Forever (22 page)

• ISABEL •

I spent the weekend waiting for Grace to call and invite me over to Beck's house, and when I finally realized that she was probably waiting for me to invite myself as usual, it was Monday. And by then, Cole's box of dangerous toys had arrived and I figured I could deliver it and see Grace at the same time. Then it wasn't like I was going over specially to see Cole. I knew what was good for me. Even if I didn't like it.

When Cole answered the front door of Beck's house, he was shirtless and faintly sweaty. He looked like he'd been excavating with his bare hands and he had a bit of bruising around his left eye. He wore a smile across his entire face, wide and benevolent. It was a very grand-looking expression, even though he had bedhead and was wearing only sweatpants. There was something undeniably theatrical about Cole, even when his stage was the mundane.

“Good morning,” he said. He peered at the warm day. “It's so Minnesota out here. I hadn't realized.”

It was a gorgeous day, one of the perfect spring days that Minnesota seemed to have no problem inserting in between weeks of frigid weather or into the middle of a summer heat wave. The lawn smelled like the boxwoods that were planted unevenly in front of the house.

“It's not morning anymore,” I said. “Your stuff is in the car. You didn't say what kind of sedatives, so I got the worst I could find.”

Cole rubbed his filthy palm across his chest and stretched his neck up as if he could see what I'd brought from the front step. “How well you know me. Come in, I was just making a fresh pot of uppers. I had a helluva night.”

Music was blaring from the living room behind him; it was hard to believe that Grace was in the same house as it. “I don't know if I'm coming in,” I said.

Cole laughed, a very cavalier laugh that completely dismissed my statement as fanciful, and walked barefoot to my SUV. “Front seat or backseat?”

“Very back.” It wasn't a huge box and I could've carried it, but I preferred to see Cole's arms wrapped around it instead.

“Come into my workshop, little girl,” Cole said.

I followed him into the house. It felt cooler than the outside, and smelled like something burnt. The howlingly loud music had a backbeat that vibrated in the soles of my shoes; I had to nearly shout to be heard over it. “Where are Sam and Grace?”

“Ringo left in his car a few hours ago. He must've taken Grace with him. I don't know where they went.”

“You didn't ask?”

“We're not married,” Cole said, and added, in a humble tone, “yet.”

He kicked the door shut behind him, his arms full of the box, and said, “Kitchen.”

With the music providing a chaotic soundtrack, I led the way into the kitchen, where the burnt smell was most potent. It looked like a disaster zone. The counter was all glasses, markers, syringes, books, a bag of sugar ripped open and rolled down to show its contents. Every one of the cabinets was covered with photographs of the wolves of Mercy Falls in their human bodies. I tried not to touch anything.

“What's burning?”

“My brain,” Cole replied. He used the last available counter space to shove the box next to the microwave. “Sorry about the mess. We're having amitriptyline for dinner.”

“Does Sam know you've turned his kitchen into a drug lab?”

“It's Sam Roth approved, yeah. Do you want coffee before we go set up this trap?”

Sugar gritted under the heels of my boots. I said, “I never said I was going to help you set it up.”

Cole examined the inside of a mug before setting it down on the island in front of me and filling it with coffee. “I read between the lines. Sugar? Milk?”

“Are you high? Why are you never wearing a shirt?”

“I sleep naked,” Cole said. He put both milk and sugar in my coffee. “As the day goes on, I put on more and more clothing. You should've come over an hour ago.”

I glared at him.

He said, “Also, I am not high. It offends me that you had to ask.” He didn't look offended.

I took a sip of the coffee. It wasn't horrible. “What are you really working on here?”

“Something to not kill Beck,” he said. He managed to seem both dismissive and possessive of the chemicals in the room. “Do you know what would be really excellent? If you helped me get into your high school's lab this evening.”

“As in break in?”

“As in I need a microscope. I can only make so many scientific discoveries with a research lab built out of Legos and Play-Doh. I need real equipment.”

I regarded him. This Cole, electric and confident, was hard to resist. I scowled. “I'm not helping you break into my school.”

Cole held out his hand. “Fine. I would like my coffee back, then.”

I hadn't realized how much I'd had to raise my voice to be heard over the music until there was a pause between tracks and I could lower it. “It's mine now,” I said, echoing what he'd said to me back at the bookstore. “I might help you get into my mom's clinic, though.”

“You're a mensch,” he said.

“I have no idea what that means,” I replied.

“Me neither. Sam said it the other day. I liked the sound of it.”

That was pretty much all you needed to know about Cole, right there. He saw something he didn't quite understand, liked it, and just took it to be his.

I dug in my tiny purse. “I brought you something else, too.”

I handed him a little die-cast Mustang, black and shiny.

