The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs (7 page)

“What happened?”

Caroline decided to tell Polly the story. Not the whole story, but the first half.

The part before she killed Lucy.

eight

Caroline had been na
ï
ve. Everything she knew about high school had come from movies like
The Breakfast Club
and
Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
She expected a campus rather than a school, with large swaths of unsupervised space and enormous blocks of unscheduled time. She expected well-lit hallways lined with lockers and trophy cases, a gleaming cafeteria, a football field, and a collection of odd and easy-to-fool teachers.

And she expected the students to be divided into clearly delineated categories. Caroline didn't really think she'd fit into any of the cliques. She wasn't a jock or a cool kid, a stoner or an outcast. But she hoped to achieve a sort of Molly Ringwald–type status. She would be the girl who was a little shy and a little poor, who would eventually find her tribe and earn the grudging respect of the masses.

That was the problem with being na
ï
ve. You went into things entirely unprepared.

Caroline didn't get her Brat Pack utopia. At Blackstone-Millville Regional High School she found low-hanging ceilings, dim, fluorescent lighting, and a dingy cafeteria that smelled of spoiled milk. Worse, she was faced with a highly structured, well-supervised environment with four minutes between classes, a complete absence of free time, and a draconian emphasis on homework. There was no football team. No quirky teachers. There were cliques, all right, but most kids didn't fit into those convenient boxes. Some dumb jocks were smart. Some cool kids were mean. There were popular stoners, articulate stoners, sad stoners, and everything in between. Whole categories Caroline hadn't even though about. Punks. Princesses. Good-looking geeks. The aggressively college bound. The clinically depressed. The invisible kids. So many invisible kids.

Standing on that sidewalk on the first day of school, Caroline was filled with misconceptions. She was frightened, but she was hopeful. Foolishly hopeful.

Emily Kaplan's idea of high school had been entirely different. Pretty, intelligent, and charming, bolstered by the wealth of her yuppie parents and her only-child status, Emily was a confident kid well armed for high school. Confident people, Caroline thought, didn't worry. They did not plan. They possessed an expectation that they could overcome any challenge placed before them. It's not that the world bent entirely to Emily's needs—even she had her disappointments—it's that she carried herself with the confidence of a person who believed it eventually would. Emily was nervous on the first day of high school, but ultimately, she knew that she would find her way and come out on top. Because she always had.

“The John F. Kennedy of children.” That's how Caroline's mother had referred to Emily. Caroline hadn't understood the reference at the time, but even if she had, it wouldn't have mattered. Emily's social skills were of little consequence to Caroline. For Caroline, it was much simpler. Emily was her best friend. The person who knew her best. The person who made her the happiest. Their friendship was a miracle of sorts. Caroline's luckiest break.

“Did you actually like Emily?” Polly asked.

“I loved Emily. You couldn't not love her. And as little kids, we were together all the time. I spent more time with Emily than anyone else. That history meant something.”

The two girls had grown up across the street from each other. Up until eighth grade, Caroline and Emily had spent at least of portion of every day together, and when they weren't in school, they were often together for the entire day.

In childhood, proximity matters. It matters a lot.

“And I knew that being friends with Emily was good for me,” Caroline explained. “I knew it made me … not exactly popular, but less invisible.”

“So you were a name dropper?” Polly asked, a smirk spreading across her face.

“Maybe,” Caroline admitted. “When stuff like that started to matter. But when we were little, we were more like sisters.”

“What about Aunt Lucy?” Polly asked. “Where was she?”

“Lucy was four years younger than me, which is like a million years younger when you're a kid. I was in second grade before Lucy could even walk. Emily and I would let her hang out with us sometimes, but mostly we left her at home. There was a little girl who lived two houses over. Patty something, I think. Lucy spent a lot of time with her.”

“So you bagged on your sister?” Polly said.

