The Telling (20 page)

Duncan glares at the woods over his shoulder, then back at me. “Remind me never to piss you off.”

Josh inclines his head, working his jaw back and forth. “Lana's
right. A few years ago some stoner kids used to come out here to a cabin where they could smoke and graffiti. The firehouse was freaked out that the kids were going to start a fire. A guy from my mom's station house stepped in an old well and snapped his ankle after breaking up one of their parties. That would be the perfect place to hide a body, and the killer, or
attempted
killer, didn't know Maggie was familiar with the spring. She got away, and he or she couldn't find her.”

“He or she,” Becca squeaks. Her hands fly to her mouth. “You don't think it was a woman, do you?”

“Here we go,” Duncan scoffs. “Because girls never do anything wrong.”

Carolynn takes Becca's hand in hers. “That's not what she said, Dumb-can.” Her lip curls as she regards him. “It's a fact that most killers of girls are men.”

Duncan looks to the ground as he adds, “Sneaky shit like poisoning is always chicks.”

Rusty slaps him on the back. “Duncan's just feeling cock-blocked that Bethany J. wouldn't let him come over last night. Her parents heard about us being at the police station again.”

Becca smooths her ponytail over her shoulder and is slightly cross-eyed and grimacing at thinking. “Do you guys think that we interrupted Maggie's murder? He could have been right here.” She grinds a heel into the rock under her. “And he heard us coming. We were playing music on the hike in.”

“Jesus,” Rusty groans. “He could have been right there watching us.” We look nervously to the foliage bordering the spring. If someone were there now, would we sense it?

“Sorry to interrupt your brain-gasms, but shouldn't we hurry up and get this stuff to the actual police?” Carolynn asks. “For all we know, Ford's already turned up and he's absolutely fine and Maggie's killer was some rando getting his jollies off and he's long gone. We can let the cops take it from here and get on with the last week of summer now that we're not murder suspects.”

“Sheesh, Car,” Rusty snickers. “Don't hold back.”

Her hands fall to her mostly naked hips. “What I mean is that we have proof of an alternative theory. The cops will explore the possibility. We're off the hook. Reasonable doubt and all.”

We collect ourselves and hike away from Swisher Spring. I watch the shadows on either side of the trail. I wait for a figure to take shape, familiar or not. A scavenger looking to collect lives. A hero looking for revenge. I watch for who or what chased Maggie through the woods in the moments before we arrived with our party at Swisher Spring. I watch for who or what she died trying to hide from.

B
en began high school when I was in the seventh grade. His first week, there were five girls, one on each day, who came to our house. I remember the fifth one, on Friday, sitting at our kitchen island, pretending that I wasn't there. She asked Ben if he thought another girl—the fourth of the week—was prettier than she was. Her lips smacked as she chewed gum. Ben's brow puckered and his eyes cut to me, as if my girlness made me all-knowing. I was pouting that we weren't out on the dinghy and that I was presently making an ice cream sundae by myself.

I stuck my tongue out at him. Ben pinched my side. I squawked and smeared caramel sauce on his chin. He grabbed my face as I reared back and wiped his chin on my cheek. By the time my attention snapped back to Number Five, she was staring at me in a way that made the laughter dry in my throat.

Ben kept laughing and opened the lid of the hot fudge for me. Number Five tossed her hair and stomped her foot. Ben shrugged a shoulder and said, “You're pretty for a blonde, but Kara's pretty for a brunette.” At twelve I knew that answer was a disaster.

Number Five pushed back from the island to make like she was storming off. Ben didn't protest, and she remained roosted on the stool. A smile spread across her lips and she said in a honeyed voice, “You like Kara because she's a slut and went down on you.” I had no idea what she meant, but by the way Ben's cheeks ignited and his eyes darted to me, I knew it was bad. I walked right up to Number Five, squirted the caramel sauce into her lap, knocked the hot fudge on the floor, and fled.

In my room I called Willa and repeated the exchange. Willa was baffled too, and because even twelve-year-old Willa didn't like a puzzle she couldn't solve, she consulted the Internet.

