CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jules: Age Seventeen
Connecticut
On Sunday, in the early afternoon, around ten minutes after his mom’s required twenty-four hours of post-hospital-visit rest had ended, Jules stood in his bedroom and gazed at all of the purple checks—the color Hobbit had assigned to him—on the evidence board.
The questions from the assembled peanut gallery were flying fast and furious. And after the obviousWhat the hell went wrong—which Jules had pretty much already figured out, to his ongoing great embarrassment—the most burning question onhislist was:How did Suspect X come to learn that Jules was searching for him?
“I can’t help but think that my being targeted and drugged was a warning,” Jules mused as he looked at Hobbit’s work on the board.
“Or maybe even afuck you.” Sadie was standing beside him. “Like,You really think you can stop me?”
He nodded, looking from her to his bed where Hobbit sat with Belle and Tom and then over to Shelly, who’d stopped needing to be horizontal and was sitting in his desk chair, swiveling back and forth and back and forth as she gazed steadily up at him with her giant brown eyes.
“So... who knows that we know?” he asked. He could tell from the silence that his question needed clarifying. “We do, obviously. Everyone in this room. Right? But who else knows that we’re searching for Suspect X? Who have we told about this?”
Sadie shrugged. “I haven’t told anyone,” she said. She looked over at Shelly, at the gang on the bed, and then at Jules. “Have you? I mean, I thought it was... private.”
“Well, obviously we told Caroline,” he reminded her. “And Krista.”
“Rachel and Diana,” Belle added to the list. Hobbit leapt off the bed, grabbed his black marker and wroteWho Knows?on the board and was now adding those four girls’ names.
“My mother now knows,” Jules said. “Not any of the details, nothing about the survivors,” he quickly reassured Shelly, “but the basics. That we’re looking for this guy and that he appeared to have targeted me last night. I couldn’t let her think it was a hate-crime.”
“Except, wasn’t it?” Shelly murmured. “I mean, I feel like... mine was a hate-crime.”
“But Suspect X doesn’t hate me because I’m gay,” Jules attempted to explain. “I mean, sure, maybe he does, too, but... I really think I was targeted because we’re coming for him not because?—”
“I get it,” Shel said. “It just occurred to me that whoever Suspect X is, he had to hate me—and Krista and Caroline—todo what he did to us. He’s probably a giant, seething ball of hate.”
“That’s a good point,” Jules told her.
“Who else have we told?” Belle asked, looking around the room, but it seemed as if they really all had kept the secret secret.
“Did we ask Caroline and Krista not to tell anyone?” Sadie wondered, frowning at Jules in concentration.
“I honestly don’t remember,” he said. “It’s possible we just assumed...”
“Fuck. I’ll go talk to them again,” she volunteered. “See if they might’ve let it leak—and to whom.” Sadie was the only person he knew who’d use correct grammar in a statement starting with the f-bomb, and he loved that about her.
“I think,” Jules said, “that our profile on Suspect X needs reviewing.” He turned back to Shelly. “What Shel said about him being a seething ball of hate seems accurate.”
Hobbit added that description to the bottom of the list that includedattended every party,has a penisandstrong enough to carry a girl out of the party and into the woods.
“We now know that this drug doesn’t entirely knock out his victims—the survivors,” Jules continued. “So thinking that Suspect X has to be some hulking behemoth is wrong.”
“I was thinking that, too,” Belle said. “Thinking it maybe could even be a girl doing this but?—”
“Krista got pregnant,” Jules said the words with her. “Yeah.”
Hobbit put a little star on the board, next tohas a penis.
“I still think X has to be someone who’s ready to carry his victim,” Tom chimed in from where he was stretched out on the bed. “Yeah, you were walking and talking,” he told Jules, “but there were times we had to pick you up off the floor. IfShel or Sadie or even Hobbit were alone with you, they would’ve struggled.”
“Me large like Amazon, have tiny friends,” Belle said in caveman-speak even as Hobbit protested, “That’s not true. Iabsolutelywould’ve figured out a way?—”
“I’m talking about things like getting him into and out of the car,” Tom interrupted. “Hob, you and I did that together—it took four hands.”
