The road was rougher, far rougher than he realized, and he heard his mother’s car make an ominous noise. Shit, something beneath the car had popped a bolt and was now dragging, making a huge amount of noise. He hadn’t felt drunk, but now he realized that the beer was catching up with him. He was definitely buzzed. This was stupid. This was way stupid.
He pulled up to the gated driveway, intent on backing out and turning around, but it was dark and he heard a hard thunk. Shit, he had hit the fence or something, but when he tried to turn the car on again, nothing happened. His mom’s distributor cap might have come loose on that road. He was going to have to call in all his charm points when his mother saw what he had done to her Mazda.
He got out, trying to walk around the car to inspect the damage, but the car was angled weirdly, so he had to climb out the passenger side. Maybe he should raise the hood, check the distributor cap, then assess the damage to the rear end. He stumbled forward, falling to his knees. He hadn’t eaten enough today. That’s why the beer was making him light-headed. He had been drinking on an empty stomach.
“Who’s there?” The question came from a shape, a huge, dark shape, almost like a bear, although Peter knew that bears cannot speak. He froze, trying to think what he should say. In his mind he was invisible as long as he didn’t speak. He would just wait for the shape to go away and-
The pain seemed to come before the sound. Was that possible? Did sound travel slowly enough that the shotgun blast that tore through him really had a chance to announce itself? His middle seemed to be on fire, and Peter clutched himself as if he had a stomachache. His arms came away slick and red, his knees buckled beneath him. Was he fainting, or was he dying?
Now he was on the ground, and he suddenly felt cold, as cold as he ever had.
Not good, he thought. Definitely not good.
How far do sounds travel on a summer night? A shotgun, for example. Does the damp air slow it down, hold it close? Does it matter if those within its range recognize the sound for what it is or if they assume it’s something more familiar-a firecracker, a car backfiring? Those in the Sweetwater Estates certainly heard Cyrus Snyder’s shotgun, but it was only the sirens, then the whirring of another Shock Trauma helicopter over the valley, the second in a week, that alerted them to the fact that something had happened. In their pen, Claude and Billy nattered, and Eve’s mother poked Eve’s slumbering father. But Dale Hartigan, eight acres away, slept on.
How far does a girl’s voice travel? Josie Patel was barely audible to the five adults gathered around her in the Patels’ family room. The detectives kept glancing worriedly at the microcassette recorder, making sure that the voice-activated microphone was picking up her words. If Dale Hartigan had been in the next room, he might not have heard the girl’s voice. But he was in his old bed, asleep in his ex-wife’s arms.
Later, when he pieced together the events of that night, he would remember that dreamless sleep as a blessing of sorts. For while it could not be said that this June evening was the last happy night that Dale Hartigan would ever know, it was the last innocent sleep of his life. When he had passed out next to Chloe, he was a victim of circumstance, undeserving of his fate. He was still a man who believed he could afford to know the why of things, and that those explanations would then lead to solutions he could effect. He had gone to sleep feeling that his life was still open, that he was not as thoroughly destroyed as he feared.
By morning he would wake to a world where five young people’s deaths, including his daughter’s, had been traced back to him. Six, if one counted Peter Lasko, and Dale did. He had not meant any of this to happen. All he had wanted was the very best for his daughter. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted?
But in the end it was Josie’s story, and Dale Hartigan never challenged her right to tell it, much less tried to contradict a word of it, unflattering and damaging as it was to him. Josie told it in her own ragged, discursive way, for there was no one else to shape her words. Not Perri, with her heightened sense of drama and narrative. Not Kat, with her tendency to edit out the problematic details, to gloss over anything unpleasant and unflattering. Not Eve, who had only Binnie’s version and one page of a letter. In the end it was Josie’s story, and she believed that every detail mattered-the cupcakes and the Ka-pe-jos, the jokes and the plays and the crushes.
There were three girls. For ten years they were best friends who did everything together. Then they weren’t, and then they didn’t. It was only in how their friendship ended that there was anything singular about them.
37
In April of junior year, Kat checked her SAT scores on the Internet and found that they were still stubbornly short of the 1400 mark. “Short” was a euphemism: At 1340 she was closer to 1300 than 1400, and even 1400 was a far cry from the 1500 that her father said would make her a “lead-pipe cinch” for Stanford.
“Lead-pipe cinch,” Perri said when Kat repeated her father’s phrase. “What does that mean? I mean, why does it denote a sure thing?”
They were all a bit obsessed with words and meanings and analogies at this point, having spent the past three years preparing for their college boards. They had taken practice tests freshman year, taken the PSATs twice, studied vocabulary lists in English this year, then taken the SATs twice. But of the three, no one had spent more time preparing than Kat.
“Some building term, I suppose,” Kat said. “Anyway, I’m not too worried. I think being ranked number one in the class balances my SATs.”
Her confidence didn’t seem a put-on. With help from her father’s girlfriend-an accomplished Stanford alum in her own right-Kat did appear to have everything else she needed for a spot at the schooclass="underline" straight-A grades, a sheaf of recommendations, a list of extracurricular activities that signaled her breadth and diversity. Even the news that Binnie Snyder planned to apply there was of little concern, because Kat was going early decision and Binnie was spreading her applications out, targeting all the big math-and-science schools-Caltech, MIT, Berkeley. Besides, Binnie was a math nerd. She didn’t have the all-around profile that Kat had cultivated.
But Kat’s calm assurance shattered when she learned that Binnie had signed up to take an advanced calculus course at community college that summer-and that she would be given high-school credit. Under the byzantine system that Glendale used to calculate class ranking, this would make Binnie number one and drop Kat to number two. Again Kat insisted she was not worried, but she was far less convincing this time. Whenever the girls got together the spring of their junior year, the topic was sure to surface, with Kat seeking her friends’ reassurances, then saying she didn’t need them.
Her usually mild-mannered father was apoplectic, complaining that Kat was being cheated out of an honor for which she had been preparing since middle school. “We’ve been outscheduled,” he told his daughter. Her father even met with the principal and tried to persuade her that no credit should be given for outside coursework. He offered to underwrite a scholarship at the school, in his family’s name, and back it with a large donation. But while Barbara Paulson took Mr. Hartigan’s money, the only thing he accomplished was getting the school to scuttle its traditional vale-dictorian/salutatorian roles. There would still be a number-one ranking as far as colleges were concerned; it just wouldn’t be announced at graduation.