Cole accepted it and set it in the open palm of his hand. He stood still; I hadn't realized that he hadn't been before that moment. After a pause, he said, “Bet this one gets better mileage than my real one.”

He drove it along the edge of the counter, making a soft, ascending sound for the engine note as he did. At the end of the island, he had it take off into the sky. He said, “I'm not letting you drive it, though.”

“I wouldn't look good in a black car,” I said.

Cole suddenly snaked his arm out and grabbed my waist. My eyes widened. He said, “You'd look good in anything. Perfect ten, Isabel Culpeper.”

He started to dance. And all at once, because Cole was dancing, I was dancing. And this Cole was even more persuasive than the last one. This was everything about Cole's smile made into a real thing, a physical object made out of his hands looped around me and his long body pushed up against mine. I loved to dance, but I'd always been aware that I was dancing, aware of what my body was doing. Now, with the music thumping and Cole dancing with me, everything became invisible but the music.
I
was invisible. My hips were the
booming bass. My hands on Cole were the wails of the synthesizer. My body was nothing but the hard, pulsing beat of the track.

My thoughts were flashes in between the downbeats.

beat:

my hand pressed on Cole's stomach

beat:

our hips crushed together

beat:

Cole's laugh

beat:

we were one person

Even knowing that Cole was good at this because it was what he
did
didn't make it any less of an amazing thing. Plus, he wasn't trying to be amazing without me — every move of his body was to make us move together. There was no ego, just the music and our bodies.

When the track ended, Cole stepped back, out of breath, half a smile on his face. I couldn't see how he could stop. I wanted to dance until I couldn't stand up. I wanted to crush our bodies against each other until there was no pulling them apart.

“You're an addiction,” I told him.

“You should know.”

• SAM •

Because Grace was feeling more solidly herself, we spent the day out. She ducked down inside the car as I ran into the Dollar Parade to buy her some socks and T-shirts and ventured into the grocery store to buy the things on a list she'd written for me. There was pleasure in the mundane, in the pretense of routine. It was only marred by the knowledge that Grace was trapped in that car, officially missing, and I was tied to Boundary Wood, tangled in the pack still, and we were both prisoners in Beck's house, waiting for our sentences to be commuted.

We took the groceries home and I folded Grace's list into a paper crane and tied it to my bedroom ceiling with the others. It strained toward the window in the current from the air vent, but when I bumped it with my shoulder, its string was only long enough to tangle it with the crane next to it.

“I want to go see Rachel,” Grace said.

“Okay,” I replied. I already had my keys in my hand.

We got to Grace's old high school well before school let out, so we sat together in silence and waited until the bell rang. As soon as it did, Grace ducked into the backseat, out of sight.

There was something odd and terrible about sitting outside her old school, watching the seniors begin to trickle out in groups, waiting for the buses. They moved in knots of twos and threes. Everything was bright colors: Day-Glo messenger bags hanging on shoulders, brilliant shirts with team mottos, fresh green tree leaves by the parking
lot. Their conversations were silent with my windows rolled up, and without the benefit of sound, I thought that they could communicate entirely with their body language. There were so many hands punched in the air, shoulders bumping, heads thrown back in laughter. They didn't need the words, if they were willing to be silent long enough to learn to speak without them.

I looked at the clock on the car. We'd only been here a few minutes, but it seemed longer. It was a beautiful day, closer to summer than spring, one of those days where the cloudless blue sky seemed high and far out of reach. The high schoolers kept coming out of the school, none of them familiar yet. It was ages ago that I'd waited for Grace to come out of class, back when I'd had to hide from the weather.

I felt so much older than all of them. They were seniors, so some of them might have been my age, which seemed unfathomable. I couldn't imagine walking among them, backpack slung over my shoulder, waiting for a bus or walking to my car. I felt like I'd never been that young. Was there an alternate universe where a Sam Roth had never met the wolves, never lost his parents, never left Duluth? What would that Sam look like, going to school, waking up on Christmas, kissing his mother's cheek on graduation day? Would that Sam without scars have a guitar, a girlfriend, a good life?

I felt like a voyeur. I wanted to go.

But there she was. Dressed in a straight brown dress with striped purple stockings underneath it, Rachel was walking alone to the far side of the parking lot, a sort of grim march. I rolled down my window. There was no way to do this that didn't feel like a page out of a murder mystery.
The boy called to her from his car. She approached; she knew he was suspected by the police, but he'd always seemed kind….

“Rachel!” I called.

Rachel's eyes were wide and it took a long time for her to arrange her face into something more pleasant. She stopped about ten feet from my driver's side window, her feet clapped together and her hands holding both of her backpack straps.

“Hi,” she said. She looked wary, or sad.

“Can I talk to you a minute?”

