Envy

chapter 11

KINGSTON HIGH WAS ONE OF THOSE SCHOOLS built with a tip of the architectural hat to its location. That was usually the intention of school district review boards, but it rarely worked as well as it did in Kingston. Just eight miles from Port Gamble, Kingston was a rolling rural landscape dotted with subdivisions and family farms that dipped at its very eastern edge to Puget Sound. The front entryway of the school was reached by crossing a footbridge over a shallow ravine of sword ferns, cedars, and winter-bronze cattail stalks.

By the time Hayley and Taylor graduated from the middle school just down the road, Kingston High was only four years old. Classrooms were segregated into pods, each known by the dominating color of its paint scheme. Rough-hewn cedar planks artfully lined portions of the interior corridors, and wide expanses of pebbly finished polished concrete swirled in browns and greens like a northwest stream. In the mornings, the espresso stand adjacent to the student store, the Treasure Trove, did Starbucks-style business, sending a geyser of steaming milk into the air as it caffeinated one teenager after the next. Even those who didn’t need coffee got in line—like Beth Lee, who never arrived at school without a Rockstar drink in her purse and a triple tall latte from Gamble Bay Coffee. She’d pay a visit to the student-run coffee stand after lunch for her always-needed midday pick-me-up.

Each pod featured its own teacher’s resource room, with their cubicles all crammed with the things they didn’t want to take home. Some teachers put up baby pictures of their children. Students who saw them often remarked how surprising it was that one teacher or another had found someone to have a child with.

“Did you see that photo? The kid looks completely normal. Almost cute,” one girl, a willowy redhead in overalls, said as she made her rounds, dropping off the latest Buccaneer Broadcast, the school newsletter.

“Yeah,” said her friend, a pudgy junior wearing tights, short-shorts, black patent-leather ankle boots, and an inch of mascara on each clumped-up eyelid. “I was hoping she couldn’t have kids. You know, for the kid’s sake.”

“Totally,” Redhead said.

Most of the congregating among students was done in the common area between the classrooms in any given pod. Along one wall were lockers of varying sizes—larger for those who were lacrosse team members and had unwieldy pads, sticks, and gear; smaller for those who didn’t have anything they needed to store but wanted a place to linger.

It was far from status quo the first day back from winter break. Katelyn’s death gave the school guidance counselors the opportunity to go into grief-counseling mode. And while they were genuinely sorry to lose a student, it sure changed up the onslaught of “I could be pregnant” or “school is too hard and I want to drop out” sessions that tended to bunch up after the holidays.

The day back from a break marked by a teen’s death meant a seemingly endless train of sobbing girls into the counselors’ offices.

Most started the preamble to their crying jags with the same words: “I’m so upset about this. It isn’t fair. She’s the same age as me.”

Hayley, Taylor, and Beth didn’t give voice to the same concerns as others. They were sick about what happened and felt they had a genuine connection with the dead girl. Their friendship with Katelyn might have evaporated since middle school, but they still felt a keen loss.

“I hated a lot about her,” Beth said in the commons. “She had no style. She wasn’t exactly fun anymore. Still, who knows, maybe she’d have turned into someone cool if she hadn’t died.”

“There was something always a little sad about her,” Hayley said. “I feel like we all kind of dropped her when maybe we shouldn’t have.”

Taylor agreed with her sister. “I know I did.”

Beth scowled and rummaged around in her purse for some lip gloss. It had been five minutes since her last application. “You two are such goody-goodies. She didn’t want to be friends with us. She was too wrapped up in being Katelyn of the Starla & Katelyn Show. Didn’t that get canceled after one season?”

“More like fifteen,” said Taylor, not even trying to be ironic.

A junior the trio barely knew came up just then. “Sorry about your friend,” she said.

All glossed, Beth answered, “We’re devastated. We can’t talk about it.”

“Take care,” the girl said. “Sorry.”

Beth looked at Hayley and Taylor. “Did I seem devastated?” she asked. “Just a little?”

“Just a little,” Taylor said as the three went off to class.

Later that morning, the Treasure Trove espresso stand put up a small sign asking for donations for Katelyn’s family. The school principal, a petite woman with dangerous nail-gun heels, kindly told them it wasn’t an altogether good idea.

“But we wanted to help,” said the kid foaming the milk.

“Yeah,” said the girl pulling the espresso shots. “She was a soy drinker, totally organic. You have to respect that.”

“Yes,” the principal argued, “but the manner of her death …” She attempted to choose her words carefully. “Katelyn died of, because of …,” she said, looking at the big Italian espresso machine.

“Oh,” said the foamer. “I get what you’re putting down.”

The shot girl apparently didn’t. “Huh?”

“An espresso machine killed Katelyn,” the foamer said. “She was electrocuted in the tub.”

Finally, the look of awareness came to the student’s face. A light switched on. The coffee girl got it.

“Yeah,” she said, quickly pulling down the sign. “We shouldn’t collect money.”

The principal gave the pair a quick nod and walked away over the shiny polished surface to her office at the front of the school. She looked through the windows of the first pod’s reception area. A small group of girls, some who might not even have known Katelyn but who got caught up in the sad drama of a dead girl, had amassed.

