“No.” Lacey stilled my hands with hers. “No, Dex. They’d have done it whether we were there or not.”
It was some note of certainty in her voice, maybe, that cued a memory from an assembly past, then half-remembered words from the morning’s service, and the pieces assembled themselves. “You knew,” I said, and of course she knew. She always knew. “You picked that town on purpose.”
“Of course I did. I was curious. Weren’t you?”
I knew the right answer: Curiosity was supposed to be our lifeblood.
“What do you think they do with cows on that farm, Dex?” she said when I didn’t give it to her. “This isn’t Charlotte’s Web.”
“That was a pig.”
“And they were going to butcher it, right?” Lacey said. “That’s how farms work. It’s not like killing someone’s cat or something.”
“Have they killed someone’s cat?”
“Do you want the answer to that?”
Silence between us, then, except for the bugs and the birds and the wind.
“You were having fun,” she said, and it felt like an accusation. “You were laughing. You just don’t remember.”
“No. No.”
“You do know it was all a bad joke, right?” she said. “Just a bunch of asshole hicks trying to freak out their parents. No one was actually trying to summon the devil.”
“Of course I know that.” What I didn’t know, at least not with the same degree of certainty, was whether it mattered. The sacrifice was a joke, maybe, but wasn’t blood still blood, dead still dead?
“Anyway, it’s not some crime against nature to watch stupid people do stupid shit,” Lacey said.
“But it was more than watching . . . wasn’t it?”
“What do you think?” Lacey laughed. “You think you helped put poor little Bessie out of her misery? You?”
I was sitting cross-legged, and Lacey shifted until she faced me in exactly the same pose. The Mirror Game, I’d called it when I was a kid, springing it on my parents without warning. You scratch your nose; I scratch mine. My mother loathed it. My father, who’d learned in some long-ago acting class how to cry on command, always won. If Lacey and I played, I thought, the game could go on forever.
She cupped my hands again. “How much do you remember, Dex? Seriously.”
I shrugged. “Enough?”
“I remember how it was my first time. Everything feels kind of like a dream, right? You’re not sure what’s real, what’s not?”
I nodded, slowly. “Not for you?” I said. “Everything’s clear for you?”
“Crystal. So I can tell you everything that happened, in graphic detail, or . . .”
“Or.”
“Or you trust me that everything is fine. That all the good stuff happened and all the bad stuff was a dream. You let me remember, and you let yourself forget. You trust me, don’t you?”
“You know I do.”
“Then?”
“Then okay. Yes. Everything is fine.”
She smiled—I smiled. That was how the game worked.
“You’re not sorry, are you?” Lacey asked, and I knew, because I always knew, what she really meant. Was I sorry not just about the things that happened in the field and the things that didn’t happen in the barn, and not just about the church and the mushrooms, but sorry for everything that led up to it, sorry about Lacey and Dex, sorry to be here with her in this field, damp and shaky and stained with blood, sorry to be with her anywhere?
I knew what she needed to hear. “Never be sorry, remember?”
Never be sorry, never be frightened, never be careful—those were the rules of Lacey. Play by the rules, win the game: Never be alone.