Jen didn’t look at them as she settled into her seat. Colleen looked up at her. “Have you been crying?”
Jen lifted a hand to her cheek. Her face was probably still beet red, and the tear or two that snuck out of her eyes in Mr. Ward’s class probably smudged her mascara. “No. Just don’t feel well.”
“You look like crap,” Bethany said. Colleen’s eyes widened with horror.
“Like you have a fever or something,” Bethany amended. Jen wasn’t going to take Bethany’s bait. She was always doing that—making nasty comments, diamond-knife-thin cuts that you didn’t realize stung until much later.
“I know what will make you laugh.” Bethany smirked over her iced tea, looking at something at the table behind Jen. “McCreepy is showing a full moon.”
Jen’s stomach puckered: Mark Zhang howled with laughter. “No way. He broke his belt after gym. Lemme see.”
Colleen tilted sideways, crushing her shoulder into Jen’s so Mark could lean across the table and gawk. Jen refused to turn around and look.
Mark’s laughing reached a crescendo, and his friend, some other jerk of a football player, joined in. “Yo, anyone got a quarter?”
Bethany dug a coin out of her change purse and handed it to Mark. Before Jen realized what he was doing, Mark stood up and lobbed the quarter at Ethan. Jen spun around in time to see it bounce off Ethan’s back and onto the floor. Ethan’s shoulders went stiff, but he didn’t turn to face them.
“Damn it,” Mark said. “Come on, Beth, you take a shot.”
The rest of the table laughed as Bethany held a quarter between her thumb and forefinger. As Bethany examined it, Colleen buried her head in her food. Jen watched Bethany in horror as she tossed the coin at Ethan.
Mark hooted. “So close! Who’s next?”
Jen’s throat was closing. She wanted to scream at them, but something was stopping her. And then Ethan stood up. Pulled his pants up and tugged his shirt down. His face was eerily calm as he strode over to the garbage can, holding his empty tray.
He stopped by their table and dropped a quarter in front of Mark. “I think this is yours.”
Mark held Ethan’s gaze as he reached and smacked the tray from Ethan’s hands. What was left in his carton of fruit punch spilled over Ethan’s sneakers. He held Mark’s gaze. And then he smirked.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Mark wasn’t smiling anymore. The table was silent. Ethan’s smirk seemed to have unnerved them.
Ethan didn’t answer. His gaze slid over Jen, as if he didn’t see her at all. She watched him walk away, and at the last moment, when the rest of the table had resumed conversation, laughing awkwardly, Jen saw it.
The way Ethan folded the fingers on one of his hands into the shape of a gun.
I haven’t texted Ethan McCready since I found the note he left in the house across the street. I don’t want him to know that I know who he is. He probably didn’t expect me to figure it out. He had saved something of Jen’s, but how would he know she saved something with his handwriting and that I had a way of tying it back to him?
I don’t want to scare him into doing anything. Especially not when he knows where we live. If I told my parents about Ethan being in the house across the street, about his taunts, Tom would go DEFCON 1 and Ethan would never be able to contact us again.
If I want to keep my family safe and get answers at the same time, I have to keep my mouth shut.
When I get last week’s AP chem quiz back on Friday, there’s a big fat “52%” at the top, circled in red pen. Practice is no better; Coach shouts at the sophomores for erupting into giggles during warm-up, and midway through our third run-through of the new competition routine, Coach stops the music.
Next to me, Rachel looks like she’s going to crap her pants. But Coach locks eyes with me instead. “Your fouettés are sloppy, Rayburn.”
The weekend feels like a small mercy. When I get downstairs on Saturday morning, Tom is coming through the front door, cradling a paper bag from the deli. Mango dances around his heels, smelling the bacon-and-egg sandwich he gets every weekend.
“Oh good, you’re up. Got your cinnamon raisin bagel.”
“Thanks.” My heart is beating in my throat. Tom looks at me, eyebrows pinched together. Do you know I took the phone?
As if he’d even say anything if he did. He falls into step with me on my way to the dining room.
“What do you think about coming to the range today?”
Tom brought me to the gun range when I turned sixteen in the spring. My mom almost had an aneurysm when she found out, and there was some shouting and Tom saying I should know how to protect myself.
When I asked Tom the following weekend if I could go to the range with him again, he said to let Mom warm to the idea first.
Neither of us mentioned it again. I know exactly what this is about: Tom thinks I’m having some sort of freak-out because of the security camera and Ethan McCready things, and he figures a refresher in self-defense is the answer.
I follow Tom into the dining room. “I don’t know. Mom might get pissed.”
Tom looks at me as he sets the deli bag on the table. “Mom doesn’t need to know every little thing that happens around here.”
I decide that he found the unlocked drawer and knows that I was in his desk. This father-daughter day at the range is a recon mission; he’s going to confront me about the phone, ask what else I saw in the drawer. For the first time ever, the thought of being alone with him unsettles me.
“I’m meeting Mike there,” Tom says, as if reading my mind. “In case that sways you.”
Mike Mejia is Tom’s partner. I have no doubt that when he got married, he devastated every woman in his life who isn’t a blood relative. All four of us were invited to the wedding in April. Tom let Mike’s new stepdaughter, an apple-cheeked four-year-old, step on his shoes while he whirled her around on the dance floor. Even my mother, three flutes of champagne deep, got up from the table to dance when they played her favorite song.
Mike is popular around here. Tom used to tease me about how I had a crush on him when I was a kid. Now the thought makes me want to throw up, because Mike is Brandon’s age.
Something lights up in my brain. Mike’s first year on the job was the year of the murders. He might be able to give me insight.
“Let me change,” I say.
* * *
—
I sit in the backseat of Tom’s car so we can pick up Mike. He gives me a “Hey, kid” and a flash of a smile.
“Hi,” I say. “How are Anna and Danielle?”
“Good, good. Anna made me sleep on the couch for forgetting the mashed potatoes from KFC, but good.”
“I remember those pregnancy hormones,” Tom says. “Phoebe threw a glass at me because I made a joke about—” Tom eyes me over his shoulder. “Well, a dirty joke.”
“Ew,” I say.
They launch into work banter, then gun talk, and I close my eyes, trying to buoy myself against the nausea that comes over me every time we drive on these winding country roads. Triple B Gun Club is twenty minutes north of Sunnybrook, but it may as well be another state, culturally speaking.
The owner of Triple B remembers me from when I was last here in the spring, so she doesn’t hassle me too much with the mandatory safety briefing. Tom ushers me through the door dividing the lanes from the lobby.
The pop-pop of guns going off sends my shoulders up to my ears. Tom puts a hand on my back and guides me to the lane he’s rented for us. He sets me up with his .22 caliber pistol and keeps his eye on me as I adjust my ear protectors and safety goggles.
I assume the proper stance and aim the gun at the paper target, a sickly skinned cartoon zombie. My index finger trembles around the trigger.
“Remember,” Tom says. “Don’t expect it.”
I fire off ten rounds. All hit the zombie’s belly and not the bull’s-eye on its head.