The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs: A Novel Read online

  “And no phones,” Caroline said. “Okay?”

  “I just want to text Peyton. Tell her that my mother Patty Hearsted me.”

  “Patty Hearsted you?”

  “Geez, Mom. Patty Hearst? Stockholm syndrome? Are you sure you went to college?”

  “Can you just put the phone away?” Caroline said. “Let this be just you and me for a while?”

  As if in protest, Caroline’s phone rang. Polly picked it up off the console and looked at the display. “It’s the school. Dr. Powers is probably pissed that you broke me out.”

  “Don’t answer it. I just want to drive for a while. No phones. No texts. Just us. Okay?”

  There was another protracted silence before Polly spoke again. “Fine, but you’re scaring me. And pissing me off, too.”

  Taking Polly out of school had made sense to Caroline. Freeing her from the clutches of Dr. Powers and his pasty-faced secretary seemed like the only thing she could do. There was no way that she was going to lead her daughter into that dingy little office and give the principal the opportunity to suspend her after she had defended her mother’s honor.

  But there was more to it than that. The truth was … well, Caroline didn’t know what the truth was. She suspected it was a combination of several things, chief among them her desire not to be alone. Had she been heading north on her own, she probably would’ve turned back already. Somehow, despite Polly’s protests, her presence had emboldened her. Made her feel braver than she had felt in a long time.

  And she was going to need it. Caroline may have found the courage to stand up to Mary Kate Dinali. She may have had the audacity to remove her daughter from school. But returning to Blackstone and executing her plan would require a lot more courage—the kind of courage possessed by a girl who could punch a popular girl in the nose.

  * * *

  Mother and daughter didn’t say a word for almost an hour, but the silence was welcome, at least for Caroline. It gave her a chance to decide how much of the story she would tell Polly—and how much she would not.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the PTO meeting,” Caroline finally said, breaking the silence. They were on the New Jersey Turnpike. The sun was low on the horizon, and clouds were building in the west. “I didn’t realize that it would affect you. But I should have.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I can’t undo it,” Caroline said. “But I really feel bad about it.”

  “Is it true you told Grace’s mom to fuck off?”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t swear.”

  “Mom, if you’re going to kidnap me, drive me a million miles from home without letting me pack a toothbrush or a change of underwear, you could at least be straight with me. Besides, I’m only quoting you. Right?”

  “I said some things last night that I shouldn’t have,” Caroline admitted.

  “I can’t believe it. You’re like a houseplant in those meetings.”

  “A houseplant is stretching it a bit.”

  “Yeah, right. Remember last year when you made me ask the questions about the Cape Cod tournament?”

  “I know,” Caroline said. “Lay off.”

  “I mean, you never talk in any meetings.”

  “I know,” she repeated. “I get it.”

  “Then why’d you do it?” Polly asked “What did Grace’s mom say that turned you into a crazy person?”

  “Nothing, really. At least nothing that she hasn’t said before. She was telling us how we weren’t doing enough for the school. How the same people were stepping up again and again for every event.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Caroline said. “But then she went after this woman who didn’t deserve it. A woman trying to do the best she can. I just lost it.”

  “Mom, you’ve never lost it in your entire life. You’re like the total opposite of losing it.”

  “I know.”

  “So what happened?”

  Caroline sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “C’mon. It must have been something. You don’t just flip your lid for nothing.”

  “I just got upset. Okay?”

  “Right,” Polly said, anger returning to her voice.

  “What?”

  Polly said nothing. She stared ahead. Folded her arms.

  “What?” Caroline said, anger in her own voice now.

  “The least you could do is tell me the truth.”

  “I’m serious,” Caroline said. “I just got upset.”

  “Mom, someone could be chopping your hands and feet off with a butter knife and you still wouldn’t complain. I’ve never seen you lose your temper once. Not even with me, and I deserve it. A lot. I love you, but you get walked all over all the time and never say a word. You expect me to believe that some lady who acts like a bitch all the time acted like a bitch again and you lost your mind?”

  Polly was right. She deserved to know. Not all of it, of course, but the beginning at least. “Fine. I’ll tell you. You have the right to know.” She thought for a moment, wondering where to begin. Where do you start the story of your life? “I was picked on when I was your age.”

  “Big surprise.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw your yearbook,” Polly said. “You weren’t exactly cool.”

  “Yeah. Well, I wasn’t. But I wasn’t hopeless, either. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “You know how there are kids who never quite fit in? They’re awkward or overweight or they stutter or something like that?

  “Yeah?”

  “I wasn’t a weird one,” Caroline said. “I just wasn’t cool enough. I was shy. I was so shy. I still am. And I didn’t have the right clothes or the right shoes. And I didn’t have a lot of friends. And your grandmother didn’t help the situation.”

  “After Grandpa left?”

  “Yeah. Your grandmother was a mess for a long time. I guess I was, too.”

  “And Aunt Lucy? Was this before she—”

  “Around the same time. And Mom just wasn’t there for me.”

