The Best of Friends

Once Kendra is alone with her husband, Paul marvels that Dani has agreed to something without Bryan’s approval. He asks to be present when she questions Caleb, but Kendra curtly refuses, saying that he’s unlikely to talk with him there. Kendra prides herself on a special rapport with the boys, owing to how “comfortable” her luxurious house is, and because she used to hang out with them late into the night, eating junk food and gossiping. Confidently, Kendra tells Paul that she’ll ask Caleb point-blank how Sawyer died, and then sit silently until he answers.

Hearing of Kendra’s request to meet with Caleb, Bryan snarls at Dani, asking how she could be “so stupid.” Stinking of vodka, he twists her flesh with his fingers, demanding that she cancel the meeting. When she whimpers that he’s hurting her, Bryan sneers that she’s just “attention starved,” and Dani apologizes, hating herself for it. After Bryan roars off in his Mercedes Benz, blasting rock music from the speakers, Dani, relieved, sinks onto her bed, then notices Luna in the doorway. Her daughter is dismayed that she still lets Bryan bully her. With “a hint of kindness in her voice that hasn’t been there in years” (80), she asks Dani if she’s okay.

While Andrew continues his search for a lawyer, Lindsey spends much of her time at the hospital, trying to suppress her annoyance at the nurses’ “lack of urgency” (81) in caring for her son. She has managed to get Jacob onto the wait list for Prairie Meadows, a long-term residential facility for patients with traumatic brain injuries, where she hopes he’ll be treated more sensitively. She has been getting regular texts from Kendra, telling her that Dani has not yet brought Caleb over for their meeting; they were supposed to come at nine o’clock in the morning, and it’s almost noon. Lindsey notes that she has not felt particularly close to Kendra in years, since long before the shooting, partly because she senses her friend is “judging” everything she says. Finally, she texts Dani to ask about the delay, and to her horror, Dani responds apologetically that Bryan has refused to let Caleb meet with Kendra. Lindsey reels at the implications of this broken promise, which she thinks will “split” the friends apart.

Livid that Bryan has canceled her meeting with Caleb, Kendra thinks she may never speak to Dani again; at least not until she learns to stand up to her husband. Soon, however, she receives an unexpected visitor: Dani’s daughter, Luna, whom Kendra barely recognizes. The blonde, typical “California girl” has, over a single year of college, cultivated a punkish look, with purple-streaked hair, piercings, and a barbed-wire tattoo. Sobbing, Luna tells her that she blames herself for Sawyer’s death. She says she’s about to be interviewed by the police and wants Kendra to be the first to hear her story: She was with the three boys that terrible night and failed to look after them. Sawyer, Jacob, and Caleb showed up drunk at a fraternity party at her college and made a “huge scene.” Sawyer got into a scuffle in the kitchen after using a racial slur, which almost led to a “big brawl” in the front yard involving all three boys. Luna arrived and managed to break up the fight with the help of some friends. Calling an Uber, she took them back to her house, but the boys would not calm down, particularly Caleb, who’s “angry and mean” (88) when drunk. Anxious to get away from them, she returned to the fraternity house so she could focus on repairing their “damage.” Luna is racked with guilt over not staying home with them to keep them out of trouble.

Deeply touched, Kendra embraces her, saying she has no reason to blame herself. Relieved, Luna melts into her arms, then adds that Detective Locke has already interviewed the fraternity boys who witnessed the boys’ fight. This shocks Kendra, who has been in constant contact with Locke, always asking him for any new leads. She wonders what else Locke might be hiding from her. Grimly, she suspects that she and Locke are “not on the same team” (90).

Lindsey drives Wyatt and Sutton to school for the first time in weeks, relieved that the media circus has tapered off. Five-year-old Sutton gushes excitedly about possibly being on television, but Wyatt seems to want to hide under his car seat. Lindsey suggests that at school, he could go to Reese for moral support, but Wyatt scoffs at the idea. Reese, she reminds herself, “has a hard time bonding with anyone” (92).

