And there she was, finally admitting it. Jane might have loved me, but deep down she thought I was just as ugly as everybody else did.
I didn’t realize what had happened until it was over, that rock gripped in my hand, Jane in an awkward pile on the ground. Well, not completely over. Jane was just unconscious then. The rest of what I did— I did after. I had no choice. And they needed to think some real sicko was responsible. They needed to at least find my bloody shirt to believe that I was dead, too. Of course, if they’d done their jobs and run tests, they’d have found Jane’s blood on that shirt, not mine. All that rain really did feel like the universe sending me a sign—I deserved a fresh start.
It was a risk enrolling at Vassar, so relatively close to Kaaterskill. I’d known that at the time. But when that married customer I was sleeping with bragged about how working in Vassar’s admissions office gave him so much power over so many young lives, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. By that point I was way past tired of the waitressing job I’d found in Yonkers and it was shockingly easy to blackmail him into helping me. In a way, I was honoring Jane’s memory by going to Vassar. It had always been her dream to go there. And, let’s face it, risk is always part of the thrill.
I didn’t plan things with Alice either. Yes, it had been my idea to stop at the Vanderbilt Mansion on the way from Poughkeepsie to Hudson. But I swear, when we got out of the car to sit by the river in the deserted park, I was still convinced I’d be able to talk Alice out of going to Hudson and that idiot Evan’s house. Because obviously she couldn’t do that. Alice was impulsive. She might go there with every intention of only leaving a note, but then something in the woman’s expression might grab her and next thing you know, she’d be throwing caution to the wind and knocking on the woman’s door. Alice was that consumed with making amends for something that definitely wasn’t her fault.
Under no circumstances could Alice end up inside Evan’s house. Apparently they had a picture of me in their kitchen— a framed newspaper clipping of the dead neighbor girl. That’s what Evan had said to me that night on the roof: “I’ve been looking at your fucking picture at the dinner table for the past ten years. Your face was fatter then. But don’t tell me that’s not you.”
I hadn’t recognized him at all until he said that. But his mom had apparently been obsessed with the murders, seeing as how one of the girls had lived right behind them, and she was also a true crime aficionado. She kept the framed clipping on the wall as a reminder to cherish life, she said. （Creepy, if you ask me. Evan thought so, too.） The worst part was that I knew the picture Evan was talking about, with my hair back in a headband and my face extra puffy. Still, it was one of the few where if you looked hard enough, you could almost see this me already, waiting in the wings.
Alice completely freaked when I brought up the subject of going back to campus instead of continuing on to Hudson. She started screaming at me. She even tried to leave me behind at the Vanderbilt Mansion, running toward the car with the keys. Though that was after I’d slapped her— just hard enough to get her to come to her senses. But apparently Alice was going to Hudson no matter what I said. No matter what I did. Except, of course, for the thing I did eventually do: make it so that Alice couldn’t go anywhere ever again.
She was light, but she was strong— I’d forgotten that— and it got ugly. I had to chase Alice down. I think she even made some calls at one point, hoping to get rescued. After it was over, what choice did I have but to leave the car someplace where suicide would be presumed? The Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge was an obvious choice— people jumped from there all the time. Honestly, though, I was surprised as anyone that they never found Alice’s body. Her parents were incensed, blamed gross incompetence. But with the powerful current and all the commercial barge traffic on the massive Hudson River, the police never seemed that surprised. Bodies weren’t always that easy to find, apparently. Of course, maybe they would have found her if they’d started searching twenty-miles downriver instead of wasting all that time up by the bridge, a place Alice never was to begin with.
But the most awful of all was Derrick. That was the worst, because he really did love me, for me. And yet in the end even he didn’t give me a choice. The way his empty eyes stared at me after, so accusingly— just like Jane’s. I couldn’t bear it. It hardly counts as a thing you’ve done when a person leaves you with no alternative.