Chapter 14
Texas Hill Country
“It’s sick,” Sophie says, for about the hundredth time in the last hour. “Someone at our school is really fucking sick.”
We’re in Hayden’s Jeep, driving aimlessly alongside the river.
I’ve been crying intermittently for the past hour and a half.
Hayden’s glitzy dance pop comes incongruously out of the speakers, every beat a blow to my head, but I don’t have the wherewithal to ask her to turn it off.
Instead I just stare out the window, hiccupping with the occasional sob.
“It’s so fucked up,” Sophie says again. “Why would someone do something like this? Everyone saw how devastated you were in the spring. Everyone saw how hard you worked to put yourself back together. So how could they think you had anything to do with it? You were a victim. It’s sick for them to treat you like this. ”
I cut my eyes over to the rearview mirror. Sophie is practically giving off sparks, her small round face hard with rage. “I’m not a victim,” I say softly.
She shakes her head, like it’s all just semantics.
“Your partner was violent. Not to you, maybe, but what he did…” She trails off, not because it’s too hard but because she’s too mad to give voice to it.
She’s never tolerated boys, or men, that hurt women.
Her favorite aunt helps run a women’s shelter in San Antonio and she’s had to listen to too many messed-up stories over the years.
It’s one of the things that makes her edgy about Carter.
“You notice no one wrote ‘justice for Lynette’ on your locker? It’s all just Rocky, Rocky, Rocky,” she says. “The one person responsible.”
“To be fair, by the time Lynette died she’d pissed off a lot of people,” Hayden says.
“Oh, so that means she deserved it?” Sophie snaps.
“That’s not what I—” Hayden starts, but I interrupt them both.
“Can you guys not do this right now? I can’t deal with it.” I rub my palms roughly across my cheeks. “You’re right, Soph, it’s fucked up, okay? And Hayden, can you please turn this off? I am losing my mind.”
Hayden snaps off the audio, and we drive in silence for a few minutes. The landscape outside my window is gold and red, dead brush and hard clay on either side of the wide and lazy river. I rest my forehead against the window.
After a while we pull off to a place where the river runs shallow across big slabs of granite. We park at the side of the road and walk to a spot where we can sit and dangle our feet.
“I’m starting to understand how Lynette must have felt,” I say. “After she got kicked off the team, I mean.”
Hayden and Sophie both visibly recoil. It makes me realize, not for the first time, how rarely we talk about her.
“It’s not even remotely the same thing,” Hayden says. “I mean, obviously she didn’t deserve what Rocky did to her. But getting kicked off the team was her fault. She was the one who fucked that up.”
That’s only half true, I think, but I have no interest in coming clean that I was the one who ratted Lynette out.
“I know it’s different,” I say. “But I can kind of get how scary it must’ve been for her to lose something that mattered so much to her. And then she was so alone.”
Cheer had mattered to her—partly because it was one of the few things she was really good at, but partly because it gave her the social currency she desperately needed.
Lynette’s family had been in Varda for generations, but unlike Rocky’s, hers did not give her a leg up.
The Zeigers were known around town as a bunch of reprobates and petty criminals.
Her own parents had settled down—her dad owned a metal salvage business and had done pretty well for himself on the straight and narrow—but some of her aunts and uncles were involved with outlaw biker gangs and were in and out of prison their whole lives.
There were rumors that her great-grandmother partied with Janis Joplin back in the sixties, which probably would’ve been a cool story if we lived in Austin.
In Varda it just means that the Zeigers had been bad for a long time. That it was in her blood.
Lynette didn’t have Sophie’s heavy-duty ballet background, but she was an amazing dancer, one of those girls that would slow down a music video and watch it frame by frame to get the moves just right.
She intuitively understood rhythm and movement in a way people train their whole lives to figure out.
She’d genuinely loved to cheer—but more importantly, being good at cheer protected her from her family’s reputation.
And she was right; once she lost it, everyone was all too happy to write her off as another white trash drug-addled Zeiger.