  “All that sucks,” Polly said. “But what does this have to do with last night?”

  “I think that when Mary Kate was talking to us like that, I felt like she was talking to me. It was like I was getting picked on all over again. And we were sitting in a high school cafeteria, so I think that may have escalated it. You know? Kind of like a perfect storm.”

  “What did the high school cafeteria have to do with it?”

  “I guess everything sort of started going downhill for me in the high school cafeteria. It’s where things went bad first. Turned me into a real outsider. And sort of turned me inside myself, too.”

  “What happened?” Polly asked.

  Caroline took a deep breath. “I’ve never told anyone this before.”

  “Maybe you were waiting to tell me.”

  Caroline laughed. “Maybe.” She’d held this secret in so long that it felt like a part of her. As critical to survival as her heart or lungs.

  “So?” Polly said. “It’s not like you’re letting me talk to anyone else. And no time like the present. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Keeping secrets is actually bad for you,” Polly said. “It stresses your frontal cortex. Sticks a roadblock in your brain that keeps you from moving onto other things.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You doubt me?” Polly asked.

  “Did you learn that in school?”

  “No,” Polly said. “I read it in Forbes.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Now c’mon. I want to hear.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  “Just shut up and talk.”

  “Fine,” Caroline said. She felt like she was standing on the edge of a cliff, about to plunge into a sea of freezing water. Once she began, there would be no turning back. “Her name was Emily Kaplan. We were best friends. At least I thought we we
re.”

  “What happened?”

  Caroline smiled. “Nothing good. After it happened, I tried to never think about it again. But I guess I never stopped thinking about it.”

  “What happened?”

  Caroline decided to tell Polly the story. Not the whole story, but the first half.

  The part before she killed Lucy.

  eight

  Caroline had been naïve. Everything she knew about high school had come from movies like The Breakfast Club and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She expected a campus rather than a school, with large swaths of unsupervised space and enormous blocks of unscheduled time. She expected well-lit hallways lined with lockers and trophy cases, a gleaming cafeteria, a football field, and a collection of odd and easy-to-fool teachers.

  And she expected the students to be divided into clearly delineated categories. Caroline didn’t really think she’d fit into any of the cliques. She wasn’t a jock or a cool kid, a stoner or an outcast. But she hoped to achieve a sort of Molly Ringwald–type status. She would be the girl who was a little shy and a little poor, who would eventually find her tribe and earn the grudging respect of the masses.

  That was the problem with being naïve. You went into things entirely unprepared.

  Caroline didn’t get her Brat Pack utopia. At Blackstone-Millville Regional High School she found low-hanging ceilings, dim, fluorescent lighting, and a dingy cafeteria that smelled of spoiled milk. Worse, she was faced with a highly structured, well-supervised environment with four minutes between classes, a complete absence of free time, and a draconian emphasis on homework. There was no football team. No quirky teachers. There were cliques, all right, but most kids didn’t fit into those convenient boxes. Some dumb jocks were smart. Some cool kids were mean. There were popular stoners, articulate stoners, sad stoners, and everything in between. Whole categories Caroline hadn’t even though about. Punks. Princesses. Good-looking geeks. The aggressively college bound. The clinically depressed. The invisible kids. So many invisible kids.

  Standing on that sidewalk on the first day of school, Caroline was filled with misconceptions. She was frightened, but she was hopeful. Foolishly hopeful.

  Emily Kaplan’s idea of high school had been entirely different. Pretty, intelligent, and charming, bolstered by the wealth of her yuppie parents and her only-child status, Emily was a confident kid well armed for high school. Confident people, Caroline thought, didn’t worry. They did not plan. They possessed an expectation that they could overcome any challenge placed before them. It’s not that the world bent entirely to Emily’s needs—even she had her disappointments—it’s that she carried herself with the confidence of a person who believed it eventually would. Emily was nervous on the first day of high school, but ultimately, she knew that she would find her way and come out on top. Because she always had.

  “The John F. Kennedy of children.” That’s how Caroline’s mother had referred to Emily. Caroline hadn’t understood the reference at the time, but even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Emily’s social skills were of little consequence to Caroline. For Caroline, it was much simpler. Emily was her best friend. The person who knew her best. The person who made her the happiest. Their friendship was a miracle of sorts. Caroline’s luckiest break.

  “Did you actually like Emily?” Polly asked.

  “I loved Emily. You couldn’t not love her. And as little kids, we were together all the time. I spent more time with Emily than anyone else. That history meant something.”

  The two girls had grown up across the street from each other. Up until eighth grade, Caroline and Emily had spent at least of portion of every day together, and when they weren’t in school, they were often together for the entire day.

  In childhood, proximity matters. It matters a lot.

  “And I knew that being friends with Emily was good for me,” Caroline explained. “I knew it made me … not exactly popular, but less invisible.”

  “So you were a name dropper?” Polly asked, a smirk spreading across her face.

  “Maybe,” Caroline admitted. “When stuff like that started to matter. But when we were little, we were more like sisters.”

