I hate knowing I’ve burdened my parents with this mess, that I’ve disappointed them. It’s hard to remember sometimes that I did the right thing. Sometimes it feels like it wasn’t the right thing at all, but then I remember Andy and Asha and Sam and the way they look whenever Noah’s name is mentioned, and the disturbing, hard glint in Warren’s eyes right before he walked out the door that night, and it reminds me that my mistake was not in speaking out.
No, my mistake was staying silent for too long.
* * *
Mr. Goldman doesn’t stay long after that. He asks me some questions about my police statement, to make sure that everything I said was truthful. It was. Lying to my teachers, my friends, my parents is one thing, but lying to the cops never even occurred to me; I was too freaked out by everything to even consider that an option. I knew as soon as I took that first step—telling my parents what happened—that there was no turning back.
When Mr. Goldman goes to use the bathroom, I steal through the papers in the manila folder, curious as to what else there is. My most interesting find is a copy of Kristen’s statement. I’m expecting nothing but blatant lies, but to my utter shock, everything in her account is truthful to what I recall. There’s no attempt on her end at protecting Warren or Joey. She was even honest about coercing me to keep my mouth shut, though she claims Warren only implied what he’d done over the phone, and that when she put the pieces together, he threatened her if she said a word.
This revelation makes me sit up a little straighter. I don’t know if it’s true—maybe Kristen only wanted to cover her own ass—but I can actually believe it. Warren’s clearly not the most stable human being around. Kristen makes it sound like she was scared of what he might do to her if she told, something she never let on to me—and if that’s really what happened, it makes me wonder how messed up Kristen is that she would still feel any twisted loyalty to him after that. Maybe their relationship was never what I thought it was.