Lindsey, still angry at Dani for breaking her promise to Kendra, has been ignoring her texts. When Kendra calls, however, she quickly picks up. Kendra tells her about the visit from Luna and what she said about the boys’ drunken brawl at the fraternity house. When Lindsey asks her if she’s going to tell Dani about this, she says she won’t, because she needs Luna to “trust” her. Luna’s trust, Lindsey realizes, is more important to her than Dani’s.

When they were teens, Lindsey remembers, Kendra partied the hardest and used to sneak them alcohol from her parents’ liquor cabinet. Now, knowing that Kendra’s house is the boys’ favorite hangout, Lindsey suspects they raided her liquor cabinet that fatal night. Discussing the boys’ drinking habits, Kendra shocks Lindsey by saying that, at least twice over the past year, she witnessed Jacob throw up at her house from drinking. Lindsey, who wasn’t aware that her son ever drank to excess, wonders why her friend kept this a secret. She feels she knows the answer already: Kendra longs to be the “cool mom” that all the children trust.

Drowsily hunting for hidden bottles of wine in Sawyer’s bedroom, Kendra exults in having “shocked” both her friends with her news about the boys’ wild behavior on the night of the shooting. Though she wasn’t going to tell Dani about Luna’s secret visit to her, she soon changed her mind. Dani sounded terrified to hear the news, probably because of Bryan’s violent temper. Kendra digs into her son’s not-so-secret cache of expensive wine, hidden in his Lego bin, and finds two fewer bottles than when she last looked, before his death. Kendra’s doctor told her not to drink alcohol on top of the anxiety medication, Xanax, but she doesn’t see why: It feels “wonderful.” Paul hates seeing her like this, but she doesn’t care anymore.

With trembling hands, Dani holds an ice pack to Luna’s bleeding lip. Bryan, she says, has never hit her or any of the kids until today. After her visit with Kendra, Luna “strutted” into the house, meeting Bryan’s questions with a level stare and a defiant “glint” in her eye, whereupon he slapped her, hard. Now she and her mother are nervous wrecks, worrying about how Caleb will react. When they first married, Dani decided that her “line in the sand” would be if Bryan actually hit her in the face. She now sees this as “pathetic.”

Dani goes to the master bedroom to tell Bryan to leave the house and is shocked to find him lounging casually in bed, watching television, as if nothing has happened. Bryan orders her to lie beside him and watch with him, and she says no, twice, to his rising anger. Bryan screams at her to “go,” and she runs to Luna’s room to spend the night. Tearfully, she confides to Luna how she’s allowed Bryan to hurt her and intimidate her for years, because “his physical presence becomes so large [she] can’t see around it and everything inside [her] shrinks to nothing” (104). If only, she thinks, her daughter could have seen her before her marriage, back when she was “strong.”

Kendra goes grocery shopping in Carlsberg, a neighboring town, where she’s unlikely to be recognized. Paul has been pressing her to return to her real estate job, but she doesn’t feel ready. At the store, she has a panic attack and runs to her car. As she drives home, the high school secretary calls and tells her that Reese was caught vaping in the bathroom; Kendra assumes he was there to sell drugs. Reese was suspended, and as Kendra drives him home, she lambasts him for “adding fuel” to all the negative publicity surrounding their family. Reese snarls at her, furious that her only concern is what people “think.” As his mother breaks down crying, Reese adds that it must be “really hard losing the good son and getting stuck with the bad one” (110). Horrified, Kendra almost loses control of the car and pulls into a parking lot. As she tries to calm herself so they can drive home, Reese apologizes for always “screwing up” and collapses sobbing into her arms.

After a sleepless night, Dani knows that she must leave Bryan, if just for Luna’s sake, but wonders how she can order Bryan out of a house that he pays for. She reflects that, when women are urged to leave an abusive marriage, the “logistics” are rarely considered. The next morning, Bryan breezily asks Dani to straighten his tie for him. When she reminds him that he hit their child the previous night, he smirks, claiming that Luna is too old to be considered a “child.” Glibly, he adds that Luna knowingly disobeyed him, making their legal situation more difficult, and deserved punishment. Jeering at Dani’s demand that he leave their home, he says he’s worked very hard to give them everything they have, out of “love”—and, if he lost his temper, it’s because he “car[es] so much” (115). Smiling coldly, he says he will “of course” come home after work, the same as always, and if she has a problem with that, “please leave.” Dani watches him stride out the door, then receives a text from Luna asking if he’s gone.

