Dangerous Girls (7 page)

ANNA:
I . . . You can’t ask me that.

DEKKER:
I can ask anything I like. Answer the question, please.

CARLSSON:
Sir, I don’t know—

DEKKER:
The question, Miss Chavalier.

(pause)

ANNA:
No. No, I’m not talking to you anymore.

DEKKER:
I’m just trying to ascertain the level of noise in the house, and—

ANNA:
No! I won’t say anything else without a lawyer. You can’t talk to me like that!

(pause)

(pause)

CARLSSON:
Interview terminated, 6:20 a.m.

It’s morning by the time
we check into one of the high-rise hotels along the beach. Tate’s family chartered a jet for our parents; they’ll be landing by noon, but for now, I can think of nothing but sleep. The adrenaline is gone from my system; I’m more tired than I’ve ever been in my life.

“Don’t wake me until my dad’s here,” I tell the others, in the gray carpeted hallway. Even swiping my key card takes almost more energy than I can bear. They must feel the same, because I get nothing but dull nods in reply before they stumble into their rooms.

Inside, I take five steps and fall face-first on the lurid aqua bedspread. I can’t move. I can barely even breathe.

There’s a knock on my door. I groan. It taps again, urgently.

Heaving myself up, I go to the door and pull it open. Tate pushes past me, inside. “What did you tell them?” he says anxiously. “What did they ask?”

I close the door behind him. “I . . .”

“That guy, Dekker, when he brought you back in? He asked what we did all day; what did you say?”

“Nothing! I mean, just what happened.” I stare at him, confused. He was there when I got out of questioning, right beside me in the cab ride to the hotel. He didn’t ask me anything about my interview then; nobody did. By then, we just wanted to be done with it.

Tate grips my arms. “Tell me, what did you say to him?”

I shrug, trying to remember. “You know, we went to the beach, we took a shower, went to dinner. . . .”

Tate frowns. “He didn’t push you?”

“Yes.” I shudder at the memory. “He kept asking what we were doing.”

“But did you tell him? About me going back to the house?” Tate’s expression is panicked, and suddenly I realize why: We
weren’t
together all day.

He went back to the house. He was gone for a whole half hour.

“No, I didn’t say . . .” I take two steps back. “I forgot. I just said we went to the beach. I didn’t remember you went back.”

“Oh thank god.” The words run together in a rush. Tate
sinks down so he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. “I was freaking out the whole time you were in there. I didn’t know if you’d told them, if they’d catch me in the lie. Thank you. Thank you!” He takes my hand, kissing it. It’s a familiar gesture, something he must have done a hundred times, but this time I want to pull away.

He forgot his shades. I’d just set up camp on the sand: towel in the perfect tanning position, magazine out to browse.
Go ahead
, I told him.
Bring me back a bag of chips.

“You went back to the house.” I repeat it slowly. “But, I don’t understand. Why didn’t you just tell them? Why did you lie?”

Tate blinks. “Don’t you get it? We’re each other’s alibis.”

“Alibis? For what?” I pause, looking down at him. Tate doesn’t reply, just stares back at me with a nervous expression. “You mean Elise?” I exclaim, my voice rising. “They think
we
killed her?”

“Shh!” Tate hushes me. “I don’t know what they think.” He leaps up again, pacing to the door and back. “But that guy, Dekker, he wouldn’t let up: Where were we? What did we do? How long were we at the house? He didn’t ask me anything about Elise, or who else could have broken in.”

“Me either,” I say with a sudden chill. “I meant to tell him about that guy, the one who hassled us at the market, remember? But he just kept asking about me, and you, and if we were apart at all.”

“That’s it,” Tate says. “We don’t even know when she died. If one of us was alone, they could say we did it, that we killed her.”

“But that’s crazy.” I reach for him, to try to calm him from this paranoia, but Tate shakes me off.

“Is it?” He insists, “Think, Anna: We’re stuck in some foreign country, and Elise is dead, and they’re asking us about our sex lives instead of out there looking for the killer! The others were off on the dive trip; it’s just you and me.”

I take a couple of breaths, trying to think through the haze of exhaustion. Was it true? Did Dekker suspect us?

