3
Stevie experienced so many emotions in a few seconds that she felt almost nothing at all, aside from a light buzzing, not
unlike the time she’d accidentally stuck her fingernail in an electrical socket.
“What is it?” Germaine asked.
Stevie could not answer. Was she about to laugh? Cry? Throw up? Jump into the fire? Unclear!
The crackling fire seemed to have grown louder. It felt her rage, which had come to scorch the earth.
As it turns out, rage is better than pain; that’s why so many people choose that as their drug. The tinnitus of pain dragged
her down, but anger was like nitroglycerin and morphine mixed together. No pain, only fire.
“Stevie?” Janelle said.
No words either. Only the burning, the desire to scream until Minerva House collapsed in on itself.
She considered running out the door into the cold night but had just enough self-possession left to know that leaving your own birthday party to go for a screaming run was one step too far.
While no one in the room had any idea why Stevie was clutching the open end of a FedEx box to her abdomen, it was evident from the sudden pause in conversation that they knew it probably wasn’t good.
And her phone was ringing again.
“My parents,” she said, her voice dry. “Be right back.”
She hustled to her room with the box, which she threw on the bed. She pulled a blanket over it as she punched the green button.
“Finally,” her mom said, with more than a trace of annoyance. “Where have you been all day?”
“Studying,” Stevie said, pinching the space between her eyes. “It’s finals.”
“Well, you could have answered.”
“It’s finals,” Stevie said again.
Her mom cleared her throat to reset the tone.
“Eighteen today! I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Stevie said flatly.
“How’s David? Did you talk to him yet today?”
The fire inside Stevie danced higher. She could feel it dancing on the backs of her eyeballs.
As far as Stevie’s parents were concerned, it was good but weird that Stevie had solved some murders.
Good in that they liked justice and murders being solved as a general principle.
Weird in that it wasn’t what teenage girls were supposed to do.
It was creepy. The one and only thing Stevie had ever done that they seemed one hundred percent on board, ride-or-die about was when Stevie started to go out with David.
She had achieved the one true goal of her life—a boyfriend, and this boyfriend was the best of all boyfriends for all the wrong reasons.
They didn’t know about what had happened in London. They didn’t know about the taxi and the pub and the faceless girl. She
hadn’t seen them since, and she hadn’t told them because that would make the whole thing a thousand times worse.
“Could you ask about me first?” Stevie said. “Do we always have to go right to David?”
A brittle moment of silence.
“I did,” her mom replied.
“No, you didn’t.”
“I said happy birthday first.”
“That’s not asking me how I am.”
“Is something wrong? Are you okay?”
“That’s not the point,” Stevie said. The effort of keeping her voice from cracking was painful. “I just want to know why you
always have to ask about David first. You don’t start with school.”
“Why do you have to make everything into an argument? You’re eighteen now. You need to start acting like an adult. Is this
how it’s going to be over Christmas?”
This was the hard part about fighting with her parents.
Stevie had a real point—why did they always want to know about David first?
But the more she had to repeat it, the less valid it seemed.
It turned into a deranged-sounding rant, and a reason for her parents to accuse her of wanting to fight.
She didn’t want to fight. Stevie just wanted the hollow, cold feeling to fade away to something warmer and like herself, and her parents were going to keep grinding on and on about David when there was no David, and maybe now, to them, no Stevie.
There would be two weeks of this. No David, no friends around. Alone with her parents, having to eventually tell them about
the breakup, being so utterly at the bottom of everything . . .
Then it hit her. They were right. She was eighteen. She did need to start acting like an adult. And no, this was not how it
was going to be over Christmas.
“No,” Stevie said. “Because I’m not coming.”
“What are you talking about?”
Though Stevie was the one speaking, she was surprised to hear what she had said. It was the break Stevie had always vaguely
known was going to happen, but she thought this moment would come later, when she was an adult adult with a house or a dog or something. But the future had rolled up early, honking its horn and telling her to get in
the van.
“You most certainly are.” Her mom’s voice was wobbling on the edge of angry tears. “You are coming. And we’ll pull you out
of there if you keep this up.”
“You can’t pull me out of here. It’s not like you’re paying for Ellingham. It’s free.”
That was maybe a bit close to the nerve. The crying had started on the other end.
“I knew this school—”
“It’s not the school. It’s me. Who I am. I solved a murder. A few of them. And you never even want to talk about it. . . .”
“Of course we talk about it. I’m sorry if we don’t spend every single second talking about you. . . .”
There was a lot of that for another half hour. Swipes back and forth. No points hit, but lots of body blows. Lots of pain.
One of them hung up; it wasn’t clear who. Stevie spent an unknown amount of time curled into a tight ball leaning up against
her bed. Her head hurt from crying. The room was too bright. Her fingers pulsed from her thudding heartbeat.
What the hell had she just done?
There was a soft knocking on the door. Stevie ignored it and crawled over to her nightstand to grab her water bottle and her
Ativan from the drawer.
Maybe—she had to think through the thudding headache and the pain of the light—maybe what she had done wouldn’t make any immediate
impact on her life. Ellingham didn’t cost anything, and she had enough money to do a year of college, probably. Once she finished
her applications. Which she had not. But her parents didn’t get her here, and they couldn’t take her away. What came next
would be largely down to her in all cases.
Stevie was now on her own.