The Night Swim(15)
“My friend wants to know your phone number,” he said.
“Why? What does he want to talk to me about?”
“He doesn’t want to call you,” he said, kicking at the sand. “It’s your sister. What’s your number?”
“I don’t know. And even if I did, it wouldn’t matter because our phone’s not working,” I said.
He shrugged and walked back to his friends up on the dune, leaving a trail of cigarette ash behind. When he reached his friends, he angrily slapped the money into their hands as if he’d lost a bet.
Jenny came out of the water not long after.
“What did he want?” she asked, wiping the salt water off her face with her beach towel.
“Nothing,” I said, deep in concentration as I used my hands to compress sand into a moat.
10
Guilty or Not Guilty
Season 3, Episode 3: The Party
Lexi lives in a subdivision a few miles out of Neapolis. It’s called Crystal Cove. Sounds to me like the name of a beachfront community. Except when I visited Crystal Cove, the first thing I noticed was that the ocean was nowhere to be seen. The subdivision, with its cute nautical name, is cut off from the coast by a forest. There’s no crystal in the neighborhood, and definitely no cove.
Crystal Cove was built on scrubland by a developer with little imagination. The houses look freakishly like clones. They’re all light blue-gray clapboard with white trim. They have double garages and attic windows. Even the gardens are identical. The place feels like a social-engineering experiment gone wrong.
When I visited, there were no kids riding bikes. Nobody tending garden beds or mowing lawns. No dogs barking.
I rang Lexi’s doorbell. She opened it wearing jeans and a black crop top with a pink sparkly motif. She’s cheerleader pretty. Shoulder-length blond-streaked hair, bright blue eyes. She was friendly enough. We talked for a bit, but she asked me not to record her.
Lexi has good reason for wanting to keep a low profile. You’ll learn why later. For now, let’s just stick with the idea that Lexi is the girl next door. A pretty one with lots of cool friends and a fair bit of attitude.
When K arrived at Lexi’s house late that afternoon, they pulled the sofas out of the way and rolled up rugs to prepare for the party. They made a huge bowl of popcorn, chose a playlist, and tested out the sound system. The first ring at the door came just after eight P.M.
By nine P.M., the party was officially out of control. They’d invited fifteen people. Four times that number turned up. Half the guests they didn’t know. Many were college aged. Some were even older.
Almost everyone brought alcohol. The kitchen counter was laden with bottles of liquor and beer. Pieces of popcorn littered the floor like white confetti.
At some point in the night, someone, nobody ever knew who, poured cheap vodka into all the half-drunk bottles of soda in the kitchen. Not any vodka, either. It was a backyard moonshine that could strip paint off a wall. K drank several cups of soda. She had no idea that it was spiked. By the time she realized it, she was already drunk.
A lot of what I know about the party is taken from videos some of the kids posted on their social media feeds that night. In the videos that I’ve seen, K is unsteady on her feet. She pushes through the crowd in the living room, pausing to laugh and talk with friends. She looks visibly drunk. In the corner of the frame of one video, she can be seen losing her balance and stumbling into someone.
The person she bumped into was Lou Lowe. He’s a baseball pitcher on the high school varsity team. He’s tall, with freckles and strawberry blond hair. Lexi had dated him a few times. She considered him an ex-boyfriend. She would sometimes tell her friends that she wanted to get back with him. That he was the love of her life. Her friends say that she talked that way about all her exes. It was Lexi’s way of putting up a “no trespassers” sign.
Lou remembers that night well because of what happened afterward. Here’s what Lou Lowe said when I spoke with him earlier today.
“I had a training session real early the next morning, so I couldn’t drink. Not even a beer. I guess I was maybe one of the only people at the party who wasn’t drunk. I remember that she knocked into me and said something like ‘my bad.’ I made some joke about how she could bump into me any time. She thought that was funny and we started talking.”
After a while, Lou pulled the classic line. He told K that it was too noisy to talk over the music. He took her by the hand, supposedly to find somewhere quiet to talk.
K allowed him to pull her out of the throng of partygoers down the corridor. They went to the laundry room, where a glass sliding door led to an outdoor courtyard. Several people saw them disappear together. Word spread like wildfire. The rumors reached Lexi. She stormed through the house looking for them, furious that her best friend had disappeared with the boy who she had suddenly decided was the love of her life.
Lexi claims that she found them making out under the laundry line, between hanging bedsheets. She tore into K with a slew of accusations. Most of them were incomprehensible. Lexi was drunk and barely coherent.
Lou walked off in the middle of Lexi’s rant. He left K to take the brunt of her friend’s drunken fury. He feels bad about that now. He wonders if things would have turned out differently if he’d stayed. By the way, he says it’s not true that they were making out. He insists that Lexi made the whole thing up to try to justify her actions afterward and to paint K in a bad light.