The Girl on the Edge of Summer Read online

  “It’s certain she did so?”

  “Yes, she left a note. There were messages from him making it clear he was extorting her for sex, and the pictures exist.”

  She sighed. “I was afraid something like that happened. I’m not old, but everything happens so fast for these kids—all the social media takes off the filters. One stupid comment or angry retort, hanging out for the world to see.”

  “Who were her friends?”

  “Oh, boy, let me think, she seemed to float around the edges of several groups.”

  “Afraid I might talk to them? Your name will never come up.”

  She gave a short—not funny—laugh. “Maybe. More that I don’t want to land other kids into something they shouldn’t be in.”

  “You think they can escape this?”

  She watched a bird fly across the sky, finally answering, “No, I guess not. Much as we try, they can still fall off the edge. Okay, Janice Watkins was the person I saw her hanging around with most. But I’d guess Sophia Gauthier was the one she’d talk to if she was going to talk. Janice was more popular, Sophia a science nerd.”

  “Hierarchies are so important, aren’t they?”

  “I keep thinking, that matters? Really? But to them it does. One slip down the cool kids ladder is a crisis.”

  “Where was Tiffany on the cool kid ladder?”

  “Off to the side, would be my guess. She wasn’t a cheerleader, not the type to run for class president. Was happy to hang out but just didn’t have whatever it took to rate.”

  “Think she wanted to?”

  “What kid doesn’t? It seems so important in high school.”

  “What about boys? Any you can think of?”

  She glanced at her watch. The end of lunch. “Also a hard one. This used to be a girls’ school, then economics made it co-ed. So there are fewer boys than girls.”

  “Good for the boys, I’d guess.”

  “Except most of these boys are too nerdy to make the best use of it.”

  “Still scaring girls with frogs?”

  “The high-tech version. Pictures of gross things on their phones. Brandon…some B-letter Cajun name, hung around with her crowd. Kevin Boudreaux. Gary Collier. Those are the only ones I can think of.”

  “She dating any of them?”

  “I doubt it. They weren’t considered dating material.”

  We started walking back.

  “You think any of them will talk to me?”

  “Probably. They all seem either numb, in shock, or still crying. I think they want to talk about it. Several have approached me, but we’re supposed to refer them to the school counselor. And she’s a gray-haired old lady.”

  “So am I.”

  “Not the way she is. You’re wearing jeans. She probably never has. I can make you a list of all the names I can think of, phone numbers with some of them. Places they hang out.”

  “Please tell me I don’t have to go to the mall.”

  “Bingo. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve survived worse. Thank you, this will be very helpful.”

  “I can ask—if you’d like—for them to talk to you.”

  “Yes, if you could. I promise to be discreet. And kind.”

  “Just see if you can make some sense of this.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  We turned the corner near the convenience store. “I used to be one of those beige girls, back in high school, when somebody liking me mattered the whole world. I got out, had a few good teachers along the way. Discovered a big world where high school seemed small and unimportant. I got the chance to travel, from backpacking Europe one summer during college, to a six-month trek down South America. Hiked Machu Picchu. A world lost hundreds of years ago. The slights of high school couldn’t compare.”

  “But now you’re back in high school.”

  We were at the school gate.

  “Yes, but now I’m the teacher. The person who might convince those beige girls the world is far, far bigger than being third runner-up for homecoming queen. I pity them now, those popular girls and boys. It’s the Peggy Lee song, ‘Is That All There Is?’ but they don’t know that yet, and too many of them get to fifty before they figure out they should have kept going.”

  I nodded and thanked her. She gave me her phone number and we said good-bye.

  I quickly hiked back to my car. I was beginning to itch; maybe I was allergic to the suburbs.

  Besides, enough time had passed, and now I could call it lunch. To make up for the croissant, I contented myself with the turkey sandwich left over from yesterday. It needed to be eaten.

  As I munched on the healthy whole wheat—chewy, okay, a little stale—bread, and turkey with mustard, I considered what I had learned.

  Little that really mattered to the case. Teachers still care about their students—some of them. Kids are still caught in the small world of liking and being liked, fumbling, stumbling to adulthood. Most would make it, some wouldn’t. A few of those would be lost the way Tiffany was lost, suicide, drugs, driving too fast, but too many would be adolescents trapped in adult bodies in an adult world, when all they could really manage was how many likes they had on social media.

  It wasn’t pleasant at the time—I knew I was queer and my home life didn’t fit the standard pretty picture—but somehow knowing I’d never compete in the popular crowd games forced me to hope for something beyond that world. And maybe that little glimmer let me survive.

  My reverie was broken by the ringing phone. It was Cindy Lee. Several of the kids were willing to meet me today after school, at a pizza place down the block. As luck would have it, they had all been scheduled for a science club meeting, but it had been canceled, so I seemed to be a better choice than going home.

  With that sorted, all I had to occupy me was contemplating if the turkey sandwich had really been enough sustenance or whether I needed something more. I made it to needing more and was saved by the phone from having to decide if that should be an apple or something on the more chocolate side.

