She waves me off and moves toward my dresser. “So is this him?” She picks up the framed photo of Jason, Laura and me from his last birthday—his last free birthday.
As casually as I can, I join her and take the photo from her, as though I’m looking at it closer myself instead of because I’m uncomfortable with her touching it. “Yep, that’s my brother.”
“He’s really cute.”
“Thanks?” I say, setting the frame back down.
She laughs and bends down to see his face again, though thankfully she doesn’t touch this time. “Look, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I know he’s not at college.”
All the air in my lungs turns to ice, but Maggie is still looking at Jason and doesn’t see me freeze from the inside out.
She sighs and straightens. “My mom asked yours which college your brother was at and your mom—” she turns to face me “—yeah, she looked about like that.”
Even though I know I need to snap back to life and contradict her, I can’t. I couldn’t move in that moment if I wanted to.
“We do that too, my mom and me, when people ask about my dad. It’s okay,” she adds seeing the tension pulling at all the muscles in my face. “You don’t have to tell me unless you want to, I just wanted you to know that I know. You don’t have to lie about him, okay?”
“Maggie, I—” I never said he was at college, but that’s what I let her believe.
“I know it’s nothing like what my dad did.” She nods her chin at the frame on my dresser. “I mean, you don’t see any pictures of him in my room, so... I know your brother’s not a philandering dirtbag who tried to steal all your money.”
The money bit is news to me, but she doesn’t give me a chance to open my mouth before she goes on, and when she does, it locks shut.
“I supposed he could be a murderer or something, but I’m guessing that would ixnay the photo too, so...” With another big sigh her brows draw together in concern. “I’m thinking it’s drugs.”
My eyes are focused on my brother’s laughing face and the small bit of icing left on his chin from when he let Laura and Allison smash his face into his birthday cake.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s drugs.”
I dream about the murder again that night. I see Jason and Cal meeting in the woods near the high school, the same area that is full of kids after Friday night football games during the season. It would have been deserted that night, empty save for the charred remains of the bonfire pit that could blaze taller than me at its zenith. The ground was damp, still sodden from the rainfall earlier so that it captured footprints in the mud—Cal’s and Jason’s—and skids and handprints. Fingers clawing into the earth, pulling, dragging. The imprint of Cal’s body and Jason’s knees.
In my dream I imagine the fight they had, the reasons that slip like water through my fingers when I try to grasp them. They’re shouting, shoving hard enough for Cal to skid backward in the mud then regain his balance enough to push Jason. There’s more yelling, more words I can’t get close enough to hear. And then Cal is saying something so horrible that Jason’s face goes white as Cal’s contorts in rage. Cal turns, looking for something—the dream blurs, and he’s not looking anymore; it’s something he already has with him, something that will hurt Jason. Fear flickers over Jason’s face. The expression is alien on him, because he’s always so brave.
He’s shaking his head; his hands are raised, and he tries to talk Cal down. But he can’t; Cal is going to hurt him. I can’t see how, but he has to be trying to hurt Jason. That’s the only reason for the knife that materializes in Jason’s hand, the only reason he plunges it into Cal’s back—
I wake up with a scream strangled in my throat and my body tangled in sweat-damp sheets. And then I’m thrashing, desperately kicking to free my arms and legs, almost knocking my lamp over as I panic to find the switch and the light that proves the sheets aren’t damp with blood.
CHAPTER 17
Idon’t go to the tree the next day because of Heath. I don’t. My shift doesn’t start on Friday until six and Maggie is busy with her mom all morning. I know I’ll go mad sitting at home with only Laura’s closed bedroom door for company. I also don’t have the gas money for a Walmart trip or anywhere else I might go.
That leaves the tree by Hackman’s Pond. Even if it did rain the night before. Even if it means I might not be the only one there.
He’s sitting on a low branch but he stands when I approach.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey.”
It takes me a few seconds to realize that I’m looking at him and it’s not pain I feel, or at least not only pain. I don’t want to look too closely at what it is. I lower my head to gaze at the grass. My latest dream flickers back to me.
“I didn’t know if you’d be here,” I say. It didn’t start raining until late the night before and kept raining almost until morning. The earth was still wet when I walked across it, my feet leaving shallow footprints in the ground.
“Yeah, me neither.”
But we both came.
“I’m not working until tonight but I have to meet my friend Maggie in a little bit,” I say, keeping the time vague in case I want an excuse to leave. We have plans to watch a few YA book-to-movie adaptations that she swears will turn me into a sobbing mess of feels—the good kind, but I still have hours until I’m supposed to be at her house.