“Then we’re fine,” I tell him at last. “We said we were together all day, and we’ll stick to it. You didn’t go back to the house, and we didn’t leave each other’s side, not for a minute. We’ll be okay.”

Tate exhales a ragged breath. “You’d do that for me?” He pulls me into a hug.

“Always,” I say, muffled by the soft cotton of his sweatshirt. I pull back a little, so I can see his face. “You didn’t see her though, did you? When you went back?”

Tate shakes his head. “I promise. I just went in, picked up our stuff, and headed out again.”

“But . . .” I pause, “You were gone for kind of a while.”

“Like, five minutes.”

“It was longer,” I say. “Remember? I was waiting for you,
to put lotion on me, and I was already burning by the time you got back.”

Tate smiles, “That’s ’cause you burn in, like, five seconds flat.” He tugs my hair, and bends his head to kiss me. I relax into his arms, savoring the feel of his lips on mine. After everything that’s happened, this feels like the safest place in the world.

“We just have to stick together,” Tate whispers, stroking my cheek. “You and me, like always.”

“Like always,” I repeat.

•  •  •

We sleep with our clothes on, curled around each other on top of the sheets. When I wake, it’s all over the news: “American teen murdered on spring break.” “Possible sexual attack.” “Police are pursuing all leads.”

They don’t have our names yet, but I know it’s only a matter of time. I click the TV off. Tate sleeps on.

I notice Tate for the
first time that summer, a few months after my I have my breakdown in the girls’ bathroom and Elise walks away from her old clique for good.

I’d seen him around in school before then. Even in a school filled with rich, ambitious, smart kids, Tate Dempsey is Hillcrest royalty: star of the lacrosse team, student government, an athlete’s body, and golden good looks. We have a couple of classes together, but even with Elise in tow—especially with Elise—we live in different worlds. I would catch a glimpse of him in the hallways sometimes, heading to class with some new, adoring girl beside him, or hanging out on the front lawn after school tossing a football around with his buddies. I would think how he wasn’t so much a real teenage guy as the billboard for one. You
know, something from a J. Crew catalogue, or the hot guy on a teen TV show who’s really in his twenties—square-jawed, strong and sure among the crowds of boys still figuring out their gangly bodies and tufts of new facial hair.

But as the year passes, I realize I was wrong. He isn’t loud, or arrogant, like some of those popular guys, but almost quaintly polite: holding open doors if you’re behind him in line, presenting his arguments in a low, confident voice in class. He doesn’t ever interrupt, or pick on the nerdy kids, or swagger around like he owns the place; instead, he has this air of mild embarrassment about him, as if he knows just how much wealth and privilege have been heaped upon his broad shoulders. Everyone else in school seems to take their status for granted, like they don’t realize pure luck is the only reason they’re not crammed in a public school across the city, taking the bus home, walking up four flights to a tiny apartment when they get done with their after-school job.

Maybe it’s because I wasn’t born into this world that I see how random it all is—especially for us kids, who haven’t built anything of our own yet, just taken what our parents can provide. My classmates act like they’re entitled to their good fortune, but Tate is different, and I admire him for it.

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a thing for Golden Boy,” Elise says with a smirk one afternoon, when she catches me watching him from across the library.

“What? No.” I quickly turn back. She’s sitting cross-legged on the chair beside me, chewing red licorice and doodling in the margins of her world history homework. We have study hall last period on Tuesdays, but Elise is so restless, we barely ever make it through the hour. “It’s not like he even knows I exist.”

“Which makes you lucky,” Elise replies, arching an eyebrow. “He’s like, a total man-whore. He’s already dated four different girls this year.”

“Really?” I can’t help shooting another glance to where Tate is sitting at a table of the popular kids, his sweatshirt sleeves pushed up over tanned forearms, blond hair falling in his eyes. “I don’t know, he seems nice.”

“Trust me, he’s just another asshole jock, but with better hair.” Elise yawns, slamming her book shut. “Speaking of assholes, I’m so done with Hitler.”

“Stumptown?” I suggest, naming the coffeehouse that’s become our regular. “Or we could catch a movie.”

