“Were you there looking for me?” I had to force myself to be still under my blanket.
“I wanted to,” she said, smoothing the blanket across my chest. “But they wouldn’t let me. I had to be examined. Make my report. Besides, they said if I went back in the woods, it would distract the volunteers.”
“They wouldn’t let you?” I asked.
“Of course not. I mean, he was still out there,” she said.
“So was I.”
Liv stared hard at the muted TV, twisting a bit of blanket between her fingers. Red, white, and blue streamers rippled across the screen and dissolved into stars that chased one another in a circle and split to re-form the number three. I’d memorized all the promos: Trust WFYT—the Friend You Can Trust!—for the local angle on the biggest miracle-recovery story since Elizabeth Smart. Paula Papademetriou folded her arms and nodded. I softened a little, watching Liv frown and pick at the cotton weave, and considered asking what she thought of Paula Papademetriou, just to break the tension.
“To be honest, as long as we’re fine, it’s really not a big deal,” Liv said.
Her words hurt more than my junk ankle and my briar-shredded back and my hypothermic hands and feet. I twisted on my hip and faced the wall. After a while she left. I rolled back and felt under the sheets for my morphine pump, grabbing the TV remote in my other hand. By then the twenty-four-hour news stations had picked up the story. Every show had some version of the same opening shot—the main entrance to the woods, its trees blanched dry and pale in the camera lights. The woods I knew were wet and black. Newscasters used phrases like plucky teen and heroine and remarkable courage. When one segment ended, I found another on a different station. Some channels covered my story twice in the same hour. The story became more horrific with every telling, proving that we’d been through hell, and that Liv should have been relieved that we were alive, grateful we both made it out, and shocked that it had happened. Yet she was none of these things. And I wanted to know why.
After a while, I let the morphine pump fall, and swore I’d never let anything cloud my mind again.
My alarm blasts Kiss 108. I roll over and hammer the top with my fist, then feel for the thick glasses I abandoned for contacts in sixth grade. My notebook lies, propped on its fanned pages, spine-up on the floor next to my bed. The memory trails off like the ends of clouds. I grab a pen and scribble in the growing light:
Things I Know About Liv:
- Drove home before calling the police
- Said my memory is unreliable
- Lied
FOUR
355 Days After the Woods
Principal Ligand splits his pants as he mounts the brick wall, unsteady in wingtips. He yanks down the back of his tweed jacket. Someone hands him an electronic bullhorn.
“All students must now report to their homerooms!” He turns side to side like he has a rod in his back. “If you do not enter the school now, you will be marked tardy.”
A line of male teachers stand with their arms crossed like undersized bouncers. We huddle in clumps, the bus kids and the kids whose parents drop them off, and the ones who drive, like me, all standing outside in the bright, cold morning ignoring Ligand and his visible boxers along with the first bell. We shift and shiver and steal looks at the white vans with their curlicue cables and satellite dishes parked in a wagon circle around the WELCOME TO SHIVERTON HIGH SCHOOL! HOME OF THE CHIEFTAINS! sign. The WFYT van has driven up on the grass, its wheels sinking in the mud. The crowd of students gives off a dangerous, honing energy looking for a place to land. A pack forms around a boy named Ari, the son of a wealthy computer executive and a leader because of his brutal sarcasm and contempt for authority. He dashes across the driveway and a patch of butterscotch grass, circling the vans and disappearing behind the welcome sign. Two boys shove each other until one, then the other, follows Ari across the grass.