“Nah. It’s you. It’s always you bitches changing. You, your sister, Scarlett. More trouble than you’re worth,” he mutters. “You all need some education.”
I have to spend another—I check my watch again—forty minutes listening to Jeff ramble about how terrible women are? I’d rather pour bleach in my ears. “Thanks for your input, but where’s the box?”
“This whole ‘females first’ shit. That’s what’s wrong with this world. Y’all turned into man haters.”
This asshole. There’s obviously no box of Rachel mementos in this basement, or this house. And even if there was, whatever he has of Rachel’s is not important. Just like the swing isn’t important or the preservation of her space in the mudroom isn’t important. Rachel isn’t in any of these things. She lives in the hearts of the people who loved her.
And Jeff isn’t one of those people.
I don’t know what game Jeff is playing, but I refuse to participate.
“Whatever. I’m leaving.” I’ll walk home.
Before I can get to the door, though, Jeff appears in front of me. The vodka sloshes over the side of his hand.
“Goddammit,” he curses. “Look at what you made me do.”
I shove his arm out of the way. “I didn’t make you do anything.” My mind is already elsewhere. I need to talk to Scarlett. Even if she gets mad at me, we have to talk about Jeff. He’s not treating her right, and all the shit his mom told me upstairs has formed a knot of worry in my belly.
“Rachel always said you were more stubborn than a goat.”
I stop, my hand on the door handle.
“She said that you’d be better at volleyball if you weren’t so quick to jump to conclusions, too,” he continues, and I hear his footsteps moving away from me.
I twist to face him. Rachel did say that about my play—that I was too quick to guess where the ball was going to land. “Why are you bringing this up now?”
“I told you. I just found it.” Jeff drops a medium-sized cardboard box onto the coffee table between the two sofas. So he does have a box.
I release the door handle and drift over toward him, but I stop halfway. “Why did you get sent to England?” I ask warily.
“Because I beat up the housekeeper’s son,” he replies bluntly. “They made me take this bullshit anger management program. Plus rehab for the pills.”
I’m surprised at his honesty. “What pills?”
“Just some oxy. No biggie.”
“Obviously it was big enough for you to go to rehab.” I frown at him. “Why did you beat up that poor kid? What did he ever do to you?”
“He got in my face about Rachel, about how I was partly responsible for her death.”
My pulse quickens. “How so?”
“We were fighting, but I think you suspected that.” Jeff rummages in the box and pulls out a hairbrush. It’s light brown, with blond strands in it. Rachel’s hairbrush.
He kept it all these years? I wonder what else he has in the box. I creep closer. “What were you fighting about?”
He slaps the brush against his hand. “I don’t really remember. It’s been a long time. Plus, remembering is painful.”
He tosses the hairbrush aside and pulls out a T-shirt. I can tell by the color that it’s a Darling High shirt. Is that Rachel’s, too? I move even closer, until I’m only a foot or two from the table.
“I stuffed this all away because I didn’t want to think about her, but I think that’s wrong. We should think about her. Like, would Rachel want you to hang out with the guy who killed her? I don’t think so.” His hand whips out so fast I don’t see it coming.
He grabs my wrist and twists it painfully. I yelp and then fall to my knees. He’s on top of me in the next minute, pushing me onto my back.
“Get off me!” I yell.
“What is it about Donnelly that you like so much? That it’s wrong? You sick up here?” Jeff taps me on the forehead. His eyes are wild and blazing, his jaw tighter than a drum.
I struggle underneath him. “Let me go, asshole.”
“Girls like you need to start listening to guys like me or you’re going to get hurt. I know you don’t want to get hurt.” He grabs both of my wrists in one hand and stretches my arms above my head.
I turn my face and try to bite his arm, but he moves it out of the way. I’ve never felt so helpless. Jeff is six inches taller than me and outweighs me by fifty pounds. He’s using every ounce to subdue me.
My heart beats wildly against my chest. “Wh-what are you doing?” I stammer. “Let me go.”
“Not until you listen to me.” He lowers his face to mine, as if to kiss me.
I wrench my head to the side, and this time I’m not stuttering. “Get off of me, you fucker!”
He claps a hand over my mouth. I bite it. He curses but doesn’t remove it.
“Listen to me,” he insists. “Calm down and listen to me.”
