“You want me to give you so much, Bram. But you won’t give me a thing.”
He hesitates, as if this thought might have resonated with him. “You don’t actually want to know the answer to your own question. That’s the truth.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He inhales, long and slow as he deliberates. “You might want to talk to thelove of your life,” he says, the words doused in irony, “since he’s the one who asked me to pull that alarm.”
“Henry?” My thoughts spin, everything colliding to a halt. “No—why would he do that?”
“I’m not sure. After the cafeteria, he wanted to talk. He said he needed me to do something for him. He said he’d taken care of the security cameras, figured out how to disable them remotely. I just had to pull the fire alarm and ask Adam to play lookout.”
“What? But the camera—”
“He must’ve only managed to disable the indoor cameras. He either forgot about the ones at the back and the front of the school, or he didn’t realize they were on a separate circuit. All he would tell me was that he was going to do something that would change all of our lives for the better. And I was too worried about Adam to ask questions. So before following Henry’s orders, I went and found him, which was lucky because he was about to do something stupid,like vandalize Todd and Neil’s lockers. He was really upset, but I managed to calm him down. Then I told him to play lookout while I pulled the alarm, just like Henry asked.”
I can only stare. “And you just…did it?”
“It was Henry,” Bram says, shrugging. “Sweet, smart, innocent Henry begged me to do this. I never thought any actual harm could come of it. I didn’t think about cameras or consequences. It was my brother—the most sensible of the three of us. So yeah, I just did it.”
Why the hell would Henry ask Bram to pull the fire alarm? “You didn’t see Henry afterward?”
Bram shakes his head. “I started toward the back doors, so I could blend in with everyone else during the drill. But I noticed Adam wasn’t coming, so I went looking for him on campus. With his state of mind and everything, panic took over. I had no idea what he was capable of. I finally found him in the car and sat with him the whole period.”
Something isn’t clicking yet. “How did you end up in the woods with Kennedy’s body?”
Bram rubs at the back of his neck. “When everything happened with Mariana and the town turned against us, Kennedy stopped harassing me. I didn’t see her or hear from her for a whole year. But the second she saw me back at school, it all started up again. Her texting me, sneaking onto our property, vandalizing shit to get my attention. She even showed up here in the house once. In thehouse. She was so aggressive, I had trouble getting her off me without hurting her. I was so upset, I said some of whatI’d wanted to say. But not all of it. She’d caught me off guard, so I didn’t have a chance to really sort out everything on my mind. About Mariana.” His eyes go from angry to sad and distant, his mind seemingly just as trapped as his physical body, in this house, since Mariana died.
“Because in a way,” he continues, “I blamed Kennedy for what happened. If she hadn’t lied to Mariana, maybe Mariana wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time—I don’t know. Anyway, the morning Kennedy…you know, she texted asking me to meet her in the woods behind the fields after school. Obviously, I wasn’t going to meet her. There was no way. But then, the whole time I sat with Adam in the parking lot, I thought about what else I wanted to say to her. I’d planned to tell her it was never going to happen and to double down on reporting her stalking to the cops. And then, when the bell rang ending school, I left Adam in the car and went to the woods to finally confront her. Only instead of having that conversation, I found Kennedy dead.”
A chill runs up my spine. “So then, Kennedy’s phone—the one with her text messages to you—the cops must have it, right? They know that she texted you to meet her in the woods?” The very place she was killed.
“They haven’t mentioned it,” Bram says. “But yeah, I assume so. They’ll toss it into their growing pile of evidence against me.”
Only he wasn’t even there when Kennedy was murdered. He was with Adam in the car, each one the other’s alibis—alibis they couldn’t share because of the parts they played in pulling the firealarm.
A third person—a person wearing the exact hoodie I gifted the Abbott brothers—took Kennedy out to the woods where her body was discovered, only minutes later.
There’s only one other person who could be in that video.
“The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
—Frankensteinby Mary Shelley
20
“I need to get home,” I tell Bram when I finally check the time. It’s 2:14 a.m. Dad must be worried sick.
“Henry took care of it,” Bram says in a calming voice. “I overheard him calling your dad and saying you’d fallen asleep on the couch. Like a perfect gentleman.”
“And my dad was okay with that?” Even after his little warning about them in my room after Kennedy’s murder? And the way my questions about the Abbott-Russo feud seemed to freak him out? I guess Dad meant what he said about not believing the rumors. He really trusts Henry.
For the first time in my life though, I’m not sure I do. Henry hasn’t been forthcoming with me about any of this. He wouldn’t tell me where he was during the “fire drill.” He must be the person who headed into the woods with Kennedy, yet he never admitted it.
My stomach starts to turn. After Mariana died, Henry’s name wasn’t thrown around by the public nearly as much as his brothers’. He wasn’t the boyfriend. He wasn’t the brother who was there at the explosion.
Yet Henrywason the property that day, working on Mariana’s car.
And he might’ve been the brother in the school security camera footage with Kennedy.
