Page 47

FORTY-SIX

Evie and I are putting the pictures back into the cardboard box when we hear a sound from upstairs. It sounds like a door closing, followed by footsteps.

Evie jumps back immediately, pulling her legs forward, assuming the same position she was in when I first woke up. It strikes me just how frightening the past week must have been for her. Melinda is giving her food and water, but that comes with an overwhelming sense of uncertainty. Evie never knows what to expect, and it must be frightening.

“Everything will be okay,” I tell Evie, resting my hand on her knee. I’m surprised by how confident my voice sounds. Inside, that same uncertainty has infected me, and I can feel my chest rising and falling in panic.

The basement door creaks open. Heavy footfalls descend the stairs, one at a time, accelerating my sense of doom. Evie and I scramble to put the pictures back inside the box. Evie manages to hide the painted rock inside her hoodie pocket just before Melinda comes into view. When she appears, she looks haggard, an exhausted version of the put-together woman I’m used to seeing at school events and in the gymnasium stands.

“Good,” she says to me. “You’re awake.”

“How long have I been down here?” I ask.

“A couple hours,” she says. “I had to get the damned movers out of here. I was hoping we could talk.”

“What about?”

“Everything. Does anyone know you’re here?”

“No,” I say. Coach Reynolds knew I was going to make contact with the girls’ families, but I never told him where I was going. Nadia is the only person I spoke to after my conversation with Beth, but she doesn’t know my exact location. I try to swallow down the feeling of being stranded so I can focus on the conversation ahead. “This entire situation has spiraled out of your control. Let me help you fix it.”

“There is no fixing it!” Melinda shouts. “Everything happened so fast. After I hit Evie, I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid if I let her go back into the building, she’d tell everyone what I did.”

“That’s why you brought her here,” I say, trying to keep the conversation going. If I can keep her talking, maybe she’ll see how ridiculous the ordeal has become.

“Right! It’s not like I was trying to kidnap her. I was just trying to buy myself time and figure out what to do. By the time I returned to the school to pick up Amber, the police were already involved. I panicked.”

“What were you doing at the school that night?” I ask her.

“It’s hard being a parent. Kids these days grow up so fast, and they have access to so much technology, it overrides any kind of rules or boundaries I try to put in place. I try so hard not to be a helicopter mom, but it’s hard when they’re being exposed to so much.

“I knew Amber was communicating with boys online. I kept telling myself I’d address it after the championship game. The last thing I wanted to do was distract her before that. The night of the lock-in, I saw the messages between Amber and the boy planning to meet outside the school. I knew I’d waited too long to confront her, and I had to stop her from making a horrible mistake.”

“How were you able to see her messages?”

“I downloaded an app onto her phone. She doesn’t know it’s there. Any message she sends from her phone or on social media, I’m able to see,” she says. “I’d been trying to download the app for weeks but couldn’t do it without her knowing. I lost my cell phone after the championship game. I used her phone to try to track mine, and it gave me the perfect opportunity to finally install the app.”

My throat swells. I was the one who stole Melinda’s phone. It was a moment of domination over a woman I felt had everything together, a relapse to my earlier years of stealing and deceiving, chasing the thrill. Even before the lock-in, my actions helped put this whole thing into motion.

“You knew Amber and her friends were messaging boys online,” I say.

“Yes. And all I wanted to do was address it. I hurried to the school, hoping I’d show up before whatever creep my daughter was messaging, but when I got there, the only person outside was Evie.” She cuts her eyes to the left, staring at the scared girl between us. “At first, I was relieved. I thought maybe I’d misunderstood the messages, and it wasn’t Amber after all, but then Evie started crying. Started whining about how my daughter and her friends were bullying her. That they were messaging boys and using her name to do it. Everything I’d been trying to avoid didn’t matter, because Evie already knew everything. My daughter’s reputation would be destroyed. I was so angry. The next thing I know, I’d swung at Evie, and she was on the ground.”

