I felt like I was drowning, struggling to get my head above the crowd, listening for the sounds of paramedics that hadn’t come yet. The words dead girl bobbed over and over to the surface.
No, not dead. Posie couldn’t be dead. I twisted my wrists, forcing a gap in Jeremy’s fingers and wriggling free, then brought my elbow back hard in his rib. I heard him grunt, and I darted into the crowd, plowing through it, fiercely determined to get to Posie. To touch her. I blocked out everything else, the smells, the angry people I bumped aside, the morbid curiosity of everyone I touched, and forced my way into the bathroom. Fumes and sweat and fear assaulted me. I shoved my way farther in. I could hear Jeremy calling my name.
In front of one of the stalls, the crowd of bystanders waved hands in front of their faces, brushing away the noxious scent of something burning. Through the gap, I saw Posie’s sandals peaking out of the open stall door. A man knelt at her side, crammed between her body and the wall. He coughed, his eyes watering uncontrollably. I pushed closer. The man held Posie’s wrist, unable to find a pulse. A horrified expression came over his face as he drew her arm cautiously away from his body. Ash-gray blisters crept over her skin, a shape materializing on the inside of her forearm.
The crowd gasped, struggling to see as the number three burned into existence, leaving an oozing white path where it consumed her. The man covered his mouth with his sleeve and dropped her hand.
I fell to my knees and reached for her ankle just as two hands grabbed me under my arms and dragged me back.
It had only been a moment. The faintest flicker. But I’d felt her.
I let Jeremy carry me away, the crowd swallowing me as I screamed, “Someone help her! She’s alive!”
? ? ?
An hour later we were on the bus, heading home. The emergency exit lights cast a haunting glow over the somber faces around us. It was quiet except for the drone of the engine. No one spoke. One teacher remained at the park with the handful of students who’d claimed they’d been the last to see Posie hours before. Jeremy had dragged me away before the police arrived, insisting that we needed to get back to the bus. He’d been livid, and walked clutching his bruised rib. When he took my hand, I’d tasted the copper and salt of his anger. He’d pulled me hard through the crowd, repeating himself over and over. If we could make it back to the bus, everything would be okay. Paramedics and police rushed past us, and Jeremy kept his head down, murmuring in my ear to keep walking. Everything would be okay, the soothing words at odds with what he was clearly feeling. “There’s nothing we can do for her,” he’d said, holding me close to his side until we were herded into the bus.
I curled in on myself with my arms around my knees, forehead down, and I shut my eyes against the image of Posie blistering and the number three burning. Three, eighteen, ten. What did they mean? Where was the pattern? I forced my brain to zero in on the details, to clamp down on the hard facts of what I’d witnessed. But they were clouded in the chaos of the moment, and the confusion of the crowd.
Think.
I took a deep breath, focused. Started with the obvious. The number in Posie’s arm was made by a chemical burn. But it was the dramatic appearance—the well-timed bleaching of the number in her coffee-brown skin, white blisters in necrotized flesh—that gave the only clue to which chemical might have been used.
Bits and pieces of data circled my brain, like puzzle pieces sliding over a tabletop, seeking a logical intersection. Slowly, they began snapping together. The acid was probably lipophilic. Hydrofluoric acid was highly corrosive and yet slow to show burn symptoms on the skin. It could be purchased in most hardware stores, and would be easy to smuggle into the park in a sealed plastic water bottle. A set of rubber gloves and a small mask to protect the lungs would be just as easy to conceal. That’s all that would have been needed to administer the poison, and a very small amount, just a few milliliters, would have been enough to kill her.
But somehow, Posie Washington had survived.
“How did you know?” Jeremy startled me. The question was barely more than a whisper in the dark. I pulled my head from my hands and looked up at him, unsure what he was really asking. Was he asking me how I knew where to find her, or how I knew she was alive? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t tell him anyway.
I let my silence speak for me. For Emily and Marcia and Posie. For the mysterious numbers etched in their skin. There was nothing to say. My puzzle was riddled with holes, pieces thrown everywhere and none of them fit. I had no answers for any of this.
Instead, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just needed to see her. Are your ribs okay?”
Jeremy massaged them tenderly. “Remind me never to sneak up behind you.”
“Why were you so mad back there?”
He gaped at me, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe I’d asked the question. “You were trying to run headlong into what may or may not have been the scene of an attempted murder, Nearly.”