Taylor Ryan was one of those girls, waiting to talk with the grief counselor. She understood that Katelyn’s death was a tragedy and there was no bringing her back, but the pain of it was a knife point to her heart.

She wanted to tell someone that she could feel Katelyn’s presence all around her. She felt that whatever had happened to Katelyn in that bathtub had the hand of another person in it somehow.

She just didn’t want her sister or Beth to see her there.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Hayley and Taylor slowed as they walked in the vicinity of Katelyn’s locker. A few members of the Buccaneers’ cheer team congregated nearby, chatting about their holiday. Tiffany, a senior, had a tan and was bragging about her “awesome” Hawaiian vacation and the hot swimsuit that she bought in a boutique in Maui. When the twins approached, she smiled.

“She was a friend of yours. Sorry,” she said.

“She was a friend. She wasn’t a really close one, but thanks,” Hayley said.

As the cheer squad moved aside, they revealed the beginnings of a makeshift memorial. A few grocery-store bouquets past their pull dates were slumped on the gray linoleum floor. Someone had taken a photo from Katelyn’s Facebook profile, blown it up, and written in very careful print: RIP, KATIE!

The fact that they’d used an exclamation point was odd, but most of the kids in school couldn’t punctuate anything properly so it probably wasn’t meant to signify that Katelyn’s resting in peace was something exuberant. Hayley thought it could have been worse.

YAY! KATIE’S ON PERMANENT BREAK!

HAVE A FUN TIME IN HEAVEN!

YOU GO (DEAD) GIRL!

Hayley stopped her train of thought as the buzzing of the other girls abruptly ceased. Starla Larsen, wearing black pants and a black cashmere sweater, joined the group in front of Katelyn’s locker.

“Sorry about Katie,” Taylor said. She resisted the urge to actually give Starla a hug because in that moment it just didn’t seem right.

“Yeah, we both are,” said Hayley, who didn’t hug Starla either.

Starla, for the first time in recent memory, looked terrible. Terrible for her would have been pretty good for a lot of other girls. Starla Terrible was quite noticeable nevertheless. Her skin was pale—in fact, very pale, especially next to the ultra-tanned senior, Tiff.

“It was a big shock,” she said, making a sniffling sound, although it didn’t appear that she had any need for a tissue. Though she had first-class designer bags under her eyes, it was pretty clear she hadn’t been crying. “We weren’t as close as we once were, but I loved her very, very much.”

Tan Tiff put her arms around Starla. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk and grieve,” she said to the others hanging around Starla. “I want to show Baby Girl the photos from my trip too.”

“Thanks, Hayley, Taylor,” Starla said, disappearing down the hallway.

Hayley turned to her sister. “Is it just me or what? Starla had dropped Katie. Those two haven’t spoken for months, and she’s saying she loved her?”

“Guilt, maybe?” Taylor suggested.

Hayley thought for a moment. “It could be guilt, or maybe it’s revisionist history.”

“Dunno,” Taylor said. “She looked tired for sure, but sad? Not so much.”

“She didn’t look sad at all,” Hayley agreed. “She doesn’t seem one bit upset, and what’s this ‘Baby Girl’ crap?”

“Cheer talk,” Taylor said, inserting her finger in her mouth, the universal sign for puking. “Worse than the twin talk we made up when we were little.”

Hayley laughed and the girls blended into the mass of Axe-drenched boys and makeup-laden girls moving like a single living organism into the doorways of classrooms.

“Please remind me never to go to another pep rally,” Hayley said.

“Gotcha.” Taylor slipped into her life science class and her sister went on to English.

Both were wondering the same thing: What was up with Starla?

THE WINTER AFTERNOON SKY TURNED INTO DUSK as Taylor trailed her sister down the stairs from their bedrooms. Hayley had just run home to grab a textbook.

“Off to hang out with Colton again?” Taylor asked. Her tone was unmistakable. The little lilt on the last word turned the question into a snipping judgment.

Hayley turned to face her. She did not have a smile on her face. In fact, she could not conceal her brewing anger. That first day back at school, Hayley had spent every minute between and after class with her boyfriend. And Taylor took every opportunity to complain about it. The incessant questioning about Colton had become more than an irritant.

It was worse than a flea bite that never went away.

“What’s gotten into you, Taylor?”

Finally, another chance to be direct, and Taylor took it. “Maybe the fact that all you ever do is hang out with him. What about Katelyn? And the ‘look’ message? We’re nowhere with it. What are you two so busy doing all the time, anyway?”

Hayley clearly didn’t like what she was hearing. “What is that supposed to mean exactly? If you’re accusing me of something, I would prefer it if you’d just spell it out.”

Taylor held her ground. “You know.”

“Colton and I are just hanging out.”

“Hey, I’m your twin. Don’t lie to me. Save it for someone who doesn’t give a crap,” Taylor spat out, trying to bury her jealousy.

Hayley wasn’t buying it. “Look,” she said, “there’s a lot going on around here that we don’t know. The two of us need to stick together to figure it all out. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you’d please lay off the Colton jabs.”

With that, she turned the knob of the back door and was gone.