He came to me next. Under the pretense of meeting for lunch with an old friend, he took me out and we met up with his therapist. A nobody psychiatrist working out of an office in the worst part of Burlington who mostly took pro bono cases but had an online website offering hypnotic therapy for recovering lost memories. She had teased most of what really happened that night out of Hayes before he brought me in, but he needed me to get the whole story.
Or so he thought.
There was no tower. Almost everything we thought was true was just lies.
I wasn’t taken to the hospital after I was shot, I was taken to the Essex College Student Health Center that night. Stitched up, good as new, and then all seven of us were locked in a room on the second floor of the theatre building to “get our story straight.”
Emily was combative and Hayes, like the knight in shining armor who grew up in a castle of a mansion, came to her defense. Hayes Fitzgerald is just not a guy who goes along. He’s a fighter. So they blamed my gunshot wound on Emily to get rid of her. This weird girl who everyone already thought was crazy, just went crazy. And they used her to threaten the rest of us.
See what happens when you don’t go along, children? You get the Emily treatment.
Louise Livingston was there to help us. With drugs. With her own twisted version of hypnotic therapy. Though she wasn’t in the business of recovering them, she was in the business of planting them.
And plant them she did.
She has never explained it. What I know of what happened is just a whole bunch of mis-matched memories. But it’s all there in the new book and I’ve read it over and over again, trying to make the pieces fit together the best way I know how.
The most tragic thing about this whole nightmare might be that if we had just read a little further that night Hayes locked us in the third-floor library we’d have gotten to the truth before morning. The beginning of the book was what we thought happened. But the truth—the real events of that night—came in the next chapter. If Connor had just read that part about me getting shot the whole truth would’ve unfolded. We’d have figured out it was all lies and Bennett and Camille would’ve never have left.
Bennett and Camille would still be alive.
Hayes blames himself for not being more forthcoming.
But it’s not his fault. No one should feel guilt and shame for trying to be careful with the people they love.
He was just trying to unravel our memories in a thoughtful way. Afraid that untangling things in the wrong way would lead to a total breakdown.
We don’t know what triggered their suicides. Maybe they started remembering on their own that night? Maybe Connor’s father got to them first and made threats? Hell, maybe Louise showed up with her drugs and started planting new memories?
Yes, we got answers. But we still have questions. And these mysteries will never be solved because the only two people who know what really happened are dead.
I think Connor’s father wanted to kill me that night we witnessed the shooting. I think I was the wild card. Just some nobody. Some expendable nobody. Someone who didn’t belong in their world. Someone who couldn’t be kept quiet out of family obligations.
But my mother was there. I think she stopped them. And if I’m being honest, I think it was her elaborate writer’s imagination that came up with this plan. But of course I’ll never understand that part. It’s just something I’ll have to live with and I keep my own imagination in check because I know how easy it is to believe the story we write in our heads.
As far as The Dirty Ones go… I think Camille, and Sofia, and Bennett, and Hayes, and Connor—who were not my friends at that point in time—saw my death that night. Saw that they could save me with these lies.
But I think giving us this story gave us power too.
They wanted to divide us that night. Make us hate each other.
But that’s not what happened. We fell in love. As a group, I guess. We grew closer. We became friends. These special people who were raised in privilege took my side and saved my life.
That’s my story, anyway. That’s the happy ending I need to write.
I have no memory of my visits to the therapist with Hayes. He deliberately told her to erase the revelations after each session because once he told me that he was looking for the truth I shut down and refused to see him again for months.
It was a slow process. Once a month he’d take me to lunch and we’d meet up with the hypnotist. In these secret sessions they put a pen in my hand and told me to write it all down. Easy, for someone like me. Someone who was born to write stories like a person possessed.