Page 34

THIRTY-THREE

Nadia ended up sleeping over.

It’s not every day I invite a known thief to spend the night in my home, but we ended up having too much to drink, and by the time I’d cleaned up from dinner I was ready to pass out.

When I walk downstairs the next morning, I see Nadia under a pile of blankets on the living room sofa.

Connor is already dressed and in the kitchen, brewing coffee.

“Are you going to wake her before you leave?” he asks.

Nadia’s mouth is wide open, drool trailing out of the corner. It makes me laugh, reminds me of the days before she was always perfectly put together.

“She’s sleeping hard,” I say. “Let’s let her rest.”

“Are you sure?”

Connor looks at me apprehensively, and I wonder why.

Sure, I had my hesitations about letting Nadia stay over, but I know her past. And her present. Connor only met her last night. What vibe is she giving off to make him this uneasy?

“She’s my friend,” I say.

“You’ve barely spoken in more than a decade,” he says. “You don’t really know her anymore.”

Just then, I hear groaning come from the living room. I watch as Nadia’s hand stretches over the couch. She’s waking up.

“Cass, is that you?”

“Yeah,” I say, grabbing my coffee and walking back into the living room. “I’m heading to work.”

Nadia sits up, her hair a tangled mess. “I’ll head out, too.”

“You don’t have to,” I say. “I mean, if you want to rest?—”

“No, it’s fine. Really. I have some things I need to take care of.”

I lock eyes with Connor, who is still standing in the kitchen. He seems relieved, but I’m annoyed. I hope Nadia didn’t overhear our conversation, isn’t aware of how much my fiancé wanted her to leave. I give Connor a stiff kiss on the cheek. I’m irritated at him, but I can’t express why. Maybe it’s because in the years we’ve been together, I’ve been introduced to countless members of his family, old schoolmates and business partners. I’ve treated each one with respect and avid interest, even when they were so boring I wanted to pull my hair out.

Nadia is the first person from my life—my real life—I’ve ever introduced to him, and he acts as though she’s a liability. Then again, maybe she is. I’ve certainly had my suspicions of her since Evie went missing. Perhaps I’m only growing soft because of what she revealed yesterday about the adoption. It certainly highlighted a compassionate part of her I’d never seen before.

As I pull into the parking lot, I try to shake away thoughts of Nadia and Connor and all of it.

More important matters need to be addressed. And it all starts with the basketball team.

* * *

Usually, team meetings are scheduled in advance. I don’t pull my players out of class unless I have prior permission from their teachers, or I try to have discussions after school hours.

Today, I’m wanting to catch them off guard. I don’t want them to have time to discuss it amongst themselves or reach out to their parents.

I send an email to the school secretary, asking her to call the girls’ basketball team to the gymnasium before lunch. After the announcement is made over the intercom, I wait alone, watching as they arrive one by one, backpacks hanging off shoulders and lunch boxes in their hands.

“Is there news about Evie?” Beth asks immediately.

She’s the only one who seems genuinely curious. The others appear confused, even a little bit annoyed. A meeting like this doesn’t happen often.

“No official updates,” I say, instructing the girls to sit on the first row of bleachers. I wait until they’re settled, all eyes on me, to continue. “Some new information has come to light, though. And I want to discuss it with all of you.”

A pause. Some of the girls look down the line at one another, while others keep their eyes glued to me.

“What is it?” Colleen finally asks, always the first to break the silence.

I cross my arms, narrowing my stare at the girls.

“Another teacher approached me yesterday and told me that some of the girls on this team have been bullying Evie for months.”

It’s almost as though I can feel the oxygen being vacuumed from the room, the air replaced with a suffocating silence. With each passing second, my anger grows.

“Evie wasn’t being bullied,” Tara finally says.

“Coach, you see us, like, every day,” Amber adds. “I think you would know better than anyone.”

“Did Evie ever say that?” Beatrice asks.

