What Happened That Night (Wattpad Books Edition)

chapter two

four months later

I heard my mother entering the house through the patio door downstairs from my bedroom, the shwoop of the door closing behind her, and the clomping of her boots against the floor as she maneuvered around the table and chairs in the dining room. I imagined her peeling off her dirt-caked gardening gloves as she walked into the kitchen, past a chair no one sat in anymore, and dropping them on the counter.

In the three months since Emily had been arrested, my mother had become more obsessed with gardening than ever before, spending hours outside as she tugged out weeds, planted autumn flowers, and filled her watering can with the hose. The head of her trowel was dented and white at the edges from scratching against pebbles in the dirt, and the elastic of her gardening gloves was worn and stretched. The back of her neck was sunburned from spending so many hours tending to the flower beds. They used to bloom with vibrant petals but now, in January, there was nothing for her to plant. Nothing for her to nurture.

I thought maybe she would've tried to convince my father to buy her a greenhouse so she could continue her intensified obsession with botany and not focus on the fact that her daughter was awaiting trial for the murder of her best friend's son. Instead she would go outside, brush the snow from her garden, and stab her trowel through it to crumble the frozen dirt. The only garden she hadn't touched was my father's vegetable garden. Most of the vegetables had been dug up by an animal last August, but the rest died in October when Emily was arrested and, unlike my mother, my father stopped caring about plant life.

A few of our neighbors—ones who used to be friends—peered out from the safety of their windows and watched her crouch in front of the flower beds, always a glimmer of anxiousness in their eyes. It was the first murder committed here in Shiloh in years, the first in decades committed by an actual resident. Everyone looked at my mother and thought, This is your fault. You raised her. How could you not know?

But no one had thought my sister, Emily Porterfield, was messed up. They'd thought she was perfectly normal too, with her cheerleading uniform and her pom-poms waving frantically in the air like fireworks at the games. She'd babysat their children. She'd sold Girl Scout cookies to them in the spring. She'd walked their dogs and even scooped up their poop instead of leaving it there. Emily Porterfield just wasn't messed up.

Downstairs, I heard our answering machine playing a message left half an hour ago, while she was outside and I was in my bedroom. The message was from my father, apologizing for working late again tonight, mumbling we should eat dinner without him, don't wait up. A moment later, my mother pressed the Delete Message button.

Sometimes she asked me if I knew why Emily had killed Griffin Tomlin, if it was just an accident, if I knew why Emily had snuck out of the house and crept across the street into the Tomlins' backyard that night. Every time she asked me a question about her, about him, about them, I would tell her no, even when it wasn't true. No, I didn't know why she'd done it. No, I didn't know why she went there. No, no, no. Sometimes I imagined Emily in a white cinder-block room, dressed in a jailhouse uniform instead of her cheerleader one, and her lips mouthing the word liar at me.

Because I knew why she'd done it.

I knew that Emily hated Griffin Tomlin the moment I'd told her something I never should have.

My parents and I haven't talked about it, but every day I've driven Emily's car to school.

Before she was arrested, we drove to school together. We'd stop at the Starbucks across the street and order mocha lattes, listening to Carrie Underwood songs. After she was arrested, my parents seemed to have an unspoken agreement that no one touched her things. Her bedroom door remained closed at the end of the hall; her granola bars were still in the cupboard, pushed to the back, hidden behind soup cans; one of her socks was still on the floor in front of the washing machine.