“Was Jamal Reynolds at your house on Friday night?”
She let out a harsh laugh. “You want to know what’s funny? What’s so stupid about this whole fucking situation? Jamal and I didn’t even do anything. We planned everything out so fucking careful for a month and then when I finally get him into the house that night we stopped messing around after five seconds. It was too weird.”
“You want me to tell the police that Jamal’s innocent?”
“Dylan always said you were smart.” Bethany spat tobacco over the railing. Her father, she explained, had been out of town on business last weekend. Before the game, the boys had stashed Jamal’s Explorer in a stand of trees north of town—“I know the ones,” Joel said—so afterward everyone would say he and KT left together for the coast when, in fact, KT dropped him off and Jamal took the back roads to Bethany’s house, meeting her at the corner of her road so he could follow her Lexus through the property’s gate.
“It wasn’t even supposed to be a big thing,” Bethany said. But of course, once they’d realized the chemistry was off, Jamal couldn’t leave and risk being seen around town—he was supposed to be in Galveston until Sunday. So he and Bethany had idled away the weekend awkwardly, often not seeing one another for hours on end inside Bethany’s enormous home. Jamal had gotten paranoid, became convinced one of the Tanners’ ranch hands could see him from the backyard. Bethany had told Jamal not to be silly. The hand whose job it was to watch her was away that weekend—she’d made sure of it.
Sunday evening came and neither Bethany nor Jamal had heard from KT or Dylan. They weren’t sure when the others would be home but they couldn’t tolerate their confinement any longer. When it got late, Bethany had texted her father to tell him she’d been ill all weekend but was feeling well enough to go and get some food. She did this because Mr. Tanner received an alert on his phone every time the gate on the property was opened. Bethany knew from experience that if her father wasn’t kept abreast of her plans he would keep an eye on her through his security app.
“And then yesterday I fucked up,” Bethany said. The pitch of her voice crept higher and higher. “I haven’t been sleeping right and when I do—Listen, yesterday, it was like my mind just stopped for a second. I’d made up a whole story about having Jasmine and Alisha over for the weekend but I was so damn tired that when the lady cop asked me what I did after the game I forgot everything, the whole story. I panicked. I said I was alone. It was the first thing I could think of.”
Joel swallowed.
“I can’t have the cops asking my dad for the security footage from the gate’s cameras that night.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. His eyes had started to ache, though whether from grief or exhaustion he wasn’t sure. After five nights without rest, he was beginning to forget what real sleep felt like.
For a long time neither of them spoke. Stars appeared.
“Don’t get the wrong idea—I’m not the sort of girl who’s about saving it until marriage, okay?” Bethany spoke sternly, as if to correct some snide comment Joel hadn’t made. “Dylan got that shit out of me when we were kids. It’s why I broke up with Luke Evers, you know. He was a real church boy back then.”
Joel thought of Luke’s photo buried in his brother’s desk, the argument he’d witnessed between the two boys on Friday night at the game. “How did Luke feel about your decision to leave him?”
“He never liked Dylan after that. Who would? But before you ask, no, I don’t think Luke could have killed Dylan. His mom’s almost as bad as my dad. Everyone knows Luke has to go straight home after games.”
“And where’s KT Staler gone to?”
“Somewhere there’s drugs. He’s trash. His trouble started with his mom and worked its way down. I always told Dylan hanging around that boy would get him in trouble and here we are. I’m a very prescient person, you know.” She pronounced itpresent.
“You’re saying Dylan died because he was wrapped up in drugs?” Joel thought again of the two thousand dollars his brother had been caught counting in his room, of the gold watch and silver bracelet, of the unmarked bottle of painkillers.
“Dylan? No—KT was the drug addict. Families like his are a menace to society.” Bethany lit another cigarette, the flame shaking in her hands. “My dad will kill me if this gets out, you know, really he will. He’d kill Jamal and me and fuck, maybe kill you, just for knowing.”
Joel would like to see him try. “Where did KT and Dylan go last Friday night?”
“They left like always.”
“And went where?”
“Dylan went to the coast,” Bethany said, sounding just a little too certain.
“But why did Dylan have to leave so often? Bethany, from where I’m sitting he looks like a guy leaving town to scratch an itch. Like a guy with a habit. You have to see that.”
“I hadtotaltrust in Dylan. We were very honest with each other.” Joel heard a rustling sound as Bethany adjusted her hair in the dark. There was something nervous in the sound. The girl added vaguely, “We were made for each other. Mostly.”
Joel took a cigarette from the baggie. Lighting it, he felt a sudden lightness in his chest. Somewhere, somehow, they had just moved in a strange new direction.
Bethany was saying, “Of course all I could think about when I was with Jamal was how I’d rather have just been with Dylan, like we were in the old days. Which is of courseexactlywhat he told menotto do. We would sneak into the house sometimes, Dylan and I, even when Dad was there, and—”
“What Jamal told you not to do?”
“No—Dylan. The whole fucking mess was Dylan’s idea in the first place.” She sucked her cigarette till the filter smoldered. “Dylan always used to say the point of being this young is to fuck up and get away with it. So when he said, ‘How ’bout you and Jamal give things a shot,’ I thought fuck it. Jamal’s hot. He’s nice. He’s been single ever since that Shanice girl moved away. Why not?”
“But Dylan wasn’t with you last weekend. That wasn’t the idea—the three of you together?”
“I just told you Dylan was at thecoast,” Bethany snapped. “Dylan set things up between Jamal and me because he felt guilty we weren’t fucking anymore.”
