Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [41]
LiquidFlo: whining bitch
XxHipHopxx: they’re gonna expel 6 kids for weed
BlackStar01: no shit!!!
XxHipHopxx: true
MasterMynd: Who?
LiquidFlo: anybody out there know?
XxHipHopxx: Stephanie, Ethan, Kristin--??
BlackStar01: Nahid?
XxHipHopxx: yeah, the towel head
MasterMynd: and she gets off?
XxHipHopxx: she told everything on everybody
MasterMynd: we shoulda done her
BlackStar01: you first
TruHacka03: ugli people should be doomed to hell. ugli people should not go out in public
JMM3: why don’t I do you all a favor and go out and kill myself?
Total online activity: 1.25 hours
An hour after reading the report, I was sitting with Juliana on the floor of her room.
“I didn’t mean it. It was just to shut them up. Please don’t tell my mother, she’ll trip.”
“I had to inform your parents, Juliana.”
“That my friends hate me?”
“These are threats.” I was holding up the transcripts. “Threats to hurt you or that you would hurt yourself. We have to take them seriously.”
“Like the school doesn’t know everybody’s smoking weed? They’re not too hypocritical? Because Nahid’s father is a Saudi prince and gave like ten million dollars for the new campus, and he drives to school in a stretch Hummer limousine?”
“I didn’t know they had Hummer limousines.”
She grimaced at my grown-up ignorance, looked down at her bare feet, toyed with a flower toe ring, trying to hide her face inside the cascade of hair, wavy and dark like mine. She was cleaned up and dressed in a big white shirt and capri-length tights, and the hoarseness had mostly healed, but she was jumpy, hollow-eyed behind the rainbow glasses, like someone weakened after a bout of pneumonia. If Willie John Black’s condition were a monotone of gray, Juliana’s was a chronic spiking fever. You’re okay for a moment, an hour, half a day; then it knocks you flat.
“They don’t understand,” she said quietly. “You made me.”
“What?”
“Tell.”
“We already knew about Stephanie and Ethan. Basically they confessed, straight out. We got a warrant and found the stash in Stephanie’s locker. They brought it on themselves, you have nothing to feel guilty about.” I waited. “Is it hard at school?”
She nodded silently.
“Kids say things about the attack? What do they say?”
“Mostly rude questions.” Her eyes rose warily. “Are you going to arrest those kids from the chat room?”
“We are going to investigate.”
“Don’t. Please.”
“They sent you on a fool’s errand. They did not have your best interests at heart.”
“Your point is?”
“There must be other kids at school you can be friends with. Kids who are worthy of you.”
She was picking at the rose-colored carpeting as if to pull it out in tufts.
“I just want you to know,” I continued steadily, “you have our protection. Nobody is going to hurt you, okay? Take my card again and call me if anything or anyone is bothering you. We have surveillance on your family, and that isn’t going to stop until we catch the guy.”
Juliana started to gag. It was as if her throat closed up on her, an anaphylactic attack based on no invasion but the air. The impulse was to throw open the windows, flush her passageways with the sweet bright world.
“Can you talk? Talk to me. Talk!”
She shook her head. Heaved. Alarmed, I thought she had deliberately swallowed something.
But she was gasping. “I’m—okay.” So there was nothing stuck, it was the breath—a living thing, according to my lifeguard friend—being murdered again and again in some cruel posttraumatic replay of the offender’s script. He hadn’t had to kill her to bring suffering to the max; the repeated assaults had damaged Juliana’s brain so that now it triggered its own gag response. This was irony, not plan. A bonus. Anything could replicate the terror. A loud noise. Violent assaultive e-mails. Her sounds were wrenching. I was helpless to stop them, her mother downstairs would be helpless, too (only knowing these attacks would pass had kept me from calling 911), and as I rocked her with my arms around her slumping shoulders, my eyes were closed, and I was listening to a random fragment