Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,31

number. Just as well. The last e-mail from him read simply, Chill, babe, and I had no idea what it was regarding, since it had been sent before the accident, when I’d had nothing in my life I needed to chill about. I stared at his e-mail address, filling with a mixture of hurt and venom. He’d ruined my life and saved his own. Even after he realized how much trouble I was in, he did nothing to help me. Instead, he dug my grave deeper. I was tempted to e-mail him. Tell him exactly what I thought of him now. But it would be a mistake. E-mailing him—contacting any of my friends from my old life—would be a mistake I couldn’t afford to make. In a moment of supreme willpower, I erased my mail. All of it. I wasn’t going to live in the past. I needed to be in the here and now, and it felt good to see the empty mail box. The blank slate.

I left my e-mail account and began researching “art restoration,” quickly learning that I was in even more trouble than I’d thought. I had absolutely no business going near that mural. Restoration was no job for a novice, let alone for one person. Page after page on the restoration sites showed groups of people wearing protective gear as they worked together on a mural. Was Jesse Williams setting me up for failure for some unknown reason? Or maybe this was his approach to dealing with the kids he tried to save. Maybe he set each of them up with an impossible task and then goaded them to complete it to boost their self-esteem. Again I wondered if he had the wrong Morgan Christopher. I Googled my name on the computer, not for the first time of course, but this time I added the word “artist” to my search. Mine was the only name that showed up. It was on Instagram, my old preprison account, when I still looked fresh faced and innocent, rather than the haunted-looking girl I saw in the mirror these days. Staring at my Instagram page, I felt myself caving. Tentatively, knowing how much it was going to hurt, I clicked on a picture of myself with my parents. I’d posted it a few years ago, why I wasn’t sure. Maybe I’d wanted to pretend I had a normal life. A normal family. We’d been at the state fair, and to an outsider, we probably looked like a handsome threesome. Nice-looking father. Attractive, golden-haired mother. Blond daughter, pretty despite wearing no makeup. No one could tell the warped history of the family from this photograph, or that a short time later, the pretty daughter would be locked up. Now I saw the picture differently and it startled me. The three of us stood in front of the Ferris wheel. My father had his arm around my mother. Although it was morning, I knew he was already hammered. I could tell by the sloppy grin, by the way his hand grazed my mother’s breast. My mother was probably three sheets to the wind herself, her prescription sunglasses askew. They didn’t look like lowlifes, my parents. They’d both somehow managed to hang on to their computer programming jobs. High-functioning alcoholics. I’d learned that term in AA. I hated the way my very presence in the photograph seemed to give them credibility. Made them look like worthy parents. “You were a mistake,” my mother told me once when she was blotto. “We never wanted to have kids.” That had already been pretty clear to me. They’d never been there for me.

This ruminating was doing me no good.

I looked up some of my old friends’ Instagram accounts, but what did I have in common with any of them now? Most of them had recently graduated, and if I hadn’t screwed up, I would have graduated with them. I winced as I scrolled through their pictures. There they were, partying, laughing, without a care in the world. In bikinis at somebody’s pool, bottles of beer in their hands. I’d never fit in with them again. I didn’t want to. Even my best friend Robin looked like she was toasted. They’d learned zip from my experience. They probably thought that what happened to me was just shitty bad luck. I felt so alone, looking at the pictures. My boyfriend of two years—Trey—was gone. My girlfriends would no longer have a thing in common with me. My