You Will Know Me (13 page)

“How does it work?” Drew whispered as Katie shook the Chloraseptic and sprayed it down his meaty throat.

“I don't know, honey. It just numbs you.”

“Where's Dad?”

“He had to work.”

“It's Saturday.”

“It is.”

Eric rarely missed Devon's weekend practices, but he'd fallen behind, with everything. That's what his text said:

Need to catch up at studio after dropping off D.

“I hope I'm okay soon,” Drew said, his voice thick and funny from the spray. “Can I go check the shrimp?”

“What?” Katie said.

Her eyes drifted to her laptop. The BelStars Facebook page. Someone had posted an old photo there. Ryan, his face breaking into a grin, alongside Hailey in cutoffs and a BelStars T-shirt in front of that purple car of hers, Maiden Pond shimmering in the background.

She wondered if it had been posted in memory of Ryan, or to remind everyone of Hailey's purple car. The car in question.

In the photo, it didn't look nearly as vibrant, as grape-crush delicious.

Instead, it looked muddy, mysterious.

And Hailey—her freckles blurry, her hair wind-stirred, her side smile—looked mysterious too. Obscurely primitive. The way she was holding on to Ryan so tightly, her neck cords visible, her painted fingers like purpled claws.

You make me crazy, baby. You make me crazy.

That's what Katie had overheard her saying to Ryan that time at the Ramada sundries shop. Moments before she'd lunged up behind Ryan as he talked to Katie, her arms bolting around him like a shield:
He's mine
.

Or maybe it was Hailey's phone call still hammering in Katie's head. But the picture. It looked like evidence for something.

Two hours before practice normally ended, the text came.

Mom, no Coach T. again. Short practice. Dad not txting back. Can u get me?

“You sure you're up to the drive, sweetie?” Katie asked as they walked into the garage.

“Yeah,” Drew said, peering down at his two-liter bottle, thick with scum. The science project, of course. “It smells funny in here.”

“You mean like old shrimp?”

“No.”

A jackknifed truck held her hostage on Route 11 for an extra twenty minutes and by the time she pulled into the BelStars parking lot, gymnasts were already streaming out of the building in their matching warm-up suits, matching hollow-chested postures, matching stoic expressions, their mouths all straight lines. But no Devon.

Looking in the rearview mirror at Drew's wan face, mouth open and lips coated white, she didn't want to leave the car. But Devon wasn't answering her phone and Katie had the sneaking sense maybe she was still at the vault, making use of every spare minute, feeling her progress whittled away by circumstance and tumult.

I just get lost up there
. That's what she'd told Amelise.

“Drew, I'll be right back,” she said, leaning into the rear seat, resting the back of her hand on his forehead for the hundredth time.

Jogging inside the BelStars lobby, the familiar bite of Steri-Fab and Tinactin, she kept her head down, avoiding eye contact with the stray parent or staff member.

As she pushed through the heavy doors into the gym, she saw only a few assistant coaches, a handful of girls in leotards over at the Resi-Pit, one girl still practicing handstand pops on the tumbling track, Bobby catching her legs.

“Where's Devon?”

“Katie. She was looking for you,” Bobby said, the girl's ankles caught in his hands, her upturned face blooming with blood. “But that was a while ago.”

“I saw her in the locker room,” Missy Morgan said, zipping her gym bag. “But I think she's gone now.”

Wending her way past the practice beams and uneven bars, Katie started to pick up her pace. Some feeling in her chest.

Approaching the locker room, eyes fixed on the long line of red cubbies veining through the door's cutout window, she heard the scream, like a tear in the throat.

“Stop it!
Stop it!
”

Heart pommeling against her chest, Katie charged through the double doors.

At first, she couldn't see anything, just heard a tight shriek, a hard clang.

“Devon?” Katie cried out.

Running past the locker stalls, her chest lurching, everything was a red blur until she saw them:

Two girls interlocked on the floor, almost like an embrace. Katie could see only the tall one on top, golden hair sprayed across the back of a red BelStars hoodie, and beneath her a pair of tanned legs scrambling, sneakers squeaking on the tiles.

