The Weight They Used Against Me

Chapter 4 Ridgeway

What I did not know was that Ridgeway was no longer three hundred miles away twice a year for Cole. His father had moved the family in the summer, and Cole had been attending Ridgeway since September. The internet had kept us talking, but I had not asked where he lived, because I was afraid of knowing how far the distance actually was.

I found that out on Friday, in the parking lot, when a green sedan pulled up next to my car and a girl got out.

She looked like Cassidy but with different hair. That is the only way I can explain her. Same smile, same chin, same way of standing like the ground had agreed to hold her.

"You are Vera," she said.

"Who are you."

"Amelia Ridgeway. My family names the school, which is how my brother gets in." She smiled at me. "Cole is my brother. He does not talk about me, which is very on brand for him."

I did not say anything. I had learned to be careful with people who arrive smiling.

"Your friend sent me a photograph," she said. "The one from the coffee shop. And a message saying that you have been lying to my brother for months. Saying that you are someone you are not." She took out her phone, and there it was, my own face in the window, sent to a stranger with a caption that said, You should know what your brother is spending his weekends on.

"What do you want me to say," I said.

"Nothing yet." She put the phone away. "I looked you up before I drove here. I did not find out what your friend says you are. I found out that you were the only freshman to place in the state history competition, and that you volunteer at a shelter on Saturdays, and that your mother works two jobs and you sometimes stay after school because of it. That is all public. Someone made a whole profile of you online for the application contest."

I did not know what to do with this. Nobody at Bellcrest had ever cared about the history competition, because Bellcrest did not compete in it, and I had done it on my own, off campus, because Mr. Delacroix had told me about it in a letter I still had in my desk.

"So you have a file on me," I said.

"I have a file on everybody." Amelia leaned against my car. "My brother is not an i***t, but he is soft, and soft people get hurt by people with nothing to lose. So I came to see for myself whether you are the person he thinks you are or the person your school thinks you are."

"And which am I?"

"You are the girl who sat in a coffee shop for two hours because she was afraid." She looked at me with an expression that was not quite kind. "I think you are a person who has been told for years that she does not deserve the things she wants, and I think that is more dangerous to my brother than any weight you carry. Because a person like that will one day decide that a person like him is a mistake she has to correct, and when she does it, she will break him and everyone around him."

My hands had gone cold.

"What do you want," I said.

"I want you to tell me the truth about your friend," she said. "I want to know exactly what she did and exactly what she has done since. Because my family does not respond to things quickly. We respond once, and then we are finished. And if I am going to bring her name into a room with my father, I want to know every detail, so that when the door closes, it stays closed."

I looked at her for a long moment. Then I opened my car door and took out the notebook I keep in the glove box, the one I write in when I cannot sleep, and I handed it to her.

"Those are dates," I said. "Everything she has ever said to me, since ninth grade. I started writing it down because I thought if I could see the pattern, I could survive it."

Amelia opened the notebook and turned pages for a long time. Then she closed it and handed it back, and her face had changed.

"All right," she said. "Now tell me about Saturday."