Envy

chapter 22

IT WAS THE MORNING OF HER FORMER best friend’s funeral. Starla Larsen stood in front of the mirror in her Kingston High cheer outfit. The dress was red, trimmed in gold with a narrow white edging. It was a color combination left over from the days when cheerleaders were wholesome and when it didn’t matter what color their pom-poms were—as long as they shook them with enough persuasive vigor when the team put some numbers on the scoreboard.

It was clear that no one back then took into consideration what a girl like Starla Larsen could bring to the uniform.

Starla knew.

White and black would be better, she thought as she turned in the mirror. White and black don’t compete; they enhance.

She had a point. Starla usually did. She was that kind of a girl.

Because of her looks and somewhat overly seductive personality, Starla was an easy target for the B-word. If gossip ever got back to her, Starla merely looked blankly at her informant.

“Really? Wow, I never even noticed her. Wonder why she feels that way?”

It wasn’t easy for most girls to look as hot as she did, and Starla almost felt sorry for them. It was true that she was blessed with her mother’s and father’s good looks, but it took more than genetics to change things in the physical world.

She was good at embarrassing girls, teasing boys, and making things worse. Those, along with her undeniable in-your-face beauty, were her gifts.

Starla’s teeth were white, her eyes glacial blue, and her hair spun gold. Those things were easy to alter. Sure, teeth could be whitened, and she routinely did that. Her eyes, thankfully, were the right hue of blue. Not blueish. Not gray. Intense icy, icy blue. Certainly, her hairstylist mom helped her with her hair. That was more out of convenience than the fact that Starla thought her mom really knew what she was doing. Starla read enough fashion magazines and watched enough Style TV to understand that the cut was more important than the color.

Her mom almost never cut her hair.

Starla had it all, and she was only a sophomore. That, she was certain, had to be some kind of a freaking record.

The only downside in Starla’s world, besides her anxious little brother, Teagan, and her omnipresent stage mother-wannabe, was her mom’s boyfriend, Jake Damon. Even at almost thirty, Jake was eye candy, to be sure. He had a decent chest—pecs, not boobs—and arms that looked muscled but not overly gross when he purposely flexed around the house doing some chore that Starla’s father would have done without making such a show of it.

Yeah, she thought, Jake is the perfect guy for Mom. She still thinks she’s in her twenties, and Jake is stupid enough to go along with it.

Starla’s mother came into her room and planted her four-inch pumps into the floorboards like she was nailing something down for posterity. Mindee was a sight as always. Her hair was gooped up with so much product, Starla wondered how her mother’s pencil neck could support it. Mindee wore a simple black dress, her asymmetrical hair clipped with a questionable matching black bow, but Starla didn’t say a word about it.

This time it was Mindee’s turn to be critical.

“You’re wearing that to the memorial?” she asked, indicating the cheerleading uniform with a jab of her fingertip.

Starla faced the mirror again and carefully reglossed her lips. “The squad is going to be there. All in uniform.”

Mindee shook her head disapprovingly. “I don’t know about that, Starla.”

“We aren’t going to do a cheer, Mom.”

Mindee pulled her heels from the floorboards and walked closer, touching Starla on the shoulder.

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I was thinking, you know, about how Katelyn felt about you being a cheerleader. It seems inappropriate.”

Starla pulled away. She wanted to say something about her mom’s boyfriend being inappropriate, but she held it inside. After all, the day wasn’t about her, her mom, or Jake. It was about Katelyn Berkley and her suicide or accident.

Or whatever. Starla didn’t care. Dead was dead, no matter how someone got there.

Teagan, a preteen with the pink flush of emerging acne and a modified Bieber haircut, wore black jeans and a sweater. He’d been unusually quiet for the past week, and Starla took his hand. It was clammy, but she didn’t mind. She liked having Teagan around to use as a human shield between her mother and her boyfriend.

“Let’s go. Let’s go say good-bye to Katie,” she said.

“I guess so,” he said, dropping her hand. “I don’t need you to drag me there.”

Starla and Teagan started down the stairs, their mother behind them. At the landing was Port Gamble’s answer to a jack-, or in his case, a Jake-of-all-trades, master of none. Jake Damon was the town’s handyman. Until he took up with Mindee Larsen, most women would have said he was reasonably handy—with or without his toolbox.

Or something like that.

Jake smelled of beer, which was how he usually smelled. He looked Starla up and down and raised a brow in that creepy way he had when he was drunk and thinking he was sexy.

“Go, Buccaneers,” he said, nodding like a dashboard bobblehead.

Starla wanted to ignore her mother’s squeeze, but she couldn’t hold her tongue. “Why don’t you go off somewhere and buccaneer yourself?”

Jake clinched his fists. The large veins on his arms stretched against his skin, and Starla thought he was a bigger jerk than she ever could have guessed.

“Did you say what I think you said?” he asked, stepping closer.

“You heard me,” she said, giving proof to all doubters that pretty could also be tough. “I said Bucc You!”

