Brandy Colbert - Pointe

“Yes, sir,” I say, pushing through my dry throat. There’s a cup of water to my right but I’m too nervous to pick it up. Afraid I’ll knock it over on the table, or worse—spill it down my shirt.

“How do you know him?”

“He’s my neighbor. Donovan Pratt.”

How long have I known Donovan? How well did I know him? How much time did we spend together each week, if I had to guess? This goes on for a long time but when McMillan gets to the day in question, it’s so simple. Like he could be asking about the day I started junior year. He asks what I was doing the morning Donovan disappeared, but he doesn’t mention Chris’s name or the abduction.

I relay what happened when I stopped by Donovan’s house. Finding him upstairs and dressed for the day, listening to him tell me to go on without him because he had things to do. I relay our conversation to the best of my knowledge and I don’t look at Donovan because that makes it too real, like I’m walking down his stairs and out the front door without saying goodbye all over again.

I let out a breath when it’s over, but I’m not sure why. This is far from over. Our mock testimonies were thorough but not this detailed. He talked about the day Donovan went missing for so long that I thought he’d never get to the actual point. But then he does and for a moment, everything stops.

For a moment, I’m still just plain old Theo Cartwright. Seventeen. A girl who lives and breathes ballet, who loved Trent Ryan Miller. Former best friend of Donovan Pratt. Daughter of the man and woman with the very kind faces sitting in the second row of the gallery—the people whose names will forever be connected with my shameful story after I speak.

“Ms. Cartwright, are you acquainted with the defendant?” McMillan asks, and when I look at him, his face has changed. It’s harder but his voice is the same. Even. Affable. If you couldn’t see his eyes you’d hardly know he was gearing up for anything special.

“Yes, sir,” I say, and my mouth instantly fills with sand.

I can’t fight it anymore. I reach for the cup, pick it up with an unsteady hand. But not so unsteady I can’t lift it. I wet my lips and the tip of my tongue before I set it back down. I don’t trust myself to do more than that.

“And how do you know Mr. Fenner?”

Take it one question at a time.

“He worked at the convenience store that was on Cloverdale.” I bite my lip. Now? No, not yet.

“Big Red’s Gas n’More on Cloverdale?” McMillan asks, threading his fingers in front of his chest.

“Yes, sir.” Not yet, not yet. I train my eyes on McMillan’s face, don’t dare glance at anyone in the jury. Certainly not in the gallery.

“And how did you meet Mr. Fenner?”

“Donovan and I would go there sometimes after school. To Big Red’s.”

“And Mr. Fenner talked to you while he was working?”

“Yes, sir.” I clear my throat. “Sometimes.”

McMillan starts pacing again. He takes long strides for such a short guy. It makes him look taller than he is. “What did you talk about?”

“A lot of things.” I practically whisper. I need to speak up but I can barely hear myself, can hardly make out my own words over the sickly pounding of my heart in my throat. “School, our friends, my dance lessons. What it was like working at the store. What high school would be like.”

“Were you aware of the defendant’s age at the time you met?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how old did you think he was?”

“He—he told me he was eighteen.”

There it is. A shift in the air. Rustles in the gallery. A few people breathe in sharply. I can’t peg who it is, but I’m not looking out there. I’ll never be able to go on if I watch the disappointment and disgust make its way across their faces like the world’s fastest epidemic.

Jurors lean forward to make sure they can hear every word out of my mouth from this point on. There’s movement at the defense table, but I only see it from my peripheral vision because not yet.

“Ms. Cartwright, how would you describe the nature of your acquaintance with Mr. Fenner?”

I get the feeling that when McMillan recounts this part of the story to his wife, to his colleagues and his friends, he’ll say this is the point where the defense knew he had them by the balls.

“We were friends,” I say. “We’d hang out while he was working and on his breaks and sometimes on his days off. And then . . .”

McMillan nods at me to go on, but I can’t. My throat has closed up. I can’t swallow. My tongue is this big, dry lump parked in my mouth like a useless ball of dough and how will I speak if it can’t move? I don’t know what to do. I look at McMillan again. His eyes shift to the cup of water.

Right. I reach for it with grateful hands, force myself to take an actual drink. A long one, and then another. I set down the cup and look at McMillan again. He gives another short, simple nod. Continue.

