‘The usual. Stealing, destruction of property, breaking and entering. I discovered I had a knack for picking locks, which endeared me to a certain group of people.’
‘And that’s why you got sent to Congdon?’
‘No.’ Bryce stubbed out his second cigarette and headed across the outcrop toward us. I turned back to Lucas, my face carefully blank, and told him what I’d never shared with anyone outside of Congdon’s walls.
‘I got committed because I killed a man and painted my face with his blood.’
Lucas gaped as Bryce reached us. I stood up and stretched.
‘Are you done yet?’ Bryce asked.
I patted Jasper on the head. ‘Yeah, let’s go.’
15
Something happens to you after you kill a person.
I’m not talking about the guilt or the doubt or the nightmares that make you do it over and over, each time a little different, each time like you have a chance to change it but you never can. What happens, in the daylight hours, is a bubble forms between you and everyone else, invisible and impenetrable. Everyone on the outside is all the same. They work and they hustle and they complain about what they don’t have and then they go home and crawl into their beds and drift away. And you can never be part of them, because something is awake in you that doesn’t know how to sleep.
I still remember the crunch of his skull, how it didn’t feel broken as I smashed the rock into it – there was no sudden give, no tremor of anything reverberating through my fingers – but I heard the pop of fracturing bone. It was a dull sound, the kind of noise that would have been forgotten in the next breath if it meant anything else and it wasn’t even the sound itself that haunted me; it was the feeling that washed through me the instant I heard that crack and saw his body go limp. Not horror. Not regret. Not even relief. It was happiness, a raw, savage joy that flooded my veins as I stood over him.
I was fifteen, I had just ended someone’s life, and I was happy.
The week started out on a crap note to begin with. Some cheerleader named Hope – why not call her Glass Half Full, you unsubtle helicopter parents? – picked a fight with me before class and of course I was the one who got suspended, not pom-pom girl. Dad was somewhere on Lake Ontario and wouldn’t be back until Saturday, so I spent the week roaming Lincoln Park with all the badassery of an unsupervised spring ninth grader. I walked the train tracks, stole Twinkies from the gas station, and finally decided to break into an abandoned warehouse, where I ran into two guys smoking weed.
Their names were Derek and Rex and they called themselves D-Rex, or rather Rex did and Derek put up with it. I’d seen them around before. They’d just gotten into town and had hung around the fringes of our group for the last month or so. One was short, the other fat. I didn’t think I had anything to worry about from some short, fat rookies, even if they were a lot older than me, so we spent the afternoon wandering the neighborhood together. Rex, the fat one, kept wanting to find things to eat. Derek, the short one, played music on his iPhone and scrolled through the crappy pictures on my old flip phone. One of them was a picture of a -picture – a shot of me and my mother standing in front of the cabin. When he asked, I shrugged off a few details, touching the agate necklace I wore beneath my shirt. Yes, that was me. My mom used to take me up north every summer, before she left us.
‘I swear to God I saw her the other day. Rex and I came from up north.’
‘From Ely?’ I spun around.
‘Yeah, Ely.’ I didn’t even register the glance between them at the time. ‘You still have the cabin, right?’
I didn’t think; I reacted. Rex knew how to hot-wire cars, so we found a rusted Ford parked in an industrial lot with no surveillance cameras. Before I knew it, we were driving out of town and it felt . . . right. Even though I’d always thought of the cabin as our place – hers and mine – it made perfect sense that she would have retreated there. The place had been in her family for generations, it belonged to her, and my dad had refused to take me there since she’d walked out. I’d just assumed he couldn’t stand the memories, but maybe they’d made an agreement without telling me. Maybe she’d been living there all along.
The sun was setting by the time we arrived and my heart practically beat its way out of my throat. I had tears in my eyes as I crept up the front walk and felt ten years old again. I’d taken the agate necklace off and clutched it in my hand for most of the drive. I didn’t know what I was going to do, if I’d clasp the pendant around her neck, throw it at her, or break it into a thousand pieces on the doorstep. The Earth took violence and decay and made agates, she’d said, so maybe I’d take agates and make violence and decay. There weren’t any lights on inside and I didn’t know the security system code, so I went to ring the doorbell, thinking the guys would hang back and let us get our angry reunion on. They dogged me right up to the door, though, and kept asking about the code. ‘Maybe you’ll remember,’ Rex prodded. ‘I’m sure one of your parents told you.’
I looked from one to the other and slowly the veil of stupidity lifted. They couldn’t quite hide it in their faces and I knew then that no one was on the other side of the door. They’d never seen my mother in their lives.
‘Wait,’ I said, feeling a different kind of tremor taking hold. ‘I think they hid a copy of the code in the boathouse with the spare key.’
The walk took forever. I scanned the horizon with every step while they flanked me the whole way down to the water. Our lot was large and wooded. The nearest neighbor, a recluse name Harry, spent most of his time fishing and probably wasn’t even home. There were no boats on the lake when we approached, only a single loon bobbing like a black speck on the sunset orange waves. Our boathouse was a creaky shack on the beach and I threw open the unlocked door, knowing right where to look. A loose piece of plywood covered not a key, but the gun my mother had always hid out here because this was bear and wolf country.
I dug underneath the plywood, scraping against studs and cobwebs, finding nothing. Where was the gun? One of the guys stepped into the doorway behind me, blocking the little light that trickled inside, and I spun around and kicked him right in the stomach, sending him flying. I ran out of the boathouse but didn’t get four steps across the beach before the other one – Rex – tackled me. He flipped me over and said not to scream, that if I told them how to get in the house, they wouldn’t hurt me.
Derek walked over, bracing his gut and smiling. He wanted me to scream.
As they grabbed me I didn’t think about why they were doing this or why it was happening to me. Those were questions Dr Mehta gave me later, the kind of questions people had when they believed their lives were worth something. It didn’t even occur to me to question them. They were animals being animals. The only refrain playing in my head was what an easy mark I’d been.
Stupid, I kept thinking. So stupid.
Rex, the fat one, held me down as Derek tried to take my clothes off. I fought and yelled at him, which was what he’d been waiting for. He started hitting me, close-fisted, over and over until even his friend told him to stop.
‘Leave, then,’ Derek said. ‘I’ll teach her a lesson by myself.’
Rex stayed for a little longer, nervously checking the horizon before he slunk into the trees. As he left, I heard him tell Derek, ‘Shut her up, for chrissake.’ In response, Derek flipped me onto my stomach and clamped his hand over my face, cutting off my voice, and that’s when I saw it. It was tucked among the other rocks forming a circle around the lakeside firepit, the place where we had built bonfires and roasted s’mores and watched the sunset over the water – heavy, jagged, the exact size of my hand. It didn’t belong in that firepit and I knew instantly what it was and who had put it there.