I force a smile. “Sure. Not like it’s already someone else’s tradition or anything—”
This time my phone cuts me off as it buzzes. I scramble, quickly unlocking it and scanning the screen for signs of humiliation. But it’s just my mom sending me another article on death by phone charger.
“Thought it was Aces, didn’t you?” Jamie asks with a loud laugh, clapping his hands like this is funny.
“No.”
“Maybe Aces is really the boogeyman,” Jamie says. I glare at him.
“It’s not funny, Jamie,” I say.
“It kind of is.”
“It really isn’t,” Belle says, putting her fork down, annoyance pressed into her soft features.
“C’mon, I was just joking. Chiamaka is being sensitive.”
Belle looks unimpressed. “Sensitive?”
Why is Belle acting like she suddenly cares about me? I need a break from this table and this conversation. I don’t want to speak to Jamie when he’s in asshole mode.
“I need fresh air,” I say, standing abruptly and causing the chair to scrape loudly against the floor. Some of the guys look up, Scotty included. I lock eyes with him briefly, and—I swear I’m notimagining it—he smiles. Then without waiting for a response from Jamie, I leave.
I don’t care about them, I tell myself. But I look at them again anyway—the texts from Aces. I rest my head against the wall of the bathroom stall I’m in, taking in the words. They’re private. Really private. The type of rumors that could follow people after high school. The ones about Devon.
I wonder how Devon’s coping. I think I’d die if stuff that personal came out about me. If I feel this sick all the time,thisanxious, over trivial stuff, I can only imagine how he’s feeling.
What if darker, more invasive secrets of mine were released? The stuff that could ruin everything… college… my career… my life.
The memory of blond, bloodied hair stains the inside of my eyes as I shut them. The image is a constant reminder of how I just left her there to die.
Every evening for weeks after the accident, I’d call every hospital in the city, asking if a young woman with blond hair had been admitted. I stayed up every night, searching for news articles on every local news site, every message board—searching for a sign, a message about a hit-and-run, a girl left by cowards to bleed out and die.
The selfish part of me is terrified by the thought that she survived and wants to find us, find me, and tell everyone our terrible secret.
What keeps me up more than anything, though, is the night after that. I’d visited the spot where it happened, this street cars barely passthrough, about two hundred miles away from where I live, and the road was completely clear. I searched the entire stretch of it for signs of her. I drove up and down, convincing myself I’d memorized the place wrong. But there is no way I did. I have it permanently carved into my memory.
There was no body. No glass from the headlight that shattered when we crashed. No blood. Nothing. Like it was all a figment of my imagination.
But I know it happened. The tree we hit was proof enough. Bent out of shape, with bark torn from where the car slammed against it. The tree remained unchanged, while everything else from the crime scene was seemingly swept away.
I brought the accident up with Jamie weeks after it happened, when my insomnia had gotten particularly bad. When I asked him, Jamie looked scared, lost even. Like he could cry. I could tell he wasn’t sleeping much either. I remember how pale he got, like he might throw up.
But he changed the subject of course, then ignored me for an entire day.
Jamie doesn’t even care about college, and the Fitzjohn family name would be enough to get him out of something this big. I’m pretty sure his family has ins with half the judges around here. But their name is not only powerful; it’s a heavy burden to carry and needs to be upheld. Jamie’s always telling me how much his father’s respect means to him, and I know he would lose it all if this came to light.
I tried mentioning it again once, weeks after that. I still wasn’t sleeping, and my panic attacks had gotten more and more frequent. Ineeded a friend. I needed to talk about it—what had happened and what I’d seen.
He straight up denied it, asked me what I was going on about. Looked so confused, the fear I’d seen the first time I’d asked completely gone. After that I never brought it up again. Knowing who his dad is, and what would happen to Jamie, I figured it was something he fought to forget and this time had succeeded.
I’ve met Mr. Fitzjohn a handful of times, at formal parties and in passing when I’ve been at Jamie’s house; the tension in the air of that place is so constricting. Even his mother seems to crumple under the pressure of a loveless marriage and the perfect family image she’s been upholding. I know from Jamie that they sleep in separate bedrooms, and she’s always “taking something” to help her sleep and distract her from the man she’s married to. Not that anyone would ever talk about that; it’s all brushed under the marble flooring. To outsiders, the Fitzjohns seem perfect, but all of them are messed up in their own way. Jamie’s more like his father than he realizes.
My family doesn’t have any of this, though. No legacy here in America. If our secret comes to light, I have no way out. Everything is at stake, and while Jamie might appear calm on the outside, hemustknow that he could be next on Aces’s list of victims.
Maybe outwardly seeming okay, rationalizing things, is how he copes with the possibility of being Aces’s next target.
I wish I could be like that right now.
