Chapter 23 #2
My pulse picks up. I look to the window, avoiding Alderson’s dark eyes and Greene’s apropos hazel-green eyes boring into me.
But again, a thorough confession on my part, motive and all, would involve Jess.
To confess would produce what she needs to avoid—my suffering little sister being thrown smack-dab into the limelight.
I clutch the edge of my chair with my right hand to stop myself from furiously picking at my thumb with my own forefinger, even with the Band-Aid on.
Nausea builds in my gut. “Was the coach dealing?” I switch gears back to the victims, wondering if this is related to drug peddling. “Was the counselor?”
“We’re looking into all of that.”
“Has the former drug rep given you his phone and computer records?”
“Like you, he refuses.” They tell me that they’re having him make lists of anyone and everyone he’s confided in about any possible thing he feels guilty about and anyone who he’s angered.
“I’d give you access to my data if my job didn’t involve confidentiality.”
“So we forge ahead,” Alderson says. “And right now, we need to know more about your history.”
I look out my window again. A squirrel chirps frantically, like he’s defending a stash of nuts. I want to mimic him—to get busy doing anything but sitting here talking about my past with these two.
“That’s a bad habit,” Greene says.
“What?” I say.
Greene points her pen at my hand.
I look down at my thumb, where the Band-Aid is stretched and folded under. Apparently, gripping the chair to keep me from self-mutilation failed. The Band-Aid has slid to the tip and now exposes the raw skin it’s supposed to shield from my other nails, despite how short I’ve clipped them.
“Yeah, I know.” I rip the ravaged bandage off, get up, and throw it away in the can under the sink. I remember Sophie scolding me the same way, and I feel spooked, as if she’s speaking to me from our dorm room years ago.
The same old tired guilt that goes with the memory, still hot and sharp as a blade, pierces me.
“You okay?” Greene asks, watching me as I sit back down.
I nod, do a slow blink, and tell them all about it, how eleven years ago, when Jess was a high school sophomore and I headed off to the University of Montana in Missoula, two hours south of Kalispell, I met Sophie.
I give them broad strokes, how she was my roommate, how great she was, but for me, it all comes screaming back in vivid detail, like it was yesterday.
Sophie was from Nebraska. She had a heart-shaped face, blue eyes, and a bubbly personality with little crinkles at the outer edges of her eyes. She loved to laugh, and I felt I’d won the roommate lottery.
When I told her I was born in Montana, she pumped her fist in glee. “Yes! A Montanan. I wanted a local. You can show me how to live in the mountains.”
I was all in. I felt powerful. Reinvented. She made me think of my dad and the times we’d spent in the woods.
We hit it right off, and I didn’t miss Jess so much when I was with her.
We used to go on walks by the river, where the late September days pulsed with life as students played soccer and Ultimate Frisbee and residents walked their dogs along city paths.
One late afternoon, we’d been casually watching four guys toss a Frisbee around.
Watching but not watching when it sailed our way.
I caught the orange disc as one of the guys barreled toward us.
Almost as if I was the target.
He was tall and muscular. He smelled like sweat and freshly cut grass.
Ruse? Accident? Or fate? It didn’t matter.
We joined in, meeting them all: Derek, Seth, Riley, and Josh. Josh was the one who nearly crashed into us. Josh and I exchanged numbers. He invited me and Sophie to a party that weekend. There were always parties.
I took great pains in getting ready. Sophie laughed at my primping. At the party, I found Josh to be more friendly than pushy. He wasn’t too eager, which I liked. A lot.
The following weekend—in early October—Josh texted me about going camping. He said to invite Sophie, too.
Sophie declined, blaming schoolwork.
“Come on, Soph,” I pleaded. “You can sleep under the stars like you always wanted. In the mountains of Montana, no less. If you stay behind, you know you won’t get to it until Sunday night anyway.”
“We don’t really know them,” she said. “Do we?”
“Come on. They’re nice. And you said you wanted the real Montana experience.”
Sophie’s long strawberry hair fell across one shoulder. She was gorgeous. I could see why Josh’s friends wanted her there.
“We can take care of each other.” I picked at my thumb with either excitement or nervousness.
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“That.” She pointed at my hand. “That’s a bad habit. You stress more than I do.”
“Does this mean you’ll go?”
She looked away, like she was embarrassed by something.
“What? What’s the problem?”
It was in that moment she confided that she was a virgin, that she wasn’t sure about being around a bunch of guys for an entire weekend. Four of them, two of us. She felt naive and shy.
“Soph, don’t worry. Maybe you need to put yourself out there a little more. Not be so guarded.”
She shrugged.
“What? A little risk is good for the soul, right?”
She flashed a smile. “Promise me we’ll get back on Sunday afternoon?”
Three days later, we drove into the Mission Mountains Wilderness and hiked up four miles to the calm waters of Crescent Lake.
The view was magnificent, the lake hemmed in by subalpine pines and the jagged ridgeline of the Mission Mountains above. It made me giddy. My dad would have absolutely loved the place.
My enthusiasm was heightened by my deep crush on Josh. I giggled over everything he uttered, even if it wasn’t funny. Sophie jabbed me in the ribs to make it clear I was being too obvious. Suddenly, she was the relationship expert.
Sophie and I pitched our tent farther away from the guys’ for a bit of privacy. Braydon, new to the group, and Seth unloaded booze from their backpacks. Whiskey, beer, vodka, tequila, and juice for mixers. Their packs must have weighed a ton. Drinking commenced immediately.
