Page 92 of The New Year's Party
She had to go. Had to meet these people. Will, who Oscar had kissed. And Jenn, who’d helped destroy him.
Somehow, Jenn found out about the kiss at the party and reported him to the Compass leaders. Allie had memorized Oscar’s final entry, made three weeks after the fateful New Year’s party.
They’ve told me I can’t lead my Bible study anymore. I don’t know how I’m going to break it to the freshmen. I hate letting them down. I’m just so embarrassed. My world is crumbling.
I need to call Mom and Dad. If I can just have their support...
He didn’t. George and Janey Lucchesi told their son he was no longer welcome in their home. Thus ended Oscar.
Ten-year-old Allie hadn’t understood everything that was going on, but she had understood that her brother was gay, and her parents had cut him off, and then he had killed himself. So when she was fourteen and starting to think she might be into girls as well as guys, she played it smart. Played it safe. She waited until her college graduation, when she didn’t need their money anymore, to tell her parents she was not only bi, but in a relationship with a girl named Lauren.
Of course it still hurt.
What she didn’t expect was to be called back into their lives three years later due to their quickly declining health—stage four cancer for her mom, early-onset dementia for her dad.
That night in the pool hall, Allie and Phelps traded numbers. But it’s not like she decided to kill Jenn right off the bat.
She researched her first. It wasn’t hard to find Jenn on Phelps’s Facebook friend list, and all her stuff was public. Allie read through every disgusting post. All herso blessedstuff.Even then, Allie wasn’t sure she could actually kill her. Did Jenn really deserve to die for something she’d done fourteen years ago?
She texted Phelps about going out for New Year’s together, feeling pretty sure he’d issue a return invitation. He did.
She told Leigh that she’d run into some old friends of Oscar’s randomly at a bar and wanted to go to their party and hear their stories about her brother. Leigh was immediately supportive.
Allie showed up at Phelps’s house early, to help with the party prep. While he was cleaning the nasty shed he called the Dog House, she did her magic in the kitchen and mixed her mother’s hospice drugs, the hydromorphone and the haloperidol and the diazepam, into a special set of “virgin” Jell-O shots for Jenn, who so conveniently didn’t drink.
Then, people started to arrive, and Allie sat back and watched.
At first, Jenn seemed pretty nice, and Allie thought,I won’t do it.She even felt kind of relieved. Then, the night took an ugly turn. Ted accused Jenn of arson over dinner, and it only got worse from there. As the evidence against Jenn stacked up higher and higher, it was as if karma had shown up, tapped Allie on the shoulder, and whispered, “See? This is where you come in.”
That’s how she felt. Not at all like a murderer. More like the pawn of karma. In the right place at the right time. An opportunity dumped into her lap she never would have gone searching for but would be a fool not to take.
“Let’s just say I got the closure I needed,” Allie murmured to her sleepy girlfriend. She knew a sudden pang in her chest, fierce and squeezing. “The truth is, babe...” Her heart felt three times its normal size, huge and pounding in her chest. Was she going to say it out loud? “I killed Jenn.”
Leigh’s eyes were only half open, but she blinked twice and ran her hand through her hair, making it stand up straight.
“Huh?” she said. “Who’s... Jenn?”
There was a moment, like an automatic door opening. Allie could walk through. Or she could take a step back and the doors would close again.
Allie leaned forward and kissed Leigh on the head. “Go back to sleep.”
“Okay,” said Leigh, heaving a sigh as she turned over. She was breathing deeply soon enough, and Allie doubted she would even remember this conversation in the morning.
There were so many things she couldn’t tell Leigh. Not just this. Allie couldn’t tell her that when her mother was moaning with pain from her quickly progressing cancer, instead of giving her the oral hydromorphone or other medications meant to supplement her CADD pump, Allie would give her liquid children’s Tylenol cut with water instead, and stash the drugs.
Janey Lucchesi had killed her own son. When she kicked Allie out too, Allie wondered if Janey was secretly hoping Allie would take her own life like her brother. Maybe for Janey it was better for your kids to be dead than gay.
Janey Lucchesi didn’t deserve to die easy.
Allie did give her mother one last chance. One opportunity to redeem herself. While she was lucid one afternoon and Allie was changing the sheets on her bed, Allie said, “Mom, do you have any regrets about Oscar and the way you treated him?”
Her mother looked vaguely out the window and said, in her feeble cancer voice, “I was just trying to do the right thing.”
When her mom finally died, late in the afternoon on a random Tuesday, Allie had enough stashed drugs to make multiple lethal cocktails, which she thought about using on her dad, but his mind was going so fast it didn’t feel like she’d really be punishing him.
The thought of using the drugs for another purpose didn’t occur to her until later.
In the end, what sealed the deal wasn’t all the horrible accusations that Jenn’s friends lobbed at her. It wasn’t even the powerful feeling of being karma’s pawn. It was hearing Jenn use the exact same words Allie’s mother had used.I just wanted to do the right thing.