“Not to me.” And I’m still bitter over the fact she felt she couldn’t come to me. That telling me the truth about what was going on would somehow make her look weak. Maybe if I’d pushed her a little harder, we could have avoided all this. “This is the first I’ve heard about it. It appears everyone was too worried about the team’s success and all your precious playing time to do what’s right.”

I take a step closer to the girls, lowering my tone.

“I don’t care about any of that,” I say. “If someone had said something earlier, maybe Evie wouldn’t be missing. But they didn’t. Now I need to know the truth. What was going on with the rest of you and Evie?”

More uncomfortable silence. The girls fidget their fingers, their shirts, the straps of their backpacks, all of them literally squirming as they wait for someone else to speak.

“Not everyone was nice to Evie,” Beth says, finally. It doesn’t surprise me she’s the most vocal. Beth and Evie were friends, but it can be intimidating to go against the rest of the team, against the powerful trio of Beatrice, Tara and Amber.

“You’re just saying that because she’s your friend,” Amber says.

“Aren’t all of you her friends?” I ask, struggling to keep my voice level. “Evie is your teammate. None of you were being mean to her when she scored the winning point at the championship game.”

“We’re on the same team,” Tara says, “but basketball is, like, the only thing we have in common with her. That’s not our fault.”

“And it took all of us to win that game,” Beatrice adds.

“You’re right,” I say. “But Evie is the only one missing, and she’s the only student another teacher has said was being bullied.”

“No one bullied her,” Amber says. “She’s just different from some of us. We can’t help that.”

“You didn’t have to always point it out to her,” Beth says, almost under her breath.

“Don’t start pointing fingers just because she isn’t here,” Beatrice warns.

“I’m not pointing fingers,” Beth says. “I’m telling the truth. Everyone treated her differently, and you three were the worst.”

“We didn’t do anything to her!”

“Beatrice, I remember hearing you call Evie SoEd,” I say. My voice wavers on that last, ridiculous word. I’m disgusted by the sheer cruelty of such an insult, can only imagine how humiliating it must have been for Evie to hear it. “Can you tell me what that means?”

Her cheeks blush, as she starts squirming even more.

“It’s just a stupid joke.”

“Same outfit every day,” I say, pointedly. “That’s what the other teacher told me it means.”

Another girl, a seventh grader, laughs. My eyes dart toward her. If looks could kill, she’d be a goner. She immediately looks away from me, and I don’t pity her embarrassment. I’m using what little patience I have left to control my fury.

“It was only a joke,” Beatrice says. I can hear a quiver of emotion in her voice. “And I’m not the only one who said it to her.”

“I believe that’s true,” I say. “But what about that is funny? Did Evie ever laugh when you called her that?”

I already know the answer. Even before I knew what the word meant, I’d seen the soft sadness in her eyes. If I could have gone back, I would have done more. I would have asked her why the term bothered her, and maybe I could have put an end to the bullying right then and there.

Was this what she’d been so close to telling me about on the night of the lock-in?

“You all say Evie was different from the rest of you,” I say. “Was any of that ever her fault? Did she have any control over what clothes she wore or who her parents were? Everyone else on this team is lucky to have stability and security and parents who look after them. Evie didn’t have that. A lot of kids don’t have that.”

I never did, and I realize I’m addressing the same tormentors from my own childhood as clearly as I am the girls in front of me.

Some of the girls are openly crying. When they’re caught up in the moment, relishing the laughter of their peers, it’s easy to pretend their words don’t have an impact. Now the cruelty of their words is unavoidable.

“It was stupid,” Beatrice says. “We shouldn’t have said it, but it doesn’t mean any of us would do anything to hurt Evie.”

“You were all just jealous of her,” Beth says. “You weren’t making fun of her because of her clothes. You were making fun of her because she was the best one on the team, and you hated it.”

“We didn’t hate it,” Amber says. “We’re all winners.”

“Yeah, but Evie was the one who got all the attention. She’s the one who scored the winning shot.” Beth looks at Beatrice. “How many times have you brought up the fact you passed her the ball? You can’t stand that she was getting all the credit.”