Mindee yanked on her daughter’s hand. “Starla! What a mouth you have.”

“Let go of me,” Starla said, twisting away. “I didn’t say anything that bad.”

Mindee looked at Jake, pleadingly. “She’s grieving; let it go.”

“She’s a pain in the ass,” he said in his Bud breath. “But sure, I’ll let it go.”

The four of them slipped on their coats and started out the door. The church was only a short distance away and they decided that, despite the cold weather, they’d walk. There wouldn’t be any conversation—just hurried steps through the cold led by a very pissed-off cheerleader.

WHILE KATELYN BERKLEY’S FRIENDS AND HER PARENTS waited patiently for the cause of death to be determined—and for grandparents Nancy and Paul to return from a four-day cruise to Ensenada they refused to cancel—her body had been kept on ice under Birdy Waterman’s watchful eye. Finally, two weeks after Katelyn’s death, it came time to bury her. Her casket was fuchsia and ivory, a color combination more appropriate to an ice-cream store than to the final resting place of a girl who eschewed such colors in favor of the drab tones that she wore in the months before her death. Behind the casket, on the church altar, were photographs of the dead girl’s life: Baby, Girl Scout Daisy, and Sullen Teen. All of Katelyn’s iterations of life stages were on display, along with a few things she’d made: a candy dish she’d glazed in purple and black at one of those coffee and pottery shops, a painting of a forlorn moon over the tar-colored waters of Port Gamble Bay, and a letter opener made in shop class that looked suspiciously like an old-fashioned barber’s razor blade.

No one said anything about that. How could they?

The church was full, though not particularly because of Katelyn’s popularity in the community. It was true that she was well known because of her omnipresence at the family’s restaurant, busing tables, helping the cooks, sitting at the counter reading a vampire novel with a half-naked boy on the well-turned cover. Indeed, the swelling size of the crowd at her memorial service had little to do with Katelyn specifically. People were there because of her youth. Nothing, all ministers know, brings out mourners like the death of a child. Katelyn might have been more than halfway to adulthood, but she was still a little girl.

A very dead little girl.

Hayley, Taylor, and their parents sat in the third row, two rows back from the Berkley family. Colton James sat behind the Ryans, and three rows farther back were Beth Lee and her mother, Kim. The order was as it had been the night of Katelyn’s death: the closer the relationship with the deceased, the nearer to the casket.

Occupying the seats across the aisle from the Berkleys were Starla and her family. Next to them mourned the rest of the Buccaneers cheer squad.

Taylor whispered to Hayley, “Look, it’s the pom-pom posse. If you ask me, Katelyn’s spinning in her grave now.”

“She’s not in her grave yet,” Hayley corrected.

“Ya know what I mean. She hated it when Starla ditched her for cheer.”

“She hated it even more that she didn’t get on the team.”

Valerie put her finger to her lips but thankfully didn’t follow the gesture with the librarian’s shushing noise.

Someone pushed a button and a CD recording of an abbreviated verse of Celine Dion’s bombastic classic, “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, tinkled aloud.

Hayley kept her mouth zipped, but she couldn’t help but think she’d rather be dead than have that song played at her memorial. And in which case, even if she were dead, she still didn’t want Celine, Mariah, or Whitney piped into her service.

VALERIE RYAN GRIPPED HER HUSBAND’S HAND as they looked up at what had to be the saddest sight in the world: the pink casket in the front of the Port Gamble church, a place in which historically the denomination changed with the tide and the whims of the mill boss’s wife. St. Paul’s was home to an Episcopal congregation then, but it had once been a Lutheran, Catholic, and even a Baptist church. It didn’t matter. The faithful went regularly, no matter what religion the wife had decreed for the town. Taylor and Hayley cried, not in the way that close friends shed a stream of tears, but tears born of a shared moment of tragedy. Some who lined the spaces in the old oak pews sobbed because they loved Katelyn. Others cried because of the overwhelming sadness that comes with a young life lost.

Valerie’s own tears came from memories of when her girls were small, memories from the darkest time of her adult life.

The event had been long ago, but the feelings of hopelessness and the fragility of life came to the mother easily while the minister talked about Katelyn’s abbreviated life. Valerie’s own girls had been side by side in Seattle’s Children’s Hospital for thirty-one days after the crash, their eyes fluttering, scanning, under eyelids both parents prayed would open. The hospital wouldn’t allow another bed in the room. Apparently, fire codes were more important than an aching heart of a mother or father. So Valerie brought a foam mattress from their home in Port Gamble, and she and Kevin took turns sleeping on it in the space between the girls’ beds.

“Why aren’t they waking up?” she asked, over and over.

“We really don’t know,” said the doctor, a pleasant, bespectacled man with nicotine-stained fingertips. “It isn’t physiological.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” Valerie caressed her girls, gently touching their cheeks to remind them that wherever they were right then … wherever their minds were … that she was with them and she would never leave.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Sometimes medical science doesn’t seem very scientific.”

