“I’ll run you a bath. You can take it when she falls asleep.”
Bex is sitting when I return to her. She drinks the entire glass and asks for another. When she’s finished, she falls back into the pillow. I watch over her until she drifts into sleep, then I take her clothes to the bathroom to try to rinse them out. I use the water my mother ran for me in the tub and get down on my knees to submerge them. I rub soap into the fabric and scrub. It’s pointless. The bloodstains are too thick and deep. Angry, I thrash them around and begin to cry, and my tears drip into the bloom of blood slowly spreading through the water.
There’s a knock. “Lyric?”
“I’m okay, Dad.”
“Did you leave the front door open?”
“No,” I say, suddenly alarmed. I wipe my forearm along my face and step into the living room. My father is waiting. I can see the yellow light from the hall lamps glowing on our floor.
“Stay here,” he whispers, and I obey, standing perfectly still as he creeps from room to room, investigating every corner. “Lyric? Where’s Bex?”
I rush past him and into my room. My backpack is spilled out all over the floor. I sort through the mess, but I already know what’s missing.
“She took the gun.”
Doyle calls in the morning with his condolences. I tell him I’m not coming in to school today, snapping at him before he can tell me I have to hold to my end of our deal, but he doesn’t.
“Take care of your friend,” he says before he clicks off.
“I will.” But I’m lying, because I have no idea where she is right now. My father has officers watching Tammy’s apartment, and a few hovering around Tito’s place, but so far she hasn’t shown up at either. I’ve sent a thousand text messages to her, with no replies. It makes me frantic, horrified, and worried all at once. I know what she’s going to do with my gun.
“I had to shoot someone once,” my father says. “He stabbed a pregnant woman on the boardwalk and ran around threatening to do it to others.”
“Did you kill him?”
He looks out the window.
“You kept that from me,” I say.
“I keep it from everyone.”
In the afternoon my mother walks me over to meet with Mrs. Ramirez. Her home is alight with candles. A photo of Shadow from the fifth grade is on the wall. A wooden cross is nailed beneath it. She quietly sobs and squeezes her rosary beads so tightly, I worry she’ll crush them. An old woman, maybe Shadow’s grandmother, wails with grief and beats on her chest, as if it were her own body that killed her grandson.
I tell Mrs. Ramirez how much I loved her boy. She says she’s grateful, but it makes her cry, and I feel terrible.
“When someone is grieving, even a kindness feels like a slap in the face,” my mother says when we make the long, sad walk home.
Later in the day my father and I walk the streets of Coney Island, and I point out anywhere Bex might be hiding, every little place we got into trouble together. I no longer want to keep secrets, and things come out that I know he would rather not hear, but if it helps us find my friend, I will strip myself bare in front of the whole world. I even tell him about Gabriel’s rooftop. We make our way up the fire-escape ladder, but there’s no sign of her.
At midnight I collapse into bed, exhausted and frustrated, my head ringing with pain. I won’t sleep tonight, but there’s nothing else to do but lie in wait for the phone to ring. I send her one last text.
I LOVE U, BECCA CONRAD. PLEASE COME BACK.
Outside my window I hear the Alpha racing past, their horrible sound crashing through the night. They drown my anguish with their thrum and move on to terrify the next block.
Three a.m. I’ve tossed and turned myself onto the very edge of an F5. I have to get myself into the bathtub and slow it down. I wake to find my parents drinking coffee in the dark. My mother is crying. My father is slouched. The act of sitting is just too exhausting. He looks like he’s just lost a fight.
“What happened?” I panic.
“We haven’t heard anything,” my father assures me.
“Then why are you two awake?”
My father gestures to his wife. “You tell her.”
“Mom?”
She takes a deep breath and tries to smile. Even in the dark I can tell it’s phony. “I have made a decision. I want you and your father to leave without—”
“No.”
“Lyric, it’s just for a little while,” she says. “You can find a place and get settled, and then I’ll join you.”
“We’re not splitting up,” I say. “Doyle is going to give me the IDs. We can leave on Friday if we want. Bex will come back, and we’ll all go together.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t leave until I find them.”
“Mom, they aren’t there!” I rage.
She’s taken aback by my anger. “Then they will come with the next wave.”
“And when is that?”
She tries to say something, but I won’t let her.