The St. Ambrose School for Girls(98)

Detective Bruno gets down on his haunches in front of me. Both of his knees crack as he does this, and he nearly hides a wince. I decide that one or both are injured from his old high school football years.

“Tell me,” he says, his eyes fixated on me.

I take a deep breath, and the image of Sandra Hollis is so vivid, it’s like she’s crouched in between the pair of us.

“Nick Hollis has a vintage Porsche,” I say. Then I point out the window. “It’s a really distinctive car. It’s parked right down there. Anyway, I was behind the three girls. I saw him pull up beside them and talk to them. Greta got in with him and they drove away.”

“So he gave her a ride and not the others?”

“It’s a two-seater.”

“And then what.”

“That’s it. Well, and then I saw Francesca and Greta arguing at Mountain Day.”

“And that’s it?”

Well, yeah. Except for pink panties. Blue Porsches. Geometry teachers. But if he knows about the phone room, surely he knows about all that.

“Yes,” I say in response to his question.

The hunter light in the detective’s stare dims, and he gives the floor a shove with his meaty palm as he stands up with a grimace.

“Okay. Thank you. I’ll follow up on all that—”

“Greta’s body is where they met every night.”

“What did you say?”

I rub my eyes to try to get that image of the body out of my mind. The scrub job does nothing to help with my crystal clear memory. “The body’s where Francesca and Stacia and Greta always met. On the rock at the river. They smoked there.”

“How do you know this?”

“I’m new here. I had no friends at first.” Still. “So I used to walk along the river at night when it was still light. I’d see them all sitting there. I never stopped to talk them because… well, let’s face it, I’m not their kind.”

In the silence that follows, I find myself mourning the sight of those three girls sitting on the big, flat boulder, smoking like they didn’t have a care, their lives so bright they had to wear shades, to quote the song. And now Greta is gone.

“What was the tone of their conversations?”

I lower my eyes to Detective Bruno’s shoes. Florsheim. I’ve seen them for sale in the mall back in my hometown. They’re cheap and have plastic wedges at the heels instead of blocks of contoured wood. They have mud on them, from him chasing after me. From him trying to find clues down at the river.

“Teenage girl stuff.” I rub my eyes again. “Who they were dating, what they didn’t like about them, where they were going to go for breaks. You should talk to Francesca and Stacia.”

“I will.”

I look him in the eye. “Are you allowed to ask me all these questions? I’m a minor and I have no legal representation.”

“This is just an informational interview. And we’re almost done.” He clears his throat again. “I understand you take medication.”

“Would you like to see it?” I lean forward but can’t quite reach the bottom drawer on the far side of my chair. I have to get up. “It’s lithium. I take it because I’m bipolar.”

When I face him again, I hold out the orange prescription bottle. He shakes his head and puts his palm up in a vertical no, like he could catch the disease if he touches the container.

“Explain to me what that means? Bipolar,” he says.

“Some doctors call it manic-depressive. I have mood swings. Big ones.”

“So you get sad and then happy?”

“Something like that.” I almost keep the sharpness out of my tone. “I’m mostly sad, to use your word.”

“Do you ever get angry?”

“Anger is about power. I have no power. Not over my illness—and not over Greta, if that’s where you’re going. Not over anything. I just endure. It’s all I can do. She was just one more thing I had to put up with, and if you think an essay about living with my disease is a big deal, I can tell you right off that words on a page are nothing compared to the reality.”

The detective stares at me. After a moment, his eyes go to the label on the little bottle, and something about the compassion that flares in his face makes me realize that he truly doesn’t think I did it.

As I go to put the pills back, I start to breathe easier. It is not until this moment, when my heart rate slows and I take less-restricted breaths, that I realize I have been frightened I might have done something very, very bad.

That’s why I ran away, and it wasn’t from the police. They were incidental.

I was running from the terror that my mental illness might have taken the wheel not to go inward into my mind, but to travel outward, into the world. I might be powerless, nothing more than a fragile identity stuck inside the bag of skin I was born into. My disease, on the other hand? It can create a black hole out of my bed, a tidal wave from my hair, a fantasy about success just because I used some black dye.

It is so all-powerful as to be godlike.

“What are you thinking about, Sarah?” Detective Bruno asks softly.

“I didn’t like Greta,” I hear myself say. And then I continue, because he doesn’t think I’ve committed murder, and I’m taking his professional opinion as fact. “I maybe even hated her, and I definitely hated what she did to me. She was like my bipolar, though. She made things harder for me, except it wasn’t personal. My disease isn’t personal. It’s not about me, although it affects me and my life. Greta was just the same, shitting on me because I lost the residential lottery and ended up in the room across from her. But I was going to get through whatever she did to me. I was going to survive because I’ve already gotten through so much worse.”