How She Died, How I Lived Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Mary Crockett

  Cover candle art © Mr Aesthetics/Shutterstock.com. Cover design by Sasha Illingworth. Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: November 2018

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  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Crockett, Mary, author.

  Title: How she died, how I lived / By Mary Crockett.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2018. | Summary: After narrowly escaping death, a teen struggles to come to terms with her guilt over the classmate who was raped and murdered instead.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017059757| ISBN 9780316523813 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316523806 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316523790 (library edition ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Guilt—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Rape—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C747 How 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059757

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-52381-3 (hardcover), 978-0-316-52380-6 (ebook)

  E3-20181003-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Worst Thing

  Five

  You Heard

  Deviant Psychology

  Running

  A Crumb

  The Gathering

  Beautiful Girl

  A Minor Point

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

  Stuck

  Poem of the Week

  Matched

  What Love Is

  Lost Twins

  Red

  Pig Latin

  Light of Morning

  What Was

  No Place Like Home

  Opera

  Happy

  There Are the Players

  Ducks

  Messages

  Strawberry

  Outside

  Huckleberries

  Relays

  Limits

  The Operators

  Feathers

  For You

  The Starting Gate

  A Song Like That

  How to Fight Dirty

  Running

  Strange Blooms

  Alas, Poor Yorick

  Friendly

  Confused

  My Undoing

  Foolish

  Interlude

  Who Did?

  Official

  One More Name for the List

  The Unexpected

  Distance

  Immortal

  Mine

  In the Stars

  Edge

  Lifetime

  Fire

  Yorkshire Pudding

  Popcorn

  Owlette, Taco, War

  Distance

  Moons

  The Plan

  Invisible

  Criminals

  Never

  Next Day

  Eighteen

  Climb

  The Sweater

  Pucker Up

  The Creepiest Thing

  The Cave

  Perv

  Heart of Darkness

  Bird Outside

  The Awesomeness of Music

  Lindsey

  Eve

  Dawn

  Ready

  The Whole Truth

  Answers

  Swings

  The Obvious

  Days

  This World

  Over

  What I Mean

  Thanksgiving

  Open

  Search

  Door

  Short Answer

  Long Answer

  Box

  Every Girl

  Mercy Garden

  Jump

  Acknowledgments

  for all the lost girls

  Wednesday, July 11—

  a year and two months ago

  Stonehenge Pool

  Want to hang this afternoon?

  I poked a straw into my sno-cone. It didn’t usually come with a straw but the cute old guy who worked at the Hawaiian Chill said he kept them on hand just for me.

  What day was it? Tuesday? No, Wednesday. Because Sander wasn’t coming back from his eternal camping trip until Friday, and that was still two days away. Two more days of Sander-less summer in the hick town we call home. I stretched out on a lounge chair, pulled the straw out of my Blue Coconut, and sucked the icy sweetness from the end.

  The sun was too bright; the pool, too dead. Monica and Andie would usually be here with me, but Monica was at a church retreat all week and Andie had to help her mom clean out their garage.

  So today it was just me and the Anonymous Annoying Family. In the shade of a yellow-striped umbrella, below a sky-blue straw hat, Mrs. Annoying drowsed. Her ten-year-old twins were playing some game where they shouted movie quotes and vaulted off the diving board.

  The lifeguard on duty—a bony guy with ostrich eyes and a silver lip ring—gazed blindly from his perch.

  Annoying Boy #1: “It’s so FLUFFY!”

  SPLASH!

  Annoying Boy #2: “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

  SPLASH!

  Annoying Boy #1: “To infinity and beyond!”

  SPLASH!

  I looked back at my phone. Kyle Paxson was a little funny, and not the ha-ha kind. He had my number from Algebra I, back when I was a freshman and he was a senior. But even as a freshman, it didn’t take me long to figure out Kyle was a guy best ignored. Harmless enough, but weird.

  “Luke, I’m your father!” Boy #2 hollered, but instead of jumping off the board, this time he grabbed a towel from the edge of the pool and whipped it at Boy #1.

  “Let it go!” yelped Boy #1, who did a sassy sort of shuffle, kicking his legs to avoid the towel’s snap.

  “I’m Batman!” Boy #2 growled.

  Another chime.

  I checked my phone. Kyle again.

  I have some good stuff.

  Of course he had stuff.

  The idea of getting high was tempting. It was, like I said, summer… and hot… and dead.

  I usually didn’t partake; it made my mind feel like it was covered with felt and Sander said he didn’t like the way I acted. But Sander wasn’t around. Maybe I should do it, I thought. Like practice for college or whatever comes next.

  I had started to type Ok, where—when another text came in.

  Heading home
early. Need my honey girl.

  I took a quick selfie of me in my bathing suit with quirked-up lips—an inside joke—and sent it to Sander.

