Red.Like Renard used to call me. My hands freeze on the door handle. I look back and see a man standing in the parking lot near his driver’s side door. He looks to be about my age, maybe a little younger, smiling and wearing a white baseball cap with LSU stitched into it. Back home from college for the summer, maybe.
I open the car door as fast as I can.
“What, no response?” The man’s voice turns indignant. “That was a compliment.”
Whisper-quiet, Everett appears at my side. I startle back. His eyes are locked on the man. A wicked smile spreads slowly across his face.
“Don’t. Go back inside.”
But Ever ignores me. In a flash, he’s in front of the man, saying something so softly I can’t hear it, and before I can yell for him to stop, the man in the baseball cap takes a swing.
It’s the invitation Everett’s been waiting for.
He ducks nimbly and catches the man in the face with his own fist, so hard he jerks the man’s head back, sending him tumbling to the gravel,his baseball cap flying. Ever is good at this, well practiced at bar fights. People used to whisper about it, and I used to say it wasn’t his fault, he wasn’t asking for it.
What if I was wrong?
“Ever,stop,” I yell, slamming my car door shut.
He shoves the man to the gravel, where he splays out. His arms go up, trying to shield his face; he’s making some sort of incoherent noise of protest, something between a groan and a plea. Everett straddles him and pummels, blows that twist the man’s face. His expression is vacant, like he’s gone back to those nights with his father, locked in the past where I can’t follow.
“Stop,” I scream, and fling myself at him, catching his heavy arms and doing my best to wrench them back. “Please,” I sob, and Ever stops, allowing me to pull him back. He staggers off the guy, breathing hard. The man lets out a sob and scrambles for his car.
“Whoareyou right now?” My voice is hoarse from yelling but no less stricken.
Everett wipes his mouth with a bloody hand, red pooling around his split knuckles. “I’m my father’s son, Ruth. ‘That which you are, you are.’”
A car engine roars and the man Ever beat peels out of the parking lot. His LSU baseball cap still lies overturned on the ground. Tears wet my cheeks. “Do youwantto go to prison?”
Ever flings out his arms and takes a step backward. “Who cares what I want? I’m a dead man walking.” He shoves his bloody hands in his pockets and turns away from me into the night.
As he leaves it hits me—this feeling. My heart like a hummingbird’s, chills despite the heat, paralysis in my legs, rooting me to the gravel.
I’m scared of my friend.
And it’s not the first time.
32
JUNE, NINETEEN YEARS OLD
The moon was bright enough to light my way around the back of Everett’s house. I brushed aside a curtain of low-hanging branches, stepped over a section of rotted fence, and entered his backyard. It looked like the inside of a madman’s mind: expansive, wild and unruly, the grass nearly up to my knees in some places, patches of mud in others, thorned branches grabbing at me like tentacled arms. The full moon shone on it all, lighting old beer bottles thick with film like a path to Ever’s window. It was late, but I would knock anyway. This was too important to wait.
Today was his mother’s birthday. When he’d told me earlier, almost shyly, I knew it was the first time he’d ever told anyone. It should’ve been a sacred moment. An outstretched hand, a show of trust.
Instead, it made me sick.
All day, I’d wrestled with the truth: I had to tell Ever how she really died. Since I couldn’t get out of Bible study after work, I was left to sneak in the dark to his house the way he usually did to mine, crossing my fingers I wouldn’t run into his father.
But before I could knock at Ever’s window, movement in the farthest corner of the backyard, near the forest’s edge, caught my eye. There—a flickering flame. A small bonfire. And was that—a figure, crouched low?Even in the moonlight, it was far enough away that all I could see was a dark mass, vaguely human-shaped.
Ever?
As if in a trance, I moved toward the fire. Something shone in the grass. I stopped and squinted. It was a smooth white stone, glittering with tiny specks of minerals. There was something written on it, dark and barely discernible. I picked up the rock and turned it so it caught the light—there. A shape. Five curling spirals, their edges meeting in the center of the stone. Rust-red. Smelling faintly of iron.
The spirals were drawn in blood.
I dropped the stone and looked frantically around the grass. White rocks were everywhere, forming a giant circle around the bonfire, their surfaces gleaming with bloody spirals. Whatwasthis? What did it mean?
