I stopped. I wasn’t ready to talk about the rest.
Astrid waited a moment after I’d finished talking before she reached across the couch and put her hand on mine. I was so drained from talking about the party that I felt relieved—if she was touching my hand, if she was still here listening to me, then it meant she didn’t think I was the worst person in the world. Even if I still thought so.
“What happened sucks, but it’s not your fault,” she said.
“Easy for you to say.” What did she know, anyway? Nice of her to say it, but we both knew it wasn’t true.
“You don’t understand. I’m not just saying it, I know it.” She was frowning, though it didn’t seem like she was frowning at me.
“Oh, great, now you’re going to be all cryptic, just like Hayden. You think you’re going to make my guilt just magically go away?” I pulled away from her and stood up. I shouldn’t have tried to explain it to her. What made me think she’d understand, anyway?
Just then I saw Eric, walking toward us. When did he even get here? “It’s almost midnight,” he said to Astrid. “We should get out of here.” He looked over at me, all good-looking in his stupid skinny pants and perfectly arranged hair. “Hey, Sam, nice to see you again. Need a ride home? I’m driving.” And he was nice, too. I hated that I could totally get what she saw in him.
“Come with us, Sam,” Astrid said. “It’s been a long night.”
“Thanks, but I’ll walk,” I said. “I could use some fresh air.” I got up without saying anything else, as gracefully as I could manage from that stupid overstuffed couch. Tomorrow I’d want to know what she meant when she said she was sure it wasn’t my fault, but tonight I just needed to deal with the fact that I’d talked about the party, something I thought I’d never do, something I’d refused to think about all week. And now I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I hadn’t even told her the worst part. I needed to be alone. I waited for Astrid and Eric to leave, then headed for the door.
Damian caught me on the way out. “You hitting the road?” he asked.
I nodded.
“A little something for the ride?” He handed me a flask.
Sure, what the hell. Whatever was in it smelled wonderful, like rich caramel, and tasted like ass. My throat burned as it hit, and I could almost feel the booze reactivating the beer I’d drunk, making my head spin a little.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Doing great,” I said. Guess I was a liar after all.
“See you around,” he said.
The cold air hit me as I opened the front door; the temperature had dropped. It felt wonderful, though the shot had made me dizzy. How ironic, I thought, as I started walking, that after confirming just last week that I’d never be able to make friends at parties, I’d gone to a party and possibly made a friend. I’d been right all along, and I’d never be able to tell Hayden. It was almost funny. Actually, it was funny. I started laughing, then realized I was freezing. I looked down at my arms, covered with goose bumps. Which meant I could see my arms. Which meant I wasn’t wearing my sweatshirt. Crap—I’d left it at the party, along with my wallet and cell phone. I had no idea what time it was, and I was getting dizzier and dizzier. I knew I should go back to the party, but I didn’t think I’d make it. I was so, so tired. And I’d just reached the 7-Eleven, which had a bench right in front. I would only sit for a minute. Then I’d go back.
THE HAND ON MY SHOULDER was gentle, but the voice was rough. “Get up, you stupid punk. This isn’t your fucking bedroom.” I opened my eyes. Standing right over me was a very angry man with a mustache and a 7-Eleven button-down shirt. His face was framed by the glowing pinks and oranges of a really amazing sunrise.
Sunrise?
Shit.
I stood up quickly and brushed the guy’s arm off me. He must have been the morning-shift dude; that plus the sunrise meant it was probably around six a.m. Mom would be home at seven. I had to go. “Leave me alone,” I said to the guy, and stood up. My whole body ached and I could hear my back crack as I straightened. As soon as I was fully awake I realized that a) I probably had a huge black eye from Trevor punching me, b) my head was killing me, and c) there was a better than fifty-fifty chance I was going to have to puke. Apparently I was having my first hangover.
“Don’t come back,” the 7-Eleven guy yelled as I went to get my stuff from the party.
Whatever, that guy would forget what I looked like after ten minutes, anyway. I wasn’t worried about him; I was worried about whether I’d make it back to the house where the party was without throwing up. I also had to take a piss in the worst way. I’d heard that heavenly forces watched over drunks and stupid people, and since I felt like both I figured I probably had some luck coming. It arrived in the form of a cluster of bushes big enough to duck into, where I took care of both problems. I still felt like shit, but shit felt a whole lot better than where I’d started.
The party must have raged on well past curfew, because the door was cracked open when I got there and I could see people all crashed out in the living room. I crept in as quietly as I could and made my way upstairs to the room where I remembered leaving my stuff on the bed. Two people in semi-undress had fallen asleep on top of it, but I managed to get everything out from under them without waking them up, which seemed like some kind of miracle.
I practically crawled out the way I came and buried myself in my sweatshirt as soon as I got outside. My cell phone and wallet were still in my pockets, and I checked the time to make sure I still had some leeway before Mom got home. It was only 6:20, so I was fine. But seven text messages? That couldn’t be right.
I scanned them as I walked home. They were all from Astrid.
Where are you? Text me back.
Every half hour, from three a.m. on. Same message, but I could almost feel the urgency increasing with every one she sent. Something bad must have happened. The time stamp of the last message was less than a half hour ago, so I took a shot.
You still up? I wrote, once I’d made it into the house and up the stairs to my room. Everything okay?
It wasn’t even a minute before my phone rang.
“Where have you been?” Astrid said, whisper-yelling. She must have been at home.
