What Happened That Night

10 ~ r e a l

After Kolby had yanked open the passenger side door and deposited his backpack in front of his left leg, a series of muffled clanks and thuds emitting from within the red and white bag, the white dirtied and faded from years of use, and a keychain of a baseball tapped against the porous speakers in the door as he set it down, roughly, and then took my backpack, purple and still smelling of the department store chemicals, and gently placed it against his right leg, the silicone case for my PocketBac hand sanitizer quietly sliding down the interior of the car and onto the floor mats, a crushed French fry under the sole of his Timberlands, the car was quiet. He didn't say anything, didn't ask me to explain why I had lied or what about, and didn't tell me to turn. He just sat there, eyes directed onto the road in front of us, and then he turned to me, gradually, as if every one of his moves are deliberate and thoughtful, and then said, slowly, "What did you lie about?" I noticed, as he spoke, that he was scratching at the worn denim in the knees of his pants, and it reminded me of my thumbnail, minutes ago, scratching at the leather seam of the steering wheel.

"I don't know why she . . . why she did that-to him. I don't," I told him, wondering if my sputtered lies were obvious to him as they were to me, jumbled up bits of untruths dangling over the console in between us, the water in the Aquafina bottle sloshing from side to side, but if he felt them lingering the air, he didn't show it. "And I didn't know that she was going over there that night," I continued, grateful that at least this was true, "but . . . before the police arrested her, I . . . knew. I knew about her, and him, and that she . . ."

"Killed him," Kolby clarified, flatly, as if this were just a fact, like the weather or multiplication or something.

I sighed, unsteadily, and clenched and unclenched my fingers around the steering wheel, feeling the leather seams create red impressions on my palms and fingers. "Yeah," I breathed. "Right."

Kolby seemed to process this for a moment, silently, and turned his gaze back towards the road, and I heard the sound of the seat belt easing back behind the seat and his body as he turned, and then he swallowed before motioning to the left. A few yards away, in between a white house with window shatters dangling, aimlessly, from only one hinge, and a mustard yellow house with plastic slides in the yard, was a left turn in the road. "Turn here," he said, and as I flipped the turn signal, I couldn't decide if his voice was his own quiet version of anger, soft and gentle, or if that was normally his tone when dealing with directions and roads. "How did you know?"

"Emily," I said, after a moment, and turned to the left, into a street named Dysinger, and passed the old, broke white home and the mustard yellow house with plastic toys littered throughout the snow covered lawn, an abandoned and frozen hat balled together neared the porch, and I bit down on my lip as I glanced out of the corner of my eye toward Kolby. He was scratching at his knee with his index finger, and I wondered if that was the knee he injured a few years ago. "She told me-the night of his funeral. I guess she felt guilty or something, I don't know. I didn't really believe her until . . ." I swallowed, clenching my hands again, and I noticed him turning to look at me out of the corner of my eye, his expression unreadable. "Until she showed me her clothes." I coughed, feeling a lump grow in my throat, and I hoped that he would stop me and tell me to make another turn just so I could focus on something other than her blood spattered tank top and shorts that she had hid in her closet, even if it was just flipping a switch. "She even kept them in a plastic bag . . . I don't even know why she would keep those."

Kolby was quiet for a moment, considering this, and I wondered if he had read on the Internet about how she had kept them in a large Ziploc bag in the back of her closet in a narrow shoe box that came with the new flip-flops she had purchased a few months earlier, in June, shoved behind her winter coats and thick sweaters, how she didn't even try to wash the blood off of them. The police said that they suspected she kept them as trophies of what she had done-done to him-but I knew that wasn't true. That wasn't Emily. She wasn't some guy in his late forties with a comb-over, driving in a large white van and offering girls roles in big movies or modeling gigs. She was Emily. Emily babysat, set the table every night for dinner, left quarters on tampon dispensers in case there was ever a woman that needed one but didn't have the quarter. She didn't keep sick, bloody clothes as trophies to look at when everyone had fallen asleep. Maybe-maybe-she just didn't know what to do with them. Maybe she was trying to figure that out when they arrested her.

