Chapter 2 #2
But even after all of that, it took me a few months to realize I wasn’t really a person anymore.
That somewhere along the way I’d become my grief.
A glass cup filled to the brim with it so that everyone who saw me—all my friends, my family, my teammates, my coach—just saw the loss of Adeline.
I began to suspect that I was unbearable to be around.
That it hurt too much for people to exist in close proximity with someone who wore their pain so transparently.
Social interactions became painful and awkward.
I had to think about things that other people didn’t—like how to smile or when to nod.
My performance was less than convincing.
Halfway through the spring semester, my grades slipped so low that the chances of being accepted to any decent colleges were next to zero.
I even forgot how to run. Every time I stepped out onto the track, it was like I was sprinting through syrup.
I went from one of the fastest runners in the state to the slowest on the team.
But I didn’t get kicked off until I refused to race.
At least, that’s what I told my coach right before he benched me.
The truth was, after a few months, my legs just gave out on me, my knees buckling every time I tried to push off the starting block.
I formally quit the team soon after the benching, a decision that should’ve been devastating, but I felt little more than relief.
Shortly after, I got my parents and therapist to co-sign my absence for the last few weeks of school, on account of bereavement.
Free of distractions, I had more time to devote to the only thing I really cared about: figuring out what happened to my sister. Why she died.
I never accepted the coroner’s conclusion, mostly because it wasn’t one.
I didn’t believe that my sister’s heart had just given out that night, at random, the way everyone else seemed content to.
But in the absence of any compelling possibilities—fingerprints at the crime scene, DNA traces, suicide letters, or grainy CCTV footage—I had nothing to grab hold of, nothing to bolster my belief that my sister didn’t just die in a cruel stroke of misfortune except for the gut feeling, this unshakable instinct, that there was more to the story.
I knew it not because of the way Adeline died, but because of how strange she’d acted in the last weeks of her life.
At the end of the last semester of her junior year, Adeline had been in a bad way.
She started skipping classes, just how she was apt to do when her depression took a turn for the worse.
There was talk of truancy and emergency meetings with therapists and guidance counselors.
None of it worried me much; Adeline’s moods came and went. It was all normal for her.
What was abnormal, though, was my aunt’s intervention.
At the end of that semester, as spring tipped into summer, she offered to let Adeline stay with her in a cabin on the lake in a rural part of northern Michigan, telling my parents that the nature and lack of cell service would do her good.
Adeline, who was at that point choosing between an involuntary psych hold and a few long months on the lake, wisely opted for the latter.
The rest was rather fuzzy on my end. At the time, I was at a track camp several states away, but I know that, two weeks into her stay with my aunt, she made some friends—good influences, my aunt had called them, though she didn’t seem to know very much about them.
Which was why I found it so surprising that my aunt and parents allowed her to leave with them that summer.
I returned home just a few days after Adeline did, and what I discovered rattled me.
My beautiful storm of a sister—defiant and contemptuous, sharp toothed and wicked smart, mean sometimes just for the sport of it—was utterly and completely subdued, all the life gone out of her.
Like she’d cut her own tongue out of her mouth and offered it up with a smile.
I was the only one who noticed, the only one who seemed to care. My parents were so relieved to have their daughter back, whole and healed and as obedient as they’d always wanted her to be, that they never seemed curious to discover what had prompted her turn for the better.
Adeline, for her part, was convincing enough.
She went to church on Sundays and attended school without complaint, never skipping any classes, never late to the bus stop.
When I picked fights with her, stealing her favorite T-shirt to wear for a track meet, taking more than my share of time in the bathroom, she never voiced the smallest complaint.
She came home from school on time every day, never sullen or smelling of smoke.
She did her homework and made pleasant conversation at the dinner table with my parents, nodding at all the right times.
There were no house parties or secret college boyfriends. No sneaking in through the basement windows after nights out. No fights with my parents or panic attacks. No bouts of depression that kept her in bed for days at a time.
To put it simply, she wasn’t the sister I knew.
In the short weeks of that summer away, she’d become a stranger to me.
When I finally questioned her about it, cornering her one night in her bedroom after my parents were asleep, demanding to know what happened to her over the summer that had changed her into a person I didn’t even know anymore, she just smiled at me.
And I saw it then, something horrible in her eyes. Something ugly.
I named it, called it what it was. I pleaded with her to snap out of it, begged her to come back to me. The anger set in then, and I made sure she knew that, while she might’ve fooled everyone else, she couldn’t hide from me.
And I was suffering because of it. We both were.
What followed was the worst fight we’d ever had.
A fight so terrible I had never been able to bring myself to revisit it, except one time.
The night of my questioning at the police station, when I turned my memories inside out making sure I told the officers every detail—Adeline’s false smile, the deadness in her eyes, the way she seemed like a stranger, the way what seemed like a turn for the better was really just her giving up.
But in the end, it didn’t matter. The police, my parents, the people in our town—they had all decided what they wanted to believe.
A girl goes out into the forest alone.
She falls asleep.
She doesn’t wake up.
These things do happen, after all.
I tried to confide in my parents, but they wouldn’t hear me.
The most they offered were soft and pitying glances, thin platitudes about acceptance and letting go.
They shuttled me to teen grief groups and therapy sessions, but none of it helped.
If I couldn’t have the truth about what happened to my sister, then I didn’t want much of anything at all.
Alone in my search for the truth, I grew numb and stony and despondent.
Not unlike Adeline in the last days of her short life, but without the fakeness and the pleasantries.
I had become so accustomed to feeling nothing but the weight of my grief that, when those five girls walked into the diner, so fully alive in the way Adeline was—the way she had been before she’d changed—I couldn’t stop thinking about them, even after they left.
I had to know more about them. I was desperate to, if only because I wanted to keep feeling that… alive.
“Well, I don’t like them,” said Conny, after I’d told her about their party and my intention to attend. “Those girls have a hungry look about them. Like they’d eat their own if it came down to it.”
This didn’t surprise me. Conny, while kind to me, had never taken to girls who did things like apply blush to the tips of their noses or bleach-dye their jeans.
Girls like Adeline. Their kind of, sure, garish beauty was intolerable to her, and I now saw it was because it made her feel plain and perhaps a little small.
I couldn’t entirely blame her. Sometimes I felt the same way, standing next to Adeline.
After my shift, I changed out of my uniform and examined the receipt with the party address.
The girl’s handwriting was lacy and ragged like a tattered cobweb: 585 Grove Street.
Just reading it sent an illicit little thrill down my spine like a trickle of ice water.
I knew that I had to go, that there was no alternate reality where I didn’t.
Those girls reminded me of Adeline, and I would’ve done anything—gone anywhere—to get closer to my sister or the next best thing, those five girls who were so much like her that it scared me.
Grove Street was within walking distance of the diner, and it was easily the most expensive street in town, the last place I’d expected to find them.
All the houses were large and quaint. Around Christmastime, they strung up the most beautiful lights, and people came from all over town—bundled up in hats and scarves—and walked hand in hand, house to house, admiring the decorations: the lights strung between the trees, the electric reindeer, and the animatronic Santa Claus that waved, yelling “Ho ho ho!” at groups of teenage girls who erupted into fits of laughter.
That night, there were next to no lights on.
Even the lampposts were dead thanks to a routine blackout.
No one on the sidewalks but me. I made my way through the neighborhood, head down, hands in my pockets, glancing over my shoulder every minute or so to make sure I wasn’t being followed.
This was one of the nicest parts of town, but it wasn’t a particularly good idea for a girl to walk alone at night in any town anywhere.