We Know It Was You (10 page)

The media lab, 6:00 p.m.

STILL FLOATING, SAYS LOCAL RESIDENT.

Zaire Bollo hit the refresh button, but the headline was the same. For three days Brittany's body had eluded the police, bobbing to the surface of the Chattahoochee River and then disappearing again into its murky depths. Pictures of the corpse showed it morphing into a bloated and purplish sack as it floated on downriver. It was becoming a joke. People needed resolution, they needed to say good-bye—but instead all they could do was watch helplessly as the inept police continued to let the body slip through their nets. Maybe they'd never get the body out. Maybe it would just disappear into the Gulf of Mexico, poured from the river into the sea. The thought haunted her, and she couldn't stop thinking about it. She felt obsessed.

She hit the refresh button again for the billionth time. Then she checked her e-mail. There was a message from Chrissie.

Hi Zaire this is so awkward but it's like, people are dying and life is so short, I just want to make sure I follow my heart. No regrets, you know? So anyway would you be mad if I liked Gottfried? I know you two were pretty intense but it's been six months so I don't know. I'm too nervous to ask you this in person. xoxoxo, Chrissie

Zaire read it twice, then deleted it without responding. Chrissie had been hinting for months that she liked Gottfried. It gave Zaire a kind of cruel enjoyment to pretend not to catch her drift. She knew she was being ungracious. But the idea of Chrissie and Gottfried getting together made her want to throw up.

She clicked back over to the news site and hit refresh again.
STILL FLOATING.
Across the lab some sophomores were talking loudly:

“And Trevor was like, get the fuck off me! And Gerard was like, I know it was you! Or something like that, I don't even know. And then Gerard
punched
him.”

“He punched
Trevor
? Christ, did he have a death wish?”

Everyone was talking about Trevor and Gerard's big fight at the vigil. Apparently Gerard had started it, which was insane. You don't touch football players. They were animals who had no control over their aggression. It wasn't their fault—the coaches trained them to be violent and thuggish, and yet everyone was surprised when they beat
kids up or were insensitive to women. They'd been hardwired to be barbarians, and they couldn't just turn it on and off. Your best defense was to stay out of their way. It was one of the first things she'd learned at Winship. She'd never been to a school with a football team before. Her schools in England and Nigeria had rugby—which was arguably
more
violent—but somehow football was scarier. Something about the bulky equipment the players hid inside, making them impossible to distinguish from one another as they rammed and slammed and heaped in piles.

She clicked refresh again, barely seeing the screen. She'd been in the lab for three hours, refreshing and rereading. Which is why it took her a moment to realize that the headline had changed:

BODY FOUND.

Benny's house, 6:00 p.m.

Benny folded his hands in the
furitama
position and shook them up and down. The name of the exercise literally meant “shaking the soul.”

It is my wish that the world should know everlasting peace.

Benny thought the words, but his mind was elsewhere. He kept seeing Brittany heaped in the backseat. If she was alive, who was the body in the river? Whose purplish, bloated sack of skin had been floating past houses and under bridges for three straight days? He got a chill every time he thought of the video, and once the image of the
corpse was in his head, it stuck there until he forced himself to think of something else.

“Rodrigo, can I get you a drink?” Mrs. Flax called from the kitchen.

“I'll get it,” Benny said, quickly dropping his pose. He went into the kitchen and poured a bourbon on the rocks. That was Rodrigo's drink, and the smell didn't feel new anymore. Before the accident Mr. Flax had been a scotch man; scotch had a cold, smoky smell, like a campfire extinguished by rain. Bourbon was different—rich and warm like leather or toast. It had taken Benny a while to get used to it. A little-known fact is that the nose is the strongest memory architect of all the senses. The connections made by olfactory receptors stay with the mind forever. In this way Benny's life was defined and divided by two aromas: before the accident, scotch; after the accident, bourbon.

For more than a year Rodrigo had been coming to the house five times a week for Mr. Flax's occupational therapy. His job was to help Mr. Flax relearn physical tasks like holding a cup and dressing himself, as well as complex mental functions like how to read.