At the hospital, Lindsey has just given Jacob a sponge bath and keeps up a one-sided conversation with him, wishing the staff showed more “enthusiasm” for his rehabilitation. As she tends to Jacob, she asks him why he didn’t come to her with his “girl” troubles. Recalling the last time the three boys got into serious trouble, she remembers confronting Jacob about his drinking, whereupon he claimed he was only “fake drinking,” pretending to keep up with Sawyer and Caleb. Nevertheless, Lindsey worried that Jacob would lose his scholarship if he got into any more trouble: Unbeknownst to their friends, and to Jacob himself, the family relies on financial assistance, since Andrew’s rheumatology profession doesn’t pay nearly as well as people assume.

Lindsey tells Jacob that she and Andrew have finally hired a lawyer. She says that the toxicology report will be coming out soon, and Detective Locke wants to discuss what he found on Jacob’s laptop, which he says is “urgent.” Tenderly, she kisses Jacob’s forehead, which “feels waxy and stiff, like an expensive doll” (120).

Getting up, Kendra untangles Sawyer’s bed sheets from her legs, vowing to stop taking Xanax, which makes her physically ill every morning. Paul, she notes, gets “angrier” every day, partly because of her “unhealthy” obsession with Sawyer’s room. Turning on Sawyer’s phone, Kendra sees Jacob’s face appear on the home screen. Jacob’s dark hair and eyes, she thinks, always set him apart from his two friends, as did his seriousness and level-headedness. By far the most “responsible” of the three, he never did anything impulsive, which is why she can’t believe he attempted death by suicide. Looking at the photos of Jacob on Sawyer’s phone, she notices that some of them capture a side of him that she never saw before, which unsettles her: a smiling dreaminess that’s almost erotic.

Lindsey and Andrew meet with Detective Locke for an interview, with their lawyer, Dan, advising them remotely. Locke tells them that the tech squad found porn on Jacob’s laptop, but nothing unusual for a teenage boy. However, they also found a “hidden account” on the laptop for which they don’t have a password. Turning white, Andrew confesses that the account is his. He created it with Jacob’s information to hide it from Lindsey. He used it, he says, to communicate with another woman, just for friendship. He insists that he’s never met this woman and doesn’t even know her real name. He was going to tell Lindsey, he says, as soon as he found the “right time.” Lindsey is devastated, thinking it must be “sex stuff.”

Dani has received a semi-urgent request from Detective Locke to discuss an “interesting turn” in the case and arrives at the station to see Bryan enter arm-in-arm with Ted, laughing ostentatiously. They don’t give her a glance. Locke has summoned them to discuss Caleb’s “anger” issues at school: “threatening” a teacher who caught him plagiarizing a test, spitting in a classmate’s food, etc. Both Dani and Bryan make excuses for their son, dismissing his infractions as totally normal for a teenage boy, and saying that Caleb is merely a “clown” who likes to make his friends laugh. Locke insists on questioning Caleb again, this time in the presence of his trauma therapist. Leaving the station, Dani meets Kendra at the local Denny’s. This is the first time they’ve been alone together since the “accident,” and the meeting is awkward for both of them. Lindsey was also invited but has not yet arrived. Grabbing Dani’s hand “conspiratorially,” Kendra opines that the “stuff” Lindsey does with Jacob is “super creepy,” and Dani heartily agrees.

Dani, meanwhile, is scared to go home. That day, she discovered that Luna went back to college, leaving her a note that she hasn’t dared to open. Dani has no money to rent an apartment, since Bryan controls their bank accounts. He always used to refer to his micromanaging of their life together as “taking care” of her, which she found charming. Now she feels like a prisoner.