She was pushing herself too hard. The slopes of Custer Road were deceptive in grade. Out here, along their lonely ribbon of gravel road, the concept of neighbors was relative, but she was heading up the rise toward the former house of Major Dawkins, coiner of Be the tallest you can. The Dawkinses had been important friends of the family; Major Dawkins was an ex-military bigwig of gold-leaf distinction who’d thought the world of Lee Fleming. But after Lee vanished, the Major and Mrs. Dawkins moved away, as if there was nothing left in the sticks worth seeing.
Liv’s heart was throbbing, and each exhale felt wet, like the kicked-up gravel shards had perforated her lungs. She kept going, though, up the winding driveway, past the rust-gobbled NO TRESPASSING: YOU ARE NOW IN RANGE sign, and through a lawn grown out to a primeval state Major Dawkins would have abhorred. She slapped the garage door—her midway point—and started back down the hill. It was Friday; she’d made this run every day after school since Tuesday and had become wary of loose rock.
What a week. Liv gave begrudging credit to Baldwin for behaving like Liv hadn’t told her off in front of the whole class, but Principal Gamble hadn’t been so forgiving. Her mood, of course, hadn’t helped. When Liv got to his office after the last class on Tuesday, her cafeteria conversation with Bruno had her nerves crackling again.
Gamble was at his desk when she got there. He was sitting with his hands clasped, devoting his entire attention to her arrival. Under another circumstance, it might be flattering. The second Liv arrived, he pointed a thick finger at a chair.
“What in the world was going on in your head?” he demanded.
“You only heard Baldwin’s side of this,” she mumbled.
“I didn’t realize there could be another side to ‘go to hell.’”
Her mumble got more mumbly. “Maybe there is.”
“This isn’t like you, Liv.”
He raised his eyebrows and waited. Liv picked at her fingernail polish, praying for this to end soon. She figured she had a decent shot. Ever since the night Gamble had halted the abomination of her father’s play, she had felt indebted to him, though she never knew how to convey it. But it must have showed; Gamble had been subtly protective of her over the last two years, smoothing over her misbehaviors, reminding teachers of the trauma she’d been through. Her hopes for that kind of charity sank as Gamble grabbed a detention pad and began writing.
“You know I’ve always tried to help you. But you’re a big girl now. You’re suspended from cross-country the rest of the week.”
“What?”
“What did you expect? You’re not impressing anyone.”
“You think I was trying to impress someone? Baldwin is doing Oliver! How could you let her do that?”
“I have enough on my plate without worrying about which play Ms. Baldwin’s doing.”
“There are a million plays, and she chooses that one?”
“We still have the sets in storage. You haven’t seen this year’s budget.”
“Which parts of my dad’s sets are reusable? The orange disco ball? Baldwin’s trying to make some point.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing—you ever think of that? It could be healthy. The school needs to get over that incident. The whole town does. Maybe Ms. Baldwin wants to take it on straight. Like an exorcism. Get all the demons worked out.”
“At my expense. You know what kind of shit I’m going to have to deal with?”
“Whoa, whoa. You don’t get to curse in here. Who do you think you are?”
“I’m Lee Fleming’s daughter. And I’m going to get shit. Major shit.”
Gamble put his pen back to the detention pad.
“When’s your first cross-country meet?”
“Saturday. Why?”
“You’re suspended from that, too.”
“What?”
“And you’re going to apologize to Ms. Baldwin.”
“That’s not fair! She’s a bitch for doing this and you know it!”
“There goes another meet. You want to try for a third?”
Liv’s face felt like it was in flames. Gamble ripped off the detention slip, and through the blurry heat waves of her vision she noted his sorry look but wouldn’t accept it. She took the slip—she wanted to snatch it—and marched from the room without a word. Baldwin’s room was just five doors down, and Liv planted herself at the threshold. Steeled as if to rip off a patch of duct tape, she performed what was, in a technical sense, an apology.
“I’m sorry about what I said.”
Baldwin looked up from sending a text. The woman wore owlish glasses and a waist-long braid, the kind of thing Liv attributed to Renaissance fairs. Her wardrobe was composed of frowsy bohemian dresses in faux-patchwork crepe, which swept along the floor, hiding gross old sandals. These were Monica-like judgments, but right now Liv gave in to them.
“Liv,” Baldwin sighed. “Let’s talk.”
“That’s okay. I wanted to apologize, that’s all.”
“Come in. We have a couple minutes. I think you may have the wrong idea about this.”
“No, I’m good. I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye.”
“Liv—”
But Liv was off, the distasteful task taken like a vaccination shot; she’d have to rub the pain away for a few hours, that’s all. The silver lining of the outburst with Baldwin was that it competed with the Doug video as the week’s top story. When the video hit her phone lunchtime on Wednesday, she watched it and judged that it could have been worse. The camerawork was woozy, and the acoustics made dialogue unintelligible. Her cameo at the climax was obscured, a small miracle she was happy to accept. No one would know she’d been involved.
Except, that is, Bruno. She scanned the cafeteria and found him with another random assemblage of kids, snarfing another torta, leading a gregarious conversation. Her secrets, it seemed, were safe with Bruno, and it surprised her that she was all right sharing them.
