Page 128 of Run Away With Me

‘Jessie, who’s Norma Jeane?’

I cracked.

It was so ridiculous – this mix of what the police knew and what they didn’t. Of all the things they could ask me about, of all the things they should have figured out by now, the one point they were most curious about wasthat?

I howled with laughter.

Lena and Officer Gale exchanged a look.

‘Norma Jeane was Marilyn Monroe’s real name,’ I said.

‘Is it some kind of … code?’ she pressed.

‘No,’ I said, slumping back in my chair. She was just like Brooke: a girl who everyone misunderstood. ‘She was just a girl. Just a girl …’

Time moved quickly over the next week. I decided that I wouldn’t go back to regular high school – not for the rest of this semester, at least. Lena home-schooled me, and she seemed pretty confident that she could catch me upon the work I’d missed. After all, I’d only been gone for two weeks.

I had to keep reminding myself of that. It felt like I’d been gone for years. Long enough to completely transform who I was.

I still had to decide where I was going to spend my senior year, and Lena was letting me find excuses to delay making the choice. She probably knew that I wanted to know where Brooke was going before I agreed to anything, but she didn’t call me out on it. I’d been putting off asking what had happened to Brooke, scared that I wouldn’t like the answer. At first, being stuck in limbo was a relief, because I didn’t have to face the truth, and then it turned into painful, silent torture.

‘Can I see Brooke?’ I asked one night over dinner when my resolve finally cracked.

‘I don’t know,’ Lena said. She didn’t bullshit me, and I liked that about her. ‘I’ll find out, if you want?’

‘Yes. Please.’

We’d talked about Brooke a few times. She obviously featured in some of my notes – the ones that Lena had read – and I’d been fairly honest about who Brooke was to me without specifically using the word ‘girlfriend’. It didn’t feel right to call Brooke my girlfriend when we hadn’t even had the chance to talk about it yet, but Lena was astute. She knew what I wasn’t saying.

I had to go back to the police station to have more interviews with Officer Gale, but the tone of them had changed. She wanted to know more about the Creep now,what he’d done to me, what I knew about his relationships with other people. His relationship with my mom. Whether or not my mom had known about how he was hurting me.

I told them she hadn’t known. I asked if the Creep had been hurting my mom. Officer Gale said she didn’t know.

Lena took me to other interviews, too, with the foster care people, which was awkward. We had to go all the way back to the ugly office building in Bitter Lake, which meant driving through my old neighborhood. Lena always made a point of taking a route that didn’t go past my mom’s house, so I didn’t have to look at it. I was grateful to her for that.

We stopped at Starbucks on our way home, and Lena handed me her credit card to pay for our orders while she found a booth. I got an iced oat milk caramel latte, because the taste took me back to a place and a person I ached with missing, and Lena wanted some green matcha thing that I was definitely not adventurous enough to try.

When I sat down, she had pulled her iPad out of her purse and her expression had changed.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured as I handed her the mug.

‘Did you hear from Brooke?’ I asked.

Lena shook her head and locked the screen. ‘I’m working on it, Jessie, I promise.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘I have got an update for you, though.’

I guessed it was something big.

‘Oh.’ I sipped my iced coffee. ‘Do they know who killed the Creep?’

Lena looked me dead in the eye. ‘Yes. They do. A man called Thomas Dederich has been charged with second-degree murder.’

‘I know him,’ I said. I pushed my drink away, not sure I could stomach it anymore. ‘He goes to our church.’

Lena looked at me, waiting in an increasingly tense silence to make sure I was okay. I nodded for her to keep going.