Page 18 of The Note

Only a few weeks before Off-Campus Night, Lauren had lectured May about needing to grow up and stop bickering with Marnie like warring schoolgirls. And so May had followed instructions,setting out to smother Marnie with kindness until she finally cracked. It actually worked. For once, Marnie actually stopped trying to prove that she could one-up everyone else at Wildwood. She told May she had a boyfriend working that summer in Hartford and asked if they could join the Off-Campus Night get-together she’d heard Kelsey was planning. She even confessed that she had always been a little jealous of May—the outsider girl on scholarship who had somehow won over the preternaturally cool girl Kelsey Ellis and seemed to hold a special place in her idol Lauren’s heart.

Marnie told her all kinds of things.

When they first realized Marnie was missing, Kelsey had grilled May on what she and Marnie had been talking about the previous night. According to Kelsey, the two of them had been huddled together near the lakeshore. “Like a couple of little coconspirators.”

May had tried so hard to remember the conversation, wondering if it held some clue as to where Marnie may have wandered off to. But she couldn’t remember a single word. She could picture them next to each other, checking behind them from time to time to make sure no one else was listening. Or she might have made all of that up in the desperate process of trying to remember. For some reason, though, she had a terrible feeling that whatever they were talking about was something May hadn’t wanted to know.

The reality is that Marnie Mann had been so unbelievably cruel to her when they were young, there were times that May had wished her dead. And then she was, and twenty-two-year-old May was still alive.

The campers were terrified when they found out why one of their counselors had not returned from her night off campus. They didn’t understand how she could have drowned when she was such a strong swimmer. No matter how many times they were told that the coroner believed Marnie dove into the water and hit her head on a rock before drowning, several kids refused to go into the lake, certain that they would die too. Parents began to show up, insisting upon the return of their traumatized children and camp fees.How could this have happened?they demanded to know. There was talk of lawsuits.

May and Kelsey had abruptly been forced into adulthood. They shared a collective sense of guilt. Why hadn’t they been watching out for this girl they’d known for years?

And then Lauren announced that it would be her final summer at Wildwood—scapegoated for not monitoring the girls’ conduct while they were off-site for the night. Someone at the camp had to take the fall. Who better than the camp’s music director, the lone Black staff member, who obviously had enough talent and ambition to make a go of it elsewhere?

When they were younger, Lauren had seemed like the bad bitch babysitter in charge. But that summer, she had become more like a friend. With her quiet departure from her position, it felt like she had sacrificed herself for them; and in return, they owed it to her to grow the fuck up.

They never talked about Marnie after the funeral, as if that entire chapter of their lives could be buried along with her corpse, wearing Marnie’s favorite recital dress: a navy blue gown with a jeweled scoop neck.

May remembered now that she had been dreaming about the search for Marnie as she fell asleep by the fire the previous night. How helpless she had felt, yelling to everyone that they needed to search the water, when May herself could barely manage a dog paddle. It had been fifteen years since Marnie’s death, but May still found herself thinking about her at the least predictable moments.

*

“Yoo-hoo, anyone home?” Kelsey smiled at her expectantly.

“Sorry”—that was apology number four so far, by May’s count—“I’m really out of it.”

“Well, let’s get you some coffee to start with,” Kelsey said, “and I’ll make the eggs.”

“I thought I heard you on the phone when I went up to bed last night,” May said. “You sounded upset. Was everything okay?”

The pause that followed as Kelsey turned on the gas beneath the skillet on the stovetop felt long. “Me? No, I crashed as soon as I hit the sheets.”

“And did anyone hear a car engine really late?” May asked.

“How could we hear anything with Moe in the house?” Lauren said, handing her a mug of coffee, black the way she liked it. “Go get your bathing suit on and stop worrying. We’ve got everything under control here.”

Before she knew it, it would be time to go back to Josh and their apartment and routines. Maybe for one short weekend, she’d try to be more like Kelsey. Not her prior idea of Kelsey, sophisticated and confident with the perfect life laid out in front of her. The new Kelsey, who found a way to seem light and fun even though her life had been turned upside down to the point that she still cried alone in bed at night.

Fake it ’til you make it, as they said. That’s how she’d gotten by at the DA’s Office at first, pretending to be a bulldozer of a trial attorney who could hang with the cops and bend a jury to her whim, until she actually began to see herself that way.

“And then I’ll take a Bloody Mary when we’re ready,” May added.

12

She had spent much of the past three weeks anticipating this weekend, and now it was already over. As much as she didn’t like the idea of leaving, the truth was that May was exhausted, deep into her bones, physically, emotionally, and cognitively, after only three days. She used to be the kind of person who could work all day in a crowded office and then go out and socialize into the night—rinse and repeat, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year—but that was before.

Back then, she thought of her mother’s life as so sad. Outside of work, Coral believed in only doing “one big thing” per day, and the “thing”could be as simple as going to the grocery store or meeting a friend for lunch. She used to scold May for being so busy, insisting that her daughter was going to “run herself into the ground” or give herself “burnout.” Now May found herself satisfied with a schedule like her mother’s. One thing a day was pretty much all she wanted to handle.

May had even taken one of those online Myers-Briggs tests to confirm that her personality had indeed changed. She used to be an ENFJ—extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging—meaning that she found energy in being with other people, focused on ideas and concepts rather than facts and details, made decisions based on feelings and values, and opted for plans and organization over spontaneity and flexibility.

But after the last few years? According to the test results, she was now an INFJ. And that change from E to I wasn’t subtle: she was 98 percent I. Granted, she was previously only 58 percent E—not the kind of extrovert who jumped in as a team leader at work or held court at the center of a party. But she used to thrive in the company of other people. She might not have led the conversations, but she loved being part of them, always believing that she learned something new simply by listening.

Curious about whether other people had gone through the same kind of personality shift, she came upon a published study where the researchersfound that, early in the pandemic, there was a counterintuitive decrease in neurotic tendencies that contribute to stress. But in the second and third years after the initial onset, the researchers found significant increases in neuroticism and declines in the characteristics that help people to successfully navigate social situations. May felt validated by the findings until she got to the part that noted the personality changes were most pronounced in young people.

The researchers speculated that younger people displayed more significant personality changes because their personalities were still in development and were therefore less fixed. Did May not have a fixed personality? She thought about the code-switching she had come to master so well. Conscientious daughter around her mother and her friends from church and school. Docile, hardworking student, whether studying academics or the piano. Confident, in-on-the-joke wing-woman to her friends, even when one of them would make a throwaway comment about how May wasn’t “really a minority” because she was half white. The prosecutor who, in the words of the cops who worked with her, “was like a dog with a bone.”

May wondered if perhaps all her efforts to be the type of person who could fit in anywhere and find a way to please anyone had made her so malleable that her personality had never fully formed.Regardless of the reasons, May had somehow gone from being a person who found energy in the company of others to one whoneededdowntime, who found energy in solitude. And while she had enjoyed her time at the beach house, she knew that she needed to get back to her work, her life, her routine, her isolation. Would she ever revert to her former disposition? It seemed like everyone else had just gone back to normal, but May felt broken in ways she was still discovering.

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