Rachel glanced back toward the school, then to me. “Sure,” she said. She didn't come any closer. That distance stung. It also meant that everything I said to her would be shouted across ten feet of parking lot.

“Do you mind if we're, um, a little closer?” I asked.

Rachel shrugged, but didn't come any closer.

I left the car running and got out, shutting the door behind me. Rachel didn't move as I approached her, but her eyebrows moved slightly closer to her eyes.

“How are you doing?” I asked gently.

Rachel looked at me, her lower lip firmly caught in her teeth. She was so incredibly sad looking that it was hard to think that Grace's decision to come here was wrong.

“I'm so sorry about Olivia,” I said.

“Me, too,” Rachel said. She said it in this brave way. “John is doing bad.”

It took me a moment to remember that John was Olivia's brother. “Rachel, I'm here about Grace.”

“What about Grace?” Her voice was guarded. I wished that she trusted me, but I guessed she had no reason to.

I grimaced and looked at the students filing onto the buses. It looked like an advertisement for a school: perfect blue sky, brilliant green leaves, eye-buggingly yellow school buses. Rachel only added to the image; those stripes looked like you had to order them out of a catalog. Rachel was Grace's friend. Grace believed that she could keep
a secret. Not just a secret, but
our
secret. Even trusting Grace's judgment, it was surprisingly difficult to relinquish the truth. “I need to know you can keep a secret first, Rachel.”

Rachel said, “They're saying some pretty bad things about you, Sam.”

I sighed. “I know. I've heard them. I hope you know that I wouldn't hurt Grace, but … you don't have to trust me for this, Rachel. I just want to know that, if it was something important, something really important, you could keep a secret. Be honest.”

I could see that she
wanted
to let down her guard.

“I can keep a secret,” she said.

I bit my lip and closed my eyes for just a second.

“I don't think you killed her,” she said, very matter-of-fact, like she was saying that she didn't think it would rain tonight, because there were no clouds. “If that helps.”

I opened my eyes. It did help. “Okay. Here's the thing, and it's going to sound crazy, but … Grace is alive, she's still here in Mercy Falls, and she's okay.”

Rachel leaned toward me. “Are you keeping her tied up in your basement?”

The bad thing about that was that I sort of
was
. “Funny, Rachel. I'm not keeping her tied up against her will. She's hiding and she doesn't want to have to come out yet. It's sort of a hard situation to —”

“Oh my God, you got her pregnant,” Rachel said. She threw her hands up in the air. “I knew it. I
knew
it.”

“Rachel,” I said. “Rach.
Rachel
.”

She was still talking. “— like everything we used to talk about and still, no, did she use her brain? No. She —”

“Rachel,” I said. “She's not pregnant.”

She eyed me. I thought both of us were growing a bit fatigued with the conversation. “O
kay
. So then, what?”

“Well, it's going to be a bit difficult to believe. I don't really know how to tell you. Maybe it would be better from Grace.”

“Sam,” Rachel said, “we all had to take sex ed.”

“Rachel, no. She told me I should say ‘Peter of the Plentiful Pecs' to you. I have no idea what that means, but she said you'd know it was her then.”

I could see the words working through her as she processed the meaning and considered whether I could have gotten them through nefarious means. She asked, wary, “Why isn't she telling me this herself, then?”

“Because you wouldn't come over to the car!” I said. “She can't get out of the car, and I can. She's supposed to be missing, remember? If you'd actually come over to the car when I called to you, she was going to wave at you from the backseat.”

When she still hesitated, I rubbed my hands over my face. “Look, Rachel, just go over there and look yourself. I'll stand here. No chance that I'm going to brain you with a beer bottle and put you in my trunk. Will that make you feel any better?”

“If you stand farther away, maybe,” Rachel said. “I'm sorry, Sam, but I watch TV. I know how these things go.”

I pressed my fingers into the bridge of my nose. “Look. Call my cell phone. It's in the car. She's in the car. She'll pick it up and you can talk to her yourself. You don't have to get anywhere near it.”

Rachel pulled her cell phone out of the side pocket of her backpack. “Tell me your number.”

I recited it and she punched it, her fingers pecking the buttons. “It's ringing,” she said.

I pointed at the Volkswagen. Through the closed door, my cell phone was vaguely audible.

“No one is picking up,” Rachel said accusingly. Just as she said it,
the driver's side window rolled down and Grace looked over from the passenger seat.

“For crying out loud,” she said in a loud whisper, “you're going to make everybody suspicious just standing around there. Are you guys going to get in, or what?”

Rachel's eyes were perfectly round.

I held my hands up on either side of my head. “Now do you believe me?”

“Are you going to tell me why she's undercover?” Rachel replied.

I gestured toward Grace. “I think that will sound better coming from her.”