  “What about Aunt Lucy?” Polly asked. “Where was she?”

  “Lucy was four years younger than me, which is like a million years younger when you’re a kid. I was in second grade before Lucy could even walk. Emily and I would let her hang out with us sometimes, but mostly we left her at home. There was a little girl who lived two houses over. Patty something, I think. Lucy spent a lot of time with her.”

  “So you bagged on your sister?” Polly said.

  “No,” Caroline said, not entirely sure what bagging on her sister meant. “Lucy and I were close. We would sit on the couch under the same blanket at night and watch TV and eat popcorn. And Lucy would climb into my bed whenever she had a nightmare, which was like every night. But I couldn’t talk to her like I could to Emily. She was just too young.”

  Caroline’s father had built a tree house for her when she was in kindergarten. It had been a safe haven for Caroline and Emily throughout most of their school years. Built within the bifurcated trunk of a towering oak at the edge of the tree line, it represented a demarcation of sorts for them. On one side stood Caroline’s backyard. Civilization, where a glass of water or a Band-Aid could be had in a moment’s notice. On the other side stood the untamed copse that filled the swath of land between Farm and Lincoln Streets, an area that Caroline and Emily had called the Deep Dark Wood.

  Until they were old enough to care about skinned knees, muddy socks, and mosquito bites (and that came later for them than most girls), this was where Caroline and Emily had spent most of their childhood. They caught frogs in the trickle of water that they called Bloody River because it was where Emily had once gashed her elbow on a rock. They swung on the teenagers’ rope swing over Getchell’s Pond, perfecting their Tarzan calls and clinging on for dear life. They read novels by Judy Blume and Lois Lowry beneath a low-hanging pine tree and argued over which one of them most resembled Margaret and Claire. They hiked and climbed and crawled and swam like only free-range children of a generation ago could.

  But no matter how long they spent exploring the forest, they would eventually find their way back to the tree house and to their favorite positions on either side of the small, rectangular room. There they would talk for hours, feasting on Flaky Puffs and Junior Mints and drinking cans of warm Mello Yello.

  Caroline had never been more true to herself than in those early days with Emily. Competition and envy didn’t exist between the girls. Their friendship had no room for ego or deceit. That was simply the way it was. And it was perfect.

  Caroline’s father left on Saint Patrick’s Day when she was seven years old. He went out to the Firehouse Pub and never came home. At the time, Caroline didn’t entirely understand what had happened. Her father drove a truck and was often gone for two or three weeks at a time. She assumed that he was on another road trip. The two had been close when she was little, but the cross-country trips, combined with what Caroline later understood to be her father’s descent into alcoholism and depression, had driven them apart. She loved her father, but she stopped needing him because he wasn’t around to be needed.

  Proximity, it turns out, works both ways.

  Caroline came home one day to find her mother crying at the dining room table. One of her father’s bottles was on the table beside her, empty. “Your father left,” she had said. “He doesn’t want to come back. He’s in Florida, and he wants to stay there.”

  “Do we have to move to Florida?” Caroline asked.

  “No, hon. We don’t.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  “You understand what I’m saying,” her mother said, looking at her closely. “Right? Dad isn’t coming home like he usually does.”

  “I know,” Caroline said. But she didn’t. Not really. “He’ll be back for Easter, probably. And my birthday. And those aren’t far away. I
t’s just like a long trip in his truck. But he’ll be back soon.”

  “Did he come back for your birthday?” Polly asked.

  “No.”

  “Bastard,” Polly said quietly.

  Caroline was accustomed to her daughter’s indignation, but it was usually directed at her. This was different. It was nice.

  “My mother let things sink in slowly for me. Let me figure it out myself over time. I know it sounds rotten of me. I had just lost my dad, but I wasn’t all that upset at first.”

  Polly screwed up her face. “Really?”

  “Here’s the thing … I was used to home being just Mom and Lucy and me. ‘Just us girls,’ as my mother would say when Dad was away, which was all the time. And I was in middle school. Getting ready for high school. I had so much to think about already. So much of my life to deal with. And back then, parents just weren’t as enmeshed in their kids’ lives like they are today. There were days when I would leave the house in the morning and not come home until the streetlights came on. And I still had Emily. Even more than my mother or Lucy, I had Emily. There’s a time in your life, you know, when your parents and your family just aren’t as important as your friends. At least that’s the way it was for me.”

  “I get it,” Polly said. Caroline knew that she did.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Caroline said. “My father broke my heart. It just took time. It broke a little bit at a time.”

  “He broke Grandma’s heart, too,” Polly said, more a statement than a question.

  “Yes, but he broke hers all at once. Maybe that’s why she was a disaster for so long. Then Mom was forced to sell the house, and we moved into the apartment on Main Street. That’s when I really got angry at my father. I hate to say it, but it wasn’t until we lost the house that I was really upset about him leaving.”

  “When your dad leaves you like that, you get to feel however the hell you want.”

  “Maybe so,” Caroline said.

  “There’s no maybe about it, Mom,” Polly said.