“I just heard about Baldwin,” Hank said, sitting down with his tray. “Holy shit, Liv.”
Liv closed her phone, killing the video. “All in a day’s work.”
“I was there,” Phil boasted. “The baddest-ass thing I’ve ever seen.”
Liv felt the prickling of a blush on her neck. She looked at the girls at the table. They seemed cautious, even suspicious. Darla wouldn’t meet Liv’s eyes. Amber and Laurie exchanged a look. Krista offered her a weak smile. Naturally, it was Monica who gave voice to the roiling undercurrent.
“That’s two meets, Liv,” Monica chastised. “We were sort of counting on you? We didn’t train all summer for you to flake out, you know. I hope you at least got some jollies out of your little tantrum.”
Monica smiled sweetly at the end of it, twisting it into a joke, but if you knew Monica at all, you knew no joking was involved. The flush of pleasure around her neck tightened into a burn. Liv swore right there, while picking at another tray of unpalatable food, that she’d make it up to the whole team. Just because she couldn’t run with them this week didn’t mean she couldn’t keep herself in top shape for when she returned, at which point she’d rededicate herself to the new Liv, finally bringing the old Liv to an end.
So here she was, doing her part, running even harder than she would at practice. John, who’d jogged with her on Custer Road for a mile, was waiting on the shoulder where he’d given up, and he rejoined her as she headed back home from the Dawkins place. It had to be past seven. The forest line under which the sun had dipped glowed as if on fire from another of Doug’s flares. In the time she’d been running, her mother would have gotten home, changed, drunk some wine, and departed for the steakhouse. Their home would be empty.
When Liv got to the mailbox, she kept running.
John followed her to the backyard, where he, as usual, halted. Liv ran past the perennial grave markers: the lawnmower corpse, the swing set cemetery, the cairns of loose brick, the garden-shed mausoleum. She vaulted the trampled back fence and hurtled through the woods, faster than she’d ever done it. Trees, upset at her unscheduled invasion, slapped her with leaves, which she ignored, and branch ends, which she fended off with elbows. There was a good strong branch, practically a baseball bat—she swiped it off the ground without breaking stride.
She wouldn’t miss another cross-country meet. She wouldn’t miss anything ever again. With the play unpreventable, as well as the affronts that would come with it, she would need to focus hard, do whatever needed doing, and to start with, that meant taking the step she’d failed to take on Sunday. The branch felt natural in her hand. It would do the job of destroying most of the traps, if not all of them. All she had to do was keep running, because if she didn’t stop, didn’t catch her breath, didn’t think, she couldn’t change her mind.
There came a sound.
Louk.
Don’t stop running.
Cleek.
Don’t start thinking.
Hwolk.
Damn it, damn it. She slowed to a jog, then a fast walk. She winced from a stitch in her side. See? This was what happened in life anytime you stopped moving and started thinking—pain came crashing. She cocked her head, swiped sweaty hair from her ear. Was it a duck? Doubtful. A chicken? Not way out here. A squirrel? She’d learned the hard way that squirrels made all sorts of unexpected noises. The truth clobbered her. Trap One had caught something. That was bad news. Amputator was no Hangman’s Noose. When its trigger was tripped and its jaws sprang shut, there could be blood, even bone.
She slowed her walk and tried to quiet her panting. Whatever it was had heard her and gone quiet, but the rustle of leaves carried. Under tree cover, it was practically night out here, as threatening as a corn maze. The idea that she would stride up to the trap in the dark and use the branch to finish off the animal was farcical. Only Doug would be so brave. She might even be forced to call him to come deal with this.
Liv circled around the final tree, her teeth clenched in expectation of blood. It could be a possum. Or a bobcat. She choked up on the branch. The animal might yet wriggle free. It might be chewing through its last tendon now. She held her breath, leaned to see better, and stepped into a clearer view.
It wasn’t a squirrel, or possum, or bobcat. It was larger. Much larger. It had four limbs, but not four legs. Two of the limbs were arms. It had a round, snoutless head. Liv’s innards flooded with nausea. Was it a man? Had the worst-case scenario of a wandering hiker stumbling into a trap finally come to pass?
She dared take a step closer. The thing spasmed. Liv gasped. A shiver shook out through the thing’s body. Then, to Liv’s revulsion, it sat up, its face swinging into the dim light, its inhuman features twisting to produce chittering sounds unlike any Liv had ever heard. Cwelk. Slouk. Flech. Mwolk.
No, it wasn’t a man, and the worst-case scenario she’d feared wasn’t the worst scenario after all, not by a long shot.
Trap One, Amputator, years after its construction, had lived up to its design. It had caught an alien being. It was the most abominable thing Liv had ever laid eyes upon, and she screamed, and screamed again, and screamed again and again, and as she sprinted back through the slashing woods faster than she’d run all afternoon, headed for home, for her phone, for help, one single thought raced even faster, stabbing her far more brutally than any stitch in her side.
Dad was telling the truth the whole time, and none of us, except Doug, believed him.