  Quack

  Grabbing my towel, I skipped out to the parking lot and was on my way.

  Today

  Tomorrow

  The rest of my life

  The Worst Thing

  I guess I have Simon Alexander “Sander” Rushford III to thank. He is, in the final analysis, a two-timing jerk. But he saved my life.

  A year ago at Stonehenge Pool, I never finished answering Kyle’s text. Instead, I zipped home to shave my armpits and lather my hair with green tea shampoo.

  It was Jamie, not me, who answered one of Kyle’s texts to a few random girls that afternoon. Jamie who drove her new Ford Escape to Moser Field on the other side of town.

  While she was turning onto the park’s gravel drive, I was slipping a royal-blue sundress over my head, my towel-dried hair dampening the neckline as it slid past. While she was sitting next to Kyle on the vinyl tablecloth he’d pulled from the trunk of his car, I was bounding downstairs, car keys jiggling in my hand. While she was listening to Kyle complain about how his grandma was always riding his ass, I was on the futon in Sander’s basement—Sander’s tongue down my throat, his unwashed woodsy smell pressed against me.

  While her pink paisley tank top and jean shorts were stripped from her body. While he beat. While he pried open her mouth to put himself in first, then his fist, then a crowbar. While he choked and kicked her. Wrapped her in the tablecloth. Stomped her head.

  I was.

  I was alive in the dank basement air, Sander’s sweat and pine against my skin.

  I was kissing, nipping, thinking about the part in an old time-travel movie I saw, where a guy messes with the past and the family photograph he carries in his wallet starts to turn transparent. That’s how I felt with Sander’s mouth on me. A few more kisses and I’d be completely gone.

  I was alive and no one was kicking me. No one squeezed my neck until my throat was raw and breathless and the vomit that surged from my stomach seeped back down my esophagus because it had nowhere else to go. I was alive and running my hands across Sander’s shoulders, down his muscled chest. I was alive, breathing hot air on his neck.

  Alive and breathing.

  And after, while Jamie’s mom called first her phone, then her friends, then the police—I lay there under the weight of Sander’s outstretched arm, an open pizza box on the floor beside us as he snored pepperoni breath, and I stared at the shifty-eyed cat clock on the wall. Its long black tail swung back and forth, back and forth, a pendulum counting down the empty seconds of my life.

  So thanks, Sander Rushford. As it turns out, making me think you loved me while two-timing me with Gemma Cook was not the worst thing you could have done.

  Five

  I was one of five. The five girls Kyle texted that day. The girls it could have been.

  Me. Lindsey Barrow. Taylor Avril. Blair Mattern. Jamie Strand.

  The plan was as simple as it was heartless. Draw one of us out to the relative seclusion of Moser Field. Rape one of us. Kill one of us. Take the car. Take the credit cards. Get out of town. It didn’t matter who he killed, he told the cops, any one of us would do.

  It was, Kyle said, really about the car. He needed one to leave Midland. This place was making him crazy. All the other stuff, like the part where he bashed Jamie’s head to a pulp—he said that was just a way to get the car.

  He had problems, he told them.

  No kidding.

  But here’s the thing. He also had a car of his own. An old piece-of-crap junker, sure. But it would have driven him, quite literally, out of town.

  Maybe it wasn’t nice enough. Like he’d made a list.

  Girls Who Drive Nice Cars.

  He’d noticed my new VW when I saw him by chance at the Hardee’s a month or so before the murder. My parents had gotten me a Bug for my seventeenth birthday and it still had that new-car glow. Metallic blue with fancy spoked hubcaps and a sunroof. I loved that car. Named it Pony because it was like getting a pony. That special.

  I still love it, in a way. But I can’t really, can I? Any love I had for it has been tainted by my hatred for Kyle.

  And not that mealymouthed ooh-I-hate-hipster-tattoos or I-hate-the-way-the-morning-show-guy-on-the-radio-laughs-like-he’s-spewing-Jell-O or I-hate-the-mind-numbing-Muzak-they-play-in-bathrooms-at-the-mall.

  I’m talking full-throttle, rage-on, red-eyed hate.

  When they asked him why he’d targeted Jamie Strand, Kyle told them, “She was just unfortunate.” Like it had nothing to do with him. Luck of the draw. The way the cookie crumbles.

  But if it was a car he truly wanted—my Pony, Lindsey’s Toyota, Jamie’s shiny new Ford Escape—if it was, as he said, not “personal,” then why didn’t he just steal one?

  Are we supposed to believe he never heard of hot-wiring? Or pocketing someone’s keys? He could have tied one of us up. Left us abandoned on the roadside while he drove away. But no, he had to rape. Had to kill.

  Some people say he was obsessed with Jamie. Some say that he was obsessed with sex. But nobody, nobody, says he was obsessed with cars.

  Did he think that would somehow make it all right?