“It . . . felt . . . like . . . rain. . . .” Mr. Flax read slowly from a special large-print book. At this stage he could see words and recite them, but was unable to articulate the meaning of sentences. What did “It felt
like rain”
mean
? To Benny it seemed very deep and existential. What
did
“It felt like rain” mean? Why did anyone attempt to communicate at all? It was futile; no person was capable of understanding another person through words. Everyone was alone in their minds. An impassable gulf existed between what people said and what they thought. Brain damage just made the case more obvious.

“Gracias, amigo,”
Rodrigo said as Benny handed him the bourbon.

“Ein davar, chaver,”
Benny said back.

Rodrigo swirled the glass so the ice clinked. He held it up and smiled at Mr. Flax. “You know this one, don't you?”

“D-drink,” Mr. Flax said, his mouth twitching. His expression was always in flux. One second his eyes would seem as sharp as ever, almost impatient, as if the idea of having to demonstrate that a drink is called a drink was too stupid to bear. But then the next second his eyes would glaze over, and Benny wouldn't really recognize him anymore.

“Not going to write that one down?” Mrs. Flax said from the kitchen.

“Rodrigo prompted him. It doesn't count.” Benny had explained that to her about a million times.

“Mm-hm.” It was a classic Mrs. Flax utterance, meant to convey precisely how foolish someone was being. She used it with his father whenever he made some addled, unintelligible demand. When she used it on Benny, it made him want to scream,
I don't have brain damage! Don't
mm-hm
at me!

“I'll be in the other room,” she announced in a clipped
voice. Mrs. Flax was always formal and awkward with Rodrigo. It was like she saw him as a stranger who'd just shown up one day, and whom they were all too polite to ask to leave. Which Benny found ironic, because at this point Rodrigo felt more familiar to him than his actual dad, who had been remote before but was now
beyond
remote—he was on another planet.

Sometimes Benny had dumb fantasies where Rodrigo and his mom fell in love against all odds and got married. His father's role in this was always dim and ambiguous. In some versions he miraculously recovered but still lived with them, like an uncle or a much older brother. In other versions he just sort of disappeared. Benny always felt embarrassed emerging from these fantasies; they were childish and disloyal. Rodrigo was a nurse, not a substitute dad, and Mrs. Flax was too old for him anyway.

Benny looked at his watch. It was six thirty. He turned on the news and resumed his stance on the yoga mat.

It is my wish that the world should know everlasting peace.

He repeated the mantra, trying to clear his mind. Aikido was meant to be practiced with tranquility of spirit, not with visions of unidentified waterlogged bodies floating before your eyes.

Benny always did his aikido exercises in the living room during the news. He felt it was beneficial for his father to observe this ritual, in whatever foggy capacity he was able to. The translation of aikido meant “the way of unifying with
life energy.” It was a Japanese martial art unlike karate or tegumi, where the winner of a fight was determined by which opponent could force the other into submission. In aikido, the goal was not to use force, but to evade and redirect your attacker's strike in such a way that no one, including your attacker, was harmed. The idea was that everyone was deserving of empathy and compassion, even those who sought to destroy you. The aikido fighter blended himself seamlessly into the motions of his opponent, like a magnet, anticipating each movement and deftly redirecting it using the attacker's own momentum. It didn't require physical strength or brute aggression: only focus and awareness and the desire to understand, rather than hate, the person who wanted you dead.

“Hey, Rodrigo, did Mom tell you I'm getting my black belt?” Benny asked, doing a wide side stretch.

“Very cool,” Rodrigo said, sipping his bourbon. “Mr. Flax, can you point to something in the room that's the color black?”

Mr. Flax sort of twitched and stared mutely ahead.

“Yeah, black sucks,” Rodrigo said. “It's not even a real color. How about pointing to something red?”

Mr. Flax pointed at the TV. On the news a bright red body bag was being heaved onto a stretcher.

“Nice,” Rodrigo said. “Now point to something—”

“Oh my God,” Benny interrupted. He stared at the TV. Police officers were standing aimlessly on the riverbank holding what looked like an enormous soggy piece of fur.