Beatrice grits her teeth and looks away, confirming the truth of what Beth just said. Tara has her arms crossed, refusing to look at me. When she pulled me aside at the prayer circle, was she only trying to distract me? Give me another lead to follow so I wouldn’t trace Evie’s disappearance back to the bullying? I wonder if Beatrice and Amber put her up to talking to me.

“There’s a lot of toxicity on this team,” I say. “More than I ever knew. And part of it is my fault for letting it get this way for so long. But I need to know everything now. I called this meeting because I thought you all might be more comfortable talking to me than the police.”

“The police?”

“Evie has been missing for days now,” I say. “Up until yesterday, you all said you had nothing against her, and that isn’t true. I need to know what else you’re lying about.”

“No one is lying!” Amber yells.

“You’re not telling me everything.”

“It’s not just that Evie was the best on the team. She was your favorite, Coach,” Tara says. “All of us could see that.”

“She wasn’t my favorite,” I say.

I want the words to be true. I try so hard not to show any bias, to give each girl the equal amount of attention and praise they deserve. The only reason I ever showed Evie more attention was because I connected with her more. I understand where she comes from in a way these other girls don’t.

“She was your favorite,” Beatrice doubles down. “But you didn’t know her. Sure, we were meaner to her than we needed to be at times, but there were things about Evie you didn’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s not some innocent little girl.” Beatrice pulls out her phone.

“No phones during school hours,” I begin.

“I’m going to show you,” she says, holding out her phone for me to see. “These are screenshots.”

I take the device in my hands, swiping through the images. “Of what?”

“Conversations between Evie and boys online,” Beatrice admits.

Sure enough, that’s what it appears to be. Pages and pages of messages between Evie and an anonymous sender.

“If Evie sent these, how did you get them?”

“She was bragging about it,” Tara says.

Beth opens her mouth to say something, seemingly in defense of her friend, but Amber cuts her off.

“Evie thought it was cool that she got attention from older guys.”

I listen to the girls, but my eyes are glued to the messages, taking them in. Evie cracking sexual jokes and sending PG-13 pictures. I try to align these conversations and images with the Evie I know and love, but they don’t fit.

You don’t know her , Beatrice had said.

I pause when I see the date of the most recent messages.

“These were sent the day of the lock-in.”

“She showed us the night of the sleepover,” Beatrice says.

Evie sent, Truth or dare?

Truth.

That’s boring. Are you ever going to be brave enough to meet me?

Yes…

When?

Idk.

I want to see you tonight. I’m at school.

It’s too risky.

I can sneak out. No parents. It’s the perfect time.

You’ll get in trouble.

Everyone is asleep. They won’t even know.

1:30. Meet me at the back door.

My stomach drops reading the messages.

“Who was she speaking to?” I ask the girls, struggling to conceal the concern in my voice.

“Guys online.”

“But it sounds like this person knows the school. They knew she was here.”

“It’s some high school guy, but he went to Manning Academy before. That’s how he knew where to go.”

They don’t even know the guy’s name. He could be someone else entirely, and for a moment, I’m overwhelmed by the naivety of young girls.

“Why didn’t any of you tell me about this?”

“We didn’t want to get in trouble,” Beatrice says. “And we didn’t want to get Evie in trouble.”

I look at Beth. Her face is completely red, tears streaming out her eyes.

“Is this true?” I ask her. “Was Evie planning to meet a boy that night?”

“She never said anything about it to me,” Beth says.

“Well she wouldn’t. You’re her goody-goody friend,” Amber says, seething with cruelty. “She was trying to impress us.”

“Why haven’t you told the police about this? Your parents?”

“None of us want to get involved,” Tara says.

“Well, you don’t have control over that anymore.”

“Coach, no. You can’t do this to us.”

“Evie could be in danger. She could have been kidnapped!”

“That’s not what happened,” Beatrice shouts.

“The police will have to make that decision,” I say, handing over her phone. “Meeting dismissed.”