Very Bad Things (13 page)

“We’re connected, yeah,” Tessa said, because it was the truth. “Her dad killed himself, you know. That was hard on Katie. She knows what happened with my parents, how they died in the fire.”

“And your brother, too,” Dr. Capello added.

“Peter.” Tessa said his name even though the shrink already knew it.

“You were seven when they died?”

“I was in second grade.” Tessa closed her eyes.

“I know you lived in several foster homes before you came to Whitney on scholarship at eleven.”

Tessa sighed. “You obviously know the answers, so why keep asking me about it?” She hated feeling like she was being manipulated. “That doesn’t have a thing to do with Katie and me or The Box.”

Dr. Capello didn’t flinch. “It’s just that you seem to relate to Katie so well because you’ve both suffered terrible losses. That’s all. There’s no ulterior motive here.”

Right
. Tessa nearly laughed. But she relaxed, uncurling her
fingers from fists. She slid her hands along the arms of the chair. “Katie understands me, and I understand her in a way that no one else does. That no one else ever will.”

The shrink pursed her lips. “What about Katie’s boyfriend? You don’t think he understands her?”

“Mark Summers?” Tessa rolled her eyes. “Katie thinks he does, but I don’t see how it’s possible. She’s not even his type. He dates girls like Joelle Needham who wear too much makeup and carry Zac Posen bags.” She plucked at a bit of fuzz on her skirt. “Katie’s not superficial like that.”

“But Mark is?”

“Yeah,” Tessa said, lifting her chin. “Totally.”

“Ah,” the shrink murmured, and scribbled on her tablet with a stylus. Tessa could hear the faint
tap tap
. “I’ll bet it’s hard sharing her with someone else, isn’t it? Particularly when it’s someone you don’t like.”

Tessa stiffened. “I’m not sure they’ll be together much longer. They’ve almost broken up already. Katie still has time to change her mind about following him to college. He’ll probably get a stupid hockey scholarship at an Ivy League school, and she’ll end up at the closest community college just to be with him.” Tessa got fidgety because just bringing it up ticked her off.

“Oh?” Dr. Capello arched her plucked eyebrows. “So you’d rather she go to the same school as you?”

Tessa smoothed her hands on her skirt. “It’d be nice if we could stay near here. There’s a decent enough state university close by. It would be good for everyone, I think.”

“Everyone meaning you and Katie?”

Tessa shrugged.

“I’m curious,” Dr. Capello said, and tapped the stylus against her chin. “Did you know Mark before? When you started at Whitney, I mean. His father was headmaster by then, and you’re the same age. It’s a pretty small school.”

“Everyone knows him.” Tessa clasped her hands in her lap. “He’d be kind of hard to miss.”

“Did he ever do something to hurt you, like tease you or bully you?”

“You make it sound so simple.” Tessa gave her a funny look. She couldn’t help it. “I could lie and tell you he called me names and tortured me. But he didn’t.”

“Then why do you dislike him?” Dr. Capello crossed her legs, leaning forward. “He seems popular enough. Homecoming king, captain of the hockey club.”

“Do I have to like him just because other people do?”

“No. But there’s usually a reason for disliking someone. A history.”

Tessa hesitated. “It’s not just him, it’s everyone like him. They don’t appreciate what they have,” she finally said. “Mark has a father who goes out of his way to protect him, and he takes advantage of that, like having that party while his dad was away.”

“So that makes him unlikable?”

Wasn’t that a good enough reason? Tessa sighed, taking it further. “He cheated on Katie!
That
makes him unlikable.”

“But Katie doesn’t agree?”

Tessa frowned. “Katie was lucky to find out who he really is before it was too late. If he did something to that girl, Rose, who’s to say Katie wouldn’t be next?”

“You think he’s violent?”

“Have you ever watched him play hockey?”

“It’s a rough sport,” Dr. Capello said. “But it’s not real life.”

Tessa snorted. “Maybe you should go to the rink sometime. You might change your mind.”

