I ran past the scarlet M again, past the corner of campus, and then I kept running as the sidewalk turned into packed dirt, roots, and stone mangling the ground. And again my flip-flops held me back, so I kicked them off and ran some more. The path narrowed, twigs and briars reaching toward me, and then suddenly opened again to a large clearing.
I bent over at the entrance, still sheltered by the trees, and sucked in some air. Then I held my breath so I could hear the noises around me—wind filtering through the trunks, leaves rustling up high, faint scurrying below. But nothing human. So I rested on the side of a fallen tree and took in the unnatural scene in front of me: a dilapidated brick building, half-walls standing, piles of bricks scattered around the floor of the clearing.
Those half-walls were the perfect place to hide, so I balanced myself on the piles of bricks and carefully stepped my way to the building, watching for nails or sharp rocks as the bricks dislodged and scattered below each step. Then I crouched at the spot where two of the partially standing walls still stood and leaned back into the corner.
I closed my eyes, but in my mind I could still see through the back window of the car, and I pictured her hair poofing over the top of the seat. I imagined her turning and watching me with those eyes, red and dry. I could see her rise higher still, pulling herself over the seat, and I could see her clenched jaw and the vein fighting to escape her neck, pulsating and pulsating.
Like I saw at Brian’s funeral.
Brian’s mom didn’t see me then. Nobody saw me. Not even Colleen, who didn’t tell me she was going. But there she was, squeezed between Cody and either Joe or Sammy—I couldn’t tell from the distance. I didn’t know whether Colleen was there for Cody or as some sort of atonement for herself. Or if maybe she was there for me. Colleen had her hand cupped over her mouth, and I could tell, even from between the pickets of the fence across the street, that she was doing that thing where she wasn’t really crying, but her body was still shaking like she was.
Brian’s mom wasn’t paying attention. She looked like she was, but if you were staring, like I was, you’d see she had her head tilted to the side like she was listening to something. Listening for something. Dylan stood next to her, his fists balled up. Staring at the ground like he was furious with it. Like it had taken something from him. Which, I guess, it had.
Then they all walked up to the hole in the ground. His mother dropped a handful of dirt into it, and someone, I’m not sure who, but someone released this noise. This horrible, unnatural sound—a wail. It traveled across the field and through the pickets of the fence. And it buried itself deep within my stomach, like grief was a concrete thing. It settled inside me, and there wasn’t room for anything else, not even air. I was suffocating. I turned around with my back pressed up hard against the fence, and I felt hot and cold all at once, but then only hot. And I vomited into the bushes behind me.
Then they were coming. They all crossed back over the street, finding their way to their cars parked along the curb. I held my breath between the fence posts. Brian’s mom was right there. I could reach out and touch her between the slats. I couldn’t see her face, but she paused right in front of me and tilted her head to the side. Like maybe that whole time she had been listening for me. Then Dylan was beside her, pulling her along. I saw her jaw tense, and that vein, seething.
Later that night, when Colleen snuck over to see me, I said, “The funeral was today,” because I wanted her to tell me why she went.
And she said, “Really? I thought it was next week.” I still didn’t know why she went, but at least I knew why she wouldn’t admit to it then: there was nothing quite like watching Brian’s body being lowered into the ground to fully understand the horror of what I had done.
Someone was running up the path. Heavy steps, stomping the dirt. I crouched lower. And then a muffled voice said, “Shit.” A decidedly male voice. I scrambled to my knees and peeked over the top, breathing in the dust from the bricks under my nose. Reid was scanning the woods beyond, my second pair of flip-flops in his hands.
I stood up, brushing the dust and debris from my shorts.
“God, are you trying to kill me?” He stepped over the piles of bricks, but froze a few feet away. He shook his head to himself and stared at the bricks. “I mean, you could’ve gotten me in a lot of trouble.” He held my shoes toward me again, like a peace offering.
I took the shoes and slid them onto my feet. “I guess it’s no secret, huh?” At least I knew why he’d been staring at me when I crossed center campus.
He had the decency not to act like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “It is and it isn’t,” he finally said. “Jason’s dad is Dean Dorchester, so no luck there. And Krista’s part of the family, though she was away for the summer, so I don’t know if she knows yet.” She did. She definitely did.
“Siblings?” Made perfect sense to me. They had the same hair color and, from what I could tell, the same cold attitude.
Reid shook his head. “Cousins.”
“What about you, Reid?” It’s not like our dads could confide in each other anymore.
He looked away. “I heard from Jason.”
