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  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1. Front Page

  2. The Pleasure of Your Company

  3. The Last Weekend

  4. Rivers and Rocks

  PART TWO

  5. German, Spanish, French

  6. 210 Grams

  7. The Day Michael Jackson Died

  8. Good Luck to You

  PART THREE

  9. Everything in Retrospect

  10. Never-Ending Sweet Spot

  11. Scorpio Rising

  12. To Bear Witness

  13. Some Graphic Images

  PART FOUR

  14. Glenview

  15. Diminishing Returns

  16. Thirty-Seven Points of Similarity

  17. Neat Little Bow

  18. The Dog Park

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my parents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS BOOK IS a work of memoir. I have reconstructed some conversations from memory; others are based on notes and recorded interviews. I relied on court transcripts and legal documents for some sections; in other sections some locations, names, and characteristics of people have been changed.

  PROLOGUE

  I CAN’T REMEMBER whose idea it was to start taking pictures that night, but it could have come from either one of us. I had a cheap autofocus point-and-shoot, and when Ashley would sleep over, we’d often go through two rolls of film in a weekend.

  Sometimes we’d hike into the woods behind my house and pose on rocks or in piles of leaves or standing on logs that had fallen across the river. We’d pretend to be models, trading off with the camera and art-directing an imaginary shoot for Seventeen. Other times we’d photograph each other playing the piano in my living room, practicing whatever duet we had learned that week. I was always Secondo and Ashley was Primo, her fingers slender and light on the high keys.

  That night after dinner we had nothing special in mind; we just started clicking through exposures at an aimless pace, picking up props we found around my bedroom. There’s Ashley, kneeling on my blue shag carpet in baggy stonewashed jeans and a white T-shirt, holding a beach ball next to her shoulder in a mock coquettish pose. There’s me, with crazy frizzy hair and Wayfarers, standing in front of a tacked-up watercolor painting we had done in art class.

  Whose idea was it to start taking off our clothes? Probably mine, but it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Neither of us was shy, but I was a bit bossier. I wasn’t yet even a preteen, but a penchant for directing and managing was already beginning to take hold.

  We’d seen each other’s bodies plenty of times before, mostly out of curiosity and veiled competitiveness and generally at times when we knew her parents or my parents wouldn’t suddenly come home. We discussed which one of us might need a bra first (me) or who looked better in the pale pink culottes we both had (she did).

  Sometimes we’d end up in the shower, but never the bath. We didn’t look at each other too closely or directly, and we didn’t touch; we more just acknowledged each other, as if to say I’m OK, you’re OK. We’re in this thing—this stage, this girlwoman gawkiness, this whatever it is—together.

  The addition of the camera that night gave things a slightly different edge. It was still just the two of us; we pretended to be models, as always, but this time, instead of imitating the glossy-lipped girls in teen magazines, we told ourselves we were the ones in the Playboys we found buried in a closet at Ashley’s house.

  It felt like a game. At the time, sexiness was as foreign a concept as cold fusion. We didn’t know enough to feel self-conscious, so instead we just giggled. Unstoppably. We covered our nonexistent breasts with our hands and laughed about how dissimilar our bodies were from the jaded, tanned, and voluptuous women on those pages. We lowered our voices and tried to seduce each other, quoting lines from The Young and the Restless, and then we pursed our lips and whistled.

  There’s me, lying in an S-curve on the carpet, all baby fat and curls. Ashley, topless with pastel cotton underpants, is hanging from the chin-up bar in my closet doorway, her belly button pulled taut like the slit on a slot machine. There are a few gymnastics poses, then a few mock centerfold shots, and click-click-click, the roll was done.

  We went to bed smirking that night—Ashley in the trundle below me—with yet another secret between us.

  • • •

  I had nearly forgotten about it until a few weeks later when my mother came home from the film developer, livid. She tossed the envelope of pictures in front of me on the table—unopened—and demanded to know what was on the film.

  “The manager came out to tell me, ‘We don’t develop smut,’ ” she seethed, hanging on the final “t” as if the word was still ringing in her ears. “I was mortified. If your father had been there, he could have been taken to jail.”

  My face grew hot. It had never occurred to me that there were actual people developing, considering, and perhaps even discussing my pictures. That it wasn’t just an automated machine like the one I got soda out of. That a teenage boy or a middle-aged man or a faceless person I couldn’t envision had seen us, maybe even laughed at us—not just this time but all the times. That what Ashley and I did in my room or in her room, or in the woods didn’t belong just to us.

  It was my first flicker of understanding that part of being a girl meant being looked at, judged, maybe criticized—whether you consented or not—and I didn’t like it one bit.

  • • •

  It was 1989, and Ashley and I were ten years old. Today, Ashley is more than sixteen years dead.