  Lady Jane had gotten into the computer and phone. All I needed to do was hike down one flight, and this case would be cracked.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Edward Springhorn. “Call me Eddie,” as his Facebook page said.

  I thanked Lady Jane for her work. She said this was just the top layer, so to speak, mostly from the phone. Did I want them to pull any more data? I said yes, better to know more, and told her to put the bill in the mail—email in this case. I declined Timmy’s offer of “rosemary-infused chai tea. It’s delish,” and headed back upstairs, taking the steps slowly.

  Once at my desk, with a newly made cup of coffee in front of me—my idea of delish—I looked over the file she had handed me.

  Tiffany, like most teenagers, had a secret life, one hidden from the adults around her. We all did it, keeping our tentative steps in a separate silo carefully sorted into closed boxes, the experiments with the forbidden—sex, booze, drugs.

  There were a few pictures of her and some friends getting high on marijuana, some with beer cans around them. Tame compared to a needle hanging out of her arm.

  And what for the most part were relatively innocent flirtations, all in hard-to-decipher text messages in made-up words. “Ur ht when u wk out.” “No ’rents at home. Wann cum ovr?”

  For the most part, the boys had been equally stumbling back.

  But not, as I’m sure he liked to call himself, “Fast Eddie.” He was easy to pick out in the pictures, clearly older than the others. A scruffy beard; big shoulders like he worked out or worked a manual-labor job; his hair, dark brown, was styled in the latest fashion, with the sides buzz cut, long on top. Although he was at most in his mid-twenties, his face was showing the middle-aged man he’d be. Chai tea was clearly not on his diet. His nose had a red tinge; the cheeks were bloated and starting to sag. Once he stopped working out, the fat would overtake the muscles, was so even now. My guess was at least a cou
ple of beers every day, pizza alternating with hamburgers, and the only veggies the ones that came on the pizza if he didn’t pick them off. Maybe he was a school mate who’d been held back a few years but just as likely one of the older guys who liked to hang around high schools, knowing that a few years and having a car or his own place made him seem like a catch to the young girls on the verge of being women. It was an old, sad story; older man takes advantage of younger girl.

  I know I was delaying reporting back to Mrs. Susie Stevens, but I wanted to read the entire file, pull out things—like the beer and weed—that she probably didn’t really want to know and give only what was most pertinent to what she had asked me to do.

  Even then, I censored most of it. It wasn’t pretty; Tiffany seemed clueless and lost. Even in the brief messages, she was torn between not wanting to lose his attention and reluctant to do what he was asking. He had the game down, albeit in crude fashion—first the mild flirting, just like the other boys, but he knew the next steps, a focused flattery—“ur so gdlk, u gotta hv men at ur tail,” “ur serius 1 of the sexyish grls I er met.” Then on to “I cant stp thinking abt u.” “id lke to b w / u, hold you.” Then, “can I get a pic?” “No, one only for me, just u no clthes.”

  First she sent him a picture of her under the pink rose sheets, only her shoulders bare, the rest left to imagination.

  But that wasn’t enough.

  I jotted down a rough chronology. They’d met in fall, the end of the football season, late November, at some party. It was unclear who gave it and when. That was when the first flirting started. He mentioned traveling, a job (oh, how grown up) that required him to make deliveries along the coast to Florida and back. He called it delivering high-end goods. I wondered if they were the kind of goods you smoked or snorted to get high.

  They met in person again over the Christmas holidays; he seemed to have even gotten a kiss under the mistletoe. “Ur lps r so soft, lk a woman, not a grl. Want more.”

  He was gone again but escalated the messages, asking for the nude picture until he got it. Once she bared her breasts for him, he knew he had her. She’d crossed the line, and he was cunning enough to pick the girls who would think it was their fault for giving in.

  The one I’d found in her room was one of the last of the only-breasts ones. She made excuses, “cldnt get a pic, ’rents around,” but always eventually gave in. First one nipple, then both breasts, then most skin revealed. A month before she died, she sent him one of her fully nude, shot in the full-length mirror of her closet door, the rose sheets in the background. The lighting was bad, it was clearly taken at night, and her facial expression was of doing a chore, not being sexy for her boyfriend.

  After the first breast shots, he’d returned again, and it seemed this time there had been kissing and serious groping, maybe a hand job. Only enough to make him want more. “I need to have u. Pics not enough. Wanna be in ur pssy n ass. All the way now or u lose me. Ill get a hotel, the whole night.”

  How romantic.

  She—finally—said no. Alas, not a firm no, but a “cant be out all night. ’rents will have a cow.” She seemed to want a little more romance “cant we go to a movie and play a litt after.”

  He wanted sex. “u wanna be a woman or a ltl girl? stop teasing and give me what u promised.” He was good at manipulation. And threats. “want me to send all those pics out? to all the boys on my list? all ur schl?”

  She gave in, meeting him in his car for a blow job.

  His tender response, “c, not so bad. u need to work on taking more in.”

  She didn’t seem to agree, again making excuses for why she couldn’t meet him. “cant get away, ’rents mking me visit grandma.”

  “dont be a bad girl, u no what happens to bad girls. pics all over school.”