“You’re friends?” I didn’t know why I assumed they wouldn’t be—it’s not like I knew him all that well. And even when I did, I never saw him with his school friends. He could’ve been an entirely different person with them. Like how being with Colleen made me bolder, more sure of myself, more confident.
Reid paused, like he was thinking really hard about the question. “We’re teammates. And secrets are like currency here. You tell one, you’re owed one. There’s a hierarchy to it.”
“You’re high up?”
He shrugged. “I’m high up.”
Reid’s eyes skimmed the trees as they rustled, like the wind was a thing and he could trace its path. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”
I looked around. The remaining walls were kind of unsteady, but nothing seemed dangerous about it. Reid continued, “This is the old student center. You know what’s past here?”
“No,” I said.
“Nothing. Well, not nothing, just nothing you’ll ever find your way out of again.”
“It’s just trees.”
“No, not trees, a forest.”
Now that was something I could understand. The way a bunch of little things can become something bigger—something more than the sum of its parts. I stared off into the distance, no longer seeing the trees stacked up behind one another, but seeing this big thing—a forest, a living, breathing single entity.
“Once you get going,” Reid said, also staring off into the distance, “it’s hard to find your way back out again. There’s this story about this kid, Jack Danvers, who got lost during initi— Anyway, he wandered off one night and didn’t come back.”
A chill ran down my spine. “What happened?”
“Don’t know. They never found a body. I tried to look it up but couldn’t find anything. Didn’t you notice that form you had to sign about not going into the woods? It basically excuses the school from liability. And a few years ago, the school finally raised enough money to build a new student center so we could stay more centralized.”
I stared off into the trees, thinking about that kid who disappeared. I wondered what the end was like for him—was it fast? Slow? Was he scared? Resigned? Was it violent? Gradual? But then I realized it didn’t matter. Dead is dead is dead.
The wind blew and Reid narrowed his eyes at the woods. “Sometimes I think I can feel . . .”
I shivered and cleared my throat. I didn’t want to talk about ghosts. “Anything else I should know?”
“Jason’s an ass. Don’t let him get to you.”
I shook my head, about to explain that it wasn’t Jason I was running from, but I wasn’t about to offer up yet another secret for distribution. If secrets were currency, I was holding onto the ones I had left. “Noted,” I said.
“So come on,” he said, holding his hand out for me. I stared at his open palm, at the lifeline running down it.
Colleen traced mine once, back in middle school. She ran the dark nail of her pointer finger along the crease toward my wrist and said, “Better live while you can.” I had laughed uncomfortably, and Colleen had smiled, even though she’d been trying to keep a straight face. “Just kidding,” she’d said. “We’re going to live forever.” Because that’s exactly the type of thing you think when you’re twelve.
Reid’s arm eventually dropped to his side. “Come on,” he said again, but this time without the open palm.
I pictured us walking back together, side by side on the narrow trail. Either in awkward silence, where I’d be thinking about how he used to be, or with him telling me stories about Monroe, like almost kissing me wasn’t something worth remembering.
“I like it here,” I said. “Quiet.”
He dug at the dirt with the toe of his shoe, but didn’t make any move to leave.
“I won’t get lost. Promise.”
“Okay,” he said, making his way through the rubble again. “So I’ll see you later?”
“Later,” I said.
After he’d left, after I couldn’t hear his footsteps, even in the distance, and after I couldn’t really even hear the scurrying of animals anymore, I maneuvered my way back over the piles of bricks and shuffled down the dirt path, back toward Monroe. I stood in front of the apparently not-main gate watching the students weave around in pairs and clusters. But before I went back through the gate, I had to know. I had to get close enough to check the license plate—check to make sure it was her. Before I called Dad. I skirted the edge of campus, easing my way slowly down the street, watching for the car.
I kept moving until I could see the main gate that Reid had been pointing out. Smaller and single arched, but smack dead in the middle of the school. From here to the gate, no car. And beyond, as far as I could see, no car. I squinted, straining to differentiate the shades of green on the shoulder of the road. The sun had sunk below the tree line, and the shadows loomed again. I tiptoed down the road, the noises from campus getting farther away, and eventually darted to the other side of the street, where I was sure I’d seen the car.
Weeds tickled my calves and the backs of my knees as I made my way through the underbrush. Nothing. I turned around to go back, wondering if I had imagined it all, if my brain put it in my head—like how I’d see Brian’s shadow against my furniture in the dark. And then I stepped into a hole. A flattening of weeds. And beside it, another. And ahead, two more. The indentations from the tires of a car.
