Hidden Truths|✓

Prologue

Ask me before and I'd say I was invincible. We all would. Nothing happens out here. Everyone knows everyone, we all grew up together. Pushing each other around on the playground, passing notes in class hoping the teacher wouldn't see. It started out as innocent as we were but turns dark soon enough. We all knew each other at parties, knew each other when we tried our first rebellious sip of alcohol, hooked up for the first time. Good girls turned bad and bad girls turned worse. Boys went from pushing girls on the playground to pushing girls to say yes. We all knew each other when we hid things from our parents. The lies, drugs, alcohol coursing through our bodies. We all knew each other and that made it worse. Because it turned out we hadn't known each other. We couldn't have or someone would have done something before it was too late.

Everyone knew the official story from that night. Olivia Parker was found dead at a senior party gone wrong. The party hadn't started out any different than the parties thrown every other weekend.  A group of teenagers got drunk as they always did but somewhere in the haze Wesley Owens had gotten a chance and snapped killing her. While facts didn't seem to line up to those of us who were there it must have been him. The police found Olivia's blood on him. It had to have been Wesley. 

The whole town believed the media reports and the police reports chalking it down to Wesley Owens stepping off the deep end, which no one saw coming. 

Not in this town, nothing bad ever happens in Fairweather.

If you asked me it was a ploy. A motto our adult residents and to attract others to move here. Bad things happen everywhere. But here in Fairweather, we were just better at covering up our sinister ways.

I still maintain that the police left out facts. Moments about the story were left out. 

No one mentioned just two hours before Olivia had gotten so blackout drunk that she made out with a boy who definitely wasn't her boyfriend

No one seemed to have noticed that I had been with Wesley an hour before, hidden away from everyone upstairs in one of the guest bedrooms.

The media reports were even worse. "Fairweather Friends" they called us. Fiction and drama were favored over facts. Leaving out a lot of the facts, changing the facts, almost dehumanizing the situation. Everyone treated Olivia and Wesley as nothing more than actors projecting this horrifying situation designed to send awareness or something to others. To teenagers, we were nothing more than a twisted reality show you binge-watch and gossip about. Team Wesley or Team Olivia? 

Teachers and coaches used them as examples, "Bad things happen to good girls who want to rebel... you don't want to end up like little Olivia Parker now do you?" "Stay away from the crazy girl's boys they'll ruin your life. Try to blame things on you and when they don't get the attention they crave they snap."

Girls would cry and say it could've been them, that what happened to Olivia could happen to them. They could've been the one with their neck slashed, bruises up and down their body, lying face down.

Everyone was so focused on how we should've seen it coming after Charlotte Cooper seven years before. Another girl killed at the Fairweather Senior Sendoff, except her killer was locked up away in some prison. Obviously, Fairweather wasn't as safe as everyone liked to pretend.

"It could've been her," People would say when they saw me, "They were all close, it could've been her." Except– it couldn't have been me, I wasn't the one out there. It was Liv.

Mothers would sit around their kitchens throughout the next few weeks, wine drunk and gossiping about us, "I always knew something was up with that boy. No one is that perfect on the outside without having something wrong on the inside. I would never have let my daughter near someone like that,  Poor girl."

Except– Wesley was dating me. Me. Not Olivia. Everyone knew Wesley was dating me.

Everyone portrayed Olivia as some sort of saint which she wasn't. The tragic golden girl, taken too soon. She wasn't a golden girl, she wasn't a saint. She was a bitch. Maybe not to me or our friends but to others? Bitch. We were best friends, friends who told everything to each other.

I thought about the night two weeks before; Olivia had spent the night in my room bawling her eyes out because she broke up with her boyfriend yet again, granted she had cheated on him. I thought about how the summer before Olivia had taken me under her wing, me the nerdy little junior, her the cool senior, dressing me up and convincing me to get contacts or that she taught me how to be someone. I was finally someone worth noticing.

I thought about Wesley. Wesley and Olivia had been friends since preschool though, family friends for life. Their families had joked that they end up married. No one saw him doing something like this to his lifelong friend. Wesley was always the golden boy. The golden boy who was going to leave our already perfect town and become something even better. Ironic how the golden boy killed the golden girl isn't it? 

That night when the police interrogated me- I lied. They asked if I knew if Olivia and Wesley were in a fight or if I knew what had happened or why Wesley did it or if he did it. I lied and said I didn't know and now even now when the case is coming to a close and the jurors are finally close to deciding innocent or guilty; they still don't know all the facts, they didn't know what happened that night at the lake. People think they've finally pieced together that whole night.

They haven't. They still don't know what really happened.

I did.