Killing Britney Read online

On tiptoes, she tried to sneak upstairs as quietly as she possibly could.

  The shadows wavered and quaked like there was something alive, a person lurking in them.

  A voice came from the darkness. “Britney?”

  “Wha—” She jumped. Her boots thudded to the floor.

  “You’ve been sitting out front a long time, haven’t you?”

  It was her father. Sitting in the shadows in the hard-back chair they kept next to the small antique table in the foyer.

  “Can you turn on the light or something?” she said. “You scared me to death!”

  She swiped at the light switch and illuminated the room. Her dad’s face was long, his nose pointy and shrewd. His exceptionally long, thin legs stuck out into the middle of the room. He wasn’t that old, but his hair had turned shock white after Britney’s mom had died. Tonight he looked especially pale under the bushy wings of his eyebrows, and Britney knew he was worried about something. On the table next to his large, meaty hand sat a telltale glass of ice cubes melting into the dregs of what had been scotch. He collected single malts but only drank them when he was either trying to impress guests or was upset about something and unable to sleep. Usually he drank cheaper stuff.

  “It’s really cold out there,” he went on, “but you didn’t want to come in.”

  Britney shrugged.

  “Because you and Ricky had a big fight.” He arched his right eyebrow. “I could see you through the window. What did I tell you about him and his friends? You’re such a smart girl, Brit. And so sensitive. I really … it baffles me why you want to be with a guy like that.”

  He kept his voice soothing and controlled, but his disdain for Ricky still came through loud and clear. He’d been against the relationship from the very start. To his mind, Ricky and his friends were nothing more than thugs. It especially irked him that because they were among the star jocks in town, when they were caught drinking or fighting, the police gave them preferential treatment.

  She tried to find something to look at that would conveniently hide her face from him. Though she’d cleaned up, there was no erasing the redness that her tears had coaxed to the surface of her eyes.

  Taking her chin softly in his hand, he turned her face up toward his so he could look at her.

  “What happened?” he said.

  He was such a kind man and so many things had gone badly for him. Britney’s mom, Jan, had accidentally drowned while they were white-water rafting up near the Wisconsin Dells—her body had never been found—breaking his heart and filling him with an unshakable loneliness. As if that weren’t enough, Jan had also run his law office. He was a prominent Madison defense attorney, and keeping track of everything was too much for him to do alone. It took him a year, but he’d eventually had to go hire someone new, a recent college grad named Tamara Lederer. Now, even eleven months since she started, this batty girl still hadn’t mastered the filing system.

  Britney had seen the strain it put on him. The harrowed eyes. The way he picked at his food. She hated to burden him with her problems with Ricky.

  “Nothing happened,” she said, and gave him a weak smile.

  “Something must have happened, Britney. It’s right there on your face. Wet cheeks, raccoon eyes. Something’s definitely wrong. I don’t know what—and I won’t unless you tell me, but I can tell it’s something.” He measured out an inch of space with his fingers. “I’ve known you since you were this big, Britney. I’ve become pretty good at recognizing these things.” As an afterthought, he added, “And that frown looks like it needs to be turned upside down.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said.

  “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  “It’s nothing. Just … Ricky.”

  “What about Ricky?”

  Britney paused. She wasn’t sure exactly what to say. “He—nothing ,” she said finally.

  Looking meaningfully into her eyes, he said, “You should tell me when something’s upsetting you. I can help more than you think.”

  He held her gaze for what seemed like too long. She turned away first, stared at the photo of the family that hung on the wall leading up the stairwell: all three of them, Mom, Dad, and her, wearing their matching Christmas sweaters, the ones with the corny knit panda bears on them, posed with stiff smiles in front of the fireplace.

  “We just had a fight, that’s all. We—I’ll be fine.”

  “Well, if you won’t tell me, will you let me give you a hug anyway?”

  His arms felt like heavy weights around her waist, but they still comforted her. She burrowed her face into his chest. He knew her so well.

  She was crying again.

  five

  A rapping at her bedroom door woke her up the next morning. She hoped that if she just ignored it, maybe she could roll over and fall back asleep. The sadness she’d felt when she’d gone to bed had lingered and sunk into her bones in the night.

  “Britney! Enough already! For the hundredth time, do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “Sort of,” she mumbled.

  Peering with one half-closed eye at the Peanuts clock she’d had on her wall since she had learned to tell time, she saw it was already 11 a.m.

  When her father stuck his head around her door, she had to scramble for the blankets so he wouldn’t catch her naked.

  “Jesus, Dad!”

  He stepped inside and leaned against the wall. He was wearing his yard work clothes: faded jeans and a green-and-white rugby shirt.

  “Are you up yet?”

  “Now I am!”

  “Good. And are you feeling any better?” He smiled softly, but she could tell it was fake.

  She snuggled into her covers, balled them in her fists up under her chin. “No,” she said bluntly.

  Moving right to the point, he said, “Well, I need you up now. I want you to take Adam downtown in, oh—” He glanced at his watch. “I actually wanted you to be gone by now, but let’s say half an hour. His parents and I have decided he needs to find a job.”

