CHAPTER TWELVE
ME, MYSELF, AND MY BRIGHT PERSONALITY
GRACE
It was pretty freaking cold in the ice-skating rink.
Like, I knew it was supposed to be cold in there, but, in case someone wanted to psychoanalyze me or something, they could also suggest the low temperature and the chills I felt running down my spine were courtesy of me, myself, and my bright personality.
Either way, whatever the reason was, I had grown quite tired of psychology ever since my mother had decided to spend a considerable amount of cash on a therapist, who occupied plenty of my free time—time I should be using to skate or study if I wanted to do something with my life.
I didn't feel like spending forty-five minutes three times per week just to hear someone with a PhD blabber about the personality disorder I had obviously inherited from my mother. There was no hidden meaning behind my reluctance to adhere to therapy; I simply didn't see how it would help me and I had better things to do.
My mother, the warmest person I knew—followed closely by the Night King—had ever so gracefully decided (and stolen my right to have an opinion in the process, but that was just how things worked in our household) that skating was now a privilege I had to earn. I'd earn it by cooperating in therapy, smoking less, and being nicer.
I'd be nicer when people stopped pissing me off.
I'd stop smoking when I found a better way of dealing with stress.
I'd start cooperating in therapy when it proved to be useful.
Maybe that was why I had been forced to go to therapy in the first place. Life worked in funny, mysterious ways, and all of them were doing a fantastic job of ruining my happiness and general will to live.
I knew it wasn't healthy to blame my mother for everything that went wrong in my life and, realistically, not everything was her fault. My insight skills were developed enough to allow me to come to such a conclusion, but I had to blame someone and blaming my dead friend sounded kind of rude.
So, now that my hours in the skating rink were at risk, I knew I had to push myself to the extreme to be able to keep the same level of perfect performance. My ankle had definitely seen better days, even though it was fully healed by now, but it was mid-November, and the temperatures were steadily dropping, which always brought a fair share of risks for my frail bones.
My therapist and my mother could suck it. I was not dropping out of the championship.
"You should take a break," Christina advised. She was wearing a heavy wool coat and a knit scarf, even if these temperatures were far from the worst we'd get in here, but she was still shivering on the stands. "You've been at this for over two hours."
"Yeah, well," I retorted, skating backward, away from her. I knew the rink like the back of my hand and my brain had gone into auto-pilot mode a long time ago, which meant I knew when and where to stop and to turn without looking over my shoulder to see where I was going. "I don't know when I'll be able to come back, so I want to enjoy my time the best way I possibly can."
"By overworking yourself? Sounds fake, but okay."
I scowled. "No. I'm making up for lost time."
"You're beginning to sound a lot like June."
I gritted my teeth and the temperature seemed to drop more, if that was even humanly possible. In my humble opinion, there was a difference between enjoying a sport, enjoying the competitive form of a sport, and being downright obsessed with it. I strongly identified myself with the middle one, whereas June had certainly been the latter. No one was joking whenever they said she lived and breathed ballet and I couldn't count on both hands the number of times she'd blown us off just to go to practice—she'd easily do it ten times in just two weeks.
Perhaps that was what ended up killing her. It wouldn't be the first time obsession killed someone, and, in June's case, it clearly wouldn't be the last.
That sort of explained why I didn't enjoy being compared to June. It wasn't a healthy comparison—it was pretty much being told you were willing to die for a sport, for a hobby, and I still had plenty of brain cells left to prevent me from falling down the same rabbit hole June had. It was the kind of thing people laughed at you for, the kind of thing that landed you in therapy, and I wasn't that stupid.
I wasn't that weak. I was in control.
"Bullshit," I eventually said. "That's bullshit and you know it, Chris."
"It struck a nerve, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm not bullshitting you as much as you want to believe I am."
I exhaled through my mouth, expelling a cloud of smoke from between my lips like a dragon, and ultimately decided to swallow my pride. "It's not that deep. It's just ice skating."
"It was just ballet until it wasn't."
I kicked off my speed and made my way towards her, stopping before I bumped my knees against the edge of the rink. She didn't even flinch. "So, are we just going to keep assuming ballet had something to do with her death? Don't you think the police are looking into it right now? It's been over a month since she died."
