The Telling (12 page)

Tears build. The blood hammers in my forehead. Wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow, with brown sugar on her oatmeal, Willa will be thinking clearly. She'll see that it isn't about the core being popular. She'll
remember how stuck I was in sadness.

Being around the core is like twisting an orange peel under your nose, its spray making you wince and sneeze and laugh all at once. Intense. Refreshing. Stinging. A relief. Willa will understand why I can't be stuck in my small life; why I'd rather
feel
chemistry than study it.

I unlatch the gate to the rear yard. I can't stomach cutting through the crush of bodies inside. I pass under a trellis with tiny buds dangling like a doll's upside-down teacups. I toddle from stone to stone until I make it to the expanse of lawn that ends at the woods. I stop short. A figure faces the tree line. The wind slips through the yard, and Carolynn's white dress lifts and dances before she flattens it against her thighs with her hands. She's ghostly. I cross to where she stands barefoot. It says volumes that between Carolynn and the party, I choose her.

Her gaze is focused on the dark spaces between the pine trunks. “You shouldn't be out here alone,” I say. “It isn't safe.”

She sniffs. “It's nicer out here than inside.”

“Even with killers on the loose?”

Her head tilts my way; she's smiling like you would when humoring a child. “Yeah. It would be a fair fight, at least. Out here I don't have to watch Bethany J. fall all over Duncan or Duncan put on his usual ‘I'm the king of the party' routine.” She glances down at her hands. They're shaking.

I wipe the runny mascara from under my eyes.

“You shouldn't be crying.”

“I'm not crying over Maggie,” I say quickly.

She tips her head back and laughs, a ragged, belligerent edge to it. “I know that. You shouldn't let them”—she
jerks her head at the house—“see you cry. Ever. They're worse than anything that could be out here.” My classmates have superpowers for making one another feel small. It surprises me that Carolynn, the most popular girl in our class, arguably the entire school, knows this.

The grass is wet with mist, and the cold fringe tickles the sides of my feet. I bend to undo my sandals. My soles crunch the individual blades; a hundred tiny pleasant pinpricks make me shiver.

“There used to be a swing set right here,” Carolynn says, toeing the grassy spot. She gathers up her hair and begins twisting it into a bun. “The boys used to push us off the swings. It was a game—knock the girls on their butts. Not Duncan. If he came up behind you, it was to push you higher. He wanted you to fly.”

Abruptly, she tugs her hair loose from the bun. “He was so sweet right up until middle school, and then it's like he forgot how. It's his dad. He's just one of those guys. All that master-of-the-universe garbage.
Don't cry. Be a man.
He just unloads on Duncan, like it's so easy to retire at thirty. As if that's
normal
. And if you aren't on your way to coming up with some billion-dollar app, you're a waste of space.” Her gaze meets mine. “I thought since you're more objective, since you're more distant, you might see Duncan better. Do you think he'd still push us higher or knock us off those swings?” She winds and unwinds her finger in the platinum chain of her necklace, waiting.

“Is he wearing the skipper hat in this scenario?” I ask, half to make her laugh and half because I think it would make a difference. She huffs softly. I consider Duncan.
Before
or
after
, he's never said anything mean to me. “I think that any boy who takes his little brothers
bike riding every Sunday morning would probably try to push you higher.”

I hear her sigh. Her head bows, shaking. “Jesus. Why are you such a sappy freak?” It isn't clear if she's insulting herself or me. Without a word she slips her heels on and walks toward Josh's deck. Blades of grass stick to her calves like dark slots in her skin. I stay at the edge of the trees. Their branches shiver in the night wind. I don't budge at the snapping of twigs behind the darkness. In this moment, I'd rather face what's outside the house than what's within, like Carolynn. I choose one point in the shadows and I stare it down. That hungry, daring voice in my head, the one with all the questions, urges me to walk into the trees.

