“You little bitch,” he says hoarsely. “You brought this on yourself, you know that?” I sink my teeth into Jake’s palm and he lets out an animal sound of pain, dropping his hand and lifting it just as quickly to strike me across the face.
I stagger, my face aching, but manage to stay upright and twist in an attempt to connect my knee to his groin and my nails to his eye. Jake grunts again when I make contact, stumbling enough that I break free and spin away. My ankle buckles and his hand locks around my arm, tight as a vise. He pulls me toward him and grips me hard by the shoulders. For one bizarre second I think he’s going to kiss me.
Instead he shoves me to the ground, kneels down, and slams my head on a rock. My skull explodes with pain and my vision goes red around the edges, then black. Something presses across my neck and I’m choking. I can’t see anything, but I can hear. “You should be in jail instead of Nate, Addy,” Jake snarls as I claw at his hands. “But this works too.”
A girl’s panicked voice pierces the pain in my head. “Jake, stop! Leave her alone!”
The awful pressure releases and I gasp for air. I hear Jake’s voice, low and angry, then a shriek and a thud. I should get up, right now. I reach my hands out, feeling grass and dirt beneath my fingers as I scramble to find an anchor. I just need to pull myself off the ground. And get these starbursts out of my eyes. One thing at a time.
Hands are at my throat again, squeezing. I lash out with my legs, willing them to work the way they do on my bike, but they feel like spaghetti. I blink, blink, blink some more, until I can finally see. Except now I wish I couldn’t. Jake’s eyes flash silver in the moonlight, filled with a cold fury. How did I not see this coming?
I can’t budge his hands no matter how hard I try.
Then I can breathe again as Jake flies backward, and I wonder dimly how and why he did that. Sounds fill the air as I roll onto my side, gasping to fill my empty lungs. Seconds or minutes pass, it’s hard to tell, until a hand presses my shoulder and I blink into a different pair of eyes. Kind, concerned. And scared as shitless as I am.
“Cooper,” I rasp. He pulls me into a sitting position and I let my head fall against his chest, feeling his heart hammering against my cheek as the distant wail of sirens draws closer.
Chapter Thirty
Nate
Friday, November 9, 3:40 p.m.
I know something’s different by how the guard looks at me when he calls my name. Not as much like a piece of dirt he wants to grind under his shoe as usual. “Bring your things,” he says. I don’t have much, but I take my time shoving everything into a plastic bag before I follow him down the long gray corridor to the warden’s office.
Eli hovers in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, giving me that intense stare of his times a hundred. “Welcome to the rest of your life, Nate.” When I don’t react, he adds, “You’re free. You’re out. This whole thing was a hoax that’s been blown wide open. So get out of that jumpsuit and into civilian clothes, and let’s get you the hell out of here.”
At this point I’m used to doing what I’m told, so that’s all I do. Nothing else registers, even when Eli shows me news stories about Jake’s arrest, until he tells me Addy’s in the hospital with a concussion and a fractured skull. “Good news is, it’s a hairline fracture with no underlying brain injury. She’ll make a full recovery.”
Addy, that airhead homecoming princess turned badass ninja investigator, in the hospital with a cracked skull because she tried to help me. Possibly only alive because of Janae, who got a busted jaw for her trouble, and Cooper, who’s suddenly some kind of superhero the media’s fawning over. I’d be happy for him if the whole thing didn’t make me sick.
There’s a lot of paperwork when you get out of jail for a crime you didn’t commit. Law & Order never shows how many forms you have to fill out before you rejoin the world. The first thing I see when I step blinking into bright sunshine is a dozen cameras whirring to life. Of course. This whole thing’s a never-ending movie, and I’ve gone from villain to hero in a matter of hours even though I haven’t done a single thing to make a difference since I got here.
My mother’s outside, which I guess is a pleasant surprise. I’m never not prepared for her to disappear. And Bronwyn, even though I specifically said I didn’t want her anywhere near this place. Guess nobody thought I was serious about that. Before I can react her arms are around me and my face is buried in her green-apple hair.
Jesus. This girl. For a few seconds I breathe her in and everything’s all right.
Except it’s not.
“Nate, how does it feel to be free? Do you have any comment about Jake? What’s your next step?” Eli shoots sound bites at all the microphones in my face as we make our way to his car. He’s the man of the hour, but I don’t see what he did to earn it. The charges were dropped because Bronwyn kept unraveling threads and tracked down a witness. Because Cooper’s boyfriend connected dots nobody else saw. Because Addy put herself in the line of fire. And because Cooper saved the day before Jake could shut her up.
I’m the only one in the murder club who didn’t contribute a goddamn thing. All I did was be the guy who’s easy to frame.
Eli inches his car past all the media vans until we’re on the highway and the juvenile detention center fades to a speck in the distance. He’s rattling on about too many things to follow: how he’s working with Officer Lopez to get my drug charges dropped; how if I want to make a statement through the media he’d recommend Mikhail Powers; how I need a strategy for reintegrating into school. I stare out the window, my hand a dead weight in Bronwyn’s. When I finally hear Eli’s voice asking if I have any questions, I can tell he’s been repeating himself for a while.
“Did someone feed Stan?” I ask. My father sure as shit didn’t.
“I did,” Bronwyn says. When I don’t respond, she squeezes my hand and adds, “Nate, are you all right?”
She tries to catch my eye, but I can’t do it. She wants me to be happy and I can’t do that either. The impossibility of Bronwyn hits me like a punch to the gut: everything she wants is good and right and logical and I can’t do any of it. She’ll always be that girl in front of me in the scavenger hunt, her shining hair hypnotizing me so much I almost forget how uselessly I’m trailing behind her.
“I just want to go home and sleep.” I’m still not looking at Bronwyn, but out of the corner of my eye I can see her face fall, and for some reason that’s perversely satisfying. I’m disappointing her right on schedule. Finally, something makes sense.
Cooper
Saturday, November 17, 9:30 a.m.
It’s pretty surreal to come downstairs for breakfast Saturday morning to my grandmother reading an issue of People with me on the cover.
I didn’t pose for it. It’s a shot of Kris and me leaving the police station after giving our statements. Kris looks fantastic, and I look like I just woke up after a night of heavy drinking. It’s obvious which of us is the model.
Funny how this accidental-fame thing works. First people supported me even though I’d been accused of cheating and murder. Then they hated me because of who I turned out to be. Now they love me again because I was in the right place at the right time and managed to flatten Jake with a well-aimed punch.
And because of the halo effect of being with Kris, I guess. Eli’s giving him full credit for figuring out what really happened, so he’s the new breakout star of this whole mess. The fact that he’s trying to avoid the media machine only makes them want him more.