“Divorced and down to one income again, my mother quit the restaurant and started dancing at a place up the road. She’d done ballet in high school. But then she’d married my father and had never worked a job until we’d moved to Florida. Anyway, she was a good dancer and got a lot of feature spots and made a lot of money. She would come home with big, fat rolls of cash. Sometimes she’d come home with customers, too. Once she brought two of them home at two in the morning, and I left the house so I couldn’t hear the noises they made.
“Ever since we’d moved to Florida, I’d kept track of what my old friends were doing. They were all on Facebook, and none of them locked down their profiles, so it was easy. I knew they wouldn’t accept a friend request from Adriana DeStefano, so I made a name up and made a fake profile. Except eventually it became my real profile, because I liked the fake name so much that I started using it on the fashion blog I made to distract me from everything else in my life.
“I didn’t have many friends at school except for this one kid, Alexander. Alexander was the only out gay kid in eighth grade. We used to dress each other up like we were dolls, with makeup and hairstyles and everything. The rule was that you couldn’t peek at what was being done to you until the look was totally complete. We always took before and after photos. Alexander and I read fashion magazines like they were our bibles, and I spent all my free time on style blogs, so that meant I could identify practically anybody’s clothes and say who designed them.
“And that’s pretty much what led to me starting The Wanted. At first it was just a daily record of what I was wearing from the neck down. But then it turned into a way for me to keep in touch with people from Trumbo, even though they didn’t know they were keeping in touch with me. I started copying and pasting their photos from their parties. And then they’d come to the page and see it and share it with their friends and their friends’ friends, and pretty soon kids from other schools started sending me photos from their parties, and at some point newspaper and magazine writers took notice, and the serious fashion world, too. It was the first time in my life anyone noticed me for something I did on my own. It changed my life.
“The whole time, I followed Delilah Fairweather’s life. She grew up to be just as beautiful and as wonderful as I knew she would when we were little. I always knew she would be a star. And I always knew what I would do when I turned eighteen and got my trust fund: find a way back to her. Find a way back to us.
“As soon as I got my money, I left Florida behind and rented my house and my car and my new life. I went shopping for everything I should’ve had, everything I could’ve had if my father hadn’t been a criminal.
“It was the best summer I could’ve asked for. We were everything I wished we could’ve been, and more. We were in love. Real love. And when the accident happened, I thought Delilah would do the right thing and tell the police the truth: that she was the one who drove the car that killed Misti. It was partly my fault, too—I shouldn’t have let her drive. She said it would calm her down, so we pulled over by the side of Route 27 and we switched.
“I want everybody to know I don’t think it was her fault. She was scared and sad and yeah, she’d been drinking, but she wasn’t super-drunk. She was maybe a little tipsy. If anyone is still looking for the car, it’s in the woods near the Fairweathers’ house. Delilah knew where to hide it. I know now that she told the police I was driving. She’s not a bad person. She’s the best person I know. She really is. I wish you could know her the way I know her.
“Anyway. That’s the story. That’s all of it. And I want you to know that I’m sorry for everybody I hurt, for everybody I deceived. It’s not what I wanted. It’s not what I meant to do.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
And that was the end of the video.
I looked down at Jacinta’s note and saw that it was spotted with something wet. Then I touched my face. I’d been crying. I’d been crying and I hadn’t even noticed.
I read the rest of the note. And now I knew exactly what I had to do.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Very early the next morning, I waited at the end of the driveway for the passenger van to pick me up. It wasn’t as fancy as a chartered helicopter or as private as a town car, but it was cheap and would get me to JFK.
A black BMW convertible with the top up rolled down the wrong side of our street. It had tinted windows, and if it belonged to any of the neighbors, I’d never noticed it before. It came to a stop right in front of me. Slowly, the driver’s side window rolled down, and I found myself face-to-face with Teddy Barrington.
“Hey, Naomi,” he said.
I stared into the distance, not saying a word.
“Naomi, I’m sorry about what’s happening with your mother,” he said, just as if this were a normal conversation under completely normal circumstances, just as if I weren’t making a studious effort to ignore him.
He paused to see if his offer of sympathy would elicit any response from me. I gave him none.
“Years ago,” he continued, “my father almost got nailed with some insider trading bullshit. Some asshole prosecutor was trying to punish successful people so he could win points in the press. Dad beat it, though. So will your mother.”
I sighed loudly and turned my back to him. It was probably the rudest thing I’d ever done. And it really threw him for a loop, too. I don’t think Teddy Barrington, ex–child star and scion of one of America’s wealthiest families, was particularly used to being ignored.
“Naomi,” he said in a pleading tone. “You can’t still be upset about the other night.”
I whirled on him then.
“You mean the night your girlfriend murdered your other girlfriend? The night you’re helping her lie about? That night?”
Teddy’s eyes flashed with anger. “It was an accident,” he said. “If you didn’t listen to that psycho so much, you wouldn’t—”
“Her name was Adriana DeStefano,” I said. “And fuck you.”
Something truly unexpected happened then. Teddy’s handsome brown eyes filled with tears. They were angry tears, but they were tears nonetheless. He looked like the world’s tallest toddler. I stared at him in disgust until he rolled the window back up and screeched off.
The passenger van came not long after. I’m not a fan of being in close proximity to strangers, but it couldn’t be helped. I muttered an unenthusiastic “hello” to the other people in the van and squished in between the window and a woman with skin pulled so tight across her face you could practically see every single contour of her skull. She had a companion, a friend with similarly bad plastic surgery.
“That’s the suicide house,” murmured Skull #1 to Skull #2.
I glared at both of them with such undisguised hatred I’m surprised their fake skin didn’t melt.
I put my earbuds in and listened to my iPod on shuffle. When we got to the Shinnecock Canal, the only point on the trip with a momentary view of the ocean, Bill Withers’s “Ain’t No Sunshine” started playing. I stared at the distant waves and thought of Jacinta and Adriana. I’d barely known them, but somehow, I missed them both.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Holed up in a corner of Alan’s Coffee Shop, I hit refresh on the site over and over again. It was only 11:58, and I hadn’t set it to update until noon, but I was growing impatient. It had been a day since I’d arrived home in Chicago, and I’d done everything Jacinta had wanted. But I wanted to see it to know it was real.