I shook my head, trying to keep the smile on my face, but inside my heart was breaking.
“Jess.” Jack laid his hand over mine. “I really do want you to have fun. For both of us.”
Fun. I was going back for so much more than that. I cleared my throat. “After I give you my report on everyone, my reward is that I finally get to meet Will.”
Jack withdrew his hand. “Maybe. You know I like to keep things…separate.”
Jack had never introduced me to his boyfriend. Not once in the years since we’d been friends again, which was itself a strange story. When Jack was accused of murdering Heather our senior year, in the few months before he left campus for good, the other students crossed the street wherever he walked, sure down to their bones they were looking at a killer. If he entered a room, everyone stiffened and fled.
But not me. My limbs had remained relaxed, limber, fluid around him—no escalating heartbeat, no tremor in the hands—despite the police’s nearly airtight case.
It wasn’t a logical reaction. Jack was Heather’s boyfriend, the person most likely to kill her, according to statistics. The scissors crusted with Heather’s blood—used to stab her, over and over—were found in his dorm room. Witnesses saw Jack and Heather screaming at each other hours before her body was found. The evidence was damning.
But in the end, the police weren’t able to convict Jack. In some ways, it didn’t matter. He was a murderer in everyone’s eyes.
Everyone except for me.
Slowly, inch by inch, my body’s knowing filtered into my brain. One night, a year or so after I moved to New York City, I woke in a cold sweat, sitting up rigid as a board in my tiny rented bedroom, filled to the brim with a single conviction: Jack was innocent.
It took me another three months to reach out to him. He was also living in the city, trying to disappear. I’d told him I thought he was innocent, and from that day forward, I’d been one of his few friends. I was his only friend from college, where, until Heather died, he’d been popular. Student body president. Phi Delt treasurer. Duquette University Volunteer of the Year.
To this day, I hadn’t told anyone I still saw Jack. He was my secret. One of them, at least.
Looking at him now, radiating kindness, filled me with anger. Jack was undeniablygood, so easy to read. The fact that so many believed he was capable of brutal violence was baffling. I’d met dangerous people—trulydangerous people—and seen the violence in their eyes, heard it brimming in their voices. Jack wasn’t like that.
So I understood why he wanted to shield the new people in his life from his past, the horror of the accusation that remained unresolved, despite the dropped charges. It’s not like he could ever truly hide it from someone, not with the internet, or the fact that his whole life, he was doomed to menial jobs that wouldn’t fire him after a startling Google search.Orthe fact that he barely spoke to his family anymore. Though, to be fair, that was because of more than Heather, because of their southernness, their Baptistness, their rigidness…
I understood why Jack would want to draw a solid, impenetrable line betweennowandthen. But still, it was hard to wrap my mind around, because the past was still so much with me. I lived with the constant unfolding of memories, past scenes still rolling, still playing out. I heard my friends’ voices in my head, kept our conversations alive, even if for years now it had just been me talking, one-sided, saying,Just you wait.
A thrill lifted the small hairs on my arms. Tomorrow, there’d be no more waiting.
Jack sighed. “Thanks for coming to see me before you left. You know, I’m glad you never changed. Seriously. Ten years, and same old Jess.”
I nearly dropped my glass. “What are you talking about?” I waved at myself. “This dress is Rodarte. Look at this hair, these nails. I’ve been inPage Six. I’ve been to Europe, like,eight times. I’m totally different now.”
Jack laughed as if I was joking and rose from his seat, leaning forward to kiss my forehead. “Never stop being a sweetheart, okay? You’re one of the good ones.”
I didn’t want to be a sweetheart. How uninteresting, how pathetic. But I did want to be one of the good ones, which sounded like an exclusive club. I didn’t know how to respond. At least Jack had given me what I’d come here looking for, besides the penance: his blessing. Now I could go to Duquette guilt-free. For that, I held my tongue as he tugged his coat over his shoulders.
He stepped away from the table, then turned back, and there was something in his eyes—worry? Fear? I couldn’t quite pin it. “One more thing. I’ve been getting these letters—”
“Please don’t tell me it’s the Jesus freaks again, saying you’re going to burn in hell for all eternity.”
Jack winced. “No. Kind of the opposite.” He looked down at me, at my raised brows. “You know what, it’s not important. It might not mean anything in the end.” He squared his shoulders. “Put your wine on my tab. Clara never makes me pay.”
He squeezed my shoulder and took off, winding around the bar’s motley collection of chairs. He paused by the door and looked over his shoulder. “Just… When you get to Duquette, say hi to Eric Shelby for me.” Then he was out the door, on the sidewalk, carried away by a sea of people.
This time, I actually did spit out my wine.Eric Shelby—Heather’s younger brother? Eric had been a freshman when we were seniors. I’d never forget the look on his face when he came flying around the corner the day they found Heather, saw the crowd gathered outside our dorm room, scanned it for his sister’s face, didn’t find her…
The last time I’d seen Eric and Jack in the same place, it was outside the library ten years ago. A crowd had gathered around them. Eric was screaming at Jack that he was a murderer, that he was going to pay for what he’d done to his sister, that even though the cops had let him go, Eric wouldn’t stop until he found out the truth. Jack’s face had gone white as a ghost’s, but he hadn’t walked away. He’d stood there taking it with fists clenched as Eric screamed, his friends trying to hold him back by his scrawny, flailing arms. If there was anyone alive who hated Jack Carroll more than Eric Shelby, I didn’t know them.
So why the hell would Jack tell me to say hi to him?
Chapter 3
August, freshman year
The day I moved into Duquette, all I could think about was the fourth grade. We’d moved to Norfolk from Bedford over the summer, so I’d entered fourth grade at a new school, desperately shy. I barely talked to anyone, kept my eyes on my feet and the linoleum floor. Miraculously, my teacher saw something in me and suggested I take the gifted test. I scored high enough to get in, and all of a sudden, everything changed. I was given books to read at the ninth-grade level. Math test after math test came back with big, fat 100s scrawled in red marker. I felt as if a radioactive spider had bitten me and infused me with boldness, like a superpower. I started looking up from the floor to people’s faces when they spoke to me, because for the first time, I felt I might be worth the attention.