Christina reached out for one of my hands and the knit fabric of her fingerless glove tickled my skin. "I'm worried about you, Grace." There it was, that annoying condescending tone I had had enough of hearing—from my mother, from my therapist, from virtually everyone. "You barely talk to me about what you're feeling."
I huffed. "Therapy."
She threw me a deadpan look. "I'd believe you if I actually trusted you to make an effort in therapy, but, since all you do is talk about how horrible and unnecessary you think it is . . ."
I knew my edges were kind of harsh. I knew I wasn't polite, or calm, or a lady, or whatever, but I knew I wasn't a bad person—not in the literal sense of the word. I didn't believe that human beings were completely good or completely bad—we were all different tones of gray, some lighter than others—and I think of myself as being at the end of either side of the spectrum.
Hearing those things coming out of Christina's mouth made me feel a lot worse, though.
I wanted her to trust me. I wanted her to believe me. I simply didn't see the point of lying or sugarcoating things when I was fully aware that life sucked and the last month had kicked us all in the ass, so I never sat in front of her and pretended that therapy was all sunshine and unicorns.
It pissed me off that she couldn't see that. If she liked therapy that much, then maybe she should give it a go instead of pushing it down my throat as if I were a child who didn't want to finish their vegetables.
I yanked my hand from hers, momentarily forgetting I was wearing ice skates instead of sneakers and that I was standing on slippery ice instead of solid ground. "If you don't trust me, then I don't see the point of continuing this conversation." I almost added or any other conversation, for that matter, but then I remembered I wasn't that dramatic. I enjoyed pointing out people's stupidity and incoherencies whenever I saw them, but I also had a mental filter to block me from running my mouth. "I sound like June. You sound like my mother."
Christina's jaw clenched. "If being worried about your well-being is the same as sounding as your mother—"
"My mother was also more worried about our family's reputation than about me or my goddamn grief back when the police linked that stupid bike back to me, so where does that leave us, huh? Do you really want to stand there, look me in the eyes, and tell me, 'hey, your mother is kind of a bitch and shouldn't have been allowed to procreate, but she was kind of right'?"
"You're twisting my words, Grace."
I threw my hands in the air. "Am I?"
"Yes, you are!" She swung her backpack's strap over her shoulder and reached out for her helmet. "I'm leaving. When you feel like remembering I'm on your side, you know where to find me."
I could have easily followed her out of the rink, yet I didn't. I simply stood there and watched her leave, simply because I knew just how pissed off she was and how it wouldn't help to try and make things right immediately after the explosion. She was hotheaded, probably almost as much as I was, and I knew I wouldn't want her to come after me.
She would have let me go. Maybe that was the problem, after all.
LEON
Being treated as a person of interest in a possible murder case was not a fun thing to do. Being treated as a person of interest in your girlfriend's possible murder case was even worse and I could think of plenty of better things to do with my time.
I was a firm believer in how people saw what they wanted to see and heard what they wanted to hear. Even though my family's money could easily pay for the best lawyers in the state, there was only so much they could do for me when the police seemed to be following a concrete, set in stone narrative and wouldn't budge. They wanted to make me fit their theory—that I had been involved in June's death—so badly that they didn't even care about what I had to say.
They didn't even care that I was innocent. They didn't care that it was just a misunderstanding.
All they cared about was their side of the story.
Naturally, everyone knew. It wasn't just people at school—I meant everyone, even my distant family. News traveled fast in Palo Alto, and gossip ran around even faster than that. It seemed like there was always new information whenever the story reached my ears again and it pissed me off because people wanted to make things sound worse than they actually did just for fun.
Then again, that was the thing about rumors. Most of the time, they weren't true, and people just wanted something to do with their free time, often at other people's expense. They didn't care about authenticity—they cared about entertainment. They wanted answers and this was their way of getting them, even if they weren't true.
"Why were you at the motel that night?" Deputy Clare questioned. I had been asked that question several times now and not just during questioning. It was beginning to get on my nerves. "As you might recall, there are pieces of evidence that place you at the scene of the crime on the night that Juniper died, around the same time as she was there."