Now. Now I look across the room to the defense side. I look right at Christopher Fenner. Lock my eyes on his face to let him know I’m not scared anymore. I’m not scared of getting him in trouble and I’m not scared of how many ways he can break my heart.

What we had was never special. He used me to get to my friend.

“We were friends first, and then he said . . . he said if we had sex, we’d be boyfriend and girlfriend.” I swallow hard around the lump in my throat. Water won’t help this.

McMillan’s voice softens. Just a bit, but enough to make a difference. “Ms. Cartwright, did you have sexual intercourse with Mr. Fenner?”

Every corner of the room is silent. So silent I hear Judge Richey’s quiet, even breaths to the right of me. Even the stenographer is still, his fingers poised over the keys as he waits for me to speak.

“Yes, sir. I wanted him to be my boyfriend. I loved him.” I pause. “I’d never had a boyfriend before. I was only thirteen.”

THE DAY I MET CHRIS SEEMED MEANT TO BE.

It was the winter of our seventh-grade year and school had been shitty that day. No, shitty didn’t begin to describe it. I’d gotten a C-minus on my math quiz—which I’d skipped lunch to study for, so I was starving. I was late to my class after lunch because I’d gotten so wrapped up in studying, I didn’t hear the bell in the library and was loudly informed by Ms. Batson that this was my “final warning.”

Earlier, I’d been in a bathroom stall where I overheard Trisha Dove debating whether or not to invite me to her birthday sleepover. She and Livvy Franklin were standing in front of the sinks, basically listing my pros and cons as they refreshed their lip gloss. As nonchalant as if they were discussing the weather; they didn’t even check under the stall doors. The consensus was that I was nice and had never done anything to piss them off, but I didn’t have a lot of girls for friends and I was a little too obsessed with “that dance thing.” God. I had known both of them since kindergarten. It’s not like I was a new girl they had to feel out. Just because I spent most of my free time at the dance studio or with Donovan and Phil didn’t mean I was a weirdo.

By the time I met Donovan at the bus lines after school, I was fuming inside my parka. I wanted to get home because I had the night off from dance and it meant I could spend the evening curled up on the couch in front of the TV. My parents would make a fire and we’d watch mindless sitcoms and the intense hospital dramas they loved and I’d forget about every shitty part of my shitty day.

But Donovan wanted to stop by Big Red’s on the way home to check out the new X-Men. I wasn’t in the mood. I was still new to pointe work and the lesson the night before had been brutal. I was half limping because of my sore feet and I didn’t feel like standing around watching him look at comics while one of the grumpy cashiers watched both of us.

Donovan was insistent. He promised to buy me anything I wanted if I’d come with him. I knew that wasn’t saying much—after all, the most expensive items at Big Red’s Gas n’More were things we’d never buy anyway, like jumper cables and bottles of liquor. And it’s not like his allowance was so extravagant. But it was still a nice offer. And I was hungry from skipping lunch, wouldn’t mind spoiling my appetite for dinner with a candy bar or chips and a soda. So I went.

The glass door of Big Red’s had barely suctioned shut behind us before Donovan nudged me. His eyes were trained on the front counter, but I’d already noticed. In place of the middle-aged woman with the bad skin, or her husband—Larry, the owner, who was just as inexplicably cranky—was a new guy. He was older, but not by a lot. Maybe college-age at the most.

His head was bent over a cell phone, his thumbs moving rapidly over the keys, but he looked up as the bell on the door jangled above us, as we stomped the lingering bits of snow and ice from our boots. He looked up and he smiled. Said, “Hey, guys” so warmly, like he’d known us forever. Like we were friends.

Donovan and I were speechless, almost frozen in place. No one had ever greeted us like that here, if they greeted us at all. Larry and his employees had no problem reminding us that we were just dumb kids who were lucky enough to have money to burn or else they’d kick us out in an instant. They were always more concerned with their magazines or the person on the other end of the phone. We were an inconvenience, another reason they had to pay attention.

But something about this guy seemed different. He was cute, for one thing, with a grin that made me look away and then back at him, a grin that made me feel grown-up and nervous at the same time. He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair as he looked at us, as he asked, “Anything I can help you with?”