Chapter 36
I KNEW SHE’D BE ANGRY. I should have realized that in the privacy of her own room, she’d be in tears. I knock on her door.
“Go away,” Hailey says, sniffling. “I hate you.”
“It’s Caroline,” I say.
A pause. Then: “I hate you too.”
“Really?” I ask, standing outside the closed door. “That’s odd. Most people don’t hate me until they get to know me.”
Do I hear a bit of a chuckle? I think so. I wait. Then I hear her clumping toward me in her four-pound Doc Martens. She opens the door.
“What,” she says. It’s more a statement than a question.
“Can we talk?”
“No.”
But she’s still standing there. Then she takes a tiny step backward, as if indicating that it’s okay for me to come in—the second-best invitation I got today.
Her room is painted a morose gray, and the walls are hung with posters of rock stars I’ve never heard of. All of them have multiple piercings on their cheeks, ears, lips, eyebrows, navels, and God knows where else. No wonder they call it heavy metal.
I sit down on Hailey’s bed and try to get comfortable.
It’s not easy. Pound for pound, my bodysuit has more foam than her mattress.
Where to begin? I think back to my interrogation training, where I learned all the different kinds of lies that agents can use to get at the truth.
Hailey is clearly a hostile witness. I’ve got to go full FBI on her.
I start with something that’s not quite true but almost.
“My mom and dad got divorced when I was a kid. It came as a total shock. I had no idea.” (Of course I didn’t. I was two years old. That’s known as a lie of omission.)
“I hated them for it,” I add. (Not true. My parents felt so guilty that I got lots of extra toys and attention for years. I was happy. Lie of fabrication.)
“Then in school, all the kids made fun of me.” (True. But in elementary school, everybody makes fun of everybody. Lie of exaggeration.)
“And did your parents treat you like a baby with stupid rules and stuff?” Hailey asks.
“Oh, yes. I cried myself to sleep almost every night.” (Sort of true. I was worried about monsters under my bed.)
Then I say, “I told you once before, being your age sucks. Everybody’s trying so hard to be cool, be noticed. Middle school was definitely the worst time of my life.” (Lie of denial. Being canned from the FBI was worse.)
“Were you ever teased?”
“Me? The fattest kid in the class? You mean like ‘She’s so fat, she’s got her own zip code’?” Hailey laughs sourly. Then she’s gloomy again.
“All my friends think Lily is soooooo cute. And the boys think Amber is sooooooo hot. And almost everyone is mean and says stupid things. When does it stop?” she asks.
She’s in such pain. I’d like to tell her soon. But that would be distorting the truth. (The truth is, it only stops with death.)
“Well, it gets better. But it never goes away completely,” I tell her.
“Think of it as rings on a tree. The feelings and memories will always be there, but as you grow up, you grow around them. You forget how nasty kids can be.” (Then you discover how nasty, vicious, and untrustworthy grown men can be. Another lie of omission.)
“I bet your mother has told you things like that,” I add.
“Yeah. Sort of.”
And that’s how I learn that Hailey’s mother, Sherry Quinn, lives in Milford, Utah. She’s a painter who has been signing her work with that name her whole life, and she never bothered to become a Harrison.