Page 55 of Did You See Evie

“It doesn’t surprise me they temper their behavior around you,” she says. “If they get in trouble in the classroom, they receive a modest punishment. Maybe a phone call home. If they get in trouble with you, they lose playing time.”

Kelly’s right, and it strikes me how manipulative these girls can be, even at their young ages. “Which girls was it?”

“Tara, Amber and Beatrice,” she says. “The three of them would get together and target Evie the entirety of my class, if I allowed it. I imagine it starts from the moment they arrive at school.”

“What do they do?”

“Sometimes they’ll take her binder or her backpack and move it around the room. Or they’ll break her pencils. Anything to get her flustered before class,” she says. “They call her names and have these inside jokes that seem to really bother her.”

“Like what?”

“They call her Coach’s Pet because she’s your favorite.” She pauses. “And SoEd.”

“I’ve heard them say that before,” I say. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“It’s an acronym. It stands for Same Outfit Every Day.”

My stomach clenches and writhes like there’s something inside it, a living embodiment of my anger. I think of Evie, coming to school every day in the same forest-green hoodie. She doesn’t have her pick of name-brand ensembles like the rest of her classmates, and even though that’s obvious, I can’t believe her peers would be so cruel as to bring it up. Her teammates.

“And it’s always the same three girls?” I say, my words clipped as I try and fail to hold back my anger.

“From what I’ve seen, yes,” Kelly says. “One day at the beginning of the month, Evie was so upset I had to excuse her to the nurse’s office for the remainder of my class.”

I imagine Evie. Splotchy face, balled up inside herself. The weight of carrying those insults all on her own. If Beatrice, Tara and Amber are targeting her this harshly, she must have felt like there was no escape. Between the basketball schedule and her classes, she’s always around at least one of them.

Tara was the one who first came to me and suggested Crystal’s boyfriend made Evie feel uncomfortable. It’s hard to believe Evie would confide in her bully. Maybe Tara only told me that because she wanted me—and the police—to look in a different direction.

“You should have come to me,” I say to Kelly, stretching my fingers to stop myself from making a fist. “If I’d known what the girls were doing, I would have done something about it.”

“I know,” she says. “I was told not to mention it to you.”

“By whom?”

“Mr. Lake. I told you I brought all this to his attention weeks ago, but it was as the team was nearing the tournament, and he thought addressing it before then would cause more harm than good.” She looks into her lap. “Doesn’t really seem to matter now that Evie is gone. I’m worried that things were worse between the girls than anyone knew.”

My body itches with fury. I stand, trying to shift the energy inside my chest. “Thanks for telling me. I can’t address these things if I don’t know about them.”

“I only wish I would have come to you sooner,” she says, also standing. “If I’d known…”

Her words trail away. None of us could have predicted Evie’s disappearance, but if we want to find out what happened, we must reexamine everything we knew, or thought we knew, about her life. That includes her relationship with the girls on the team.

I’d seen some irritation between the girls on the basketball court, but that’s normal. In some ways, even healthy. The girls challenge each other to be better and improve their own skills in the process. They might banter back and forth, but they also give each other hugs and cheer each other on when we score the championship prize.

Kelly’s description of the girls’ behavior goes far beyond rival sportsmanship. At least three of the girls on my team were actively targeting Evie, and they were smart enough to do it when I wasn’t around. Could the girls have planned something at the lock-in I didn’t know about? Could they have taken their bullying to the next level after I fell asleep? Is this what Evie wanted to tell me?

I’m determined to find the answers to those questions, but first I need to talk to Mr. Lake.

TWENTY-NINE

When I enter Mr. Lake’s office, he’s sitting behind his desk, on the phone. He raises a hand to silence me.

I sit across from him, waiting for his attention. My foot begins tapping rapidly against the floor.

“What’s going on?” he says, when he hangs up, a much friendlier demeanor than he had earlier in the week.

“I just had a conversation with Kelly,” I say. “She told me the other girls on the team have been bullying Evie for weeks. She said she came to you about it.”

“It’s something we’ve been looking into,” he says. “In order to write up a student for bullying, we have to be able to prove it’s repeated over an extended period of time.”

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