It was too cold to swim. Derek and Riley fished while Josh and Seth and I started a fire and roasted hot dogs. We were the only campers. The guys took it as a sign to blast the portable speakers. Serenity? Nonexistent.
Worse, I was not the target of Josh’s eye. It was Sophie. I had missed every signal from the get-go.
I tried to get Sophie to walk around the lake with me, but she wanted to stay by the fire with Josh.
I went alone. Down at the water’s edge, a perfect reversal of the mountains was reflected in the calm surface.
I found a big rock to sit on and watched the glassy surface.
Geese flew over in formation, a few on the left end out of line and fraying the V.
A bald eagle sat up high in a pine tree surveying the lake, his bleached head winking in the sunlight.
I tucked myself down behind a rock and tried to read a paperback novel in the dwindling light. But the loud music was too much.
I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but a huge part of me willed—ached for—someone, Sophie especially, but any of them really, to come fetch me, to encourage me to join in.
And the sense that I wanted that so badly made me feel weak, like a deep dig that hit something already bruised inside me.
I stubbornly looked out over the lake, disturbed only by rings from fish rising to the evening mayfly hatch.
I didn’t want to feel this way, like I needed others. Like I wasn’t just fine on my own.
When I returned to camp, the empties were strewn about and the guys started to crash. I told Sophie we should hit the sack.
“You go ahead.” She slurred her words. “I’m awake.”
Josh had his arm around her. She leaned into him, eyes at half-mast. She kicked a stray coal into the campfire. Smoke billowed.
“I might sleep outside,” she said. “Under all this.”
Above, the night sky was an inky bowl splattered with stars, the Milky Way running like a burst vein through the center.
Sophie looked ethereal in that moment, either strong like a fire goddess or fragile like she might dissolve into the smoke.
I sensed a touch of dread, but I couldn’t separate it from my jealousy.
And why? Did I want a drunk roll in the hay?
Try to steer Josh my way? If the tables were turned, would I have let Sophie sleep alone in the tent?
I went into the woods and peed, got in the tent, zipped the fly, and crawled into my sleeping bag. I closed my eyes and tried to block out the blasting music.
Later, the night was still and quiet when I woke to Sophie frantically prodding me. She was gasping for breath. She grabbed me through the bag and shook me awake.
“We have to go.” If terror had a smell, it rode on her breath—something acrid and urgent. “Now, Crosbie. Please, please. Get your boots on. Now.”
I found my flashlight. Her eyes were wide, tinged with fear.
“I’ll explain later,” she said.
“A bear? Did you hear something?”
“It’s Josh.”
The urgent tremor was like a jolt of electricity to my sleepy head. I slipped on one of my boots.
“He’s at the lake, but he’s coming back.”
I tugged on my other boot as fast as I could, leaving them unlaced. I grabbed my jacket, snatched the flashlight, crawled out of the tent after her, and followed her into the dark.
I tell Greene and Alderson how we fled and spent the rest of the night in the woods.
How we stumbled over logs and roots after we turned my flashlight off because we heard some of the boys talking and realized they were looking for us.
How we kept on, away from their voices, away from the lake and down slopes and ridges, hopefully toward the highway, but we ended up going too far down into a drainage basin. We curled up together to stay warm.
The next morning, I remembered something my dad told me years before when hiking in the North Fork of the Flathead.
He said that people make a common mistake when lost in the mountains: They keep going down, thinking that’s correct, but they end up too low, in basins far away from the trails and roads.
Often, if you go back up, you can find the path.
So we picked our way upward, and eventually we hit a path traversing a ridge.
We followed it and made it to a dirt road that led us to the Swan Highway, where we got a ride into the closest town and called a friend, one of our dormmates.
Back safe in Missoula, we went to First Step, a resource center at one of the hospitals for victims of sexual assault, to have Sophie examined.
I tell them how, after a few days, Sophie finally decided to go to the police.
They informed her, before they’d even spoken to Josh, that it would be tough to prosecute because there was a lot of alcohol involved and things got blurred.
He said, she said. Et cetera. They brought him in when he returned with the others, but nothing came of it.
Sophie told me she wanted to return to college life and pretend it didn’t happen.
She wanted to act like everything was carefree and fun, like our first few weeks in the dorm. But it had become anything but.
One month after that night in the mountains, after my philosophy class, I returned to our dorm room.
Sophie sat cross-legged on her bed staring out the window.
She wore an old green, baggy sweater that hung loosely on her bony shoulders.
Her hair fell around her shoulders, greasy and lank, and the autumn light falling across her face exposed some creases in her forehead that I’d never noticed before, as if she were no longer a college student but a much older woman.
I wanted to cry. What was happening to my roommate? I should have prevented this. I should have never talked her into going camping, should never have encouraged her to be more open and, with that, implied willingness. If I could only press rewind, I’d do it all differently.
I set my books down and sat on my bed, facing her. “Aren’t you going to go to your math class?”
She shook her head. “Not today.”
“Sophie.” It came out as a sigh. “You need to go to your classes. If you don’t, you’re going to flunk out.”
“I’m not sure I care.”
“Of course you do.”
“I don’t know what I want anymore.”
“You can’t go on like this. Not eating, not going to class.” Crying all the time. “It’s going to keep eating away at you. If you press charges,” I said to her, “at least you might feel empowered, like you’re taking control of your own situation.”
“I just don’t know if I can talk about it,” Sophie said. “I mean, to everyone in court like that. In a trial and everything. I can barely talk about it here. Talking about it just puts me right there, in it again.”
Suddenly, with tears streaking down her cheeks, she looked like a child. She nodded to me with wide, hopeful eyes, trusting that I was correct, that it would make all the difference.