“Help!” came a strangled voice as Katie forked her arm under the torso of the hoodie girl and lifted with all her might, which seemed infinite.

Wrenching the girl by her hood, barring the tanned expanse of her broad shoulders, Katie hurled her aside, somehow stronger than ever in her life, and found beneath the bloodless face of her daughter.

“Devon,” Katie cried. Sprawled on the floor, her daughter still grasped the girl's hoodie cord so tightly it had cut into the center of her palms, blood-whorled.

“I'll kill you,” the hoodie girl screamed, and Katie's head whipped around to see who she was.

Though she already knew.

The freckled nose and bright teeth, that corn-colored hair rippling.

“Hailey,” Katie panted, her arms wrapping around Devon, shielding her hunched body. “Oh God, Hailey.”

“Call the police! Call the police!” someone was shouting as the doors to the locker room swung open behind them.

There was a swirl of noise and doors and shouts, Bobby and Amelise descending upon them, propelling Hailey backward, legs kicking, punching air, and the crash and rattle of locker metal and the skidding of sneakers and the savage howl of a girl who barely sounded human.

Her face
, Katie thought,
her face
—
who is that?
Teeth bared, veins rising everywhere, a face full of blood.

In an instant, turning her body, Devon lifted her muscled leg and pounded, with a force like the force she marshaled to punch the springboard, her foot landing on something with a deafening crunch.

The stray bits of a lavender cell phone scattered across the floor like confetti.

Hailey let out one last howl.

“I called 911!” came a shout from the hallway.

Huddling over Devon, Katie looked up at Hailey, who stood panting wildly, a thick strand of her own hair caught in her mouth, her neck scored with nail marks.

Held back by Bobby's trunk arms, Hailey breathed in, bent her head, and let loose a warm spray of pink saliva that scattered across Devon's chest, onto Katie's calf and ankle.

“Bitch, I know you,” Hailey muttered, Bobby pinning her arms back fiercely, “I know you.”

Devon, eyes sheeted black, her expression as stony, as pitiless as Katie had ever seen, looked up at her and said nothing.

Katie's hands clutched the wheel tightly even though the car was not running.

Bobby had tried to get her to wait in Teddy's office until the police arrived.

“If we don't handle this right,” he'd warned, “there could be trouble. People trust their children with us.”

But she'd needed to get Devon out of there, and Drew was alone in the car.

Now, all three of them sat, fogging the windows, and there were too many things to do all at once, and Eric's phone went straight to voice mail.

“What happened?” Drew asked. “Did Devon fall?”

Her head felt like it was whirring, her hands shaking.

Devon was leaning forward in the front seat, hand pressed on the dashboard as if she might fall.

“Devon, look at me,” she said.

But Devon wouldn't, and wouldn't, until Katie finally reached across and pulled her sharp shoulder back.

She supposed she'd imagined it would be worse. But other than Devon's chin, scored with red half-moons, her daughter looked remarkably intact.

Except: Was that a strand of Hailey's hair caught in the corner of Devon's mouth, like corn silk?

“We may need to go to the hospital,” Katie said, reaching out for Devon's chin.

Flinching, Devon pulled back, covering her chin with her hand.

A police car turned into the lot.

“Stay here,” Katie said.
“Do not move.”

“You can meet us at the station,” said the officer with the shaved head and soft lower lip. “We'll get some other statements here first.”

His nameplate said
Officer Crandall
and his severe affect was oddly comforting. Shaking his head as he took notes, he wouldn't let her back in the locker room. The sounds coming from there, piercing girl squeals echoing, reminded Katie of the time they'd found the dead raccoon trapped in the gym air shaft.

Back in the car, Devon was still pitched forward, her eyes shut.

On the tan dashboard, there was a red palm print like a kindergarten art project. The palm that had been wrapped around Hailey's hoodie cord.

“Mom,” Drew said when she opened the door, “Devon didn't cry once.”