  I bashed her head so hard that her skull cracked in three places. But it wasn’t personal. I just needed her car.

  Kyle texted all of us that day. All the same message. Want to hang this afternoon? Followed by something just for us—an offer of pot or money or dinner out or, in Jamie’s case, a desperate request for “someone to talk to.”

  And Jamie was the only one nice enough to give him the time.

  She was always nice. Such a sweet girl, they said at her funeral. An angel. Born for sweetness.

  She was born, in fact, with one leg shorter than the other, so she shuffled when she walked. Jamie knew what it was to feel other people’s eyes on her—that hum of pity like a stupid song that gets stuck in your head. It might have made some girls bitter. But not Jamie. She laughed before anyone else could laugh at her. She reached out to anyone who didn’t fit in. A sweet girl whose sweetness killed her.

  No, that’s not right.

  It wasn’t her sweetness. It was Kyle.

  You Heard

  When it first happened, talk of Kyle and Jamie was everywhere. How he’d been fired from his job at Advance Auto the week before the murder. Stuff about Kyle’s nutty grandma. Or Jamie’s heartbroken boyfriend. They said Kyle acted weird that July, bragging about how he was going to surprise everyone, do something big. They said Jamie’s mother walked the aisles of the Kroger in her bathrobe the day after the funeral.

  They said and they said. So much noise. A cloud of gnats that descended on the town.

  But weeks passed, seasons. And the talk was swatted away.

  So, now, after almost a year of no news, is it wrong there’s a dead space in my stomach when Kyle’s broad face appears on the front page again? This time with a shaved head, thick black-frame glasses.

  Why couldn’t they just lock him away and be done with it? But what we get is GRAND JURY TO HEAR KYLE PAXSON CAPITAL MURDER CASE.

  Which is stupid because he already said he’s guilty.

  Even so, it could take months.

  Gah.

  I lift a clot of mushy green beans from my tray and let the fork drop with a clatter.

  I am in the cafeteria of Midland High, five minutes late for my fifth-period psychology class. The hall is mainly empty now, but I still don’t want to go out there. I know where it leads. To windowless rooms, uncomfortable desks, droning voices.

  All the same, I stand, shoulder my backpack, and walk over to dump my tray.

  “You heard?”

  I know Lindsey’s silvery voice without turning around.

  I didn’t notice her come in. She eats third-shift lunch, so I only see her in the cafeteria when I’m running late.

  “Yeah.” I don’t have to as
k what she’s talking about.

  Kyle, of course. Now that he’s back in the news, the gnats have descended again. Not that Lindsey is a gnat. Her long brown bangs swoop in front of her face and she blows them away. “It’s horrible.”

  She walks with me down the hall. Since she’s wearing a navy-blue pencil skirt, like a slinky secretary from a 1940s movie, her stride is shorter than usual, constrained by her hem. I shorten my steps to match hers. The clack of her heels on the hallway tile is so much louder than it needs to be.

  “They’re doing another vigil. This Sunday,” she says. “Mark was putting up flyers.”

  That would be Mark Lee, official neat freak of Midland High. Of course he’s the one organizing the vigil. He’s the best friend of Charlie Hunt, the dead girl’s brokenhearted boyfriend—and in Mark’s role as best friend, he’s taken to organizing Charlie, too.

  Charlie and Jamie had seemed perfect for each other. Both good-looking, both nice in that sunshiny, pay-it-forward way. He was tall. Smart. She was sweet and friendly. When Jamie’s parents got divorced, she moved with her mom into a small brick ranch beside the two-story white colonial where the Hunts lived. Jamie was six at the time; Charlie was four. Literally the boy next door.

  People say they grew up in each other’s kitchens. They played together, lost teeth together, and in middle school, when it was time for girlfriends and boyfriends, they picked each other. It never mattered that Jamie was two grades ahead of us. They were the sort of people who could cross that line.

  Only now, Charlie isn’t so sunshine anymore. I see him in both of my classes at the end of the day, sixth-period English and seventh-period gym. He’s thinner, shoulders hunched, and he doesn’t smile in that far-off way he had. Or talk.

  Or do anything, really.

  Except run.

  When Coach Flanagan sends us out for laps, Charlie takes off like a fox with dogs on his tail. He is fast. And graceful. But his running is painful to watch, at least for me. It’s like I see what’s really chasing him. And it’s not dogs.

  “Exhibit A,” says Lindsey, pointing to a yellow flyer on the wall outside my psych class. MEMORIAL GATHERING—SUNDAY—7 PM—MIDLAND STADIUM is printed in big block letters at the top, and below is a photo of Jamie: pretty, heart-shaped face; dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair; hopeful eyes. Below that, in a fancy font, SHE LEFT A TRAIL OF BEAUTIFUL MEMORIES EVERYWHERE SHE WENT.