They’re wasting time.
“Oh please. What about that preppy—check that, aggressively preppy—blonde? Granted, she doesn’t have a brain in her head, so she can’t threaten your manliness,” Liv retorts.
“Nice. Real nice,” Kellan spits.
In my belly, the black thing opens one scaly eye.
“I mean, why not a real girl?” Liv says. “Like Julia, for example. Julia’s a certified heroine, not some flaky puck-f—”
“Take us to the woods!” I shout.
Kellan’s eyes flash at me in the mirror.
Liv’s head snaps around. “We are not going to the woods.”
Kellan pulls over hard into a drainage ditch and twists in his seat. “Why would you want to go back to the woods?”
“To see where they found the dead girl.”
“That is the absolute last place I would think you would ever want to be,” Kellan says incredulously.
“It is,” Liv says, blinking madly. “We are not going.”
“I hate to admit it, but Liv’s right,” Kellan says. “There’s an extremely good chance my dad could show up there. And the Fells is probably Paula Papademetriou’s next stop.”
“We are absolutely, positively not going,” Liv murmurs, shaking her head.
“You’re talking about nosing around a crime scene where the police dug up a body. Maybe a murdered body,” Kellan says.
“No one said anything about digging,” I point out. “Based on my research, the elements would have exposed her.”
“Aren’t you afraid of what you’ll see? There could still be remnants. Hair. Blood,” Kellan continues, as though he’s thinking of these possibilities for the first time and starting to freak out.
“Doubtful,” I say. “The rain would have washed them away.”
“Seriously, what’s wrong with you?” Liv says. “Do you have to be so macabre?”
I shoot Liv an insulted glare. But Kellan ignores us, earnest as all heck, determined to offer some special wisdom gleaned from being the son of a cop. “You have no idea what’s up there. And seeing disturbing stuff can really affect you. There’s no unseeing it. My dad knows cops who have this condition called PTSD from the bad stuff they’ve seen—”
“You might say I know something about it,” I interrupt flatly.
“Right. I’m sorry.” His eyebrows gather, pained. “That was out of line.”
That’s when I notice his eyes are clear green glass, eyes GIRLS titter about, and there is empathy there, but not pity. I know pity, it repels me, and his eyes do not repel me. I could get lost in them, but I won’t. I sort of wish he would turn around, because it’s easier to look at the back of Kellan’s head than his eyes.
“I just don’t get how seeing a grave can be a good thing,” he continues, his voice softer, the edges of his words rounder. “Given what you’ve been through.”
Green glass. Rare. An eye color no one else has.
“That body has nothing to do with what happened to us,” Liv says firmly. “It’s irrelevant.”
I pull my eyes away from Kellan. “Relevance is elusive,” I tell her.
“What does ‘relevance is elusive’ mean? Can you ever talk like a normal person?” Liv replies.
“It’s interfering with a crime scene. And that’s what we’ll get punished with: under federal law we could get twenty years,” Kellan says.
“We’d get off,” I say. “Any lawyer would argue lack of knowledge and lack of intent.”
“How can you possibly know that?” Kellan asks.
“I researched it,” I say.
“Of course. Let me try a different tack,” Kellan says. “I know I can’t possibly understand what you went through—”
“Well, I understand what she went through,” Liv interjects. “And there is no reason for us to go into the woods. Period.”
“No, you do not understand. Because you weren’t with me. You. Left. Me.” I bite off every word.
Liv throws up her hands. “Oh fine! The whole world knows: you went through hell and I didn’t. You screwed up your ankle. You got hypothermia. But you didn’t get raped. The doctors said you weren’t raped.”
Kellan turns forward, the tips of his ears turning red. “We should head back.”
“You got away, Julia. He couldn’t catch you. You won!” Liv says.
“What do you mean, I won?”
“I mean, we’re here and he’s dead! We’re putting this behind us, like we’ve had a thousand conversations about, like you said you were going to do.” She looks from me to Kellan, desperate. “The whole idea of hiking up there is stupid. Kellan, tell her.”
Kellan lets out a hard puff of air. “Is this some kind of closure thing?”
“If closure implies a need for information and an aversion to ambiguity, then that sounds about right,” I reply.
“What if I have an aversion to your sick fetishization of things ghastly and irrelevant?” Liv says.
Kellan meets my eyes in the mirror. “Is this what you want to do?” he asks.
I nod.