Which begs the question: What will they believe about me? What do I stand to lose, if these rumors don’t stop?
Sophie rummages in her bag, pulls out her vape pen. She hands it to me first. Usually I don’t partake. I get too nervous about getting caught. But if this isn’t an extenuating circumstance, I don’t know what is. I take a small drag and fight my lungs to keep it in. Then I pass it off to Hayden.
“What am I going to do?” I croak, exhaling as I do so. It makes Sophie give a wry little laugh.
Hayden takes an expert inhale.
“I think you’re doing it,” she says a moment later. “Smoke some weed, relax, skip school the rest of the day, go skinny-dipping with your friends…”
“Absolutely not,” says Sophie, who doesn’t do public nudity.
“… and then go home and go to sleep,” Hayden finishes. “And tomorrow, maybe it’ll all look different.”
“That’s very optimistic,” I say.
“You’re ruminating,” Sophie says, jabbing a finger at me with the vape pen in her hand.
“What’s that mean?” Hayden asks.
“It means she’s thinking about it all again. Stop it.” Sophie slaps lightly at my arm, kidding but not.
I am thinking about it all again, but maybe not in the way she meant. “Easier said than done.”
“No it’s not,” she says, a faux-Pollyanna note in her voice.
“Look at me! Sure, my body is totally fucked up, and I can’t land that double twist in the new routine to save my life, and I’m two weeks behind on whatever we’re supposed to be reading for English, but I just fix my face”—she beams, dimple popping out of her left cheek—“and kill a few brain cells, and I’m back to being dumb and hot the way God intended. ”
I can’t help it. Maybe it’s the weed, or maybe it’s the desperation, or maybe it’s just that Sophie’s darkest comedy always keeps me from the brink. I start to laugh. Hayden jumps up, wobbling a little on the edge of the granite, and strikes a pose, a right punch.
“Come on, girls, you know what you have to do. Get down, get hard, get mean!” she chants, shooting her arms out in time with the words. “Get down, get hard, get mean!”
“Get down!” Sophie claps twice. “Get hard.” Clap clap. “Get mean!”
It’s corny, but it’s funny. And true. And the fact that they’re here with me, that they’ve been here with me through it all, matters. I lie back on the warm stone and giggle, listening to their voices echo around the clearing, letting the rhythm hold me safe.
That’s when I hear a siren.
We all freeze for a second, waiting. Sound carries out here.
They might not even be close. But then the red and blue lights come swiveling into the clearing above us.
A cop car, wheels grinding on the gravel.
Hayden looks wildly around for a second and then throws the vape pen as far as she can.
Like that’s going to help. It doesn’t even land in the water, coming to rest on a granite outcropping. Sophie gives her a murderous look.
The driver’s side door opens. It’s Holden Mays—sorry, Deputy Mays now. He was the football team’s equipment manager when he was a senior and we were freshmen. We knew him as a quiet, pale guy whose stare clung to you like a wet bathing suit. Now he’s an officer of the law.
“We’re not playing hooky,” Sophie says quickly. “We have a free period.”
An obvious lie, but the bigger issue is the vape pen. My heart picks up speed. If he arrests us for possession we are absolutely off the team.
Just like Lynette.
I can sense rather than see his eyes on me. He watches for a moment, then steps down the incline. None of us move. “How are you, Iris?” he asks.
A tremor starts through my chest and spreads across my shoulders, down my arms, into my hands. I clench my teeth to keep them from chattering as I stand slowly up.
“I’m going to need you to come with me,” he says. “We have some questions for you.”
“It’s just a vape pen,” Hayden says shrilly. “It’s not even tobacco, it’s just juice. You know. Mango.”
Holden doesn’t even look at her. He stops in front of me.
“It’s about the death of Richard Koenig and Lynette Zeiger,” he says.
By the time I get to his car I’m shaking so hard I can barely buckle in. Rocky and Lynette’s names sit like weights in my chest.
I guess the rumors have finally reached the sheriff.