Kimbra took up a place by the camper’s door. She eased it open, taking in the trailer park, judged the distance to Luke’s orange RV and wondered for the first time if she weren’t making a colossal mistake. Hadn’t Luke come out here of his own accord? Hadn’t he had sense enough to know that nothing good came of boys like Mitchell Malacek or Garrett Mason (or, for that matter, their good friend, poor broken KT Staler)?
Too late. When Kimbra saw Luke struggle to rise again in his pool of blood she knew she couldn’t do anything but try to help him. Luke could be aloof, could be embarrassingly alone, but he didn’t deserve to die here.
And besides: Kimbra suspected that if it weren’t for all her plans and tricks over the summer Luke probably wouldn’t have been brought here in the first place.
“Good luck,” Joel said.
Without looking back, Kimbra said, “I think you need it more than me, man.”
A brief silence. The night held its breath. She tightened her grip on Browder’s knife, just in case any of the frightened boys she saw watching her from their windows suddenly decided they wanted to get in her way. Better safe than sorry.
Clark shouted, “Clear!”
Kimbra leaped to the ground outside. The moment she landed she heard a strange chugging noise, saw the lights of the trailer park go dark around her. Before the lights went down she saw it: the truck parked near the side of the black trailer, the truck full of blood, the truck full of bits of the beautiful boy she’d spent far too many years of her life hoping to fix.
Kimbra saw KT’s corpse before the lights went out and hesitated for just a moment before she started running.
There were two pops of gunfire. The sound of glass shattering. She ran faster.
And then a third shot—furious and deafening as a thunderclap—burst over the Bright Lands. A strange, sharp heat seeped across Kimbra’s chest.
The ground swallowed her feet.
The lights kicked on again. Above her, staring out from inside the tall triple-wide, Kimbra saw the long barrel of a high-caliber hunting rifle extended in her direction. She even imagined she saw a trail of smoke rising from the tip.
And above the gun? It was the face that had haunted her all week in her sleep.
Kimbra saw herself—her twin, her mirror image—staring at her through the triple-wide’s window, eyes wide with surprise under a head of perfect brown hair, clad in a tight Bisonette singlet.
But no, not quite an identical twin: Kimbra had never managed hair that pretty.
And when, she wondered, had she grown such a funny mustache?