I whipped my head over my shoulder and stared into the trees—no, into the forest. I closed my eyes and listened for sounds from a car. The shadows stretched farther, crisscrossing the street, making the gate to Monroe contort backward, concave, like a spoon. I swatted at a mosquito on the back of my arm. And then the first firefly of the evening flashed in front of me. Light on. Light off. Here and not here. Like a signal to the rest, they lit up the roadside.
One flittered in front of my face, black as night. Light off, it flew.
The night Brian died, Colleen was catching fireflies on my back patio when I stepped outside. She had one cupped in her hand, and when I walked down the steps, she released it into my face, laughing as I swatted it away. “I think that’s bad luck,” she said. “Like breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder or something.”
“I thought you were grounded,” I said, looking over her outfit: black miniskirt, tight blue top.
“I was. Until Martha next door got in a fight with her husband and my mom went over, and my bedroom window just happened to slide open a little, and I just happened to fall out of it. And then I just so happened to remember that Brian is having a party this very instant.”
“There’s late, there’s fashionably late, then there’s God-where-were-you-you-missed-everything late. Guess which one we are.”
“He’s your boyfriend. Or something.” She smirked.
I grinned. “My parents will be home in two hours. What’s the point?”
“What’s the point? What’s the point?” She gripped me by the shoulders and shook. “Cody fucking Parker, that’s the point!”
“He called?”
“No, he texted.” She fumbled around in her bag and pressed a few buttons on her phone and held it in front of my face, the screen illuminated like the firefly.
where U at
Classy.
“I’m not ready,” I said.
“So get ready.”
I smiled. Colleen smiled back, big and toothy. “Two minutes, Mallory.”
I took three. Exchanged my boxers for a jean skirt and threw on a black tank top. Since we were God-where-were-you-you-missed-everything late, we didn’t walk up to the beach, down the boardwalk, and cut back in, even though it was safer according to my parents, who didn’t like me walking in the alleys after dark. Especially since people came and went so quickly in the summer, renting homes for a month, or a week. Then they’d be gone and replaced with more people we’d never get a chance to know.
So as we walked, Colleen took out her black mini canister of pepper spray with the key ring on the end and swung it around on her pointer finger.
“It’s probably not effective if they know you have it.”
“This is preemptive,” she explained. “They see I have it and that I’m not afraid to use it. You should get one.”
“That’s why I have you,” I said. Also, I never carried a purse if I could help it, just stuffed my back pocket with a few dollars and hid my house key at the base of the gutter beside the front porch.
Colleen skipped ahead, spun around, and struck some made-up martial arts pose. “You wanna mess with this? Do ya?” Then she tilted her head back and opened her mouth, and her laughter echoed down the alley, across the ocean, and back again.
I crossed the street and entered campus through the main gate. As I walked back toward my dorm, I noticed a few people looking at me. I finally understood Colleen’s feeling of power as she walked to the party that night. I could walk across campus and people would know. They’d know what I was capable of.
And I didn’t even need the pepper spray.
A girl with long black hair, short black bangs, and thick black eyeliner put her hand on my arm as I walked through the lounge. “Do you remember me?” she asked. She moved a piece of gum from one side of her mouth to the other. “Chloe. Remember? You came to my mom’s wedding. I was a bridesmaid. Orange dress. Big bow. You can’t forget something like that.”
Her hair had been lighter and shorter, and that had been before her discovery of eyeliner, but she was right: hard to forget an orange dress with a giant bow.
“The chocolate fountain,” I said, because that wasn’t something you could forget, either. Especially since I got it all over my dress. Actually, Reid had gotten it all over my dress. Chocolate-covered-strawberry handoff gone wrong.
Chloe smiled. “Exactly. My mom told me you were enrolled this year.” I wondered what, exactly, her mother had told her, but I could tell from the way she didn’t ask that she already knew. “Come sit with us at Preview?”
“Preview?”
“Yeah. Fall Preview. It’s like a dinner-dance thing in the dining hall the day before classes start every year. Kinda lame, but, you know, tradition.”
“Oh, I can’t go,” I said, because I was fairly certain I’d never go to another party again.
She scrunched up her mouth. “All right. Well, I’m in 233.” She pointed straight up. “Come visit sometime.”
“Okay,” I said, and Chloe left through the front door. I walked down the hall toward my room. I wished it was that easy. Walk up the stairs to room 233 and talk about her hideous bridesmaid dress. Be friends in that easy, simple way. Talk about easy, simple things.
Think about easy, simple things.
My dorm room was empty—emptied. I guess this was just another part of consequence, like my grandma had warned me. Everything we do has consequence. This was just another.