  PART

  ONE

  1

  FRONT PAGE

  SHE WAS FOUND by her roommate in the hallway of their split-level bungalow at 1911 Pinehurst Road in the Hollywood Hills at approximately 9 a.m. and pronounced dead by paramedics at 9:28, February 22, 2001. Her body was faceup on the carpeting near the entrance to their bathroom, and when Jen opened the front door that morning and saw her from across the room, she at first thought it was some sort of practical joke. Ashley was known for her occasional put-ons and tricks, but as Jen got closer, it was impossible to miss all the blood.

  It was trailing from Ashley’s nose and mouth and matted in her hair. It had drenched the green terry-cloth robe she was wearing as well as the blue tank top that was stretched around her torso and the shorts that were bunched around her thighs. It covered her arms, legs, and hands with a sickening sheen, nearly obscuring the bracelet tattoo she had around her left ankle. It had turned the carpet around her body a dark, angry red.

  Jen bolted out the door to her car to call 911, not wanting to remain in the room for another second. She would never spend a night in that house again.

  The fire truck was the first to arrive, and then came Detective Thomas Small of the LAPD, Hollywood Division. He noted that the victim was a twenty-two-year-old Caucasian female who was last known to have been alive as of 8:15 p.m. the previous night. He noted that there had been no forced entry into the residence, and no obvious weapons had yet been recovered. He also noted that due to the time lapse, she wasn’t a viable candidate for tissue donation.

  An external
examination of the body revealed forty-seven stab wounds, twelve of which were later deemed fatal. Defense wounds were also observed on her right forearm and hands. Ashley’s neck organs had suffered extensive trauma, and her windpipe and right artery had been cut in two. Stab wounds blanketed her back, stomach, and arms, and her head had been partially dislocated from her spinal column.

  Bloody shoe prints were noted in the house entryway. The official report from the deputy medical examiner wouldn’t be filed for another two weeks, but the manner of death was obvious: homicide.

  She was officially identified at approximately 11 p.m. via DOJ fingerprints as Ashley Ellerin, of Los Altos, California. An hour later, a local police sergeant was sent to notify the next of kin: her parents.

  It took another five days for the news to reach me.

  • • •

  We sat around the kitchen table, my parents and I, with the paper between us. The story had made the front page of The Bernardsville News, below the pictures from the latest hospital benefit and an article on deer population control.

  I read it while they stared at me. I was just under two months out of college; in a few weeks I’d turn twenty-two, just as she had been. I had graduated a semester late, and although I still had my same apartment in the city, something about the new stretches of unstructured weekend time unnerved me. How did you fill it all, all by yourself with no essays to write or assigned reading to get done? I had taken to visiting my parents in New Jersey more regularly while I sorted things out. At the end of February there was a bit of snow left on the ground, and my eyes kept settling upon the patches of whiteness outside every few sentences as I read. “Former Peapack Resident Murdered in Los Angeles,” the headline shouted. I blinked and knew instantly what was coming.

  The article quoted a family friend—someone I had never heard of—who said Ashley had recently transferred from UCLA to the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, and called her “an accomplished pianist and a talented artist.” There would be a private funeral in California, the article said. Her remains would be cremated and her ashes scattered in Hawaii, “a place the family had visited frequently and where Miss Ellerin had wanted to live and work.”

  I felt detached, numb. The time-appearing-to-stop thing you hear about, that was there. The feeling of floating on my back in the middle of a cold lake, staring up at birds chirping in the trees above my head but not being able to hear them—that was there, too. I wondered if my parents expected some sort of emotional display from me and how they’d handle it if I produced one, or if I didn’t. Should I cry? Should I drop my head into my hands and wait for my mother to say something? Should I excuse myself? Nothing seemed appropriate, so instead I stayed silent.

  I wanted to tell my parents what I knew about Ashley, but I didn’t know how. I wanted to tell them the things that would shock them, scare them, and cause them to shake their heads and go silent. I wanted to unburden myself and push them up against the limits of their parental aptitudes. How would they make sense of this one? There was no way to. I felt angry at her, and I wanted them to be as well. How could her life have ended up this way? But maybe it wasn’t my place to share what I knew. They could find out from someone else, or maybe not at all, or perhaps there’d be another occasion to talk about it when things weren’t so fresh.

  I would wait this time. There were still a million questions yet to be answered. I knew I had secrets about Ashley I was quite certain she had told few others, but I still didn’t know what had happened to my oldest friend at the end. So what did I really know, anyway?

  2

  THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY

  “I’D LOVE TO,” Ashley said when I asked if she wanted to meet for lunch at Pizza Hut on Saturday afternoon. I had earned a certificate at school for two Personal Pan Pizzas for meeting some reading goal in the fourth grade, and I wanted to treat us. I called her on the phone, and it felt like a special occasion, yet I still recognized her choice of words as something a little unusual for a young girl to use, even though I was also one myself.