"You don't have to answer that," my lawyer, a small woman who wore perfectly fitted suits, argued, sitting next to me with arms firmly crossed. Sweat ran down the nape of my neck, not because I was nervous—I was fully confident in both my innocence and my ability to stay calm under stressful situations—but because I was tired of telling the same story over and over again. "You don't."
"I'd strongly advise you to answer," Deputy Clare insisted. "The quicker we get out answers, the quicker we can figure out what happened that night."
"Don't pressure my client, deputy."
I huffed. "How many times will I have to tell you? I was at the motel on the night June died, but not for the reason you think I was."
"And what is that? Why do you think we think you were there?"
I clenched my hands into fists. "You think I killed June."
"Well?" Deputy Joffrey intervened. "Did you?"
"No," I repeated, for the hundredth time. "No, I did not kill June. I would never land a hand on her, let alone kill her. I see what you're trying to do here, deputies."
"Mr. Matthias," my lawyer warned, through gritted teeth, but I knew my limits. I knew there were things I couldn't say if I didn't want to make things worse than they already were.
"You're trying to get me to confess to a crime I didn't commit," I continued, "even though I have already told you multiple times I didn't hurt June. No matter what I say, you won't believe me. You're basing your accusations on a bunch of circumstantial evidence because it's all you have. You have zero information and I'm not going to sit here and let you turn me into your scapegoat just because your team is so incompetent they keep hitting dead-ends."
"Leon, please answer the question," Deputy Clare pressed. The vein in her neck throbbed. "Why were you at the motel?"
"I was at the motel because June asked me to meet here there," I grumbled. "She didn't tell me why. She said she wanted to talk."
"Talk about what?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. The future, I guess." I stared down at my empty Styrofoam cup. "Guess it doesn't matter now, does it? She wanted to go to San Francisco, but we'd been arguing on the phone"—my lawyer literally facepalmed—"about it earlier that month, so I was sort of confused as to why she was bringing it up. I didn't want to argue with her again, but I still went there."
"Why did she choose that place to talk to you? Couldn't she have talked to you over the phone or somewhere less . . . stranded?"
I shook my head. "June didn't do phones. She wanted to keep things secret."
"Wanted to keep what a secret, exactly?"
"I don't know. She never told me." I leaned forward. "If you have access to the footage from the security cameras, you know I left less than fifteen minutes after I got there. You also know she followed me outside, so she was still alive by then. She called me, I met her there, and then she told me to go home, that she'd changed her mind. She'd been drinking, so I—I guess I should have stayed, but she was so stubborn."
"But you went back."
"Yes. Yes, I did."
"Unfortunately, the footage from the cameras was ruined thanks to the rain, so there's not much we can see past that point. All we know is that you went back to the motel. What happened?"
"I changed my mind, that's what happened. I went back, knocked on the door, but she didn't answer. I thought she'd gone to bed."
"Did you enter the room?"
"Not that time, no. The door was locked."
Deputy Clare's eyes narrowed. "We found samples of your DNA under Juniper's fingernails. Was there some sort of . . . altercation?"
Heat rose up to my cheeks. "Uh—"
"I think we're done here," my lawyer intervened, saving me from the embarrassment of sharing details from my personal life with two police deputies. "You have your answers."
"We're not, actually," Deputy Joffrey corrected. "Did you know about June's condition?"
"What condition?" I asked, with my heart threatening to jump out of my throat. They exchanged nervous looks. "What's going on?"
"Juniper was pregnant when she died," Deputy Clare revealed.
I spilled my guts out over the steel table between us less than thirty seconds later.
eyes emoji
i'm in love with nick from left 4 dead 2. i guess my type is basically guys named nick who fight zombies lmao (nick clark....i miss u bb. i do. i stopped watching the show for YOU)
so. uhhh. this was an ending, wasn't it lol i realized my original plan didn't make as much sense as i wanted it to, so i switched some things here and there.
on the next chapter: sofia remembers she's part of the school newspaper and badmouths one of my favorite books ever. fun times!