad to herself for the night—with or without Jules’s puke all over him.
“Your dad and I—” Her mom hesitates. “We’ve been worried.”
Jules says nothing. Maybe they aren’t as oblivious as she thought.
“You, well, haven’t seemed like yourself for some time. And we’re worried that something happened?”
It’s stated as a question, but it’s more of a desperate hope for answers. She thought they didn’t notice how bubbly Jules, vivacious Jules, queen-bee Jules, pick-your-adjective Jules, went from that to this.
Jules considers telling her. But as much as she loves her mother—the carefree former sorority girl and Miss Nebraska who would kill to be eighteen again—Jules can’t bring herself to do it.
She feels a wave of panic slither through her at the thought of his whisper: If you tell …
I know where you live. But it’s more than the threat against her and her family.
She can’t let anyone know what he did to her because it will change everything.
Last year a girl at school reported that her stepfather raped her and everyone treated her like she was ruined.
Jules won’t, she can’t, be ruined. Can’t be Hester in The Scarlet Letter, a book assigned in English that she never read but Quinn Riley explained to her during study hall to help her prepare for the test.
So, she turns to her mother and says: “I’m sorry. I’ve been a bit of a mess. I mean, high school has been so amazing. What if college…”
They were the words her mother wanted to hear. What she needed to hear. That Jules was just anxious that life couldn’t possibly get even better than high school.
After Mom floats out of her room as if a weight’s been lifted, Jules decides it is time. Time to remove a heavy weight of her own.
Time to do something to help stop him.
She takes out her spiral notebook, and she writes it down.
Everything. Every ghastly detail of what he did to her.
Everything she can remember to help identify him, from the way he smelled to taking her driver’s license to the reason he said he let her go: You’re one of the Lucky Ones.
Her hand shakes with every word, her forearm shielding the paper from her tears.
And when she’s done, she finds the name of the cop who was quoted in the newspaper about the last victim and addresses an envelope to him.
Tomorrow, she will put it in a mailbox. And she will evict the memories from her mind and never think about the May Day Killer or Death Day again.