He frowned. “Bec—”
“Don’t.” Her eyes were red-rimmed, but no tears had fallen yet. She looked down at the pillow again. “Just let me get it out. You’ve heard enough. You might as well hear all of it.” She rolled her lips inward, her expression taking on a faraway quality. “In high school, I was…intense. Like I told you, all my focus was on getting the top grades and making my transcript for college look stellar. Achievement equaled love in my house, so I ended up craving it like an addict. I needed the A’s. I needed to be editor of the paper. I needed to be student council president. The last one was the hardest because I wasn’t naturally outgoing or beautiful, which made a popularity contest a challenge.”
Wes wanted to refute the not-beautiful part but he kept his mouth shut, sensing he would spook her and keep her from telling him more.
She ran her teeth over her lip and picked at a loose thread on the pillow. “All the pressure I put on myself took its toll. I started flipping out over minor things—a B on a test or getting a reporter position instead of editor on the paper. The little failures sent me into a pretty dangerous depression. An angry one. My dad finally noticed, and my doctor sent me to a therapy group for teens. I was willing to go but didn’t want anyone to know, so I attended one in the next town over.”
Wes propped his elbow on the cushion of the chair, leaning his head on his hand, listening.
“Trevor Lockwood was there,” she said, a hollowness in her voice.
“Trevor, one of the shooters.”
She glanced his way briefly and nodded. “Yeah. He’d threatened suicide a few months before. So he was in the group for depression, too. He was the only other kid from my high school, and I didn’t know much about him except that he’d transferred into Long Acre High sophomore year, had that stoner vibe, and took remedial classes. We ran in completely different crowds at school. But the therapy was kind of ridiculous. The head therapist talked to us like we were kindergartners, and she used all these woo-woo, new age techniques. So even though Trevor and I weren’t friends at school, we ended up talking a lot after group and bonding over how lame we thought the whole thing was.”
A shiver of foreboding went through Wes. “You became friends.”
Her gaze went back to the loose string. “It was a weird thing, that bond we developed. The friendship existed in an alternate universe, at least in my mind. A secret society kind of thing. At school, we didn’t acknowledge each other. It was like an unspoken agreement.”
“Understandable. Therapy is private.”
Her fingers dug into the pillow. “Then I messed it all up.”
Wes could see the tension roll through her, stiffening her posture. “What do you mean?”
Her throat worked as she swallowed. “One night after group, I’d had a really rough week and was feeling all this pressure. I got this urge to just…not be me for a little while. To feel what it was like to not give a damn. To be free of all of it.” She shook her head as if admonishing her former self. “So I asked Trevor if he wanted to go somewhere, do something, anything.
“He said we could go out to the lake and get high, but I wasn’t going to do any kind of drug that would stay in my system. So he bought some liquor with a fake ID and shoplifted some snacks from a convenience store. Of course, I didn’t go in with him because I wasn’t willing to take the fall for it.” She blew out a breath. “Which makes me sound like a selfish bitch.”
“Or a smart, law-abiding girl.”
She frowned. “But I wasn’t that night. I was going to drink that liquor and eat that food. I just wanted someone else to take all the risk on my behalf. It wasn’t fair. But he did it without thinking twice, even though I knew he would be facing big consequences if he’d gotten in trouble again. He just…did it. Maybe I didn’t believe he would.”
Wes’s unease grew. Once upon a time, he’d been a lot like Trevor. And he knew exactly why a kid would take that risk. A pretty girl who wanted to spend some time alone with you was a great motivator.
“We drove out to the lake after that,” she said, her voice soft, lost in the memory. “We both got tipsy—not wasted, but enough that it felt illicit, which was what I’d been after. All the pressure had stirred this surge of rebellion in me, and it felt exciting and powerful to push back against it for a little while. To give everyone the middle finger. But then I took it too far.”
Wes stayed quiet, letting her go at whatever pace she needed.
She glanced over at him as if gauging his reaction but then looked away again. “I kissed him. Not because I was so into him, but because it felt dangerous and impulsive. My dad had drilled into me. Don’t drink. Don’t be alone with boys. Don’t put yourself in compromising positions. I’d always listened. But now there I was, alone at the lake, buzzed, with this edgy boy who I wasn’t supposed to be friends with, and I wanted to push back on all those rules. So I kissed him.”
Wes ran a hand over the back of his head. “I’m guessing it was well received.”
A despondent look crossed her face. “That was heady, too. That someone wanted me like that. I could feel how into it he was, how excited. That was new and thrilling to me. The wanting. The physical stuff. I’d been pining for my best guy friend for years by that point with no luck, so it felt good to be on the other end of all that desire.” She tucked her hair behind her ears in an almost little-girl way, like she was back in that teenager’s shoes. “But when it started to go further than I was ready for and began to feel a little too good, I put a halt to things. Stopped everything cold.” She sighed. “Part of me wishes I could say he was aggressive about it or pressured me to keep going, so I could tell you he was always a villain. But he didn’t. He was completely cool about it—stopped and apologized, made a joke about outdoor sex being a bad idea anyway. And he took me home.”
Wes absorbed all of that, imagining the scene, the simple act of teenagers getting wrapped up in hormones and alcohol and new experiences. Almost everyone had a story like that. But this was no ordinary experience in a life. That boy Rebecca had kissed would become a mass murderer. How could a kid who’d been a gentleman with a girl take such a sharp turn? Had something happened in between? A bad year. A family trauma. “How long before the shooting did all this happen?”
“Weeks,” she said softly.
Wes’s stomach flipped over. “Weeks?”
Her eyes glistened again. “After that night, I came back to my senses, realized how stupid I’d acted, how close I’d gotten to doing something really reckless. Plus, I was embarrassed. I skipped the next few weeks of therapy group to avoid him. I continued to pretend I didn’t know him at school, though I’d noticed him trying to catch my eye a few times. I basically shut him out completely. But then one day after lunch, when I was passing out flyers for a student council event, he stopped me.” She swiped at her eyes. “He asked me to prom in front of a group of people, including Finn, my friend I had a crush on. People were looking at me, whispering. I panicked. Trevor was not someone I could be associated with at school.”
Wes knew what was coming, but he stayed quiet, letting her get it out.
“I said…” Tears fell down her face and her fingers squeezed the pillow. “I said, ‘Who are you again?’ and laughed.” Her voice snagged on the word. “I laughed at him, Wes. Humiliated him in front of all those people. And I saw the look on his face. I saw that glimmer of decency and hope die in his eyes, saw how it hardened over. I killed something in him in that moment.”
Wes’s heart broke at the anguish in her voice. “Rebecca…”