Envy

chapter 9

NEW YEAR’S DAY AT THE RYAN HOUSEHOLD smelled of coffee, orange juice, and maple syrup. Valerie had sliced a loaf of brioche and had the already eggy bread soaking in a mixture of eggs, cream, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Taylor loved the way their mother fixed French toast. It was the best breakfast thing she made, by far. Hayley was more of a waffle girl, but French toast with maple syrup and peanut butter was pretty hard for her to resist too.

While the French toast sizzled in a foamy sea of butter on the stovetop griddle, Taylor noticed her parents’ mugs were low on coffee and she topped them off with a splash more.

“Couldn’t sleep last night,” she said, returning the coffee carafe to the heating element.

Valerie turned from the griddle. “I know, honey,” she said. “I woke up thinking of Katelyn too.”

“A terrible tragedy,” Kevin said over the morning’s Kitsap Sun.

“An accident like that should never, ever have happened,” Valerie said. “Honestly, what in the world was Katelyn thinking?”

“An accident? Who says?” Taylor asked.

Valerie stacked three pieces of French toast on a plate and handed them to Taylor. “Your dad does.”

Kevin set down the paper. “I talked to the coroner. This one’s going to fall under the ‘tragedy’ heading, a freak accident. That doesn’t make things any better, of course, for the Berkleys.”

Hayley, who had been mostly silent, spoke up. “Do you know if suicide has been completely ruled out, Dad?”

Kevin’s lips tightened and he shook his head. “They don’t think so. Anything is possible, but only her history of …” He stopped, to search for the words. “Her history of emotional problems could be an indicator of suicide, but the evidence they’ve gathered doesn’t point to it.”

Hayley weighed her father’s words. “But if they aren’t sure it was a suicide and it could have been a freak accident, couldn’t it just have easily been a homicide?”

Kevin shook his head. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t think so. But really, we might never know what happened to Katelyn.”

Hayley looked into her sister’s eyes. There was no need to speak. Both of them knew what the other was thinking.

Oh yes, we will.

BETH LEE ACCEPTED THAT SHE WOULD NEVER BE TALL. Her parents were both short. She knew her wisp of physical presence might cause her to get shunted off to the side. Sure, she had great hair—black and thick, and near–mirror reflective. Besides the fact that she was the only Asian in her elementary school, she had seldom stood out. At her mother Kim’s insistence, Beth wore long pigtails and ribbons that matched her outfit until fourth grade, when she could no longer take it and took scissors to one side.

Her mother ripped her a new one when she got home and made her go to school for a week looking lopsided.

“You want to stand out, so now you do,” Kim Lee had said.

After her DIY haircut and resulting humiliation, a line in the sand had been forged, Hell’s Canyon deep. Beth Lee would never let anyone, not her mother, not her best friend, tell her how to look or dress. She didn’t want to be the dutiful daughter, the brainy Asian, the girl who was anything different than the others who lived in Port Gamble.

Hayley and Taylor Ryan were her best friends, though she seemed to consider them a single entity. Hay-Tay were the only ones in town who didn’t try to mold her into something she wasn’t. They simply let her be. If Beth wanted to be a vegan for a month, fine. If she wanted to go Goth and wear a dog collar around town, the Ryan twins didn’t make a big deal out of it.

Lately, she’d taken to shopping exclusively at Forever 21 in the Kitsap Mall in Silverdale, where she purchased outfit after outfit. She never saw a dress or shirt with a nonfunctioning zipper that she didn’t proclaim so totally her.

The only other Port Gamble woman who shopped regularly at Forever 21 was Starla Larsen’s mother, a woman about whom others gossiped, saying that she never saw a zipper she didn’t want to undo.

Beth remarked on it. “Saw Mrs. Larsen at Forever.”

“Was she shopping for Starla?” Hayley asked as the two sat on her bed waiting for Taylor to come upstairs with snacks so they could eat, chat, and waste the last few days before school restarted on January 3.

“Shopping for herself,” Beth said. “Same as always. She wears club clothes to work, I guess.”

Taylor entered the room carrying a couple of Diet Cokes and a can of Ranch Pringles.

“Who wears club clothes to work?” she asked.

“Starla’s mom.”

“Did you talk to her?”

Beth took a second. “Not really. I pretended I didn’t see her, but she nabbed me by the checkout counter.”

“Did she say anything about Katelyn?” Hayley asked.

“Something about how she saw it coming. Katelyn was a sad girl. Whatever.”

Taylor looked upset. “‘Saw it coming?’”

Beth shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I wanted out of there. I was afraid she was going to corner me and force me to come in for a haircut.”

“If she saw something was wrong, if she saw it coming, then she should have done something about it,” Hayley said.

“I guess so. Can we talk about something else? All this talk about Katelyn is kind of boring me.”

Taylor looked at Hayley, her eyes popping. Neither one of them knew how it was that Beth Lee could possibly be their best friend.

But she was.