Picturing the moment makes me grind my teeth in anger. Melinda, a grown woman with all the comfort and security in the world, putting her hands on a vulnerable and scared child. It’s not right. The power imbalance isn’t fair, and it brings me back to my own childhood, when my father would take out his frustration on me. Useless violence leading to even more mistakes.

“This isn’t just about Evie,” I say. Melinda looks at me with confusion. “You did this because of me.”

“What do you mean?”

I bend down, sifting through the cardboard box again. I retrieve the picture I’d found earlier. The one of Melinda when she was a young girl, likely Amber and Evie’s age. She’s standing in front of a Christmas tree, holding an overstuffed stocking in her hands. An older sister towers over to the left, and her mother stands on the other side, her arm over her shoulders.

Melinda’s father is also in the picture, although I remember him differently.

“Coach Phillips was your father,” I say, holding up the picture for her to see.

“It says a lot about you, doesn’t it?” she says. “My daughter has been on your team for two years, and you didn’t even recognize me. I started going by my middle name years ago, not that you knew that. Dad spent all his time with you. He was hardly ever around my sister and me.”

Coach Phillips talked about his family, but they were already adults by the time I moved in with him. He had pictures of his daughters around his house, but they were all pictures from childhood. School dances and birthdays and graduations. I never even saw his daughters after Coach Phillips’ funeral. The girl in this photo is completely different from the woman in her forties standing in front of me.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask her, trying to understand how any of this relates to what’s happening with Evie.

“There wasn’t any point,” she says. “I recognized you straight away. Of course, I did. My sister and I used to crack jokes about Dad and his little charity case.”

Even though I’m an adult, those words sting. I never want to be considered charity. Not then. Not now.

“Your father was a great man,” I say. “He changed my life.”

“He changed mine, too. You know, I hardly saw him after my parents divorced? It felt like Mom was raising us by herself half the time.”

“Divorce is hard?—”

“My parents splitting up never bothered me. My father had written me off long before then.”

“What do you mean?”

“All he ever cared about was basketball. It was more important than anything else. My sister and I were never good, so he didn’t have time for us.”

I can’t believe Coach Phillips’ motivations are that simple. Yes, the man loved sports, but there was more to him than that. He didn’t just care about me because I was good. He took me under his wing because it was the right thing to do.

Then I remember all the times he talked to me about his strained relationship with his kids. Maybe there is some truth to what Melinda is saying. Maybe he knew he didn’t give enough to his own children, and that’s why he poured so much into me.

“You’ve resented me all this time?” I say, looking between Melinda and Evie. “Are you saying you kidnapped Evie to get back at me?”

“Of course not. I already told you, things spiraled too fast.” She pauses. “I was hoping if some of the girls were outside unsupervised, I could snap a picture and send it to Mr. Lake. Maybe that would finally be enough to get you fired.”

Coach Reynolds was honest with me earlier. He was never after my job. Melinda Terry was the parent that wanted me fired, not because of how it would impact her own daughter’s role on the team, but because she had a personal vendetta against me.

“You’ve been pressuring Mr. Lake to get rid of me since I started.”

“The moment I heard they hired you as the coach, I knew it would be a disaster, but nothing I said or did seemed to be enough,” she says. “I never went to school with the intention to hurt Evie or anybody. All I wanted to do was confront my own daughter and stop her from making a mistake, maybe get you in trouble while I was at it. I’ve given my daughter everything, and she’s still making stupid decisions. And Evie Masters of all people, with her absent mother and pitiful home life, knew better.

“History was just repeating itself. You favored Evie, just like my own father favored you. That’s why I lashed out and hit her.”

It wasn’t about protecting Amber’s reputation. She was reacting off the resentment she’s felt toward her father and me all these years, and Evie paid the price.

“You can end all this now,” I say. “Let me and Evie go before anything gets worse.”

“I can’t do that,” she says. “Too much time has passed.”

“What other choice to you have?”

Is Melinda really considering hurting Evie? And now me? She can’t possibly consider doing us harm to protect herself. Then again, I think with a shudder, people have committed violence over far less. She’s desperate, which puts us both in a terrifying position.

Above us, we hear footsteps.

Someone else is inside the house.