Jackson didn’t take anything seriously. He walked through the world like he knew he could get away with whatever he wanted, and for the most part, he did. His default mode was the assumption he would be lucky, right up until his luck ran out.
He was exactly the kind of numbnut who would dive straight into a rock. Overconfidence plus entitlement should be bottled and sold as a drug. He definitely got high off it.
I don’t know what’s true about the Dive and You’ll Die story. I’m starting to feel like I don’t know what’s true about anything anymore. If you were here, we would talk it through and you would make it make sense, and my head would stop spinning, finally.
Maybe.
Whatever you said, would I believe you? Should I? I’d still want to.
Here’s where you’re right, I guess, about the fourth rule: It doesn’t matter anymore if you killed Jackson or not. It only matters what the jury believes.
Love,
Kayla
November 6
Dear Lainie,
I take it back. That was bullshit, the stuff I said about the fourth rule. It does matter what’s true. It matters to me, anyway.
But what even is truth? Because we all have different perceptions and those perceptions shape our truths, and two contradicting things can be true at once, and argh and ugh and so forth.
Plus with something like love, friendship, or memories . . . those aren’t tangible, provable things. They exist in our heads and hearts, and perceptions there are everything. So how does one determine the truth of them?
Your perceptions of your relationship with Jackson probably differed a lot from his (which differed still from mine, Nitin’s, Emma’s, or anyone else’s), but that doesn’t mean either of you was wrong, just that no one could have the full picture. Which I guess brings us back to your original hypothesis, and I can picture you smirking and raising your eyebrows like “See?”
But there is a true story of how Jackson died, even if perceptions of why are all different. Even if multiple whys might be true. And that story must matter, because if it weren’t true, he wouldn’t be dead. Right?
Excuse me a moment. [Screams into the void] *Brain explodes*
I hate working through impossible questions like this on my own now, without you—or with only the you in my head. It was so much better bullshitting out loud together. If we could meet on the dock and hash this all out, it would feel like we were solving the puzzle of the universe, not turning my brain to mush just trying to assemble the pieces.
It must be cold out on the dock now. Probably windy and frigid, like it is here today. That seems appropriate on the one hand and strange to imagine on the other. In my heart, it’s endless summer there. A place we can never return to but that would always welcome us back. I guess the leaves are gone too. And any last trace of his blood.
Here’s a complicated truth, and one I forget sometimes in the After, because it no longer fits with what I want to believe, but: Jackson was my friend too, in a way.
There’s an alternate path this all might have taken, if the police had stuck to their original theory and declared Jackson’s death an accident. A version of the After where instead of shoving us apart, his death would bring us closer together. Where there would be no arrest and no trial, no blame to throw around, and we would mourn and remember him together.
We would reach out sometimes just to say things like, “Remember the time he kept saying ‘beignet’ when he meant ‘bidet,’ and we all thought it was a story about washing his butt with a pastry, and you laughed so hard you nearly wet your pants?” Or, “Sometimes I picture the dimple that appeared on his right cheek whenever he was about to say something ridiculous, and I don’t know whether to smile or cry.” Or, “He was a jerk sometimes, and so damn full of himself, and I’d give anything to get to be annoyed with him again, you know?” And the other person would remember too and understand.
You would acknowledge he’d been kind of a shitty not-boyfriend, and we would talk that through too: the ways he hurt you. The mistakes you made. The closure you might never get from it. But that would help you move on, in a way. Eventually the missing-him would subside and he would become, for us both, a bittersweet memory. A tragic loss we shared.
I’m Team Lainie to the bitter end, but imagine if there were no teams to be chosen.
Dr. Rita thinks that’s “something we can work on,” the ability to allow myself to mourn Jackson without it feeling like it’s a betrayal of you.
I’m not there yet.
I’m still working on admitting you hurt me.
You know what’s strange? How completely fucking normal this week has been. You are on trial for Jackson’s murder and I have been going to school like usual. Eating lunch with Dina Who I Usually Have Lunch With. Trading smiles with Ian in math class. (He hasn’t tried to kiss me again—nor have I lunged at his face with mine—but we talk a little. Pass notes now and then. It’s nice. Slow and nice. Way more normal than I thought it would be.) Doing homework. Having dinner with Peter and Adele. (They’ve been extra hawklike with the mood surveillance, but each day of your trial that I don’t have a breakdown, they relax their feathers a touch.) Talking about my feelings with Dr. Rita. Reading about my best friend the murderer online for hours each night.
It’s surreal.
In the sketch artist’s drawings of the daily proceedings, you look pretty but steely. There’s a harder look in your eyes than I can imagine actually being there, which I’m guessing means the artist thinks you’re guilty. It’s so weird that a courtroom sketch artist wouldn’t try to be unbiased, but I watched an interview with one in a documentary about another case, and the artist talked about how at first he drew the defendant one way, but as the trial continued, he felt more sympathy toward the guy, and started drawing him differently. Isn’t that wild? I guess the jury doesn’t see the sketches until after they’ve given their verdict, but still. Everyone else does. And how you look definitely influences what people think, for better and for worse.
The coroner’s testimony started today, and I swear, the press is practically salivating. People sharing stuff online are definitely drooling all over themselves. They’re devouring every graphic detail.
I hadn’t thought about this before, but I guess part of the reason people are so fascinated by Jackson’s murder (besides that he was young, white, pretty, and rich, and you’re young, white, and pretty), is they can’t get over the idea of someone like you being violent. Girls and women aren’t supposed to be killers. We’re supposed to be nurturers, healers, and life-givers. I don’t think anyone would be this obsessed if they thought Nitin smashed Jackson’s head with a rock. But the idea of you doing it horrifies and thrills them.
Last night I looked up other murder cases where the alleged killer was female, and it’s the same thing. People get obsessed. No one’s surprised when men are violent. We expect it. Almost celebrate it. Men can kill for fun or out of entitlement or greed, and people only blink twice if the victims are famous or children, and white.
But an attractive female killer gets everyone all worked up. Uncomfortable. Excited. (Less so if it was self-defense. We expect that too: Women kill to escape men; men kill to own women. A lot more of the latter than the former, from what I can tell.) It’s like society has this need for women and girls to be only victims. Your case fascinates because you defy the stereotypes. People want to find a way to explain it away and they can’t. They reassure themselves you must be psycho.