“No,” Caroline said, not entirely sure what
bagging on her sister
meant. “Lucy and I were close. We would sit on the couch under the same blanket at night and watch TV and eat popcorn. And Lucy would climb into my bed whenever she had a nightmare, which was like every night. But I couldn't talk to her like I could to Emily. She was just too young.”

Caroline's father had built a tree house for her when she was in kindergarten. It had been a safe haven for Caroline and Emily throughout most of their school years. Built within the bifurcated trunk of a towering oak at the edge of the tree line, it represented a demarcation of sorts for them. On one side stood Caroline's backyard. Civilization, where a glass of water or a Band-Aid could be had in a moment's notice. On the other side stood the untamed copse that filled the swath of land between Farm and Lincoln Streets, an area that Caroline and Emily had called the Deep Dark Wood.

Until they were old enough to care about skinned knees, muddy socks, and mosquito bites (and that came later for them than most girls), this was where Caroline and Emily had spent most of their childhood. They caught frogs in the trickle of water that they called Bloody River because it was where Emily had once gashed her elbow on a rock. They swung on the teenagers' rope swing over Getchell's Pond, perfecting their Tarzan calls and clinging for dear life. They read novels by Judy Blume and Lois Lowry beneath a low-hanging pine tree and argued over which one of them most resembled Margaret and Claire. They hiked and climbed and crawled and swam like only free-range children of a generation ago could.

But no matter how long they spent exploring the forest, they would eventually find their way back to the tree house and to their favorite positions on either side of the small, rectangular room. There they would talk for hours, feasting on Flaky Puffs and Junior Mints and drinking cans of warm Mello Yello.

Caroline had never been more true to herself than in those early days with Emily. Competition and envy didn't exist between the girls. Their friendship had no room for ego or deceit. That was simply the way it was. And it was perfect.

Caroline's father left on Saint Patrick's Day when she was seven years old. He went out to the Firehouse Pub and never came home. At the time, Caroline didn't entirely understand what had happened. Her father drove a truck and was often gone for two or three weeks at a time. She assumed that he was on another road trip. The two had been close when she was little, but the cross-country trips, combined with what Caroline later understood to be her father's descent into alcoholism and depression, had driven them apart. She loved her father, but she stopped needing him because he wasn't around to be needed.

Proximity, it turns out, works both ways.

Caroline came home one day to find her mother crying at the dining room table. One of her father's bottles on the table beside her, empty. “Your father left,” she had said. “He doesn't want to come back. He's in Florida, and he wants to stay there.”

“Do we have to move to Florida?” Caroline asked.

“No, hon. We don't.”

“Okay. Good.”

“You understand what I'm saying,” her mother said, looking at her closely. “Right? Dad isn't coming home like he usually does.”

“I know,” Caroline said. But she didn't. Not really. “He'll be back for Easter, probably. And my birthday. And those aren't far away. It's just like a long trip in his truck. But he'll be back soon,”

“Did he come back for your birthday?” Polly asked.

“No.”

“Bastard,” Polly said quietly.

Caroline was accustomed to her daughter's indignation, but it was usually directed at her. This was different. It was nice.

“My mother let things sink in slowly for me. Let me figure it out myself over time. I know it sounds rotten of me. I had just lost my dad, but I wasn't all that upset at first.”

Polly screwed up her face. “Really?”

“Here's the thing … I was used to home being just Mom and Lucy and me. ‘Just us girls,' as my mother would say when Dad was away, which was all the time. And I was in middle school. Getting ready for high school. I had so much to think about already. So much of my life to deal with. And back then, parents just weren't as enmeshed in kids' lives like they are today. There were days when I would leave the house in the morning and not come home until the streetlights came on. And I still had Emily. Even more than my mother or Lucy, I had Emily. There's a time in your life, you know, when your parents and your family just aren't as important as your friends. At least that's the way it was for me.”

“I get it,” Polly said. Caroline knew that she did.

“Don't get me wrong,” Caroline said. “My father broke my heart. It just took time. It broke a little bit at a time.”