  There was always something a little bit different about Ashley, though, which is part of why the two of us made such a good pair. I first met her right at the time when I was beginning to realize that I didn’t quite fit in. The rules of how to succeed at a central New Jersey public elementary school in 1987 were discrete and finite: have the right clothes, be cute and not too loud (if you were a girl), and be good at sports. Despite my best efforts, I came up short in every department.

  I had corkscrew curly hair that stuck out in all the wrong places. I wore a combination of Esprit and hand-me-down knits from my mother, resulting in a look that put me somewhere between eccentric and oblivious. I didn’t have the requisite CB winter jacket with crumpled lift tickets from ski resorts hanging off the zipper or the Cavaricci jeans with the nipped-in waist and puffed-out thighs. I wasn’t a team asset during recess kickball, either; I lacked the quick reaction time, general sportiness, and suspension of disbelief necessary to get excited over who was winning.

  My parents worked long hours, and I didn’t have a regular after-school babysitter, so most days I stayed in the library until about 6 p.m., when they could pick me up. I tinkered around on the computers, scanned the bookshelves over and over, and sometimes chatted with the other straggler kids, the ones who were in between child-care situations, lived too far out for the bus routes, or had some entirely more complicated—and usually unfortunate—thing going on with their parents: messy divorces, custody issues, restraining orders. It was above my emotional pay grade, but bits and pieces occasionally sank in.

  In spite of—or perhaps because of—all that, I acted like a know-it-all: I raised my hand first every chance I got and delighted in winning whatever academic competitions were happening—history quizzes, mock stock trading, young inventors’ contests. My older brother—the boy genius, according to my new teachers who had had him six years earlier—was no help, either. He had been an even bigger outcast at our school; after years of being bullied, he had decamped to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts at the age of thirteen to be among his kind, the ones who were doing calculus before they hit puberty and spending their free time huddled around an Apple II. But where was my kind?

  I had some friends; some lunches by myself; kissed a boy on the playground who decided he didn’t like me the next afternoon. The day I felt most popular was when I found a German porn magazine in my brother’s closet and brought it in to homeroom. While our teacher marked papers at her desk in the front, I quietly became the center of something in the back row. The boys flipped pages and the girls tried to suppress giggles, but a few began to slip out. We were caught, and I was marched to the front: scolded—an outlaw.

  • • •

  Baby Jessica McClure had fallen down a well in Midland, Texas, that fall, and we couldn’t take our eyes off the nightly news. My parents had a small color television upstairs, and after dinner that week I’d watch with my mother while she ironed the shirts and pillowcases.

  I wondered what it felt like to end up in such a dark hole. There must have been bumps and scrapes along the way, and then the bottom came without warning. What did the sky look like from so deep down? Was it just a dot, a faraway abstract thing? I thought about whether Baby Jessica knew what had happened to her and if the fear had ever faded into boredom as she waited.

  To me, the images on TV were murky and didn’t seem to communicate much; my mother’s emotion confused me, the way she would tear up as if on cue. I wondered if perhaps the adults were in on something that I didn’t quite understand yet, whether the older I got, the more I’d start to feel.

  • • •

  I liked Ashley right away for a million unquantifiable reasons that, looking back, I can only describe as chemistry and timing. What else was there, really? She had shiny dark hair and a round face, and she didn’t rush to try to get in with the popular girls or make too much of the curiosity she aroused by being new at school that
year in the fourth grade. Her clothes weren’t much better than mine, but she barely seemed to notice or care. Her dad was Jewish, like mine was, which felt like a rare enough thing to have in common that it was meaningful, and we each had a brother, though hers was younger, so she was easily in control of their dynamic. In her house, she was the lead pony for how childhood was going to go down, which was the opposite of how it was for me.

  She handled being the new girl much more fluidly than I had two years earlier. New kids always seemed to show up late their first day; I had arrived in the middle of a second-grade spelling bee already in progress. “Sarrr jent,” I heard the teacher say as the door to my new classroom opened. A tall girl raised her hand.

  “S-E-R-G-E-A-N-T,” she spelled out confidently, as I stared at the floor while the principal handed papers to my teacher. Who were these kids? How did that girl know there were all those Es?

  By the third grade, I had sloughed off my newness like an ill-fitting raincoat, and I could stare at the new new kids from my comfortable, protected perch in the second row of desks as they nervously interrupted a social studies or math lesson. They always faced perpendicular to the class while the principal and the teacher conversed over their heads, their fear palpable, not knowing what would happen next. Wondering if things would be better here or if they’d still get made fun of for their lazy eye or occasional lisp. I looked at them with curiosity and a kind of empathy. I would sometimes try to imagine the things that would need to happen to have this person end up being my friend. Perhaps I’d be assigned to take her to her locker, or I’d feel a dose of boldness at lunch and invite her to come sit at my table. Their pasts always seemed intriguingly foreign to me—Pittsburgh, Ontario, a military base in Virginia—though I vaguely understood that they had probably come from somewhere they hadn’t wanted to leave.