“Journal of a friend of theirs from college who killed herself,” I say. “She felt guilty about some kid who went off the roof at Vassar. Sounds like he was drunk and fell. An accident, but this group— well, I guess they left the scene, didn’t call anybody. Seems unlikely that he could have survived, neck broken probably. But you never know.”
“Wait, the roof of Vassar?” Dan asks, squinting at me. “When was this?”
“I don’t know, ten years ago?”
Something behind Dan catches my eye then. At the back of the living room, the cabinet doors are half open. I can see bottles lined up, glasses arranged on a silver tray, an ice bucket, tongs.
Dan snaps his fingers. “Wait, this is that kid? The one I was telling you about, from Hudson.”
“What kid?” I ask, getting up to take a closer look at the bar. There’s something etched in gold on the ice bucket that I can’t make out from across the room.
“That lady in the pink tracksuit. I’m pretty sure that was her kid. She was all over the news at the time, wailing about her poor beloved son. Until it came out that he’d actually hated her guts. She just liked being on TV. She lived right behind Bethany, actually. Evan Paretsky, that was his name. He was working some construction job in Poughkeepsie at the time.”
“Why didn’t I hear about that?” But then I would have been in California at the time.
“It was big news around here, but only for a few days,” he says. “Once the college said he’d been breaking into rooms before he fell, people lost interest.”
“Well, from the journal, it doesn’t sound like he was breaking in anywhere. The group met him in some off-campus bar and invited him back to party on the roof. Guy was drunk, got too close to the edge, and slipped. Bad accident made a whole lot worse when they didn’t call anyone. Stupid kids.”
“Not drunk, no way,” Dan says. “Not Paretsky. He had some kind of metabolic thing or gluten intolerance or allergy or something. I remember. He was a couple years ahead at Hudson High. A single drink, and he’d get real sick. Vomiting and all that. Ended up being everybody’s designated driver. Shitty hand of cards, huh? First that and then the roof. That was the first thing I thought when I heard he’d died.”
Dan is still talking, but I’m not listening anymore now that I’ve reached the bar. I lift the ice tongs, the engraving there clear for the first time. Two looping letters, in the exact same font as the corkscrew.
“LG,” I say out loud, looking around.
Finally, I see it, the bronze plaque on the wall above the bar: LOCUST GROVE, EST 1883.
ALICE
I finally have Evan Paretsky’s address! And Hudson is only an hour away from Poughkeepsie.
I’m still not exactly sure what I’m going to do when I get there. Maybe I will just leave a note anonymously at Evan’s house, like I told Maeve I planned to. His mom does seem very, very angry— I saw her on the news. Not just about Evan’s death, but also about him being falsely accused. It’s hard to imagine she’ll react well to me admitting I was involved.
And, yes, I know I could just mail a note. But I need to at least see her read it. To know for sure that she got it.
Maeve said to mail the note certified— she wasn’t even joking. But she also said that I had to take my medication before she’d even consider helping me. And I did take it. It was good anyway because I think my mom was planning to come up for a “visit,” too— her code for a meds check. I know it wasn’t helping anything, me not taking them. But I have now, and I already feel myself settling. Eventually I’ll settle too low, that’s always the problem— the place where my brain moves like sludge. But for now I’m in that sweet middle ground.
I’ll ask Derrick for his car on the way out. I know he’ll say yes. He always does. And Maeve will come, I could see it in her eyes— she’s already on my side. She knows I need to do this. Besides, she owes me. I let her keep that last shirt she stole from me without even saying a word.
DERRICK
SATURDAY, 8:41 P.M.
I felt relieved when I saw Maeve waiting at the end of Jonathan’s dark driveway in her leggings and sweatshirt, arms filled with the jackets she’d brought for us. God, I really was so in love with her. And, no, our conversation earlier hadn’t gone as far as I wanted it to, but something had shifted between us. I could feel it.
Maeve opened the back and tossed the pile of jackets in before getting in on the passenger side.