There was only the clicking of the keyboard and then she told me, her soprano gravely serious, “Holy Gertrude Guacamole Bell.” Willa was going through a major archeology phase, so most of her swears, like Gertrude Bell, were explorers and archaeologists. “It's when sexual partners put each other's genitals into their mouths for pleasure.”

We went on about how gross that sounded and how we'd never do anything mental like that, and there was a general consensus of horror and feeling dirty and guilty for knowing. After a while Willa got off to finish homework. I couldn't get the definition or the visual from my head. Ben was only two years older than me. I knew Ben's guilty-as-charged expression, and there was little doubt that what Number Five had alleged was true.

For a week I was jumpy around him. He plopped down on the couch and I leaped for the love seat. He sat next to me at the kitchen table and my knee jerked so hard the chair rattled.

It was the first time in two years that I was aware that (1) Ben
was a boy and I was a girl, and (2) we didn't share blood. I don't mean that I didn't know Ben was a boy straight off, only that the difference between us never made me self-conscious. Ben wasn't the kind of boy who suggested that I was inferior because of my girlness. Dad taught us both to sail and bake cookies, and it was only Dad's occasional Bumblebee-this or our-girl-that that drew attention to me being different from Ben. I was hyperaware that we weren't blood siblings only when I thought about how unrelated boys and girls touch.

In the end Ben cornered me and tickled me until my knees gave out and I hiccuped. All the awkwardness fell away and he was my ridiculously long-limbed Ben, pinning me on the ground and threatening to bite me if I ever gave him the silent treatment again. “It was because of what that girl said, huh?”

I hid my face and yelped, “Yeah.” I never saw Ben with Number Five again.

It didn't matter; there would be more girls like her. It was just the beginning.

I started Gant High when Ben was beginning his junior year. While I'd been mastering flying under the radar, Ben was busy getting noticed—especially by girls. The attention's side effects spilled over to me. Ben was oblivious. He didn't notice girls turning and watching as he shouted across the three hundred hall after seventh period that he was ready to drive us home. He was blind to the stares as he dragged his feet over to where Willa and I ate lunch at the beginning of freshman year in the corner of the quad.

It was one of those days in the first two weeks of ninth grade while I was still kind of hopeful and giddy that high school might not be as terrible as middle school. A whole summer had passed, and
kids would be that much more mature. The new school would be a clean slate and I'd get to be whoever I wanted. It might have worked out that way, if not for my golden, attention-getting stepbrother.

Willa and I were walking to Latin after lunch and a line of freshman girls, including Carolynn, were crowded in the packed halls behind us. “They're not really brother and sister. Not by blood,” Carolynn said.

“She probably wishes they were doing it,” Amanda Peters, who—mercifully—moved away in the middle of tenth grade, added.

“Shut up,” a third giggled, amused.

“What? I would if I had a stepbro who looked like that,” Amanda said.

Carolynn stood right at my back and said loudly, “I would have thrown the giant
V
at him after my thirteenth birthday and been screwing his brains out since.”

I looked over my shoulder and Amanda caught my eye. “What are you looking at, Uni-Boob? You want to tell us all about what a kinky, incestuous freak you are?”

I ditched Willa in the halls and ducked into the bathroom. I covered the toilet seat with a textbook and sat there crying for all of next period. It was easy to believe I'd done something wrong. There was this complicated and subliminal set of rules for girls. Who knew that wearing black underwear meant that you wanted sex? Or that wearing a toe ring or eating an effing banana in the school caf meant that you were a slut? I didn't. Nor did I understand why a girl who wanted sex was labeled a slut, but a boy who wanted sex was normal,
healthy
. Our middle school vice principal was always saying that so-and-so's skirt was too short and boys couldn't concentrate. It seemed backward to blame girls for boys' behavior. Medieval to
act like boys and girls should want different things.

All this came crashing down on fourteen-year-old me. I figured that it must be my fault that those girls perceived Ben and me as something we weren't. I can't say why I didn't write it off immediately as more teasing from the same bitchy girls who'd perfected name-calling on me in middle school. Instead I felt fear. Would Ben hear the gossip? Would he think I was bad and a freak who didn't understand we were just siblings? Would I lose him?