I was too embarrassed to tell her I’d fallen asleep on a bench outside the 7-Eleven. “I crashed right after I got home from the party,” I lied. Again. “Shut off the ringer on my phone. I just saw your texts when I got up to go to the bathroom.”
“Thank God,” she said.
“Why, what’s going on?”
“You haven’t checked Facebook yet, have you?”
“Nope. I haven’t even gotten out of bed.” That was true, except for how I’d just gotten in it. Also, she clearly hadn’t yet figured out that I wasn’t on Facebook. I didn’t need hard evidence of how many friends I didn’t have.
“Well, you’re going to want to take a look at some point,” Astrid said. “Someone beat the crap out of Trevor last night.”
My stomach lurched. “What?”
“The cops found him in an alley this morning. He’s got a concussion and two broken ribs. Looks like someone took a baseball bat to him.” She sounded almost excited, but she was probably wired from being up all night.
“Is he going to be okay?” I’d wanted to see him get what was coming to him, but not like this. Just because he was a jerk didn’t mean he needed to be pulverized.
“Yeah, he’ll be fine, but he’s done with sports for the year. Maybe even next year at college, too.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “We just saw him. Where were Jason and Ryan?”
“Nobody knows,” she said. “Nobody really knows anything. Jason’s still laying low after the whole Blue Star thing, and Ryan’s parents apparently are such a mess that he hasn’t left the house since, you know. Trevor was on his own last night. His parents freaked out when they woke up and realized he’d never come home, and they called the cops to look for him.”
“I thought the police didn’t get involved unless someone had been missing for, like, two days.”
“Justice works differently on the east side of town,” Astrid said. I noticed she didn’t say “their side,” or “our side” and it made me realize I had no idea where she lived. Now didn’t seem like the time to ask, though.
“Did they find out who did it?” I asked.
She hesitated. “That’s the thing,” she said finally. “Trevor says someone clocked him on the back of the head and he doesn’t remember anything after that. Never saw the guy. But some people on Facebook are saying . . .”
“What?”
I heard her take a deep breath. “People are saying it was you.”
I started to feel dizzy. “Me? How?”
“Everyone saw you guys getting into it at the party, and they heard him threaten you. People think you went home, got a bat, and went after Trevor because you couldn’t handle him without a weapon.”
So much for making new friends. They all already thought I was some sort of vengeful maniac. “I would never do that,” I said. “You know that, right? Please tell me you know that.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ve just been trying to find you so you’d hear it from me and not someone who thought it might be you. And besides, from what Trevor said, this all happened after midnight, and I saw you leave the party way before that. I told people you went straight home.”
“Right,” I said. “Home.” Now I had to feel guilty for lying, on top of everything else.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said. “I’ve got to crash now—I’m totally exhausted.”
“Of course. Talk soon.” I hung up the phone, and my stomach heaved. I hoped I didn’t have to throw up again. The fact was, I had no idea where I’d been when Trevor had been attacked. I assumed I’d been passed out on the bench, since sitting down was the last thing I remembered before getting up; it only made sense that I’d spent the whole night sleeping there.
But what if I hadn’t?
I’d never been as angry at anyone as I’d been at Trevor. At the party last night I’d wanted something bad to happen to him, and in some ways I wanted to be the bad thing. Who was to say I hadn’t actually done it, in some sort of drunken blackout rage? Wasn’t this why drinking was supposed to be such a terrible thing? Had I finally snapped and gone over the edge, like the loser in one of those songs on Hayden’s mix?
Just then I heard the ping of my Gchat window opening up. I crawled back out of bed and over to the computer.
ArchmageGed: Two down.
At first I had no idea what ArchmageGed was talking about. I was so tired I could hardly focus, and I was still dizzy from all the booze. But then I remembered what he’d said after Rachel told me about Jason: One down, two to go.
Was he talking about the bully trifecta?
Except that left me with even more questions. To start, how did ArchmageGed know the two attacks were related? And ArchmageGed didn’t just seem to know about the connection; he was all but taking credit for the attacks. But he wasn’t real; he was either the ghost of my dead best friend or some sort of hallucination on my part, either of which meant I was nuts, but which also meant there was no way he could go around beating people up. The only thing I knew for sure was that I’d written off the idea that someone was trying to screw with me. Not at this point.
I so wished my head weren’t spinning; it would have been hard enough for me to puzzle through this if I were sober and well rested. But I had to try. Okay, so if ArchmageGed was counting down, that meant Ryan was next. Normally I wouldn’t think that was too big a deal. I wasn’t all that broken up about Jason getting humiliated, although I didn’t think outing someone was cool; I was pretty disturbed at the extent of Trevor’s injuries, but I wasn’t exactly weeping with despair that someone else seemed to hate him as much as I did. The thought of something bad happening to Ryan seemed almost fitting, given that I viewed him as the most responsible for Hayden’s death.
But I’d told Mr. Beaumont that it wasn’t my job to decide who should pay for Hayden’s death, and I thought I meant it. The problem was, as far as I could tell, there were only two people who viewed the three of them as the source of most of our problems, and one of us was dead.
Was ArchmageGed trying to tell me that I’d done it?
I didn’t exactly have a good alibi for either event. I’d been on my computer Gchatting with the Archmage, who wasn’t real, when Jason got hit, and as far as I knew I’d been passed out on a bench in front of the 7-Eleven last night. And I was covered in bruises—from Jason knocking me into the pew at the funeral, from Trevor punching me in the face, and who knew what else? Could I really be sure that all my aches and pains were from the things I remembered? Was it possible that I’d attacked Jason, or Trevor, or both? And that they’d fought back?