Charlie lowers his voice so that I can barely hear him over the music. “I know Cal wanted to tell someone about the drugs and everything. Maybe that was the right call. I don’t know.” He scrapes a hand over his jaw. “I told Stefan what’s been going on, and he says no way. He says I just need to lie low and keep my head down for a while. And everything will work itself out.”
That sounds exactly like something Stefan St. Clair would say. “Is Stefan around?”
“Outside,” Charlie says, jerking his head over his shoulder. “There’s a deck off the kitchen.” I go to leave, but he steps in front of me. “Hey, listen. Is there something going on with you and Ivy?”
God. We don’t have time for that conversation, and even if we did, I wouldn’t know what to tell him. “Later, Charlie, okay?” I say, pushing past him.
I make my way into the kitchen, where bottles crowd every square inch of the counter and a line for the keg snakes into the dining room. “I didn’t really know him all that well,” the guy manning the keg is saying to the girl beside him. “But we have to celebrate life, right?”
“Right,” the girl says somberly, tipping her cup against his. The sleeve of her shirt lifts just enough to display the black ribbon on her wrist. “Boney taught us that.”
A sliding glass door leads to the deck. In the distance, I see both actual pine trees and their reflections mirrored in the glassy shine of a pond. I knew this neighborhood looked familiar; Stefan’s backyard runs up against the new golf course. Ma laughed when she saw listings for these houses online. “They’re calling them waterfront,” she said. “I guess a pond is as close as you’ll get in Carlton.”
Stefan St. Clair is sitting on the edge of the porch railing, holding court with half of Carlton High’s dance squad. He ignores me as I approach, because of course he does. Stefan might have graduated last spring, but he still considers himself the king of the school. The guy who knows everyone and everything, who’ll throw a party every night of the week. Even the night that his former classmate died.
Stefan shakes his hair out of his face the same way his younger brother does when he laughs at something one of the girls says. I wind my way through his audience, until I’m so close that he can’t ignore me any longer. “Hey, man,” he says, tilting his head to guzzle the last of his beer. “What’s good?”
“Have you seen—” I start, and then I break off as I catch sight of someone hovering at the edge of Charlie’s yard, near the bushes that separate it from the golf course. Someone who’s taking a leak, from the looks of it. “Never mind.”
“Good talk,” Stefan calls as I turn abruptly and head for the stairs that lead from the deck into the backyard.
I don’t try to be stealthy about it. I want him to see me coming, because I need to see his face. He’s weaving a little, though, and doesn’t notice me until I’m almost halfway across the lawn. Then he stops in his tracks and snorts out an irritated half laugh. “Well, look who it is. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Hey, Gabe,” I say, closing the last few feet of space between me and my cousin’s loser boyfriend. “Or should I say, ‘Hey, Weasel’?”
Startled alarm flickers in Gabe’s eyes. “Dígame,” I add, echoing the voicemail greeting I heard over Boney’s phone while staring at Autumn’s bulletin board.
And then I take a swing at him.
CAL
I’ve only been here once before—last week, when I gave Lara a ride home from school while her car was in the shop. “You want to come in and see my new charcoal pencils?” she asked with a flirty smile when I pulled into her driveway. I thought that was a euphemism, maybe, for taking the next step in our relationship, but I was wrong. All we did was sketch until she had to leave for a date with Coach Kendall.
After weeks of anticipation, I’m glad now that she never did anything except string me along. It makes all of this easier to deal with.
There’s no sign of her car in the driveway, but she has a garage, so that doesn’t mean she isn’t home. I go to the front door and ring the bell, first lightly, and then I press hard on the buzzer. “Hello?” I yell. “Lara?” I’m not worried about the neighbors; Lara doesn’t have much in the way of those. “I need to talk to you.” There’s no response, so I grab the doorknob and twist. First left, then right, but no luck.
I stand on the front step, considering. The last time I was here, Lara complained about a back door lock that didn’t work properly. “I should get it fixed, but why bother?” she said. “I’m going to move soon anyway.” I didn’t want to talk about that; about the house she kept saying she was going to buy with Coach Kendall. I couldn’t believe she’d actually go through with marrying him. She was avoiding a lot of stuff the whole time we were hanging out, and I hope that still includes home repairs.