I grip my belly and scream then, leaning back and shaking my head, a howl that could bring police sirens. It still might, given Mom is on the deck, and the Mincuses’ backyard is twenty feet away. When I scream, I imagine a black lava flowing from my mouth, every kind of deadly animal riding inside: lions, tigers, sharks, cobras. When I’m done, a cold sweat runs down my shirt, and my back heaves, hands on thighs. The exhaustion that follows brings peace. Sticks lie scattered at my feet like bones, but for two bunches in my hands. I am Shakespeare’s Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, trimmed and given bundled branches for hands, her tongue cut out, all so she couldn’t bring justice to her violators. But she found a way. She took a stick in her mouth and scribbled their names in the sand. She had her revenge.
Like Lavinia, I will figure out a way to make my greatest offender known. It won’t be public, but it will count. I will create my own kind of justice.
THIRTEEN
366 Days After the Woods
The skate park should be the perfect place to perform an extreme stunt. Where else to explain my seeming alliance with the person bent on taking down the Shiverton police department? To make amends for being Paula’s instrument? To stoke my courage, I catch snowflakes on my tongue. In the half hour that I’ve been waiting for Kellan, I’ve tested my resolve by exposing different parts of my body to the cold. Ankles, wrists, earlobes, lower back, tongue.
I let the snow dissolve. Granular, tolerable, gone. In the distance, steps approach, boots crunching in the cold dust.
“You came,” I say.
“I came.” Kellan shambles to me, shoulders hiked to his ears. The light poles cast a pewter glare. His eyes are coated with mistrust. Am I too late? Has disappointment calcified into hate?
“I suppose you think I’m a traitor,” I say.
He cocks his chin and stares at the sky, which is worse than an answer. This is the opposite of the skate park where we celebrated before, dark and upside-down. I clear my throat, starting over. “I asked you here so I could explain why I agreed to an interview with Paula Papademetriou.”
He jams his hands into his pockets. “Don’t think you can.”
I wasn’t expecting such an absolute shutdown. Flummoxed, I stall. “How did you get out so late?”
“Snuck.”
“Me? I used the front door. I’d planned something more dramatic, but it turned out to be overkill.” I wait for a smile, but his mouth is set. Around us, the first snowflakes of the year fall sparsely. Everything is blurring, the seasons overlapping. It’s a wavy-mirror world that suits things perfectly. “Please sit with me.”
“No thanks.” He says it with an edge, breath swirling from the side of his mouth. “So you said yes when Paula asked to interview you?”
“I had no choice,” I reply.
He winces at the sky. “Did she hold you hostage?”
It would be easy to give him the story I gave Mom, to lie, say I was ambushed. But I have to make him understand that Paula is my last resort. “We’re working together. Paula’s helping to make things right.”
His eyes flare with disbelief, which is awful, but better than the dull veil of before. “How can screwing the police department be right? Don’t you get it? If my father loses his job, it’s bad, for him and for my family. Why do you think I left St. John’s? Things are tight. If you haven’t noticed, we don’t live on your side of Shiverton.”
“Paula is trying to change a broken system,” I say.
“That broken system saved you,” he says.
“A guy riding his bicycle by the watchtower saved me. That broken system got me abducted. Donald Jessup’s ankle bracelet told the police he was lurking around the high school, the track, and Liv’s house, and still he slipped through the cracks.” I say it steadily, without emotion or inflection. Just the facts.
“My father didn’t create the system. He’s a good guy. He cared about your case, not only for the two days they were searching for you and Jessup—and he was out there, on the ground, in the woods—I’m talking months and months after. Your case might have been officially closed, but my father always believed there was more to it.”
“Your father isn’t the one who looks bad. Chief Pantano is taking the fall,” I point out.
“Is that what Paula says? Your new BFF?” he spits.
“Paula is the only one who can help me. There’s a lot you don’t understand. Ever since the woods, something’s not right with Liv.”
“Somehow the fact that this is about Liv Lapin makes it so much worse.”
Kellan angles his body away from me. Beyond us, traffic thrums and beeps, and the cheesy gym next door leaks riffs of music. But inside the cement bowl it’s just us and the patter of snow. The air smells metallic, lustrous and charged. I wonder how I can do this, remain seated and totally still, while Kellan twists and turns to stay warm, beating at his sides and shifting from foot to foot.
I stick out my tongue to test a snowflake again.
He squats, forearms resting on his thighs, and for the first time looks me full in the face. “You once said what happened in the woods made you morbidly fascinating, a freak-show oddity. But you don’t get it. I never looked at you until the woods.”
If the woods could create a snake in my belly, why couldn’t it make me irresistible to Kellan? Maybe the cold forced my body to burn fat, turning me into a lean, hard fighter. Perhaps learning to hide my footfalls in the crunch of telltale leaves gave me agility and grace. Seeing through rain sharpened my vision, let me see people for who they are.