“Pie.” Elise’s eyes brighten. “I’ve been craving it all day. Dusty’s has the best, and all the college boys are going to be out studying for finals,” she adds mischievously.

I laugh. “You had me at pie.”

We grab our stuff and head for the exit, past Tate’s table. He doesn’t look up.

As we near the doors, Lindsay and her group saunter
in, armed with razorblade smiles and perfectly glossy bangs. “Aww, look, it’s Hillcrest’s new favorite dykes,” Lindsay sneers as we pass.

Elise doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even look around, just flips up her middle finger as we pass, linking her other arm through mine. As we push through the doors and outside, I glance over to check her expression, but there’s not even a flicker there, just a determined smile. “Peach or pecan?” Elise asks as we head down the steps onto the front lawn.

“You even have to ask?”

“You’re right,” she replies gravely. “I should have known. Both.”

•  •  •

It’s startling, how completely they cut her out of their clique, and how fast Elise sheds them, like some unwanted skin. She’s grown up with them, after all: sleepovers and birthday parties and after-school hangouts going back years. But in a day—in an instant—she was done. I feel guilty at first, wondering if she regrets her choice, giving up so much and getting only me in return. I didn’t yet know that Elise never looked back. Once she made a call, there was no other choice in her mind—she just kept moving forward, never regretting a thing. “Screw ’em,” she’d say whenever Lindsay would aim a new barb in her direction—her resentment for me nothing compared to the betrayal of a former friend. “We don’t need anyone but each other.”

And we don’t, not those first few months. The world of girl friendship and intimacy that has always seemed so foreign to me suddenly opens up, just the way I’d glimpsed that very first afternoon. It may sound wrong, but I’m the happiest I’ve even been that summer, even with my mom’s chemo treatments starting up again, and that sickly-sweet medicated smell lingering over my parents upstairs bedroom again. Because I have a place to escape now, a place of my own in the world, full stop.

I’m not alone anymore.

•  •  •

Elise and I fall into friendship like it’s gravity. We eat lunch together in the shade of the far trees on the east lawn and toil over our homework at coffee shops downtown. We trade clothing and music, passing notebooks filled with lyrics and doodles in the back row of every class we share, and learn the exact texture of each other’s bedroom floors from long nights sprawled on our stomachs, watching trashy reality TV. But soon we want more, and weekends become an adventure: fibbing to our parents about sleeping at the other’s house, then sneaking out in our best tight denim and chunky boots. It almost doesn’t matter where we go, as long as it’s somewhere nobody knows us, where we can be anyone we want to be.

Elise buys us fake IDs from some MIT student hacker, and although the door guys look twice, they always let us through.
Rock shows, and dive bars, and the college haunts that line Boylston and Beacon—most of the time it isn’t even about the alcohol, we just want to see the world waiting for us, after the battle of high school. One night we put on our best vintage dresses and red lipstick and take the elevator up to the lounge on the top of the Hub, a skyscraper high above the city. We sip cocktails from sugar-rimmed glasses and watch the lights over the river, fierce with the knowledge that this will all be ours one day, for real.

The night I meet Tate is near the end of the semester, when summer vacation looms, full of promise and freedom. Elise and I luck into a college party invite from our favorite barista at Stumptown, off-duty with his friends at the table next to ours. Elise shrugs, casual, and says we’ll try to make it, but the minute the group leaves, we grip each other’s hands, bright-eyed with delight. “Tell your dad you’re crashing at my house,” Elise orders, and I call him to leave the message, knowing there will only be a hurried text in reply. Ever since I brought Elise home, and he made the connection between her father, Charles Warren, and the state senator of the same name, my father has let me go out with her anytime I want.

So we do: getting ready in a flurry of discarded outfits and lip gloss, then sneaking down the back stairs while her parents are in the den, breathless in the backseat of a cab as we cross the twilight city, heading for adventure.

“If anyone asks, we’re freshman at Berklee,” Elise orders me as we clamber out of the cab outside the scribbled address. It’s a warm, muggy night and the street is busy with college crowds; music is already spilling out of the upstairs windows of a narrow brownstone. “I’m studying psychology, and you’re a business major.”