“He broke Grandma's heart, too,” Polly said, more a statement than a question.

“Yes, but he broke hers all at once. Maybe that's why she was a disaster for so long. Then Mom was forced to sell the house, and we moved into the apartment on Main Street. That's when I really got angry at my father. I hate to say it, but it wasn't until we lost the house that I was really upset about him leaving.”

“When your dad leaves you like that, you get to feel however the hell you want.”

“Maybe so,” Caroline said.

“There's no maybe about it, Mom,” Polly said.

Caroline and Emily spent their last day in the tree house eating Junior Mints, listening to
The Karate Kid
soundtrack, and crying. Emily helped Caroline pack her bedroom into cardboard boxes, taking time to examine mementos that had accumulated over the years. Friendship bracelets. A mini-golf scorecard from a night at Weirs Beach. Notes about bitchy girls and annoying teachers passed across middle school classrooms. A ticket stubs from their first concert. Memories piled neatly atop each other like an endless wall of Lincoln Logs. Caroline felt closer to Emily in that final day than she had ever felt before.

Then that perfect wall began to crumble. All her walls started coming down. With the loss of her father also went all of the family's discretionary income. Her mother began harping on lights left on and showers taking too long. They ate a lot of macaroni. Sometimes they had cereal for dinner. Then Caroline and Lucy were added to the free lunch roll at school.

The losses began piling up, one after another. Summer camp was canceled. Their membership to the Tupperware Pool Club was not renewed. Places that had been an integral part of Caroline's childhood were suddenly inaccessible and off-limits. It was like vast swaths of Caroline's childhood landscape had been annexed by some foreign power. The loss of her father and even the house had been quick, but it was these small losses that did the most damage. Death by a thousand humiliating cuts. The donations of food from the local church. The hand-me-downs that found their way into her dresser drawers. The end of family vacations. The kind words and generous offers from family and friends made unkind by their acknowledgment of the family's descent into poverty. Caroline quickly learned that the last thing a poor kid wants is for people to know is that she is poor. Hunger is often preferable to charity.

Caroline's access to Emily seemed to have expired, too. The girls still spoke in school and saw each other after the final bell, but Caroline sensed the friendship slipping once the gravitational pull had been eliminated.

“I know it sounds crazy,” Caroline said. “But just the fact that we started taking different buses made it hard,” she said. “We went from a forty-five-minute bus ride every day to a quick good-bye at our lockers. This was before cell phones, so it wasn't like we could stay in constant contact like you and your friends do. I would go over to her house sometimes, but it was hard. I'd stare across the street at a house that used to be mine.”

“First your dad and then Emily,” Polly said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Caroline said. “I never thought about it like that, but yes. And you know, just like I didn't care about losing my father at first, I felt like Emily didn't care about losing me. I kept trying, but I never felt like she was trying back. She didn't always return my phone calls. Even though she could've taken me to the swim club as a guest as much as she wanted, she didn't invite me. She'd tell me she wasn't going, but when I'd call her house, her mother would tell me that she left for the club hours ago. She started dating this boy named Brian but didn't tell me for three days, which is like three centuries to a teenager. At least back then it was. And when she dumped him two weeks later, she never bothered to tell me that, either. That summer before high school was awful. I felt like everything was falling apart.”

But then came the first day of high school. Thrown into an unknown and confusing world, Emily and Caroline stuck together, partly because they arrived in their new environment aboard the same bus once again, and partly because there is safety in numbers. Mostly it was because Emily and Caroline shared five classes together. They couldn't escape each other if they had tried.

Proximity was working its magic once again.

For a while, the girls were as close as they had ever been. They navigated the embarrassment of the girls' locker room together and learned to avoid the make-out corner of the library. And during that nerve-wracking first-week jostle for tables and seats in the cafeteria, Emily and Caroline had found an empty table where they were joined by four other similarly nervous girls.