  Her only reply was, “please dont.” He kept hounding her, but she no longer texted back. My guess was that was when he started sending the notes. To make sure she knew she couldn’t get away from him.

  I got up for another cup of coffee. It would keep me awake tonight, but I doubted I’d sleep well anyway.

  Her knight in shining armor turned out to be the dragon.

  Why didn’t she have enough sense to turn to an adult? For the same reason we all did at that age. We didn’t want to admit we couldn’t handle the situation, or we were so ashamed and lived in a black-and-white world and couldn’t see that in ten years it wouldn’t matter because ten years from seventeen seems so impossibly long that it might as well be the moon. All the future you can see is going to school the next day and the day after that.

  I should call Mrs. Stevens and hand this off to her. Not the timeline I’d created, or the messages I’d used to create it. I didn’t know Tiffany, and it was painful; it would break a mother’s heart. I’d return the phone, computer, and flash drive and give her what information I had on Fast Eddie. Unless she asked—which I doubted—I’d keep most of the details to myself.

  I made a separate file and put in it every sordid word and image from her phone and computer. That file would stay hidden deep in a drawer, separated from the official case file. I wasn’t going to let Mrs. Stevens see any of it, even across my desk.

  I made the call. She answered on the first ring. I told her I had information for her and offered to come out to her house in Metairie. I was too much of a coward to risk having her break down in my office and me being the only one available to deal with it. I was also too much of a coward to do it today, making an appointment for tomorrow morning.

  That would also give me time to consider how to present this to her. And to come up with probes to see what she intended to do with the information.

  I quelled my inner debate of whether or not to go down to the computer grannies and see if they wanted to do some hacking on this toad’s life by calling Torbin; he’d be a distraction. Vigilante justice isn’t my style, but Fast Eddie seemed to be begging for the karma train to catch him in the tunnel.

  I needed to update Torbin on how useful his suggestion of online matchmaking had been. Four rings—almost voice mail—and he answered.

  “I don’t want any, and my mind is already made up as to who I’ll vote for.”

  “Too bad, I have a sweet deal on a spectacular bridge out on the West Coast.”

  “Not a swamp? I’m disappointed.”

  “Swamps are all sold out. You missed a great deal.”

  “So what did I do to have your cheery voice brighten my day? It’s been such a long time.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I admitted. It had been a while since I’d picked up the phone to call him. But I skimmed over that and got to my point, “To thank you for your suggestion that women desperate enough to throw themselves on the internet might be good dating material.” I then launched into a totally honest description of how completely awful my date had been.

  His response was a bland, “It’s only your first one. You can’t condemn it after only one try.”

  “I think you owe me.”

  “I made a suggestion. You could have chosen to remain in your loveless rut swilling cheap Scotch.”

  “It’s not cheap.”

  “Whatever. You could have come up with another plan or taken my suggestion. I think you owe me for having the temerity to suggest you do something besides work yourself to death.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy the first drink if you buy the second.”

  “Agreed, but there has to be food involved. My stomach is no longer young enough to consume copious amounts of booze without something to soften the blow.”

  I proposed tonight. It would be nice to debrief after today, and I wasn’t counting on the pizza place to be suitable supper, but Andy had already started dinner. I finally said, “How about the Saturday after next? I’ll cook.”

  “Can’t, have another obligation.”

  “Am I missing something going on? You’re the second person to be already booked for that Saturday.”

  “Coincidence, I’m sure. We’ll come
up with a date and time. Have to go and help Andy with chopping onions.”

  After I hung up, I glanced at my watch. Time for another trip to Metairie.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The traffic back out there was the most annoying thing about the trip. The second most annoying thing was that it was for nothing. I already had the information I needed, and quite frankly, as much as I wanted to know. I doubted that Tiffany’s school friends could tell me anything else that would be useful.

  I pulled into the lot at Uncle Poppo’s Pizza-Pie. Its appeal seemed to be how close it was to the school. It was in a strip mall that probably dated from the sixties and even then hadn’t been built for high-end establishments. Boxy, yellow brick with big greasy plate glass windows, the kind that looked like they leaked when it rained. It was a quarter after three; the kids would be there around three thirty.

  I sighed and got out of my car. Maybe Uncle Poppo’s was one of those hidden gems and the pizza would be good. I could order one to go and that would be supper. And breakfast. Cheer the fuck up, Micky, I told myself. I needed to be witty and bright for the kids, or at least my most professional self. They had to be upset at the early death of someone they knew, they had agreed to give me their time, and I needed to respect that. I wouldn’t let on I already knew who had pushed Tiffany to the edge. Maybe they would have some kind stories of her as a friend, ones I could give to Mrs. Stevens to help soften the blow.

  The place was empty, only a table of three old guys nursing beers that were probably how most of their afternoons were spent. I headed for a large, circular booth at the back. I wasn’t sure how many kids would show up.

  It was a couple of minutes before the lone waiter ambled over to where I was. Slow afternoon meant everything moved slowly.

  “I’m meeting some people,” I said, to justify taking up all the space. I ordered a large everything pizza—that should cover all the bases—and two pitchers of soft drinks, one regular and one diet.