Читать книгу A Knife in the Heart - Michael Benson - Страница 11

Lisa Lafrance, born and raised in Pinellas Park, had known Rachel Wade since middle school, but they really started hanging out in ninth or tenth grade. “She was dating our friend Nick, and we had grown up with Nick,” Lisa explained.

Lisa and Rachel started out as enemies. The problem, of course, involved a boy. In what would become a familiar pattern, hostilities between Rachel and Lisa built up through phone calls and text messages. They had a fight on Rachel’s driveway. Lisa took complete blame for that. She’d started it. Rachel didn’t want to fight. Lisa had to go onto Rachel’s property to throw the first punch.

“Rachel liked to talk it, but she wasn’t violent. She wasn’t face-to-face confrontational,” Lisa said. After the fight, they became BFFs—best friends forever.

Even back then, Rachel was only “off and on” when it came to living with her parents. She began to date Nick, and then spent a lot of time at Nick’s. Lisa hung out there, too.

When they were hanging out, sometimes their activities were mundane. They played cards. But they were also bad girls. “We did a lot of drugs together,” Lisa remembered. Those were the days of smoking weed, snorting coke, and taking Roxies.

Lisa was with Rachel for one of their shoplifting busts: “We used to steal clothes, sell them at Plato’s Closet, and use the money to buy gas,” Lisa explained.

Lisa could never figure out what it was, but Rachel’s home with her parents was not a happy place. Her parents were nice, and they had her back no matter what, but they couldn’t prevent her from being a relentless rebel.

Constant rebellion brought animosity, which led to further rebellion. Rachel yearned to do her own thing in a world without rules—a world where she had no one to answer to.

Plus “she was boy crazy,” Lisa said. “She was always with a boy. The entire time I knew her, she was never without a boyfriend.”

She was so dependent on boys that whichever boy she was with became Rachel’s absolute priority. Parents were no longer necessary. Dealing with parents became intolerable.

“Her parents were great,” Lisa said. “They just didn’t know how to react when Rachel grew up, being as mature as she was for her age.”

Lisa noted that Rachel had a brother, who was just a couple of years older than Rachel. The siblings never got along; and in Lisa’s experience, he was never around.

“Rachel used to say they she and her brother fought all the time. She said that her brother hated her. She didn’t talk about him much. She didn’t like to talk about him. It was a sore subject.”

Rachel needed a boyfriend to validate her feelings and make her feel better about herself. “Even though she was gorgeous and had a great personality, she needed validation,” Lisa said.

Rachel’s life improved immensely when she got her own apartment. Once they no longer shared the same roof, she and her parents were on even better terms with one another.

Lisa remembered the days of hanging out at Nick’s as some of the best times ever. She remembered the problems she had with Jamie Severino over Jay. That got complicated: that was what had started the big fight outside Nick’s with the brass knuckles and the cops.

Lisa had maybe the best perspective of the events that would follow because she had been really good friends with both Rachel and Sarah. In school, Lisa and Sarah used to hang out in the gym together. This was before Rachel and Joshua got together. Sarah and Erin didn’t get along because of Joshua, and Jamie and Lisa had their troubles over Jay.

Lisa and Sarah never really had a falling-out, but they did stop speaking. With Sarah and Rachel feuding over Joshua, Lisa could no longer be friends with both, and—since Rachel was her best friend—Sarah was dropped.

During the last days of their friendship, Sarah had tried to pump Lisa for info. What was up with Rachel and Joshua? Were they hanging out? According to Lisa, Sarah asked, “Could you please break them up for me?”

Lisa felt bad about it. She understood where Sarah was coming from. Sarah had lost her virginity to Joshua.

Lisa understood what a bond that could create. For four years, Lisa was with the guy who had taken her virginity; and when another girl came around, she was always willing to fight for him.

Lisa told Sarah to her face that, out of loyalty to Rachel, she had to stop being her friend. Sarah took it well. “Sarah and I never had problems. We had an understanding that I was going to stand by Rachel,” Lisa recalled.

Sarah was awesome, a really good kid, but not as innocent as some made her out to be. She was just fighting for Joshua: fighting for his love, for his attention. She even said to Lisa, she never felt good enough for him. Erin was beautiful; Rachel was beautiful; Sarah was beautiful, too, but she was insecure because of her weight problems that had plagued her for much of her life. She was cruelly affected by all of the juvenile taunts she had heard.

“Kids used to call her ‘Shrek,’” Lisa remembered. “That was so messed up—because Sarah was gorgeous.”

Lisa was aware of the escalating problems between Rachel and Sarah. Rachel would call Lisa while she was coming home from work and would talk until she was safely in her apartment. She needed somebody to talk to because she anticipated an ambush some night from Sarah.

During the last weeks of Sarah’s life, Lisa was no longer speaking with Rachel, either. But it was her own fault, not Rachel’s. Years had passed since the days of doing lines, weed, and pills at Nick’s, and Rachel had—as far as Lisa could tell—stopped taking drugs. Rachel was vocal about her disapproval of Roxies, which was like taking heroin without the needle. Rachel had seen Nick getting goofy on pills, choosing pills over everything else. That was what had broken them up.

For Lisa, however, those drug vices she had acquired while hanging out at Nick’s had become habits. She had a serious addiction. “I let Roxies take over my life for three years,” Lisa admitted. She tried to recall in detail the last time she spoke to Rachel before Rachel went to jail, but it was hard. She could remember events only as reflected in something resembling a whacked-out carnival mirror.

Rachel was with a friend of hers named Jeremy Sanders at the time. Rachel’s friends, in fact, would have said that Jeremy was Rachel’s boyfriend. He was a muscle-bound stoner, but he made Rachel “feel so safe” when he held her in his arms—his “guns.”

That there was still a soap opera going on involving Joshua Camacho would have surprised many who knew Rachel—especially Jeremy, who had been told by Rachel that Joshua was a thing from the far, far past. Rachel had assured Jeremy that she wasn’t even going to think about Joshua anymore.

That bitch on the voice mails? Those weren’t the “real” Rachel. That was an act. Rachel might have sounded pretty aggressive in her voice mails to Sarah, but in reality she was insecure. Rachel had thought about the situation with Sarah and Joshua.

“I don’t think I’m going to get to be with Joshua anymore,” Rachel said.

Lisa didn’t recall taking that too seriously. Rachel was all about breaking up and making up.

“Still, it was my understanding that she was with Jeremy at the time,” Lisa said.

At one point during that final visit, with Lisa slurring her speech and bleary-eyed, Rachel gave Lisa the ultimatum: “The pills or me.” It was the first time Rachel had ever spoken to Lisa that way—and it was obvious she was doing it because she wanted to help her. Rachel had lost Nick to pills, and now she was losing Lisa to them.

Sadly, Lisa chose the pills. She was high all of the time. She was high on the night Sarah died.