Who is in that body bag?

Tuesday

The assembly hall, 8:30 a.m.

Everyone was talking excitedly. There was an undercurrent of explosive giddiness in the room. People were actually shaking. Every so often someone would shout, “You can't kill a Wildcat!” and the entire assembly hall would break into a cheer. The room sparkled with glittering plastic tiaras. Corny Davenport was passing them out, and everyone was wearing one, even the teachers.

“Where do you get three hundred tiaras at a moment's notice?” Virginia asked loudly. She was supposed to be sitting with her homeroom, but no one was paying attention in the disorder, so she'd grabbed a seat in the front next to Benny.

Benny shrugged, turning his tiara over in his hands, as if inspecting it. “You should put it on,” Virginia told him. “You'll look suspicious if you don't.”

Benny frowned, and then put the tiara on his head. Virginia snorted. If there was anyone who looked really ridiculous in a tiara, it was Benny Flax. He looked younger,
like a deeply dissatisfied thirteen-year-old whose mother had forced him to have a princess-themed bar mitzvah. Suddenly his serious expression didn't look so serious—it looked pouty and sulky and babyish.

Virginia adjusted her own tiara, cocking it a bit to the side at what she hoped was a jaunty, careless-looking angle. You should never let your accessories dominate your look—it made you seem insecure. There was a way to look good in a tiara, but irony was key. Virginia didn't want it centered on the crown of her head like an actual princess, or perched goofily like a cake topper the way some people were wearing them.

A loud cheer went up, louder and more raucous than any of the previous cheers. Virginia looked up at the stage and saw a pair of blondes, Corny and Angie, with their arms around a third blonde they were lovingly escorting to the podium: Brittany Montague. She looked weak, but happy. She waved at the crowd like a pageant contestant. Benny and Virginia clapped mechanically.

Brittany gave Corny and Angie a hug, and then they stepped back, seeming reluctant to let Brittany out of arm's reach. Brittany gazed out serenely as the house lights dimmed and everyone went quiet.

“As most of you know at this point, I'm alive.” She giggled, and the crowd giggled back at her. “But what you don't know is how much I love you.” A huge cacophonous cheer erupted. It lasted more than a minute.

“And love is what got me through the last three days. Well, love and strawberry-kiwi Gatorade!” Everyone laughed again, though it wasn't a joke. The Gatorade was the reason she was standing there and not in the hospital hooked up to an IV. The local news headline was
THANK GOD FOR GATORADE, SAYS ABDUCTED CHEERLEADER
. Corny Davenport had found her locked in the pom-pom closet yesterday, where she'd been trapped since Friday night. She'd been drugged before the game and ditched there. There were no signs of abuse (the paper had reported this), and though Brittany's purse had been stolen, it had contained no cash, and no charges had been made to the many credit cards. The attacker appeared to have wanted only one thing: the mascot suit.

Onstage, Brittany pulled out a bottle of pink Gatorade and took a long, dramatic sip. The audience cheered wildly. She wiped her mouth and giggled.

“What do you bet this whole thing is a scam by Gatorade,” Virginia whispered.

Benny didn't reply or even register that he'd heard her. He just stared ahead with his arms crossed. Several newspaper articles were clenched in his fist, the ink blackening his clammy palms. Things were moving ahead of him now, and fast. Brittany was alive. For a precious few moments, that information had been his and his alone. Well, his and Angie's and Corny's and Virginia's, anyway. But as the twins' Lexus had zoomed away yesterday, his control over
the case had zoomed away with it. And now he was reduced to reading the paper for information like a clueless yokel.

According to the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, the last thing Brittany remembered before her abduction was standing in the shower with her clothes on. But she seemed confused—in the online edition of the story she reported that the shower occurred
after
Corny had rescued her. According to the
Marietta Daily Journal
, there may have been no shower at all; the reporter suggested Brittany had invented the shower to cover up her embarrassment at having repeatedly urinated on herself while trapped in the pom-pom closet. Normally Benny would have pounced on such discrepancies, analyzing every possibility, but at the moment he was too distracted by an overwhelming sense of failure.