“Dealing or buying?”
“Dealing.”
“Did anyone get hurt?”
He winced as if the question caused him pain, but didn’t answer.
“If you really want to change, why are you hanging out with Lonny Johnson?”
“It’s complicated,” he said almost to himself. “But it doesn’t really matter, does it? You know, once a bad element, always a bad element.” The words were empty. Hollow. As though he’d heard them so many times they’d lost their meaning.
I watched him fall into a dark corner of himself and I resisted the urge to touch him, not wanting to feel the depth of emotion I saw on his face. Expunging his past was as much his ticket out of a life he didn’t want as my scholarship.
“That’s bullshit.” I turned the page, starting the lesson again. “Just because it’s complicated, doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution.”
14
Marcia wasn’t coming back. That much was certain. But Thursday, we knew that Emily wasn’t either. Jeremy and I stepped through the front doors as Vote for me for Prom Queen posters of Emily were stuffed into oversized trash bags, discarded like yesterday’s news. Posters of new faces immediately went up in their place. Their smiles seemed to say: “Nothing to see here, folks. Everything’s back to normal.” But I knew better.
Everything wasn’t back to normal. The note carved into my table in physics class promised this was far from over. Better luck next time. Emily’s disappearance under the bleachers was directly connected to Marcia’s murder, even if the police had been careful not to reveal any information about the marking on Marcia’s arm that matched the one on Emily.
“What do you think happened?” A gravelly voice spoke close behind me and I lurched. Reece leaned over my shoulder, close enough that his hair tickled my cheek.
“Don’t do that!”
He just laughed.
“I’m heading to class.” Jeremy swallowed hard, Adam’s
apple catching on his good-bye. “See you later, Leigh.” He disappeared behind a row of lockers before I could say a word.
Reece sidled up beside me. “I don’t think he likes me very much.”
“You might consider softening your image a bit . . . if you care, that is.” I picked up my pace and he walked beside me in silence.
“So . . .” he finally asked, “what do you think?”
I risked a sideways glance, seeing only his left side in profile. It was like looking at an entirely different person. From this side, I couldn’t see the two barbells in his brow, the scar that leaned to the right of his chin, or even his tattoo. He looked smooth and deceptively charming. Even his smile seemed to hug the left side of his face. It was like all he had to do to soften his image was turn around. “I don’t know . . . Maybe the facial piercings are a bit much.”
He touched the studs in his brow. “That’s not what I meant. What do you think about Emily and Marcia? A lot of rumors flying around. What do you think happened?”
I’d been listening for days for the quiet conversations between classes, and the whispering clusters in the halls. The school had been so preoccupied with Marcia’s death, everyone had more or less forgotten about Emily until this morning when her Prom Court posters came down. Nothing in any of the wild rumors linked the two. Which meant the police had told Reece that the cases were connected. And now he was fishing. Waiting for me to slip up and say something that he could take back to Nicholson.
“I think their families have probably been through enough. And talking about it isn’t going to change what happened to either of them.”
I cut Reece a quick glance out of the corner of my eye, hoping I’d sounded vague and uninterested enough to be convincing. I wasn’t paying attention and smacked headlong into Vince DiMorello. He stood over me with a broad, dimpled, shit-eating grin, like an opportunity had just fallen into his lap.
“Hey, Boswell.” His smoothed his jersey, his green eyes twinkling. I lowered mine to the floor. Vince was hard to look at, perfect in ways that made the world seem that much more unfair. “The team’s going out on Friday night. Thought we’d go see your mom.”
Freshman year, Vince’s older brother used a fake ID to get into Gentleman Jim’s. He managed to take a few incriminating photos on his cell phone before Butch kicked him out. None of them showed my mother’s face, but it wasn’t her face they were interested in.
“Let it go, Vince.” The jokes about my mother got old years ago, and I just didn’t have the patience for it today.