Then Maddy was murdered, and the vicious cycle began anew. Only this time Charlie was part of it. A supporting player to Maddy’s morbid starring role. She talked to so many people in the days following the murder. Local detectives. State police. Even two FBI agents. A pair of women dressed nearly identically in silk blouses and black blazers, their hair pulled back in severe ponytails.
Charlie told them everything.
She and Maddy had gone to a bar to hear a cover band. No, she wasn’t yet twenty-one, an admission that caused her not a second’s hesitation. Maddy was dead. Her killer was still out there. No one gave a shit about her fake ID. Yes, she and Maddy had argued outside the bar. Yes, she had walked away even though Maddy had begged her to stay. And, yes, the last two words she uttered to her best friend were indeed “fuck off,” a realization that, when it hit, sent Charlie running to the police station bathroom to throw up in the sink.
It got worse when she returned to those tough-chick FBI agents and learned everything they knew about Maddy’s final moments.
That no one could remember seeing Maddy back in the bar after Charlie left.
That two people exiting the bar five minutes after Charlie saw Maddy leaving the alley with a man, although they didn’t know for sure because he had already rounded a corner, giving only a glimpse of white sneaker.
That based on her time of death, authorities believed the man Maddy followed out of the alley was the same person who killed her.
“I saw him,” Charlie said, stunned by the realization that what she’d seen hadn’t entirely been a movie in her mind.
The FBI agents straightened in their chairs.
“What did he look like?” one of them asked.
“I don’t know.”
“But you saw him.”
“I saw someone. But it might not have been the man Maddy left with.”
One of the agents gave her a look hot enough to peel wallpaper. “You either saw someone or you didn’t.”
“I did see someone.” Charlie’s voice was weak. Her head spun. Nausea continued to churn in her stomach. “But I also didn’t.”
She had no idea if the person she saw looked anything like his real-life counterpart. The movies in her mind sometimes warped things until they were no longer recognizable. It was entirely possible that the man she’d seen was cobbled together by her imagination using pieces of a dozen different leading men. Part Mitchum, part Lancaster, part Burton.
Charlie had to spend an hour explaining the movies in her mind. How they worked. When they happened. How very often the things she saw weren’t really there, including men in dark alleys. Even after all that, the agents insisted she sit down with a sketch artist, hoping that describing what she saw would somehow jolt her into remembering what had really been there.
When that didn’t work, they tried hypnosis.
After that, too, failed, Charlie was sent to a psychiatrist.
What followed was reluctant talk about Maddy’s murder, her parents’ deaths, the movies in her mind. Then came the prescription for the little orange pills, which Charlie was told would make them go away.
The psychiatrist stressed that Maddy’s death wasn’t Charlie’s fault. That each person’s brain is different. That it works in unusual ways. It does what it does, and Charlie shouldn’t blame herself for what happened.
Charlie disagreed. She had known that night that what she saw outside the bar was a movie in her mind. She could have waited until it passed, revealing the true picture. Or she could have returned to Maddy, apologized, and demanded they walk home together.
Instead, she simply turned and walked away.
In the process, she both failed to save Maddy’s life and avoided gleaning any identifying details about the man who murdered her.
Looked at from that perspective, all of it was Charlie’s fault.
Time passed.
Days and weeks and months.
Charlie eventually cut herself off from everyone but Robbie and Nana Norma. She didn’t even have the mental strength to attend Maddy’s funeral, a fact that didn’t sit well with everyone else in the dorm, who chartered two buses to shuttle them to Middle-of-Nowhere, Pennsylvania, for the service. Right up to the moment of departure, there’d been needling and disbelief and guilt trips from the girls on her floor.
I can’t believe you’re not going.
She was your best friend.
I know it’ll be hard on you, but this will give you a chance to say goodbye. You’ll regret it if you don’t go.
Only Maddy would have understood her reasons. She knew about Charlie’s parents and the double funeral that had rewired her brain just so she’d be able to cope with it. Maddy wouldn’t have wanted her to go through that again.
So Charlie stayed behind. A decision she definitely doesn’t regret. Her preference was to remember Maddy alive and laughing and being her usual dramatic self. She wanted her memories to be of Maddy dressing like Liza in Cabaret to go to a statistics class. Or of last Halloween, when the two of them went to a costume party as the Gabor sisters and everyone assumed they were Madonna in Dick Tracy, even though both of them spoke with exaggerated Hungarian accents. Charlie certainly didn’t want to remember Maddy as some lifeless shell in a casket, her face tinted orange by too much mortician makeup.
But the bedrock truth is that not attending Maddy’s funeral was an act of cowardice on her part. Quite simply, she couldn’t face Maddy’s family and their justifiable anger. The phone call had been enough—that tear-streaked confrontation with Maddy’s mother, who had lashed out with a vengeance only a grieving woman could possess.
“You saw him. That’s what the police are saying. That you saw the man who killed my daughter but can’t remember what he looked like.”
“I can’t,” Charlie said, sobbing.
“Well, you fucking need to remember,” Maddy’s mother said. “You owe it to us. You owe it to Maddy. You left her behind, Charlie. The two of you were out together, and you left without her. You were her friend. You were supposed to be there for her. But you abandoned her with that man. Now my daughter is dead and you can’t even bring yourself to remember anything about him. What kind of friend does that? What kind of person does that? An awful one. That’s who. You’re truly awful, Charlie.”
Charlie hadn’t voiced anything in her defense. Why bother when everything Mrs. Forrester said was true? She had abandoned Maddy. First in life, when Charlie turned away from her outside the bar, and then again in death, when she couldn’t remember a single identifying feature about the man who killed her. In her mind, Maddy’s mother was right—she truly was an awful person.
So Charlie spent the day of Maddy’s funeral alone watching Disney movies, one right after the after. She didn’t eat. She didn’t sleep. She simply sat on the dorm room floor surrounded by white plastic VHS cases.