Homicide.
I could’ve made it. It’s what the lawyer thought. It’s what my parents thought. It’s what everyone thought. I could tell because they never asked.
I heard Mom rummaging around in the cabinets while Dad walked the lawyer to his car. And that night, when I ran into the kitchen to grab a soda, the entire knife block was missing. Just in case I didn’t already know what she thought.
I snuck out the side door—not the one in the kitchen—behind the laundry room, and kept to the sidewalk alley between the backs of the beach houses. I walked, arms folded across my stomach, until I reached the intersection two blocks away. Then I paused, took a deep breath, and ran. I didn’t turn my head, but I still saw the pine-green car sitting at the corner, where I knew it would be. Exactly two hundred yards from my front door. Where it had been every day since.
I barely caught a glimpse as I ran, but I knew she saw me. I knew by the way the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and the way my ears rang and the way my instincts begged me to keep running. I felt his mom’s eyes on me. I felt her hate. I didn’t have to look to feel it.
I never looked.
I kept running until I reached the back of Colleen’s house halfway down the next block. I didn’t feel safe until I opened the gate of her high wooden fence, eased my body through the tiny entrance, and latched it silently behind me. I kept off the noisy pebbles by jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone. The house was one level—an older beach home that hadn’t been demolished and rebuilt like the rest of ours—and its windows were wide open.
“Coll,” I whispered into her bedroom window.
She had her music turned up and face turned away, brown curls bouncing to the beat. Yet somehow she knew I was there. She spun around, glanced at her open bedroom door, and sent me a quick sequence of hand signals. A twist of her first two fingers. A cross of her wrists. A flash of three fingers. Dairy Twist. The one near the Exxon. Three minutes.
Yes, there were two Dairy Twists within walking distance. Yes, we ate at both. I let myself out of her yard and walked the last two blocks to the Dairy Twist. I was slouched against the white vinyl on the side of the building when Colleen strode across the intersection. She sank down beside me on the pavement, like me and nothing like me. She was pale and curvy where I was tan and straight. Curly light-brown hair to my dark straight hair. Blue eyes to my brown.
People still got us confused. Must’ve been the way we walked, or maybe talked. We’d been inseparable since her family moved to town in the fifth grade. Ever since Carly Preston made fun of the gap between her front teeth and I’d told Carly it was better than walking around with a hideous mouth full of metal. Nobody makes fun of anything about the way Colleen looks anymore, but not because of me.
Colleen laced her fingers with mine and leaned her head back on the wall. “She says I’m grounded for life. What do you think that means in Dabner family talk? Two months? Three? What will you do without me?”
“They’re sending me away,” I said, my voice wavering.
Colleen released my hand and stood up. “Sending you where? Did the lawyer come back?”
I shook my head and stood. “Not prison. Boarding school.”
Colleen sucked in a giant breath and exhaled, “No!”
“Yes. New Hampshire. My dad’s old school.”
She shook her head, her curls whipping around. “No. No fucking way. This isn’t happening.”
I started to panic at the way she was panicking—so unlike Colleen. When the cops showed up, she lied through her teeth. And when she found me later that night under the boardwalk, she didn’t freak out. Didn’t adamantly shake her head or say things like no or no fucking way or this isn’t happening. Instead she’d said, “I’m sorry,” which made no sense. And besides, I hated apologies.
And now she was freaking out. “God, I can’t believe I didn’t go home with you that night.”
“Cody Parker,” I said, forcing a smile. Trying to force her to smile. “Who could blame you?”
“Cody fucking Parker,” she mumbled. “So not worth it. God, this is one of those things I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make up to you, you know?”
“Coll, it wasn’t your fault,” I said, because it wasn’t.
And she said, “No, it was Brian’s fault. That little prick.” Because that was just the sort of thing a best friend should say. She started crying and said, “Shit,” as she wiped at the mascara under her eye.
She grabbed me around the middle and cried into my shoulder, and I felt that ache in my throat like I was going to cry too, but nothing came out. I held on tight, reasonably sure that I would never love another human being as much as I loved Colleen Dabner in that moment.
Someone leaned out a car window and whistled. We both shot him the middle finger. And then Colleen’s hand tightened around my arm. Because standing on the corner of the street was a group of guys, watching us in a way that made Colleen dig her fingers into my skin.
Joe and Sammy and Cody fucking Parker. And Dylan. Brian’s brother, Dylan. I did a double take before I realized it was him. Even though Dylan was three years younger than Brian, sixteen like me, he had his brother’s same lanky build, same blond hair, same amber eyes.
Empty now, just like Brian’s.
They didn’t speak. Dylan stood so still I wondered whether he was breathing at all, until I noticed the fingers on his left hand twitching. Cody stared straight at me, but he wasn’t making eye contact. Sammy dropped his hands to his sides, and chocolate milk shake sloshed out the top of his cup, running across his knuckles. And without communicating with each other, they spread out in a semicircle in front of us. I could see it happen, the shift in thinking. Like they were losing individual accountability, becoming part of something more.
“Hey now,” Colleen said, putting her hand palm out in front of her.
They shuffled closer, and we backed up against the dirty siding. The only one who seemed to be thinking anything for himself was Dylan, and it didn’t look like he was thinking anything good.
“Cody,” Colleen said, brushing her hair off her shoulder. Cody jerked his head, registering Colleen for the first time. Colleen could get guys to do whatever she wanted with a single sway of her hips or a tilt of her head, and this was no exception. Cody stepped to the side, forming a little path.
“Get out of here, Colleen.”
“Yeah, I’m gone.” She gripped me by the wrist and pulled, like maybe they’d think I was just an extension of her. I brushed Dylan’s shoulder as I passed, and all the muscles in his arm went rigid.
I turned my head to say something, but really, there was nothing to say. And Colleen was moving fast. One more step, and we were gone. We sprinted until we reached Colleen’s back fence.
“Maybe leaving for just a little while isn’t such a bad idea, huh?” Then she squinted, even though there wasn’t any glare, and backed into her yard. I heard her feet scrape against the siding as she scrambled back through her bedroom window.
There was pizza on the dining room table, but my parents were eating on the couches in the living room. We didn’t eat in the dining room anymore because of the tiny fragments of glass. There weren’t any, really, not anymore. But no matter how many times my mother vacuumed the floor, she swore there were pieces left behind. She said it wasn’t safe. And the kitchen, well, it looked pretty much the same as always except for the spot on the floor where the cleaning company had used bleach. Even though the tile and the grout were both white, we could still see the outline where they had to scrub out the blood. Whiter than all the rest.