“You know what?” Gwen interrupts the silence. I look up at her and see that she’s staring at me intently. “No one’s spray-painted our garage in weeks. Isn’t that weird?”
The fact that my baby sister thinks it’s weird that no one has harassed our family lately makes me unbearably sad for a second. I try so hard to hide it all from her: the vandalism, the nasty letters, the angry glances from our neighbors. I swallow the lump in my throat. “Yeah. True.” I shrug. “Maybe people have started to forget. Not, like, what happened, but the fact that Mom felt the need to insert herself in the middle of it.”
“I doubt it. Now that the trial is about to start…” She trails off, and I glance at her. She’s staring at the television with tears glistening in her eyes, her fists balled in her lap.
“Hey. What’s up, Gwenie?” I straighten and lean toward her. “Are people being dicks to you at school again?”
“Again?” She lets out a sarcastic laugh that hurts my heart. “Again would mean that it had stopped, ever. I’d say that people are still being dicks, yeah.” She gives a tiny shake of her head. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“I thought things were going okay? Did you have a good time at that girl’s party? What’s her name? Emery?”
She snaps her head up, face red. “Don’t ever mention that name around me again. She’s awful.”
My stomach tightens. “What did she do?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She sniffles and buries her face in her hands. I can barely understand her. “She invited me to that party and told me I should try out for cheerleading next year, and I thought maybe things were turning around, maybe things could go back to how they were before all this crap started…and so I show up to her house this past Saturday, and…” She lets out a plaintive sob. “And when I knocked on the door, Emery and this other girl, Jill, answered and I could hear the party going on behind them, and they just looked at me and started laughing. They didn’t even say anything….They just…laughed.” She’s full-on sobbing now. “And then they shut the door in my face, and I could hear them go back to everyone else and they were all…laughing. All of them. At me.”
Sitting here, listening to Gwen, I want to scream at my mom. She should be here to see my little sister’s pain, not off in her office, working to defend a guilty asshole. But whatever.
Actually, no—not whatever. I’m working on not being that guy—the whatever guy. The guy who always backs down and makes himself invisible.
“I’m calling Mom.” I shake my head. “This is bullshit.” I make a move to stand up, and Gwen throws herself on top of me.
“No, please, Zach.” She knocks the wind out of me. I fall back onto the couch. “Please. Don’t call Mom. Please. It’ll just make everything worse. It’s not even her fault, real—”
“How are you still buying that?” I interrupt. “This is all her fault. If she cared about us more than her stupid career, there’s no way she would have taken the case. Put us through this. Don’t you get that?”
“That’s not true.” She moves off me and crosses her arms. “She told me it’s not true. She has to do this: everyone deserves a fair trial.”
“Everyone? Everyone? The guy killed seven people in cold blood. Murdered them. Shot them while they pled for their lives. He killed a teacher. He killed May’s brother. He left them all there to bleed out and die, and then he didn’t even have the decency to kill himself. He stayed around and fucked up more lives. Mom isn’t defending someone who might be innocent. She’s defending someone who is, without a doubt, guilty. What the fuck is the point of that, other than for her to get publicity? She doesn’t give a shit about us.”
All the blood has drained from Gwen’s face, and I realize I’ve gone too far. I reach out and put my hand on her arm, but she snatches it away.