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Everything should be good. She’s at a good college and she likes her classes and she’s made new friends and still keeps in touch with her old ones. Her relationship with her parents is better and so is her relationship with herself. Everything should be good.
It is decidedly not. Because she’s tired and stressed and she misses her friends and above all else, the past won’t leave her the fuck alone. It’s not even like she’s trying to avoid it or outrun it or whatever the heroines do in the movies. She just doesn’t like acknowledging it. Unfortunately, her past is constantly begging to be acknowledged.
“Ronnie, you okay?” Louis asks. “You’ve been quiet.”
“Yeah, Ronnie,” Heather Chandler croons, leaning over the back of Veronica’s chair. Her hair is tickling Veronica’s neck, and Veronica has to try very hard not to scream in frustration. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says, attempting her best smile at Louis. This is a study group, she reminds herself. At a college that is very, very far away from Westerberg. Everything should be good. But after all of it- the police interrogations, the carefully formatted lies, the way she weaved the truth into something acceptable that absolved her of all blame, the rest of the school year and college applications and a summer with Martha and Heather Mac and now three months of college with a major she enjoys- after all of it, something is still wrong.
Maybe it’s the fact that four dead people are following her wherever she goes.
Yeah, when she thinks about it, it’s probably the ghosts.
She makes it through the rest of the study session with minimal interruptions. She manages to tune out Ram and Kurt’s bickering, which is something she’s gotten very good at over the past year. Heather is mostly quiet, cutting in with snarky remarks occasionally when one of Veronica’s classmates says something she thinks is funny or stupid. JD lingers, like he always does, never close enough to really pay attention to what’s going on, but always close enough to keep an eye on her.
She goes back to her dorm after the study session and flops down face-first on her bed. She’s in a single room, miraculously. Something about the trauma of your ex-boyfriend blowing himself up in front of you the night of a pep rally. No one knows about the rest of it.
No one except the four ghosts that are her constant reminder of what she did, that is.
“Since when are you going by Ronnie?” JD asks. She rolls onto her side; he’s sitting at her desk. The rest of them are nowhere to be seen, but she knows they haven’t gone far. They never do.
“Where have you been the past three months,” she grumbles. JD talking to her is rare, even though he’s the only one that never leaves.
“Right here,” he answers. “You like it better than Veronica?”
“I like that it’s a name you never called me,” she retorts. He raises an eyebrow, then when she doesn’t cave, turns away with a snort.
“You haven’t gotten rid of us yet,” JD says eventually, staring out the window above her desk. She sighs and rolls onto her back, stares at the ceiling for a while and doesn’t respond. JD repeats his comment.
“I don’t know how,” she says. “If I did, trust me, you’d be gone.”
“You should accept your part in it,” he suggests. “We all know you were just as excited about it as I was.”
“Was I?” she says, turning her head to the side to give him a look. “I seem to recall being lied to the whole time, then trying to stop you as soon as you told my fake-dead body what you were doing.”
“Funny,” JD says. “I thought of it differently.”
“That’s why you’re dead and I’m alive,” Veronica tells him, turning away again.
“Ouch,” he says quietly, and she can’t tell if he’s joking or not.
“Besides,” she says eventually. “I have accepted my part in it. I encouraged you, and I didn’t go to the police sooner, and I lied, and- fuck. What happened to me?”
“What ever do you mean, dearest?”
“Don’t call me that. I mean- God. You fucked me up, you know that?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not.” He laughs breathlessly, and it feels like a weight sinks onto the bed, like he’s laying down next to her. “You know what I think about a lot?”
“What?”
“Something you said to me that night. About my mom. You wished she’d been stronger.”
“I remember.”
“I don’t know if that would’ve changed anything,” he says, like he’s admitting some great secret. “I think I was a dead man walking from the start.”
“You and me both.” He laughs at that, and she hates that he laughs at it, but she laughs, too.
There’s silence for a while. She thinks she hears Kurt and Ram shouting outside, then Heather’s voice cutting through them both. She can’t make out what they’re saying. It sounds like they’re getting farther away.
“I think,” she says eventually. “That there’s really nothing I could have done to stop you. Because I was a dumb fucking kid- I still am a dumb fucking kid. But I was a dumb fucking kid that thought I was in love and I didn’t want to lose the only person I ever thought would fight for me besides myself. And I guess- fuck. I guess I did the best I could, considering the circumstances. It’s definitely partially my fault. But I think most of the blame rests on you.”
She’s quiet for a while after that. He doesn’t say anything. When she looks over, he’s not there anymore. She goes to the window; Heather and Ram and Kurt aren’t outside. She can’t hear them anywhere. She closes her eyes, counts to fifty, and then flops back down on her bed.
“Fuck,” she says out loud, and there’s no one there to hear her, ghost or not. “I need to call Martha.”