Valerie positioned herself between the two beds. Twin beds. Hayley’s and Taylor’s beds were tucked into a web of tubes and wires. “I just want to know what you’re going to do to get them to …”

“Snap out of this,” Kevin said, entering the room with two cups of coffee and a granola bar for Valerie, who’d stopped eating. The worry for all three of his girls was evident on his face—haggard eyes, dark circles. And as tired as he appeared to be, he never once wanted anyone to think he wasn’t grateful for what he had. Other parents had lost their children.

Hayley and Taylor had been spared.

But for what? What kind of life would this be if they never woke up?

The Ryans’ prayers were answered, of course. The girls did recover and they did get out of that hospital and back home where they belonged. It was true that both parents knew their daughters were not the same as they had been before the bus crash that almost killed them, but they never talked about it. Not really. It was easy to avoid, because the change was invisible.

In the church pew alongside her grieving family, Valerie pushed those memories aside. She looked over at Sandra and Harper Berkley in the front row. Harper had his face buried in his hands; Sandra had tilted her head and was resting it awkwardly on his shoulder. Valerie could imagine how they were feeling sitting there, thinking about how cruel life had been to them.

Katelyn had survived the crash, only to be snatched by death as a teenager. There was something very, very wrong with the world.

Valerie just didn’t know how wrong.

HER TEAR-SOAKED TISSUE kneaded into a near-perfect sphere, Hayley looked on while the minister talked about Katelyn … her love of orcas, baseball, Claire’s boutique, and Cinnabon rolls served hot at the mall in Silverdale. The list made her smile and cry at the same time. She and her sister—she and everybody—had let Katelyn down. What had they missed? How could it have been prevented?

She looked at Taylor, her mother, her father. Over at the row of cheerleaders. She noticed how Katelyn’s grandmother, Nancy, seemed to just stare straight ahead, while her husband, Paul, let tears roll down his ruddy cheeks.

And without turning too much, because being a spectacle at someone’s funeral was the last thing Hayley Ryan wished for herself, she glanced back at Beth and her mom. Colton gave her a quick, supporting nod.

What had they all missed?

And yet it was more than the words spoken about a friend who’d become a stranger that tugged at Hayley’s emotions; she could feel something coming to her. Coming at her. Hard and fast. It was more than the emotions of the occasion or the sadness pouring at her from every direction as a teenager just like her was being mourned. That feeling was anguish, heartache, misery.

Instead, Hayley was feeling, of all things, fear.

Not from the dead girl in the pink casket—which might have made some kind of sense, given how she’d been abandoned by everyone—but from someone else in the church. Someone wasn’t sad at all. Someone was thinking that Katelyn Berkley had brought this on herself.

Hayley leaned very close to her sister and whispered in her ear. “Someone’s worried about all this,” she said. “About the truth of what happened.”

Taylor, her blue eyes welling with tears, nodded. “I know,” she whispered back.

In doing so, she happened to catch Sandra Berkley’s eye. She looked so sad, so completely broken. She was lost and alone in the middle of a crowded church. Something about Katelyn’s mother called out to Taylor.

It was as if she was beckoning her, asking her something.

LIKE A FLOCK OF CROWS against a stainless-steel sky, black processional umbrellas zigzagged along the trail up the hill to the Buena Vista Cemetery. The snow had turned to rain, which fell upon Katelyn’s family and a small group of friends from all stages of the dead teenager’s life. They had convened to watch her coffin slip quietly into the muddy earth above Port Gamble Bay. Harper, Sandra, and even Katelyn’s kitchen-remodeling grandmother, Nancy, sobbed like they were at war with one another over who could be the most anguished.

Without question, Sandra was winning. She had her thin fingers interwoven and locked around her heaving chest.

The Ryans were there, too. They’d known Katelyn forever. Beth and her mother were also on hand, their eyes lingering on a small row of graves not far from Katelyn’s final resting spot. They knew that place so very well.

Starla’s family also showed up. They were joined by Jake, whom Mindee clutched like an accessory, which, of course, he was.

Because his dad was away fishing and his mom incapable of leaving the house, Colton had arrived with the Ryans. Throughout the brief and grim graveside ceremony, he held Hayley’s hand like a c-clamp. There was no way he was going to let go. If Hayley had thought she was all cried out, she was wrong. Katelyn might not have been her best friend, but she didn’t deserve any of this—not then, not ever.

Taylor’s tears mixed with the rain as she stood and looked at the casket while the minister said a few words. Inside, she felt nauseated. She wasn’t sure she could hold the contents of her stomach. The feeling was more than just sadness, grief, or loss. Taylor could feel the presence of something dark and scary. She’d been deeply troubled since the church service. She had carried that feeling to the cemetery, and it intensified.

What she sensed was terror from someone fearful about being caught—from a person close by.

It can’t be.

Whoever had done this to Katelyn, whoever had resigned the teenager to a casket the color of a bakery box, was there … among them.