My bed was piled high with my stuff, but the other side of the room, where Bree had been, was now consumed with an emptiness. Her bed was stripped. Her desktop was bare. The lights were gone. The posters were down. The only thing remaining was the sticky tack where the posters used to hang.
I unpacked and set up my room, trying to spread everything out so the emptiness wasn’t so overwhelming. It wasn’t a big room, and it hadn’t felt empty when I’d first arrived. Only after Bree came. And left. People are funny like that.
I booted up the laptop and followed the instructions to set up the Internet connection and a school e-mail account. Then I composed a message to Colleen:
1 ex-roommate.
1 creep.
2 bitchtastic girls.
79 days till Thanksgiving break.
I hit send, pressed my thumbs into my temples, and felt this chill along the base of my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut and thought No, but that doesn’t do anything either. My laptop made a tiny ping—a message from Colleen:
Miss you too. Will come as soon as detainment is over.
And that was just like Colleen. She didn’t send cryptic messages, saying anything but what she meant. If she loved you she said I love you. If she hated you she said I hate you. She said what she meant.
And she did what she wanted.
We were a block away from the party that night when she stopped walking. She’d put her hand on my arm while I was re-tying a ponytail that I’d just undone. “You’re nervous,” she said.
“My hair won’t cooperate.”
She reached up behind me, pulled out the elastic, and threw it to the ground. “It’s perfect.” Then she put her hands on her hips and lowered her voice. “Mallory, it’s no big thing. You do what you want to do and you don’t do what you don’t want to do. No biggie.” Then she shrugged her shoulders and fluffed my hair with both hands.
Easy for her to say. Turns out Colleen mostly wanted to do everything anyway.
“Hey,” she said, her hand on my elbow. “We don’t have to go.”
“But Cody Parker.” I grinned.
“I like you better,” she said.
Then I was laughing and not as nervous anymore, which I guess was her point, and we continued walking down the alley.
She hung an arm over my shoulders and pulled me in close for a few steps. I could hear the smile in her voice. “Dylan’s gonna freak,” she said. “You know he dumped Danielle last week.”
No, I hadn’t known.
People in the dorm were getting ready for Fall Preview. Whatever that meant. Were they previewing the new kids, like some meat factory? Did they bring a pen and take notes for later? All I knew was the bathrooms were overrun with girls spending hours trying to look like they hadn’t spent any time getting ready.
I saw Bree skip across the hall, following Taryn into her room at the other end, near the lounge. I guess they were roommates now. If she noticed me, she didn’t let on. I went back to my room and made a list of things I’d have to buy at the campus store tomorrow. First on the list: lights.
I thought about sending Colleen another e-mail about this ridiculously pretentious school that calls their lame-ass dance a Fall Preview, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to compose a coherent sentence. Something was scraping my outside window. A tree branch, probably. And there were footsteps. Quiet, shuffling back and forth. Some guy waiting outside his girlfriend’s window, probably.
Probably.
But in the back of my mind—no, in the front of my mind—I kept picturing that car. It was somewhere nearby. And if the car was nearby, so was Brian’s mom.
My room was nestled into the corner—far enough so the noise from the hall didn’t really bother me. Also far enough so nobody in the hall would hear me either. So I left the room, locked the door behind me, and walked through the cluster of girls streaming back and forth down the hall. I pushed through the door leading to the lounge and found a couch tucked away in the back corner. I watched the people waiting for their friends to show up, or waiting for their friends to come out of their rooms. So they could walk over together, I assumed. Like Colleen and I would’ve done.
Krista and Bree came through the hall door, side by side. And Taryn came tagging along right behind them. Jason barreled through the front door, pushing the wooden doors so hard they ricocheted off the wall and bounced back toward him. He stopped them with his open palms held out at his sides.
He stood in the entrance, scanning the room, scanning right over me, until his eyes landed on Krista. “Lovely, as always.”
Krista curtsied and Bree smiled her nonmysterious smile.
“Who’s this?” Jason asked, scanning Bree from head to toe.
“Bree,” said Bree, even though I’d already introduced her as Bree not half a day earlier.
He looked between Krista and Bree and rocked back on his heels. “So are we going or what?”
“We’re going,” said Krista, with Bree on her arm and Taryn trailing behind.
But as they crossed the threshold, I saw Krista reach behind her and take Taryn’s hand, pulling her along.
And for a second I thought that Krista was all right. It’s the kind of thing Colleen would do for me. Making sure I was included. Making sure I was with her. Making sure I knew she was thinking of me.
She’d done it that night. When we left the alley and stood on the corner of Brian’s street, she took my hand and pulled me toward the front steps.