ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Local Girl Gets a Gallery Show
The Fargo Free Weekly extends a huge congrats to Katie Hunter, a graduating senior at North Dakota State University in the visual arts department, for winning the annual Naturalists of North Dakota Award. Her prize includes acceptance into the MFA program, an assistantship, and a gallery show to display her work and celebrate her success at the Campus Art Co-op on August twenty-fifth. Festivities begin at seven-thirty. No RSVP necessary. Refreshments will be served.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - CADEE
Isabella walks into the Campus Art Co-op at seven ten looking like a fashion model who just got off a plane from Paris. Because that’s basically what happened. She’s wearing a large sunhat, cream-colored wide-legged linen pants, and a pale yellow camisole that shows off her glowing tan.
Her bright green eyes wander around the room—which is already filled with a few of my friends from school—and land on me.
She sucks in a breath. Then steps into the crowd with open arms and a wide smile.
We don’t hug—we fall into each other. Arms all the way around. Faces pressed into hair and necks. Long, deep breaths. And when we pull apart, we both have tears in our eyes.
She shakes her head at me. “I’m so proud of you, Fugling.”
I laugh and wipe my eyes. “You’re such a bitch.”
She hooks her arm in mine. “Seriously, this is all so great! Look at all your shit hanging on the walls!” She places a hand over her heart. “I’m super impressed.”
“It’s a university gallery. I expect about thirty-seven people to show up, and none of it is gonna sell.”
“Hmm. We’ll see.”
“What did you do?”
She shoots me a look that says, Who, me?
“Isabella. If you bought all my art, I’m gonna be pissed.”
“Me? I hate art. You know that.” But then she steps aside and points to the door. “But those bitches are crazy for it.”
I lose my breath, and my mind, and my sense of self when I see all the girls enter the gallery. “What on earth!”
Mona, Sophie, Valentina, Selina, Maddie, Natalie, and Elexa all come through the door looking like their own versions of spectacular.
They crowd me with their bodies and their words come out in rushed excitement.
We stay like that for at least a full minute. A pack of bodies all entwined together. Enjoying the feeling being close again.
I think that’s a feeling they have always had, so it’s not quite as special for them as it is for me. But I have learned to stop longing for the things I’ve missed in life and I now look for the things I didn’t instead.
And even when they are far, far away, I have them.
We all got out that night the FBI raided the tomb.
We got out in teams.
Sophie and Elexa.
Maddie and Natalie.
Selina and Valentina.
Only Mona stayed behind with the boys to set the record straight and make sure the truth got out about what really happened at High Court College and Prep.
But even though we all left, we didn’t all end up in North Dakota.
The GPS in the car Cooper left for Isabella and me was programmed for a hotel in western Ohio. There was a room key, a hundred dollars in cash, and a bag of clothes in the backseat. There was an envelope but there was no information about my parents inside it. I hated Cooper for that lie. I hated him for the entire trip even though Isabella pointed out that the information the envelope did contain was still a lot of clues about who I was.
It just wasn’t enough.
The next day there was a new car, new GPS coordinates, new clothes, more petty cash, and another room key for a hotel in the middle of Michigan. There was also a key to unlock my collar.
Was it weird that this key was not given to me in the first envelope?
No.
I needed to let that collar sink in.
I needed to feel it around my neck.
I needed to focus on the pain of the metal and worry about the sores that would eventually appear on my skin if I didn’t get it off.
I needed a reminder of what I was truly leaving behind.
Tough love works, I guess. Because I stopped my moping and began to focus on the future.
We did this hotel stop one more time, and the final destination was my house. A little place in Fargo, North Dakota. Just like the Chairman told me about back on move-out day when he called me into his office to offer me a scholarship.
It’s a two-bedroom house and there were clothes in the closet, a folder with some information about my school schedule and Isabella’s upcoming graduation, some flyers for local restaurants, and in my room there was a box filled with documents about my parents.
I stopped hating Cooper when I found that box. Not just because it had the secrets I wanted so badly, but because I didn’t want to hate him.
I wanted to miss him.
My feelings about the truth inside that box were conflicted.
Did I really need this information?
Did I really want to know the truth?
Was it going to make me a happier person?
Or a sadder one?
Nothing good was going to come from that box of truth. I never looked at those documents.
I put it out of my mind and told myself that not knowing was easier.
The path of least resistance.
It was a familiar path. A comforting one.
But I’ve been thinking about it more and more lately. There have been enough years between then and now for the hurt to fade.
Just a little.
Maybe enough.
I don’t know how long the Chairman had been planning my escape. I don’t know if he meant for my mother to get away too, or just me. And I’m never going to know because he pled guilty to every single crime against him and now he’s locked away in the Colorado supermax prison.
Cooper never testified against him.
The Chairman made sure he didn’t have to by pleading guilty the first day of his trial.
Of Cooper, I have no idea what happened to him. I watched the trial, like everyone else. Cooper was on the TV quite a bit, and I was glued to the live stream, but it wasn’t enough. Every time I saw him my heart ached. And then, after his father pled guilty, he got up and walked out of the courtroom while the judge was still talking.
None of us, aside from Mona, ever heard from the boys again. And Mona has a strict rule about the past. We do not mention it. Ever. She and Dante are remaking High Court College and Prep into something new these days. I guess Dante got his crown after all—even if it was through marriage.
The rest of us got new names. Mine is practically the same. Katie with a K instead of Cadee with a C. New birth certificates. New passports. New college records. We freshmen had to start over and all of us agreed that was for the best. No one wanted to list High Court on their new college applications.
Not that we had to apply. The Feds set everything up for us. The Chairman cut a deal with them and this was part of it. Sophie and Elexa ended up in Idaho. Maddie and Natalie ended up in Texas. Selina and Valentina got real college degrees from Ohio State University in their declared majors.
Isabella’s degree came from North Dakota State even though she didn’t attend a single class at this school and she wasn’t even in town for graduation. They mailed her degree to Paris.