Bree dislodged her arm and rolled her eyes. She was nobody’s second choice. And she sure as hell didn’t want my leftovers.
We walked out the gate with the M over the top and started walking around the perimeter. Reid said, “This is the West Gate—what the town considers our main entrance, but our main entrance is actually farther down this road.” He pointed behind him as he walked backward, and we all strained to see. Apparently there was a gate in our immediate future, but the only thing I could see was the car pulled off the side of the road, engine off. Same color as the surrounding weeds.
Jason was trying to say something again, but I had stopped moving. “Mallory?” Reid asked, shooting a glance from me to Jason.
They were all still moving toward the car. I turned around, picked a spot in the distance, woods on woods on woods.
And, like always, I ran.
Chapter 4
I ran past the scarlet M again, past the corner of campus, and then I kept running as the sidewalk turned into packed dirt, roots, and stone mangling the ground. And again my flip-flops held me back, so I kicked them off and ran some more. The path narrowed, twigs and briars reaching toward me, and then suddenly opened again to a large clearing.
I bent over at the entrance, still sheltered by the trees, and sucked in some air. Then I held my breath so I could hear the noises around me—wind filtering through the trunks, leaves rustling up high, faint scurrying below. But nothing human. So I rested on the side of a fallen tree and took in the unnatural scene in front of me: a dilapidated brick building, half-walls standing, piles of bricks scattered around the floor of the clearing.
Those half-walls were the perfect place to hide, so I balanced myself on the piles of bricks and carefully stepped my way to the building, watching for nails or sharp rocks as the bricks dislodged and scattered below each step. Then I crouched at the spot where two of the partially standing walls still stood and leaned back into the corner.
I closed my eyes, but in my mind I could still see through the back window of the car, and I pictured her hair poofing over the top of the seat. I imagined her turning and watching me with those eyes, red and dry. I could see her rise higher still, pulling herself over the seat, and I could see her clenched jaw and the vein fighting to escape her neck, pulsating and pulsating.
Like I saw at Brian’s funeral.
Brian’s mom didn’t see me then. Nobody saw me. Not even Colleen, who didn’t tell me she was going. But there she was, squeezed between Cody and either Joe or Sammy—I couldn’t tell from the distance. I didn’t know whether Colleen was there for Cody or as some sort of atonement for herself. Or if maybe she was there for me. Colleen had her hand cupped over her mouth, and I could tell, even from between the pickets of the fence across the street, that she was doing that thing where she wasn’t really crying, but her body was still shaking like she was.
Brian’s mom wasn’t paying attention. She looked like she was, but if you were staring, like I was, you’d see she had her head tilted to the side like she was listening to something. Listening for something. Dylan stood next to her, his fists balled up. Staring at the ground like he was furious with it. Like it had taken something from him. Which, I guess, it had.
Then they all walked up to the hole in the ground. His mother dropped a handful of dirt into it, and someone, I’m not sure who, but someone released this noise. This horrible, unnatural sound—a wail. It traveled across the field and through the pickets of the fence. And it buried itself deep within my stomach, like grief was a concrete thing. It settled inside me, and there wasn’t room for anything else, not even air. I was suffocating. I turned around with my back pressed up hard against the fence, and I felt hot and cold all at once, but then only hot. And I vomited into the bushes behind me.
Then they were coming. They all crossed back over the street, finding their way to their cars parked along the curb. I held my breath between the fence posts. Brian’s mom was right there. I could reach out and touch her between the slats. I couldn’t see her face, but she paused right in front of me and tilted her head to the side. Like maybe that whole time she had been listening for me. Then Dylan was beside her, pulling her along. I saw her jaw tense, and that vein, seething.
Later that night, when Colleen snuck over to see me, I said, “The funeral was today,” because I wanted her to tell me why she went.
And she said, “Really? I thought it was next week.” I still didn’t know why she went, but at least I knew why she wouldn’t admit to it then: there was nothing quite like watching Brian’s body being lowered into the ground to fully understand the horror of what I had done.
Someone was running up the path. Heavy steps, stomping the dirt. I crouched lower. And then a muffled voice said, “Shit.” A decidedly male voice. I scrambled to my knees and peeked over the top, breathing in the dust from the bricks under my nose. Reid was scanning the woods beyond, my second pair of flip-flops in his hands.
I stood up, brushing the dust and debris from my shorts.
“God, are you trying to kill me?” He stepped over the piles of bricks, but froze a few feet away. He shook his head to himself and stared at the bricks. “I mean, you could’ve gotten me in a lot of trouble.” He held my shoes toward me again, like a peace offering.
I took the shoes and slid them onto my feet. “I guess it’s no secret, huh?” At least I knew why he’d been staring at me when I crossed center campus.
He had the decency not to act like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “It is and it isn’t,” he finally said. “Jason’s dad is Dean Dorchester, so no luck there. And Krista’s part of the family, though she was away for the summer, so I don’t know if she knows yet.” She did. She definitely did.
“Siblings?” Made perfect sense to me. They had the same hair color and, from what I could tell, the same cold attitude.
Reid shook his head. “Cousins.”
“What about you, Reid?” It’s not like our dads could confide in each other anymore.
He looked away. “I heard from Jason.”
“You’re friends?” I didn’t know why I assumed they wouldn’t be—it’s not like I knew him all that well. And even when I did, I never saw him with his school friends. He could’ve been an entirely different person with them. Like how being with Colleen made me bolder, more sure of myself, more confident.
Reid paused, like he was thinking really hard about the question. “We’re teammates. And secrets are like currency here. You tell one, you’re owed one. There’s a hierarchy to it.”
“You’re high up?”
He shrugged. “I’m high up.”
Reid’s eyes skimmed the trees as they rustled, like the wind was a thing and he could trace its path. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”
I looked around. The remaining walls were kind of unsteady, but nothing seemed dangerous about it. Reid continued, “This is the old student center. You know what’s past here?”
“No,” I said.
“Nothing. Well, not nothing, just nothing you’ll ever find your way out of again.”
“It’s just trees.”
“No, not trees, a forest.”
Now that was something I could understand. The way a bunch of little things can become something bigger—something more than the sum of its parts. I stared off into the distance, no longer seeing the trees stacked up behind one another, but seeing this big thing—a forest, a living, breathing single entity.
“Once you get going,” Reid said, also staring off into the distance, “it’s hard to find your way back out again. There’s this story about this kid, Jack Danvers, who got lost during initi— Anyway, he wandered off one night and didn’t come back.”