Scar (11 page)

But when she opened the door, she found her mother and father on her mother’s laptop, their eyes wide, mouths agape. Her mother turned away, grimacing. “I’m going to be sick,” she said, and then ran to the bathroom.

“What’s going on?” Caelyn said, her heart thumping in her chest.

Caelyn’s dad looked at her, his expression one of total devastation. He shut the laptop. “Tell your sister to come in here immediately.”

“Dad, listen—“

“Caelyn,” he said, his voice sounding different than anything she’d ever heard before, “go get Deena right now and tell her I want to speak to her.”

Caelyn swallowed. “Okay,” she said, suddenly anxious. It was one thing to hope for her sister’s downfall, to want to see people find out about her real nature, and quite another thing to realize the effect it would have on her entire family.

She walked out of the bedroom and back down the hallway to Deena’s room. “Hey, Deena,” she said, knocking. There was no answer.

She knocked again.

Still, no answer.
Finally, Caelyn turned the knob and opened the door to Deena’s bedroom, finding her younger sister sitting on the floor with her laptop, staring at the screen. She glanced up at Caelyn.

“Come here to point and laugh?” she asked. Her face was pale, her lips dry and cracked, and she had scabs on her chin and cheeks, as if she’d been scratching and picking at her face.

“I’m not laughing,” Caelyn said. “Dad told me to come and get you. He wants to talk to you.”

Deena smiled. “This should be fun.
Especially for you.
You finally got what you wanted, Caelyn. You always had to be the better sister, the one who Mom and Dad loved most, who everyone loved most. And now that your life has become a joke, you needed to make sure that mine was even worse in comparison. Happy?”

“Deena, I don’t know why you think we’re competing,” Caelyn said. “I never cared about being better than you.”

Deena’s jaw trembled and she took a shuddering breath. “Liar.”

“It’s the truth,” Caelyn said. “I never wanted to be better than you. I never really thought about it.”

“Maybe that’s because you didn’t have to.”

“Where did you get the idea that Mom and Dad thought I was better than you?”

Deena laughed, a high-pitched giggle
that sent chills up Caelyn’s spine and made the hair on the back of her neck stand
up. Looking at Deena right now, Caelyn thought that her younger sister looked possessed.

“I don’t know where I got that thought,” Deena said sarcastically, typing into her computer as she spoke. “Maybe it was when I was ten years old, and I overheard them talking downstairs. They thought we were asleep, I guess. They were kind of whispering, so I snuck downstairs and listened to their conversation. They were talking about us, and about how they were concerned because I just wasn’t that bright, or curious, and that I didn’t seem to be as loving or caring as you. In a nutshell, you were awesome and I was basically a big fat nothing.”

“Come on, Deena, you were ten. You probably just misunderstood them—“

Deena looked up again, glaring with fury at Caelyn. “I didn’t misunderstand anything,” she growled. “They were worried about me. It wasn’t like they were just saying it to make fun of me. They were trying to figure out what to do, if I needed counseling or special tutors, or what. But until that moment, I’d never understood why I always felt so different, so set apart from you and them. I always was excluded. That was the moment that I realized I was different from you, and from them too.”

“How is any of that my fault?” Caelyn asked her. “I’m just their child, same as you. I didn’t force them to think those things or say those things. If you were angry at anybody, it should have been them.”

Deena giggled again, went back to typing on her computer. “You really aren’t very bright,” she said, “at least not nearly as bright as they think you are.”

And then the truth hit Caelyn like a ton of bricks. How had she not seen it before now? It really was obvious, in a way.

“Oh my God,” she said. “You were only hurting me because you knew that would hurt them most of all. You were trying to torture Mom and Dad this entire time, by making them lose faith in me as a person.”

Deena raised her eyebrows but didn’t bother to comment. “Tell Dad I’ll come to talk to him in just a second.”

“What are you doing on that computer?” Caelyn asked, feeling more nervous now.

“Just talking to my English teacher online,” Deena said lightly. “He’s very worried. The kids who stole his phone made a whole website about us and now the entire school and most of the parents have seen it.”

“Deena—“

“Don’t try and sound concerned,” Deena told her. “It’s so gross.”

“I didn’t want things to be this way between us.”

Deena put her laptop aside and stood up, facing Caelyn. “Listen to me,” she said. “I know that you’re upset and all, and I get that we have this history and baggage and everything. But the truth is, I really don’t care about you at all. Not even a little bit. So you probably shouldn’t waste your time thinking about me anymore. That’s my honest advice.” She patted Caelyn’s shoulder and then walked out of the room.

***

The next day, Caelyn’s parents took Deena to an inpatient psychiatric unit. They left very early in the morning, and Caelyn watched them leave from her bedroom window. She hadn’t bothered to say goodbye to her younger sister, because she’d realized that Deena had given her the best possible advice when she’d advised Caelyn not to even think about her.

About two hours later, the first reporters showed up at the house and then the phone began to ring.

Caelyn got on her computer and saw that the story about Deena and her English teacher—and the resulting webpage with all the gory text messages and pictures that had been put online by other students—had gone viral.

Mister Marshall was under arrest and the initial webpage with all of the evidence had already been taken down, but it didn’t matter. The story had ignited a firestorm of controversy about who was really the victim and who was the perpetrator in the scenario.

The comments in response to one of the articles on CNN had grown to thousands of replies, and many of them were vicious attacks on Deena. They called her a psychic vampire, a slut, a narcissistic whore, and worse.

