“Courtney,” she says.
“Pardon?”
“If I’m going to call you Josh, you’re going to have to call me Courtney.”
I nod, thinking we’re having a moment. She glances back to make sure the kids aren’t listening, and then she looks at me again, leans in, confessing, “I’m not sure I’m ready to go back home and deal with everything that comes next,” and I honestly wish I could say something to make it better, something more genuine than what I say.
“You can do this. I know you can.”
She’s quiet. Then she nods, reaching for her bag. “Say goodbye to Detective Evans,” she tells the kids, and they mumble their goodbyes.
“Bye, guys,” I say. “Be good.”
I give them a little wave as I get back in my car. I pull away, watching them get smaller in my rearview mirror until they disappear. I breathe out a sigh of relief when they’re gone. Because their perception of me won’t be altered. Because after they leave, Mrs. Gray will still think of me as one of the good guys. She won’t know what I did.
It’s a twenty-minute drive back home. The rain is coming down even harder now, hammering the windshield, the wipers whipping back and forth but hardly able to keep up.
I spend most of the drive mulling over something Ms. Dahl said this afternoon in the interrogation room, when she was describing what she saw that night. How she said she watched Daniel dig that hole in the cemetery with an energy and determination she’s never seen before or since from him.
I looked up at the time, reading the expression on her faceand trying to decide if there was some hidden meaning in there, but there wasn’t, which made it all the more ironic.
Because it wasn’t Daniel she saw.
It was me.
When I get to my house, I pull into the driveway. I park the car and then make a run for it, getting wet from the rain, thinking of that night, of the cemetery, which I only knew the way to because of the times Daniel and I met there to get high, sitting on his mother’s grave, smoking a joint. Daniel wasn’t just someone I knew of. He wasn’t some random kid a couple years younger than me in school. We might not be friends anymore, because people change (although Daniel never changed, he’s still that sad sack I knew in high school), but I knew him my whole life, because he grew up across the street from me.
I flip on the living room light. I make my way to the bathroom, unbuttoning my shirt as I go. I peel it off and then set it on the counter by the sink, staring at my face in the mirror, which has changed, become more defined these last few years. I’m not that same round, baby-faced kid that Daniel knew, who could barely grow chin scruff.
It all changed the night that Kylie Matthews died. I changed that night.
I reach down, set my hand on the short sleeve of my t-shirt, still wet from the rain. I hike it slowly up, exposing my bicep, which I manage to keep covered in public. To this day, I have a hard time looking at it, though I force my eyes to lower, to make contact with the snake’s fierce white eyes, which stare back into mine.
There were four of us who grew up on the same street and went together to get them, Daniel, Jeremy, his kid brother Adam and me. We used fake IDs and blew money we stole, because we thought we were cool at the time and we wanted the worldto know it. We made up some fake gang—the King Cobras—and told everyone we knew we were in it, spending our free time when we were kids smashing mailboxes and robbing gas stations, stupid shit like that. We never got caught; we always got away with it, which gave us a high like we never had at any other time in our lives. We were invincible, untouchable. We had power. People listened to us. They were scared of us. We meant something.
The rest of the time, we were nobodies. We meant nothing to anyone, not even our own folks.
I didn’t mean to hurt Kylie Matthews. It was an accident.
My kid sister had her over all the time. They were practically joined at the hip. She’d come over and the two of them would make fun of me. It was relentless. They’d sit in the same room with me and laugh about everything I said and everything I did. The way I walked, the fact that I was tall or that I had some patchy facial hair coming in. It made me angry.
One night, not long after it happened, my sister, Abby, knocked on my bedroom door. “Josh?” she asked, poking her head in.
“What do you want?”
She came into my room without saying, sat down on the edge of the bed, picking imaginary fuzzes from the quilt. By then, it had been a couple weeks since it happened. For the first few days, I was convinced I was going to get caught. It wasn’t so much anifbut awhen. The police questioned me that first night, same as they did Mom, Dad and Abby, and I kept imagining them coming back, taking me away in handcuffs, locking me up.
But at the one-month mark, when the police seemed to have no leads and I started to think I might actually get away with it, the fear morphed into guilt, into nightmares, into me not being able to think about anything else but running Kylie Matthews over with my car. I hated myself for what I did.I hated the person I was. I made the decision to change, cutting myself off from Daniel, Jeremy and Adam because I didn’t want to be like them anymore. After high school, I joined the academy because I thought that if I could help other people, it might make up for what I did to Kylie, and in some effed-up way, it did. Those times I broke up domestic disputes or talked a man down from a bridge, the guilt would let up, if only for a time. I wasn’t a murderer. In those moments, I was a hero. I was the good guy.
Still, when I’d see her folks around town, I’d think about confessing, because if I did, I wouldn’t have to keep my secret anymore. It weighed on me, it preoccupied me to the point that there were physical effects. I couldn’t sleep, I could barely eat.
But then I thought of everything I’d lose if I told them the truth. My family, my freedom, my future. In other words, everything I took from Kylie.
I kept my mouth shut. I told no one.
“She liked you,” Abby looked up from the bed that night and said.
“What do you mean?”