For the last month I've given in to that voice, mostly. I'm not crazy. The voice is mine. It was with me the day I left my bed for the first time in four weeks to stagger to the lower terrace, where Ben and I used to hang out. I watched the flames in the fire pit after lighting the wood, and I thought,
I've always wanted to leap the blaze.
I wondered if I could do it, so I did. It singed my socks—pink cashmere ones that Dad and Diane gave me for Valentine's Day. It was thrilling. I was alive. That was the first thing I did in
after
. My inaugural act as a new girl.

At present that voice quietly urges me forward:

Come prove that you're as brave as the girl in the stories.

Prove that you still exist.

It begins to sound less like me and more like Ben's alto. What if all this time, it
was
him? My toes clench in the grass. I wish I could reach inside my brain and pinch the thought as you would the lit wick of a candle. Snuff it out. When you love someone, love them
in your bones and know them until the backs of their hands are as familiar as yours, can they ever be gone? Is Ben all the way gone?

I take a step for the trees. Maggie's killer is on the loose and maybe he's concealed by the shadows, staring me down, inviting me forward.
Who
would I find if I looked?

“Ben?” His name slips out, an arrow aimed at the dark.

There's laughter from behind me, not from the trees I'm focused on.

“Are you talking to your dead stepbrother?” Ford asks between snide chuckles.

My cheeks burn hot and I've scooped up my shoes and am halfway across the lawn by the time I can bear looking up at Ford. He's a few stairs above the grass on the redwood deck, sneering like I'm a bug under his boat shoe he's about to squish. “Liddy and Kristie were all, ‘I bet they only let Lana hang with them because they feel sorry for her.' ” He makes his voice higher than either girl's is. “And I told them no way Carolynn Winters”—her name's said with contempt—“let some desperate wannabe join her crew, even for the summer, because that girl doesn't have a heart.”

I stop short. This is not
before
. I am not Lana trying to listen to Mrs. Edgemont's Mary Shelley lecture and refusing to let on that I feel Ford's breath on my neck. This is not Mr. Gupta's astronomy; I have more options than transferring out, or pretending I don't hear Ford's sniggers each time I speak, or risking making the bullying even worse if I tell Mr. Gupta on him. All those little jabs took divots out of me. They reduced me to easy and frequently picked-on prey. But tonight, I am not afraid of fighting back or making it worse.

I smirk at him like he's told a joke. “You're calling
me
a desperate wannabe? Do you hear yourself, Ford?”

He clears his throat, surprised. “All I'm at is that I was wrong. Pity it is: they must know you're a desperate bitch who talks to herself when no one's around. You were just mid-séance.”

I reach the bottom step and am about to jog up them and disappear into the house. It feels like retreating from this spiteful boy. With the woods at my back, the pressure of the breeze in my hair, and whatever presence I sensed in the trees still near, I refuse to.

I place my hands on my hips, channel Carolynn's glacial stare, and say, “If it had anything to do with pity, it would be
you
they included. I wouldn't normally say this, but you're not a nice person.” I shift forward confidentially and enunciate each word. “They think you're a hanger-on. But not me. I know the truth, Ford. You're worse than that. Your brother was a sadistic asshole. But you are a zombie, completely unoriginal, feeding off his popularity and nastiness, hoping that no one will see how pathetic and
mind-suckingly boring
you are.”

He takes a step back and spits, “Screw you, bitch.”

I give a laugh. “Way to prove me wrong.” I jog up the stairs, hands shaking and blood singing between my ears as I half turn to look down at him. “Guess what, Ford?
I see.
”

Three light-headed strides later, I'm in the kitchen, dialing Dad to pick me up.

I
sit on the long, pale-yellow couch in the living room and cuddle Basel. Dad left for Portland before I came downstairs. I've been watching the harbor's water go from black to gray, replaying the exchange with Ford last night. Telling him off was as exhilarating as diving from the ridge into the spring. It was the feeling I used to get as a kid rolling down a grassy slope, building speed, world spinning, a giddy tremor in my chest.

The doorbell chimes and Basel wriggles away. He lets one angry meow rip. I fling the front door open, wishing for it to be Willa. Two uniformed officers stand on the porch. They stare at the welcome mat. There's a dead bird in the center of its monogrammed
M
. I inhale sharply. The bird is brown with a dusting of white feathers on his plump breast, one wing fanned and crimped.

