He owed Mira her truth. No one could stop him.
It came without warning, the sudden whine of bald tires turning hard. The driver had spotted Mr. Cillo’s driveway late. Ben’s bowels dropped to the floor. Car door slams were followed by men calling to each other, the words indistinct and loud: drunk. Ben could be spotted plainly if Mr. Cillo looked through his own living room window. Ben turned to take the stairs, knocking the backpack off his shoulder. He stooped to pick it up. As he raised his eyes, he saw the note, pinned to the underside of the couch near where they’d made love. White-winged and folded, waiting to be set free.
Ben raced up the stairs, note in fist. Like downstairs, the girls’ bedroom was inexplicably lit. He wished the room was dark—how could he hide in a lit room? He opened a closet stuffed with trendy clothes and shoes the girls had stopped wearing. Downstairs, the front door slammed. Ben couldn’t risk Mr. Cillo hearing his footsteps. He jammed himself in and sank to the floor, backpack behind, propping him upright. A boot heel dug into his thigh. Francesca’s, he thought, as he eased the closet door open a crack, like he’d found it. Though Ben felt sure Mr. Cillo never came in this room, the scene of his crime.
Except for the closet, the room was unnaturally orderly for any girl, even ones acting unnatural. It reminded Ben of a furniture store display, decorated with potpourri and generic art. He tried to distract himself by attaching objects to each of the girls, then considering how they might have used them. On the dresser, the plastic paddle brush he decided was Francesca’s was picked clean. He imagined her plucking at the tangle, dropping dark tumbleweeds of hair into the trash can. It seemed curious to Ben that a soon-to-be-dead girl would clean her brush for the next person when there was no next person. Under one twin bed, Ben spotted a paperback of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the same edition he’d been assigned in tenth grade: Mira’s. He imagined Mira slipping it under the bed the night they died, as Francesca shrugged on a sweater and told her to hurry. Pink Post-it notes fringed the top and sides. Ben wondered what passages Mira had marked important.
Clatter-crash! rang out from the kitchen below. Mr. Cillo was preparing canned something on the stovetop, and having a hard time. What would become of Ben if Mr. Cillo set the kitchen on fire and he couldn’t escape? Would the charred body in the closet become one more mystery surrounding this family where anyone young kills themselves before they grow old, and the old ones go on and on?
Mr. Cillo stumbled, followed by a squeak and a bang—the cat toy thrown against a wall. Ben wondered if he’d committed a crime, breaking and entering. After a while, the noises settled into a television drone that worried Ben more than swears and crashes. It could be hours before Mr. Cillo fell asleep, and then deeply enough that Ben could tiptoe past and out the front door, or the back, through the kitchen. He told himself it was a waiting game he could win as long as he didn’t panic. He nestled among the clothes in an effort to get warm, and realized he was leaning against the collection of shapeless dresses that Francesca had taken to wearing. He wished there was something more of Mira in this room, objects that would remind him why he had pulled this stunt to begin with.
Eventually, he opened the note.
Francesca says it’s as though
he has a knife to her throat.
She is out of options.
End at the end.
And so he was coming to the end. He already knew the option that she—they—chose. And Mira wouldn’t have chosen it unless she was out of options, too.
Ben had trouble breathing. He leaned through the closet doorway for air. That’s when he saw the hat. It hung over the back of a chair, barely more than a slub of yarn, a knit thing that had sat sideways on Mira’s head starting around April, after the girls came back to school following Connie’s wake. Mira wore it no matter the temperature, no matter that winter was over and she hadn’t even worn it in the winter. When most of the girls who had something to show off (and even the ones who didn’t) began to expose knees and arms and backs, Mira covered up more. During those last weeks, in Semantics, Ben watched as she wound her bright hair around the widest part of her hand and stashed the bunched knot underneath the terrible thing. He had come to hate the hat, not only for hiding what most guys noticed first about Mira, but for marking her as sullen and weird, which it did better than if she’d dyed her hair black and tattooed a tear on her cheek. Ben remembered the day their Health teacher asked her to remove the hat—girls, snarky and jealous, said it was for fear of lice—and when class ended, she left it on the metal rails under her chair. Ben had waited until she was nearly out the door before he stood and walked over to it, poised to snatch it and stuff it in the boys’ room trash can, deep under piles of mealy paper towels. But Mira remembered and rushed back in, creating a standoff where for a moment, Ben thought she would speak to him. Instead, she turned red and her eyes widened, a look that he could neither tolerate nor place. Clutching the hat to her chest, she ran from the room.
A choking noise escaped Ben’s throat. He wondered how many missed chances there had been, when Mira would have spoken to him, but didn’t. Had he done other things, too, that made Mira distrust him enough not to tell him what her father was doing until after he could do nothing about it?
He gazed at Mira’s bed through watery eyes. He wondered if Mr. Cillo had touched Mira in that bed, which was so close to the other bed. It was hard to imagine things could happen to one sister without the other knowing. His brain flashed to the girls protecting each other from the monster by sacrificing themselves. It was so easy to envision the sick beast moving from one girl to the other. Starting with Francesca, then—
Ben paused his thoughts and stared at Mira’s bed. He banished the thought of Mr. Cillo’s sweaty visage looming over Mira. Ben felt certain that was how it had gone down, why Francesca had taken such pains (and he felt sure Francesca had led the charge) to cleanse the room of their personal selves, which they took with them to the quarry. Their bodies, finally, their own.
Ben wished he could get out of his own head.
He felt for his phone in his back pocket and found it black. He pressed hard on the power button, but nothing came. He swore, then cursed himself for cursing. Downstairs, upbeat music from the television floated to meet him.
Ben felt the sense of ice tongs squeezing the sides of his brain. His vision narrowed.
As his panic grew, he ticked off the things the dead phone meant he could not do. He couldn’t text his parents a lie that he’d gone somewhere after practice. He couldn’t send a panicked message to Kyle for help.
Kyle. He needed Kyle.