I can’t breathe. His body is weighing me down, squashing the air from my lungs. A mélange of thoughts race through my head. This is Jeff. My sister’s boyfriend. His mom’s upstairs. He’s dating my best friend.
He’s hurting me. He’s hurting me.
I buck up again.
“This is what that Donnelly kid is going to do to you, Beth, if you don’t stop hanging around him.”
A hand fumbles between us, grappling for the waistband of my pants. I twist enough to make him lose his grip, but he’s back again.
“You’re the only one who’s hurting me, Jeff.” I pant. “Stop it.” I try to reason with him. “This isn’t what Rachel would want.”
He laughs. “How do you know? How do you know what she wanted? Did you listen to her? No. It was me who listened to her. I held her hand and dried her tears. I was the one who helped her study, drove her to practice, picked out her clothes, read her texts, listened to her phone calls. And for what? For her to tell me I was being possessive? And awful? Oh no.” He tears at my shirt. “I didn’t put in all that time with her for her to break up with me! Do you hear me?” He’s shouting now. Spit is coming out of his mouth.
I jerk my hands upward, breaking his hold. I scratch at his face and try to wriggle free. When he grabs for my hands again, I roll over, stuffing my arms under my body. He laughs again. It’s a terrible sound.
“You want it like this? You want it like a dog?” His hand lands on my butt.
Oh fuck, this is a mistake. I try to roll over again, but he lies flat on top of me.
And then the door opens.
We both freeze and look up to see Mrs. Corsen at the door. She has a tray filled with drinks in her hands. Somehow, it doesn’t drop to the floor. But her jaw does.
“Mrs. Corsen!” I cry. “Help me. Your son is hurting me.”
“Wh-what?” she stutters in shock.
“That’s not true!” Jeff exclaims at the same time.
His moment of panic is all I need to throw him off me and start running. Past Mrs. Corsen. Up the stairs. Out the door. Down the long drive. I stumble on something. My shoe falls off.
It’s dark out and I can barely see the street because of my tears.
I keep running.
This is how Rachel felt. I know it. That night, she was trying to escape Jeff. She might’ve been crying. I swipe a hand across my face and stagger forward, the tears still obstructing my vision.
I hear the screech of brakes.
Honk!
I look up to see a pair of headlights headed straight for me.
32
Before I can react, a big object slams into my side, pushing me out of the road. I land hard on the sidewalk, the wind completely knocked out of me.
“Ouch!” I cry.
“Are you all right?” an urgent voice asks.
At the same time another one roars, “Get away from her.”
I catch a brief glimpse of Chase’s face before it’s replaced by my mom’s.
“My baby. Oh, my baby.”
Mom throws herself onto the sidewalk and gathers me in her arms. She’s crying as she clutches me against her chest. Just beyond her I see my dad looming, one hand on his hip and the other holding a phone to his ear. I try to peer around Mom for Chase. I swear I saw him.
“9-1-1. Yes, this is Dave Jones. I’m reporting an assault by Charlie—”
“No!” I push Mom aside and lunge at my dad, grabbing the phone from his hands. “There’s no need for any emergency services.” I gasp into the phone. “No one is injured.” I disconnect the call and then throw the phone as far away as I can.
“Goddammit, Elizabeth. What are you doing? Give me your phone, Marnie.”
Mom looks at him uncertainly.
“No. No. No.” I shake my head. “You’ve got it all wrong. I wasn’t running from Chase. I was running from Jeff.”
I point toward Jeff’s house, only to see him at the end of the driveway, blinking at us like a deer caught in the headlights.
“You fucker,” Chase growls, appearing from behind my father’s stiff frame.
The threat lights a fire under Jeff’s heels. He turns and starts booking it toward his house. I run after him, but Chase beats me by a mile, tackling Jeff to the ground. Chase straddles Rachel’s ex, grabbing Jeff’s T-shirt and twisting it around his throat.
“What’d you do?” Chase thunders.
“She was asking for it,” Jeff pants out. “She’s been teasing me since I came back to school, telling me how much she wanted me. She was always jealous of Rachel. She always—”
Out of nowhere, my mother flies forward and slaps Jeff across the face. “Don’t talk about my girls like that!” she spits. Breathing hard, she turns toward me and asks, “What happened, baby? What did he do to you?”
“Jeff attacked me. He was going to rape me.” I lift a corner of my shirt so they can see it was torn.