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" Kolby asked after a moment, his index finger stilling and his jaggedly cut fingernail no longer scratching at the worn, faintly grass-stained denim, and I let out a sigh as he glanced at me, his gaze flickering down to my hands clenching around the steering wheel, and then back up at me. He seemed . . . hesitant. Maybe he was remembering how I had snapped at him a few days earlier, asking him why he never noticed that Griffin had done something that made Emily want to sneak into his backyard that September night, almost a full year after we had kissed in my own backyard, and slammed one of his mother's decorative garden rocks in the side of his head, his body spinning and landing in the pool, his blood staining the aqua, glimmering water red near his head. I couldn't stop thinking about Mrs. Tomlin, in Home Depot, picking up one of those flat, smooth garden rocks and placing it in her orange cart with the Home Depot logo on the side, excited to redo her backyard, not even realizing she was holding the object that would murder her youngest son. In their backyard, the stone pathway leading to the pool and the vegetable garden from the patio doors was missing one, an oval indent in the earth that exposed the potato bugs and ants crawling around underneath, a reminder that a rock wasn't the only thing missing from their home now.

"Because," I said, my cheeks beginning to redden and warm from embarrassment as my voice cracked on that simple, simple word that really wasn't simple at all. I just felt so stupid, sitting in my sister's Mini Cooper and driving the best friend of her murder victim home while trying to explain why I never told anyone that Emily admitted she killed Griffin two whole weeks before she was arrested, my voice breaking on the words. I remembered that night of the Super Bowl party, how I could barely catch my breath as I asked him to promise me he would never tell, and how this would be the second time I lost it in front of Kolby Rutledge. I swallowed and wished, not for the first time, that my sister's Cooper played more than just that one Carrie Underwood CD, that it had radio or something, just so I wouldn't have to listen to the blood thumping in my ears. "I just-I didn't know what to do. She was . . . Emily. I don't know." I sighed, shakily, and I turned to look at Kolby, trying to swallow back the lump growing in my throat, dislodging the air from my lungs. "I guess I thought that if I did-that if I did nothing that it meant it wasn't real, you know? I know I saw the clothes and everything, but it just-it was Emily."

He just looked at me for a moment, his eyes holding my gaze for a fleeting moment before he looked away, down at my hands on the steering wheel, directing him home, ashen white from clutching the leather wheel so tightly, and then he exhaled, seeming to slump in the back of his seat, gesturing to the right. "Turn here," he said, his tone somewhat defeated, and I nodded, numbly, as I switched on my turn signal, the sound of the little neon yellowish green arrow blinking the only thing I heard in the car over the sound of the wind beating against the windshield and the water in the Aquafina bottle sloshing in between us. "My house is just up the street. The brown one with bike in the yard." And then he tilted his head, slightly, just barely even visible, and mumbled, "I know you might think that a lot of people blame you, and that might be true, but if it is, I'm not one of them."

I felt my breath hitch in my throat. "What?"

"Just because you're her sister doesn't mean that you could've changed anything that happened."

I pulled into the driveway of the brown house with white trimming and drawn, yellowish curtains behind the window panes, and visible fragments of a bicycle beneath a blanket of fresh, powdery snow, a black wheel and a silver rim encasing half of it and one of the handlebars poking through the collection of snowflakes in the yard. Somewhere, in the house, I heard the muffled sounds of a dog barking. "Yeah, well," I said, my voice thick and struggling to escape around the lump in my throat, and I touched the arm of my glasses to bring them closer to my eyes. "I'm not so sure about that," I murmured, and it felt like the truest thing I had said since the Super Bowl party last year.

Kolby grasped his fingers around the handle of the passenger side door, shoving it open with a muffled pop, and he grabbed his backpack but instead of getting out of the car, he turned and looked at me, and smiled. Like, actually smiled, in a way that looked both totally weird and totally amazing on Kolby Rutledge as he got out of the car and swung his backpack onto his back, his textbooks thudding against his spine, and he said, "Well, I am. Thanks for the ride, Clara." And then he gently slammed the passenger door closed and trudged through the snow on his lawn up to his porch, instead of walking through the shoveled driveway, and jogged up the steps and fumbled around his pocket for a moment to find his keys, unlocked his front door, and then a dog appeared in the dog way, struggling to get out past Kolby's legs, and as he dodged the dog, a black lab, he turned back and gave me a wave over his shoulder as he stepped into the house and closed the door.