There would be more innuendos from girls. There would be more whispers about what a freak Uni-Boob was to love her half brother or second cousin or whatever that beautiful boy was to that quiet, weird girl. Other kids had step-siblings at school. It wasn't earth-shattering. But remember, we were amateur siblings. We didn't know we were supposed to act as if the other was vomit-inducing and stank of boiled cabbage. Ben didn't flip me off, and I didn't whine
gross
when he touched me.

None of the girls even believed their lies. Before he started dating Maggie, a lot of those meanest to me threw themselves at him. They sent roses and candygrams, and they slipped notes into his locker. Willa and I heard about Ben messing around with girls at parties.

So, the difference between Ben and me in high school: he wanted to feel like an outsider, and I was one. Ben didn't want to fit in. He was just different enough for kids to glom onto him; for girls to flock in his direction; for guys to intone, “Classic Ben,” whenever he wondered aloud if we really needed fresh sushi in the school caf when others were starving. He was not so different as to be labeled a freak. The McBrook family with our elephant of a house and Dad's money couldn't be shrugged off like a polo. Ben's popularity
was a snowball, coasting downhill, unstoppable. His disinterest in it only made him more appealing. He was
different
wrapped in a pretty and confident package.

But me? WELL. I was the girl, and the world—high school and beyond—makes it so much easier to fault girls than boys. It became obvious to my tormentors that I wasn't going to tell Ben what they said. If there's one thing teenagers love more than iced coffee and candy, it's an easy mark.

I didn't stick up for myself because I was afraid it would escalate and Ben would find out. I didn't want Ben to have to defend me. I should have been able to defend myself. I also didn't want to admit to Ben just how different I was from the Lana in our stories or even that little girl with the knitting needle. She didn't exist.

It wasn't always Carolynn. It was a lot of the girls who ate with the populars in the quad. Up until December of tenth grade, it was mostly Amanda Peters. It got better once she moved away and I'd go months without a snipe. I never set foot near the populars. I grew distracted with the eight-semester plan. I didn't show my face at parties, sporting events, or dances other than freshman homecoming. I made myself small and scarce.

Right after Ben's death I didn't feel small. For most of his funeral I thought about summer provisions and that he didn't need any where he was. He would never need anything from me again. The intangible hurt grew. It was everywhere, running from my nose, mouth, ears. It helped to imagine it in a tangible way. I pictured the skin on my wrists splitting open. The blood would run and run. I'd stand in a puddle, a lake, an ocean that would flood the cemetery and fill his empty coffin. Then at least one of us would be buried inside.
It helped to think of the pain in my chest, under my skin, radiating from my organs, as coming from a specific wound.

It contained it.

It helped me believe that I would heal.

In the backseat of Josh's Jeep, behind the wheel once we pick up our cars from Josh's, on the drive to Marmalade's Café, I let myself be big. I let the relief that we're off the hook for Maggie warm me like sunbeams. I smile at my reflection in the rearview mirror as I parallel park at Marmalade's. My knees bounce as I sip my iced latte as we wait for Josh to confirm what we've convinced ourselves of: we're in the clear. The underwater cavern will be enough. The police will pursue other leads and other suspects, and who cares if they ever find who killed Maggie just so long as they know it wasn't us.

It's fifteen minutes before Josh and the blustery morning come through the door. His heavy dark-blond hair is low on his forehead as we huddle. “We did it,” he says, expression stunned. “There are too many things not adding up about us as suspects.” He struggles to temper his smile. “They can't figure out a motive for any of us.” His eyes flick to me. I'm the only one with a motive and he knows it. “None of us, including Willa, have deviated from our story.” I sink into my ribs, exhaling. “They figured that if we were guilty, one of us would fold. When we didn't, they started doubting their theory. Maggie poisoned from rosary peas has them stumped. They brought a profiler in from the FBI, and she thinks it's unlikely that a bunch of kids would kill someone that way.” I don't say it out loud, but I think this profiler is an idiot.