Caelyn had to stop reading after that, because it was just too surreal and too disturbing. The thing was, even though Caelyn didn’t like Deena and had every reason to hate her—they were Caelyn’s personal reasons.

Deena was still her sister, but now she was literally the world’s punching bag. Everyone had an opinion on her, everyone thought they knew who Deena was, and even those who wanted to defend her were just as wrong.

None of them knew the real story or the real motivations for Deena’s behavior.

Caelyn didn’t even know, and she was the girl’s sister and had known her for her entire life.

Caelyn decided to stop going online to read news stories, and she refused to answer the landline.

Occasionally a reporter would come and knock on the front door of the house, but Caelyn never answered that either.

Instead, she ate some cereal and watched an old movie on TV in the living room.

While watching TV, Caelyn had the realization that it really was time to do something productive, and Caelyn thought that maybe, just maybe, her parents would be willing to hear her out after everything that had gone on with Deena. Maybe that would make them realize that Caelyn wasn’t so bad as Deena had painted her, and that she could still be trusted to make a good decision now and then.

Even though her heart was heavy with grief over Elijah, somehow Caelyn felt lighter for having made up her mind to go back to college. As she finished her cereal and put the bowl in the sink, Caelyn wondered how it was that she could still feel a sense of optimism after everything that had gone on.

Her family was destroyed, changed beyond all recognition. Her parents were empty shells of who they’d once been, her sister was psychotic and involved in a massive scandal, and Caelyn had lost the one person who she could truly count on—Elijah.

But somehow she hadn’t given up hope.

The realization was kind of astonishing.

In some way, she now understood that there was nothing anybody or anything could do to take away her hope. She and Elijah would find their way back together somehow. Even if it took the next twenty years, Caelyn would do her best to stay positive and be ready for the day when they could be together once more.

Knowing that inner strength, she felt a burst of energy. She wanted to go for a run around the neighborhood, or sing at the top of her lungs. She smiled, for what felt like the first time in forever.

At just the moment when she was feeling the best, her cell phone began to ring. Caelyn didn’t recognize the number, but she answered it anyway, just in case.

She hadn’t really expected it to be him, as she’d tried to call Elijah’s hospital room the previous night and hadn’t been allowed through.

But then she heard the familiar voice on the other end and her heart skipped a beat. “Hey kid,” he said, and she could almost hear his grin through the phone. “What’s new?”

She closed her eyes and felt a wave of relief at hearing his voice again. At the same time, she felt an intense longing and grief for not being physically with him. The two emotions seemed to do battle inside her body, until the love for him won out and she allowed herself to just enjoy his voice. “I’m sitting at my house trying to avoid reporters outside,” she said, finally.

“Are you serious?” Elijah asked. “The reporters followed you all the way home because of me?”

Caelyn laughed. “Actually, no. The reporters at our house have nothing to do with you, strangely enough.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. “There’s some other reason why they’d be there? Is it because of Jayson?”

She hadn’t thought of Jayson in a little while, and the mention of his name caused her to flinch. “No, it’s not Jayson, thank God,” she said. “It’s about Deena.”

“Go on,” Elijah said. “I’ve gotta hear this.”

So Caelyn began to tell him everything about Deena and her English teacher, and how she’d discovered it first but then kept it to herself, trusting that the truth would eventually come out—which it did. She ended with the fact that her parents had admitted Deena to an inpatient psychiatric unit.

When she was finished telling him everything, Elijah whistled. “Holy crap,” he said. “You sure do have a crazy life for a girl who’s supposedly normal.”

“I don’t think I’m normal.” She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “Enough about Deena and my crazy family,” she said. “I don’t want to waste precious seconds of our time talking about all of that.”

“Well I know you don’t want to hear about my boring life,” Elijah said.

“Of course I do. And your life is hardly boring.” Caelyn sat down on the sofa and curled up with a pillow, wishing he could be next to her, hugging her as they talked.

“Actually, things have been kind of interesting around here,” Elijah told her. “They let me do an interview with Anderson Cooper from my hospital bed.”

“What?” she shrieked, sitting up straighter.
“Anderson Cooper? As in Anderson Cooper from CNN?”

Elijah laughed. “Yeah, the same dude. Last night he flew in and sat down right in the room with me, and there were lights and cameras and then we just shot the shit for like an hour. He told me I did really well being on camera.”

Caelyn’s head was spinning. “When will it be on TV?”

“I think Anderson said they’ll be airing it tonight.”

“Are you nervous?” Caelyn asked.

“Nervous about what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What the whole world will think when they watch you on TV.”

Elijah laughed again. “There’s no point in being nervous about it. I’m already on YouTube and people are writing about me and saying all kinds of stuff. So I might as well put my version out there. And anyway, I’ll be locked up so what the world thinks of me doesn’t matter that much to me.”

Caelyn’s smile faded. “Are you sure you’ll be locked up? I mean
,
there’s got to be a chance that they won’t send you back to jail. We need to get you the best lawyer we can, someone who can fight for you.”

“Caelyn, I’m not going to fight it. I already told you, I’m ready to pay my debt to society.”

She swallowed back a bitter taste. “You’ve paid your debt,” she said. “You risked your life for four people you didn’t know and you saved them. That makes up for all the bad stuff you’ve done.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he replied, simply.

She could tell from his tone of voice that there was no changing his mind about it.

“So what’s next?” she said. “Are you healing?”

“I’m doing a lot better,” Elijah said, “but I’m going to have some scars from the burns.”

“I wish I could see you,” she told him.

“You can see me,” he said. “Close your eyes right now.”

She closed her eyes and listened to his voice. “Okay. I closed them.”