  “Ugh.” She hid her head under the blanket and squirmed.

  “I can’t do it, Britney. And whatever it is between the two of you, I need you to get over it. He’s a troubled kid.”

  “I know he’s a troubled kid. Last time he was here, he chased me around that berry farm we went to with a dead mole.”

  “Last time he was here, the two of you were only nine years old. And even if you think he is annoying, you’re the mature one. You can handle it. Let’s go.” Clapping, he said, “He’s waiting for you.”

  “Fine. Whatever,” she said, and her father left her alone again.

  Adam didn’t know anybody in Madison and he didn’t know how things worked here. From the day Britney had been told he was coming to stay with them, she’d worried that he’d cramp her style. He was funny looking, maybe not pimply, but too skinny for his height. He dressed preppy—that might go over all right in New Hampshire, but it was the furthest thing from cool in Wisconsin. Light blue Tommy Hilfiger oxfords and pleated khakis and beat-up old running shoes. Instead of the heavy insulated parkas everyone around here wore to keep out the winter wind, he wore a canvas Lands’ End hunting jacket. He parted his floppy hair on the side. In New Hampshire, he’d apparently been a star on the golf team. The golf team! That was like being the star of the chess club. When he walked, his elbows and knees bopped around as if someone had taken the joints out of them.

  And there was something awkward and unpleasant about him. He had a malicious way of teasing her, pestering her for no reason, long after she told him to leave her alone.

  Now, as he sat next to her in the passenger seat of the bright yellow VW Bug that her father had bought her for her sixteenth birthday—the new kind with the wrapping, oversized aerodynamic windows and the thing on the dash designed to hold flowers—he kept asking her questions as if he were doing research or something. “How many people live in Madison?” “Besides cheese and milk and stuff, what other indust
ries do you have here?” “Is it true people here drink more beer than the whole rest of the country combined?”

  Her stock answer to all of these questions was, “I don’t know.” She couldn’t fathom why these things mattered to him—unless he was just being willfully annoying, which would make sense; that’s how he usually was.

  “I’ve heard there’s a wicked rock scene here. Are there any cool bands I should check out right now?”

  She turned on the radio. “I don’t know, Adam,” she said. “Why don’t you scan the channels for a while and see?”

  “I mean underground stuff that doesn’t make the radio. The stuff you can only pick up on the QT.”

  “I have no idea.” This was getting frustrating. She flicked the radio back off and turned onto Cedar.

  “You don’t know? How could you not know?” He was smirking. She could tell he was looking for an excuse to argue with her.

  “Because I don’t. Music’s just music. I’ve got lots of things I’d rather do with my time than try to keep up with bands nobody’s ever heard of.”

  “How can you say that! Music’s everything! And in Madison … I mean Rot Gut’s from Madison!”

  “I don’t even know what Rot Gut is.”

  He groaned.

  “Rot Gut’s this legendary band from, like, I don’t know, the late eighties, early nineties. They were Satanists. They dug up grave sites and stuff. They were cool as hell.”

  “That’s pleasant,” she said.

  She couldn’t understand how he’d tricked her into another tedious argument like this, but she could have predicted it would happen. He did it every time. Now she was rattled. She wasn’t paying attention to the road. “Adam, it’s really icy. I need to concentrate on my driving.”

  “I just can’t believe you’ve never heard of them. I mean, they’re counterculture gods. And they’re from Madison.”

  They were in the university district now, driving the past redbrick dorms and the large stately buildings that housed the various campus departments.

  “Hey, which one’s the economics building?” Adam asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Stan Chen.”

  Here he went again. “Look, I’m sick of this game, Adam. Either tell me or don’t.”

  “That guy who shot up all those people in ‘97. He was a student in the economics department. He took over one of the classrooms.”

  Now she remembered. It had been a huge thing. Something to do with the guy’s PhD funding or something. She didn’t like thinking about it. Murder and death always sent her thoughts off toward her mother.

  “I can understand you not knowing who Rot Gut is, but Stan Chen? It was such a huge thing. It made the national news. I even heard about it in New Hampshire,” Adam said.

  “Can we talk about something else?” she said. She was absorbed now in memories of that fateful white-water-rafting trip. The last time she’d seen her mother smile, adjusting the straps on her orange life vest. “Now I feel completely safe,” she’d said with a laugh.

  An SUV in the opposing lane began honking at them hysterically, waking Britney from her reverie. In her peripheral vision, she saw someone frantically motioning at her, but she couldn’t tell who it was. The SUV sped by so fast that Britney didn’t get a good look at it, just a blur of blue and black.

  “Hey, wasn’t that your cheerleader friends?”

  In the rearview mirror, she could make out the back end of the SUV. A baby blue Ford Explorer. It could have been Erin’s car.

  “I don’t know, was it?”

  “They looked really upset. I bet someone broke a nail.”

  It just figured that Adam would distract her so much that she’d miss her own friends. She wondered what they had been trying to tell her. “Thanks for letting me know,” she said flatly.

  “I did let you know.”

  “Yeah, after they were already past.”