The shorter officer glances up. “Lana McBrook?” he asks, revealing teeth that are crooked and crowded. He drops his chin to his chest. “You have a bird-catching cat?” The taller officer toes the bird with his boot.

“We have an indoor cat,” I say, pointing at Basel twitching his tail beside me.

“Neighbor's cat, then,” the shorter replies. The taller sweeps the bird to the side of the porch with the inner sole of his shoe. “Your parents home?”

I shrink back. Police asking for the adults of the house can really only mean dire things. As if reading my mind, the taller officer places his boot on the threshold, preventing me from slamming the door. I shake my head. He slides his jaw back and forth, thinking. “Can you call them at work?”

My hands make tight fists and I force a smile.
Grin until you feel it.
“My stepmom's on vacation and Dad is working a couple of hours away,” I answer.
Vacationing
is what Dad and I say Diane is doing. From the way people smile sympathetically, everyone knows better.

The taller officer gives a decided nod and says gruffly, “You'll call them on the way to the station. You're needed to answer additional questions about the events at Swisher Spring, two nights ago.”

I swallow. When I needed to answer questions about the night Ben died, they called Dad on the phone, requested we come in at our convenience. The police showing up to escort me doesn't seem like a good development. The shorter one's staring from my naked feet to my pj shorts with cartoon ponies on them. I know I look younger than seventeen. He tilts his head in a friendly manner and says, “If you promise to be quick, we'll let you change into something more appropriate.”

Raindrops pitter-patter on the roof as I wriggle my pants on upstairs. This close to autumn, the rain comes out of nowhere. It's usually sprinkling on the first day of school, and that's just a week away. I find my pink wellies in the mudroom and squeak to the door. Basel is a sentinel on a console table, and he's swiping his tail back and forth and sinking into a crouch while eyeing the officers.

I scratch his head. “Bye, toots,” I murmur. The cops start away, and I follow once I've locked the door. The bird rests against a big stone planter, its broken wing pinned up like it's waving to me. Our neighbors don't keep outdoor cats. Twinkie and Winkie get loose from Becca's yard and they go after anything fuzzy and smaller than they are. “I watched a bird fly into my bedroom window and fall to the terrace a few years ago,” I say. The tall officer grunts as he holds the rear door of the cruiser for me. Seated, I dial Dad.

He answers after the first ring. “There you are, Bumblebee. You sleep in?” His voice is warm, light as it used to be.

I cradle the phone between my shoulder and ear and rest my head against the window. “Not really. Dad?”

“What is it?” His voice is instantly alarmed. I imagine him knocking over the latte on the table in front of him, the brown liquid bleeding into his shirt cuff without him noticing. “How are you feeling? Are you still in bed?”

“Dad, I—”

A sharp intake of breath. “Are you hurt? Is it Diane?”

I stare out the window at the tunnel of fog we're in the thick of. “They're bringing me to the police station to answer questions.”

Dad wonders why the police would escort me down rather than extend the courtesy of a call, since I was the one who discovered Maggie. He proclaims me a hero. A hot flare of nausea spreads from my stomach. I don't want to be Maggie's hero. I'd rather be Ben's. I'd rather be the reason Maggie was sent to the bottom of the spring than the force that dragged her up. Neither of us understands why the police would want to speak with me. I don't know how or why she ended up where she did. I try to stop thinking
about it before I consider what Rusty said last night. Ben is gone.
Dead.
There's no trace of him left. Nothing remains of the dead. Rusty was joking. Still, I feel paranoid, as though I know more than I've admitted, as though I'm hiding the truth. The officer driving watches me in the rearview mirror like he senses it too. My heart begins to thump louder.

“Don't say anything until I'm there, Lana. Thirty minutes, max. I'm already on my way home. And don't worry, I'm going to take care of this and you and I are going to watch a movie tonight, your choice, no comedies, I promise, and we'll order in from that new Italian spot. You tell Willa the same thing. She's invited if you like.”