Dr. Capello stared at her for a long, uncomfortable moment, then glanced down, scribbling on her tablet again. “So Mark isn’t the right guy for Katie?”

“He’s not like us,” Tessa said, scooting to the edge of her seat, wishing the shrink would see her point. It wasn’t like it was so complicated. “He’s been given everything on a silver platter. If you haven’t ever gone through something horrible, you can’t appreciate when you’ve got someone special in your life.”

“His father raised him alone,” the shrink said, and Tessa nodded—it was something everyone at Whitney knew. “In a way, he lost a parent, too.”

“Please.” Tessa wanted to scream. “His mother’s not dead, is she? She just ran off with some guy. Mark could see her if he wanted to. It’s not like he had to stand outside his own house and watch it burn, knowing who was trapped inside and not being able to do anything about it.”

Tessa clamped her mouth shut. She’d said too much already.

Dr. Capello set aside her tablet. “Would you like to—”

“Talk about it?” Tessa felt like she’d explode if anyone asked her that again. “No, thanks,” she said coolly. She jumped up from the chair and walked to the big window. “Are we done?” she asked, and gazed out to the woods, where a bunch of men had gathered. Two of them were holding dogs that strained on their leads. “I should really go find Katie. She’s not taking things well. Life can be rough on sensitive girls.”

“Life can be rough on everyone.”

Tessa kept staring out the window. “Does it ever make you numb, Dr. Capello, hearing everyone’s problems day after day after day?”

“When people feel broken, sometimes they feel ignored, too. They just need someone to hear them. I do my best to listen.”

“What if they’re too broken to fix?” Tessa asked, touching her fingertips to the glass. “What do you do with them then?”

“I try to help them change.”

“What if it’s too late to do anything at all?” Tessa asked, staring outside, watching the men and the dogs weave through the trees, making circles, their movements increasingly frantic. “What if they can’t change? What if they’re so screwed up they’re more like ghosts of themselves than real people?”

She saw Dr. Capello’s reflection in the glass as the shrink came up behind her.

“Are you sure there isn’t anything I can do for you, Tessa? Don’t be afraid to ask for help. It doesn’t mean you’re weak.”

“Anything you can do for
me
?” Tessa turned around. She
made a noise of disbelief. “You think I was talking about myself?”

“I don’t know,” the woman said, looking her in the eye. “Were you?”

“No, Dr. Capello, I wasn’t talking about myself.” Tessa’s hands started shaking. “Unlike the majority of self-absorbed snobs at Whitney Prep, everything I say isn’t always about me.”

Then, without another word, she left.

A
fter her first class, Katie waited for Tessa outside the administration building. She knew Tessa had a Wednesday-morning session with Dr. Capello, and Tessa rarely missed classes or mandatory counseling. Her scholarship depended on it.

Katie hadn’t seen her since the night before. Tessa still wasn’t in bed at four a.m. when Katie got back from the greenhouse with Mark. She hadn’t returned to their room by the time Katie had to dress and leave. Where had Tessa gone and what was going on with her? Why was her best friend keeping secrets?

When Katie saw Tessa’s pale hair glinting in the sunlight, she waved her down. “We need to talk,” she said.

“What’s with the sour face?” Tessa asked. She had her thumbs looped in the straps of her backpack. “You look like you OD’d on toxic waste.”

“No more games, Tessa,” Katie said, too tired for verbal sparring. “Just tell me where you went, okay?”

“What do you mean, where I went?” Tessa replied. “I was getting grilled by the school shrink, like every Wednesday. She had me trapped in her office for an hour. Now you’re in my face, too? Jeez.” She shook her head and started walking.

“That’s not what I meant.” Katie hurried to keep up. “Where’d you go last night? I woke up from one of my freaky dreams, and you were standing by my bed.” Katie had glimpsed Tessa’s pale skin and pale hair. Who else could it have been? “Then you ran out of the room, and I found a rose petal on the floor—”

“What?” Tessa stopped walking and gave her a funny look. “That’s bananas.”

