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Three days later I started ninth grade. It would have felt strange wearing the clothes Regina had bought me at the mall that day, so I threw them out, same as I’d done with the bloody tennis skirt.
I mostly wore my same Cyndi Lauper sweatshirt and jeans, alternating with an old T-shirt I’d rescued from a box of my mother’s old clothes from her hippie days.
Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
As expected, my father had moved out of our apartment by the time I got back to New Jersey.
My mother had found a job at a package store.
Given the nature of the business, we figured she would probably see my father as often as she did back when he still lived with us, but this turned out not to be the case.
After all the times my mother used to beg him to quit drinking, he’d joined AA.
For a while then, nobody said much about Regina’s death or any of the rest of it, though I gathered Forrest had called my father up one night at his new apartment that he shared with his friend Bud and ended up crying on the phone for a couple of hours.
My one and only friend at school, Martha, had a boyfriend now, so she wasn’t that interested in hanging out with me anymore. My breasts filled out enough that the training bra actually served a purpose, finally. I even got a real bra after that. I figured out how to use tampons.
As I had guessed, my high school had no tennis team, but it turned out there was a tennis program starting at the local Parks and Rec.
I showed up for the first session with the racquet Jonathan had given me.
The tennis player kids in Hubbard didn’t look anything like the ones back at the Lake Catherine Country Club.
One of them made a remark about my racquet.
How expensive it must have been. I didn’t go back.
I had not forgotten Forrest’s words to me, that I was going to have an amazing life, but this no longer seemed likely or even possible.
Sometimes, when I woke up in my dark little room in the apartment I shared with only my mother now, it felt as if the whole summer I’d spent at Wonderland was just a dream.
Except Regina really was dead. That part was real.
Over and over, my mind returned to those last days at the lake. Two images haunted me.
I couldn’t get the sight of Regina out of my head, as she’d been that last night, standing over the kitchen counter, shoveling in giant spoonfuls of custard and chocolate and whipped cream as if she was in a Boston cream pie–eating contest.
There could be only one reason why Regina, a person who lived with a deathly fear of gaining a pound, would have eaten that pie the way she did that night.
She knew she wasn’t going to be around in the morning to step on the scale.
This was probably her last act on earth before she went upstairs and swallowed the pills. Remembering how she’d stopped taking her pills that August, it came to me that she’d probably been stockpiling them for weeks.
There was something else I tried not to think about, but I kept coming back to it: the leatherbound journal Regina had given me with the birds on the front and all those stories I’d written inside about sexual scenarios I dreamed up that never really happened.
I kept replaying that moment when I’d lifted the mattress off my bed to retrieve my journal and found it gone.
Somebody had taken it. They’d read what I’d written on that thick, creamy paper, about a man who strongly resembled Forrest telling someone meant to be a slightly older, sexier, more beautiful version of me, that he couldn’t keep his hands off her.
Avowals of love in the library stacks. Open-mouth kisses.
Sex behind the tennis court. Sex on moss.
My journal was out there someplace. I had no idea where.
I couldn’t stop thinking about how, if it wasn’t for me, none of this would have happened.
Forrest would be off in Boston, thinking up an idea for some crazy new company.
Jilly would be signing up for Brownies. Hayward would still be a jerk, but Regina would be alive.
I wouldn’t be walking around feeling like I’d ruined their lives.
I told myself Regina had always teetered on the precipice.
My discovery, just days before her death, of what took place with her sister may have offered an explanation for the mystery of what led her to that point.
She’d probably never been alright after that.
Her relationship with Forrest was founded on the knowledge that she was the replacement for a dead woman. His favorite.
She’d talked about killing herself for years. Still, I knew what it was that had led her to making her final decision when she did, to do it again. Only this time she made it work.
This was my awful secret. I’d carry it around with me forever. Who wouldn’t go crazy, believing that the man she adored was going along with his lover’s plot to kill her?
Now the police were investigating Forrest. And because the way Regina chose to end her life implicated her husband as a possible murderer, I could be responsible for destroying Forrest’s life too.