It's what he always said when his sister got injured, and it was very dear. Katie tried to smile for him but caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, her face and neck smeared pink with adrenaline, sweat-smudged hair, mascara striped across the bridge of her nose.

“I think Dad called,” Devon said, eyes still closed.

Katie looked down at her phone, blinking rapidly.

When she called him back, he said he was already on his way to the police station. Bobby had phoned, he said. Bobby had told him.

“How is she?” he asked, breath ragged. “How's her wrist?”

“Her wrist? She's okay. She—”

“Goddamn it. I told you we needed to keep her away from Hailey.”

“What?” she said. “This is my fault?”

“I shouldn't have left her there. That gym isn't safe. Can you put her on the phone?”

The back doors of the gym opened.

“We have to go,” Katie snapped, turning the phone off and tossing it onto the console with a hard crack.

The three of them watched silently as the officer escorted Hailey, hair sprigged like Medusa, in plastic cuffs, to the squad car.

Once, at a booster-sponsored volleyball game, Hailey had worn a bikini, and Katie could swear she had the tan poreless skin of a slick Barbie doll, not a stray blemish, not one broken blood vessel, not a single scar. A perfect, markless body.

And here she was, face ruddy, eyes lowered, angry scarlet grooves swooping up her face and neck. Officer Crandall's hand behind that honeyed head, ducking her into the backseat.

She imagined Hailey at thirteen, hitching her way down to Florida. Ripped shirt, clawed face. Fighting with another girl, beating her with a sandal.
What took you so long?

“Mom,” Drew said, “what happened to your arm?”

Katie looked down and saw the long looping fish hook of a scratch extending from her elbow to her wrist.

“And your eye.”

Pulling her hair back, peering in the rearview mirror, she saw the knot of blood under her eyebrow and couldn't remember how she'd gotten it. A tigress, protecting her young.

At the police station, Katie watched as Eric's hand clenched the water bottle so tightly it cracked, leaking all over his jeans, into his pocket, blurring all the print on the speeding ticket stuffed there. The one that Officer Crandall said he'd “take care of,” given everything.

She put her hand on his leg firmly.

The desk sergeant sat with Drew on the other side of the windowed room. Katie watched Drew's mouth moving, imagined him talking and talking in that funny little frog voice.

Inside, for the next half hour, Devon told Officer Crandall what had been happening with Hailey and what had happened that day.

It was hard to get her to say everything and Katie had to prompt her several times.

“Hailey called me once,” Katie said, “but she's been calling Devon constantly. Tell him, Devon.”

Devon looked at her, and then down at her hands. “She kept calling,” she said, so quietly they all leaned forward. “I don't know.”

“But you never spoke to her?” Officer Crandall asked. “Did she ever directly threaten you?”

“No,” Katie said, looking at Devon, who was staring at her sore hand.

“She did,” Devon said.

“What?” Katie said. “When?”

“She was sending me texts. I kept deleting them. They were creepy. Dad told me to block her.”

Katie and Officer Crandall turned to Eric.

“Because of the calling,” Eric said, straightening in his chair, looking at them both. “I told her to block her because of the incessant calling. I didn't know about the texts.”

“Devon, why didn't you tell me about the texts?” Katie asked, her head throbbing.

Officer Crandall looked at Katie, then back at Devon, who was still staring at her right hand, the ailing wrist bandaged now, like a fat paw.

“I don't know,” she said, finally.

“What did the texts say?”

Devon shrugged. “She kept calling me names. I don't know why.”

The officer looked at her as if waiting for more.

“Are we going to talk about what happened today?” Eric said, squirming in his chair.

“You have no idea why she might have targeted you?” Crandall asked.

There was another brief silence.

“Sometimes,” Katie jumped in, “Devon's talents make her a target. There's jealousy, you know. A lot of it.”

Devon nodded, staring at her hands. “Hailey wanted to be a gymnast,” she said. “But she was too big.”

“That's true,” Katie said, except it didn't seem precisely right. The way she'd always understood it, Hailey had abandoned serious competition back in high school for swimming, and then coaching. “Can't you get those texts from Hailey's phone?”