“Have you been watching me at night, Tessa?” Katie asked, because she couldn’t help wondering. “Are you trying to psych me out or something?”

“You think I’m the ghost from your dream? You’re joking, right?”

But Katie was dead serious. “You’re hiding something.”

“And you must be
on
something,” Tessa shot back, “because you’re totally imagining things. I couldn’t sleep, so I went down to the basement to watch TV again. That’s all.”

“You were in the basement?”

“There was a
Real World
marathon, so I tuned in until I fell asleep,” Tessa said, so easily that Katie might have believed her.

Except she knew it was a lie.

Katie stared at her friend, her heart aching. There was no question in her mind that Tessa was covering something up.

“What’s with the third degree?” Tessa turned aside as a group of students brushed past. “You weren’t in bed when I came back upstairs. So maybe I should ask where you were, and please, don’t tell me you snuck out with Mark again.”

“I wouldn’t have run into him if I hadn’t been looking for you, and thank God I did or I’d still be stuck in the tunnels,” Katie said without thinking.

Tessa turned red. “You
did
see him, Katie! What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with
you
? You’re avoiding my question,” Katie said. “Where’d you go, Tessa?”

Why did they always go in circles? Why wasn’t Tessa coming clean? Why was her friend turning this around on her? Katie was getting such weird vibes she didn’t know what to do. She opened her mouth to say, “Just tell me what you were doing in the steam tunnels and why you ran away from me,” when a scream stopped her cold.

“They found her!” someone yelled from farther up the sidewalk. Suddenly, she heard the dogs, howling so loudly the air practically vibrated around them.

Had the search dogs tracked Rose?

Katie glanced ahead, squinting, and grabbed Tessa’s arm. “Oh, my God,” she said, and her stomach did a nervous flutter. “Let’s go.” She flung her book bag over her shoulder and started running, following a crowd of people.

Katie felt like a wildebeest merging in with a migrating
herd as she raced across campus. Elbows, feet, and book bags swung this way and that, bumping into her as the herd cut through neatly trimmed lawns between the stone buildings, then rushed down the gently sloping hill toward the creek.

“Hey, wait up!” she heard Tessa call from behind her, but she didn’t slow down.

Her breath came hard and fast as she ran toward the greenhouse and the maintenance shed. Then the forward motion of the students slowed and ground to a halt.

“Excuse me, sorry,” Katie said, pushing her way through until she found the cause: the campus police were setting up sawhorse barricades on the near side of the creek so no one could cross.

“Stay back, please, stay back,” they kept saying, doing their best to keep the students a safe distance from the woods.

“Is it true, they found the missing girl?” a girl asked the campus cops.

The cops looked at each other but didn’t answer.

Katie strained to see what was going on not more than thirty yards away. The braying of the dogs went on, rattling her eardrums. She watched one of them, a reddish-colored bloodhound, pulling hard against the leash held by a police officer.

“Bring the shovels!” a deep voice bellowed from the woods.

“They must’ve found something,” the girl beside Katie murmured, “or else why would they be digging?”

Katie’s book bag felt heavy, the strap biting into her shoulder. Then someone jostled her from behind, and her bag slid
down her arm to the ground. She reached for it, and when she stood, she saw Mark, edging into a spot beside her.

“Hey,” she said, staring up at him.

He had a nasty bruise on his forehead. She didn’t need to ask what had happened. She’d gone to hockey practice before first period; sitting high in the stands, her gaze was on Mark as he skated. He’d seemed off during warm-ups, out of his usual rhythm and out of sync with the rest of his teammates. Then he’d gone after Steve Getty again, and Katie had found it too ugly to watch.

She’d left the rink as fast as she could.

I would never hurt you
, Mark had texted her soon after.

You are hurting yourself
, she typed back.
Don’t let him get to you.

If Mark wanted to convince everyone that he was innocent, he had to stop lashing out at Steve. It just made him look angry and unpredictable and capable of anything.