  “I’m sure, whatever it was, it was really important,” Adam said. He jumped into a high, mocking girly voice and said, “Oh my God! You’ll never guess what Buffy told me last night! Did you know that Biff—”

  The light changed, and Britney pounded the gas in frustration. The car fishtailed briefly and then sped forward.

  “Whoa!” said Adam, his voice back to normal. “Who are you now, Jeff Gordon?”

  She’d had as much as she could take from him.

  Screeching the car to a halt, she said, “You know what? Get out. We’re close enough to downtown. You can walk from here.”

  That shut Adam up, but it didn’t wipe the smirk off his face.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  Their stare-down didn’t last long because Adam started chuckling to himself.

  “Sure. All right. Cool,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll catch you later.”

  He ambled out of the car as though nothing had happened and obnoxiously threw her the peace sign as he walked away.

  Britney sped off. She was preoccupied with the hockey wives, worried about what she’d missed. They must have been trying to get her attention for some reason. She wished she could call them, but she’d forgotten her cell phone. And by now there was no way of knowing where they’d be.

  At least there was Melissa. It was doubtful that she’d know the dirt since she didn’t have any connection with that crowd, but at least Britney could complain about Adam to her. And she might have some more good advice about Ricky.

  six

  Melissa’s house was in a transient section of town right near the UW campus. Most everybody who lived there were college students and weirdos. It wasn’t unusual to see them having snowball fights in their underwear or smoking pot out on their front porches. The houses were a hodgepodge of styles, a lot of duplexes and two-story nondescript apartment buildings, the paint peeling, old furniture piled in the yard. Reggae music or, worse, jazz could be heard coming from the different buildings at all hours of the night and day. The streets were lined with cars so old and beat up that Britney always wondered if they’d been abandoned. The trees, elms and oaks and chestnuts, were large and shady, and when their leaves turned yellow and began to blanket the ground, you could almost feel the education in the air.

  When she arrived at Melissa’s pale blue clapboard house, Britney stormed right in without bothering to knock. That was the kind of friendship they had. They were like sisters—or they had been until this year. Britney had grown a little apart from Melissa, not because she wanted to; she was just so busy now with Ricky and all the new friends she’d made through him. Melissa’s parents were professors at the university, and she had inherited their awesome intelligence.

  “It’s you!” said Melissa when she saw Britney standing in the doorway. Britney let Melissa pull her inside.

  The house was a mess as always. Every surface—the coffee table, the end table, the plush cushioned chair as well as the rocking chair, and even the floor—was buried by papers and books. The bookshelves were full, and whatever space wasn’t packed with bits of text was cluttered with the knickknacks Melissa’s mother collected on her travels throughout the third world. Britney stared at an abstract painting, an ugly canvas covered in blobs of thick brown and green and purple paint. Supposedly it had been painted by someone famous, but Britney had never heard of the artist. As far as she was concerned, it was, like so much of the stuff in Melissa’s house, junk.

  Melissa’s red hair frizzed out in unruly curls and she hid her eyes behind studious cat’s-eye glasses. She could be cute, Britney was sure of it, if she just tried a little, but instead she clomped around in beat-up combat boots and wore shapeless overalls and lumpy sweaters in all the worst colors.

  “I’ve been trying to call you all day, but your dad said you were out. Is there something wrong with your cell phone?”

  “I forgot it at home.”

  “I figured.” Melissa held Britney’s hand out in front of her and looked her up and down as if she were searching for a hidden message
. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to be alone today.”

  Releasing Britney’s hand, Melissa let the topic drop. “You’re really upset, huh?”

  “I am upset. I’ve been carting that idiot Adam all over town and I ran into the other hockey wives—”

  “It probably doesn’t help that you were fighting with Ricky right before it happened.”

  Britney shuddered.

  “Let’s not talk about that,” she said, suddenly repulsed by the idea of rehashing last night with Melissa again.

  She felt dizzy.

  “I mean, it’s going to be harder for you to find closure now,” said Melissa.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Britney.

  Her pulse pounded in her temples, and she held her hand to her head to stop the spinning. Just as suddenly as the dizziness had started, it stopped. “Wait a minute, what are you talking about?”

  Melissa gasped. Her eyebrows rose above the frames of her glasses. “You don’t know, do you? You seemed so upset, I thought you knew. He’s … Britney, he’s dead. Ricky’s dead.”

  The sage, schoolmarmish expression that Melissa usually wore slowly drained away as Britney stared at her. Pushing a pile of newspapers out of the way, Britney sank onto the pullout couch. She looked around the room in search of something simple to focus on, but there was nothing simple in Melissa’s house.

  Britney grew very quiet. She curled up into a tight ball on the couch and pulled Ricky’s letter jacket close around her. She fingered the small brass hockey stick that was affixed to the rough-textured L on the jacket. The letter was right over her heart.

  “I’m sorry,” said Melissa.

  The two of them sat in shocked silence for a while until out of nowhere, Britney asked with a voice that was surprisingly steady given what she’d just been told, “How did it happen?”

  “He was killed.”

  “How?”

  “A hit and run. He must have been driving home from dropping you off. It happened at right about the same time as when we were talking on the phone. They’re saying it was a drunk-driving accident.”