James averted his eyes—perhaps in defiance, perhaps in shame—and Meredith turned her gorgon gaze on me. Every tiny intimacy of the previous night came creeping back to mind: her lips against my skin and Richard’s ugly fingerprints on hers, neither more persuasive than the other. I swallowed a hard lump in my throat. If it be not now, yet it will come.
Alexander was fidgeting, on the verge of interrupting, but he shut his mouth when I moved, shifted, put myself between James and the rest of them. He twitched at the weight of my hands on his shoulders. “Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?” I said. He looked at me with unbearable mistrust, as if I were a stranger, someone he didn’t recognize. I pulled him just an inch closer, trying to tell him in some impossible way that I wanted him and the others unhurt and unafraid more than I wanted Richard alive, and we couldn’t have both anymore. “James, please. Let be.”
He stared at me a moment longer, then let his head droop again. “Wren?” he said, turning just enough that he could see her from the corner of his eye. She looked impossibly young, huddled between Meredith and Alexander, arms wrapped tight around her stomach, as if they wouldn’t unwind. But she seemed to have wept all the softness out of her cool brown eyes. She didn’t speak, didn’t even open her mouth—just nodded, slowly. Yes.
Something wretchedly like a laugh slipped out between James’s lips. “Do it, then,” he said. “Let him die.”
That loathsome opiate, relief, raced through my veins again—sharp and lucid at the initial prick, before everything went numb. I heard one of the others, maybe Filippa, exhale and I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt it. The moral outrage we should have suffered was quietly put down, suppressed like an unpleasant rumor before it had a chance to be heard. Whatever we did—or, more crucially, did not do—it seemed that so long as we did it together, our individual sins might be abated. There is no comfort like complicity.
Alexander tried to say something, but a wet spluttering sound made us all look toward the lake. Richard’s head had lolled to one side, low enough that the water lapped at his nose and mouth and left a cloud of dark hematic red around his face. His whole body stiffened, seized up, the muscles in his neck and arms bulging like steel cables, though he didn’t seem to be able to move his limbs. The rest of us watched in a state of rigid paralysis. There was a distant groan, the sound trapped somehow inside his body, unable to find a way out. One last little spasm went through him, the hand that had so futilely stretched toward the sound of our voices opening up like a flower. The fingers flexed, closed again, shrank back toward the palm. Then everything was still.
At long last Alexander rolled his shoulders forward, and all the smoke he’d been holding in his lungs spilled out at once. “Well,” he said to the rest of us, suddenly calm and placid as the lake that lay behind him. “What now?”
The question was so absurd and the way he said it so ludicrously casual that I had to clench my teeth against a psychotic impulse to laugh. My classmates shifted around me, turning inward, toward one another, away from the water. Their faces were smooth, impassive, the panic of a minute before forgotten. No reason to fuss now. No rush. I couldn’t help but wonder if my own expression was so staid, if perhaps I was a better actor than I’d always thought and none of them suspected that there was some sick, silent laughter trapped in my throat.
Filippa: “We need to decide what to tell the police about what happened.”
Alexander: “To him? Who knows. I don’t even know where I was half the night.”
Meredith: “You can’t say that. Someone’s dead and you don’t know where you were?”
Me: “Jesus, it’s not like one of us did this.”
Filippa: “No, of course not—”
Me: “He was drunk. He drank himself blind and went crashing into the woods.”
Wren: “They’re going to want to know why one of us didn’t go after him.”
Alexander: “Because he’s a violent fucking lunatic and he chucked you across the yard?”
Meredith: “She can’t say that, you idiot—it sounds like a motive.”
James: “Then you had better not say where you were either.”
He spoke so softly I almost didn’t hear him. He watched Meredith without embellishing, his face white and stiff as a plaster cast.
“Sorry,” she said, “what motive do I have to kill my boyfriend?”
“Well, what I remember about last night is your boyfriend calling you a slut in front of everyone and you rushing upstairs to revenge-fuck Oliver. Or have I left something out?” He looked from her to me, and that pain in my chest was back, like he’d grasped an invisible dagger and twisted it between my ribs.
“Look, he’s right,” Filippa said, before Meredith could argue. “We don’t know what happened to Richard, but there’s no sense making this more difficult for ourselves. Least said, soonest mended.”
“Okay, but we can’t avoid the fight in the kitchen because half the school was there,” Alexander said, then gestured from Meredith to me. “And someone saw these two morons making out in the stairwell.”
“He was drunk,” Meredith snapped. “Drunker than you, and you don’t even know where you were.”
Filippa talked over them. “We were all drinking, so any question you don’t want to answer, just say you don’t remember.”
“And the rest?” James asked.
“What do you mean?” Wren said. “‘The rest.’”
“You know. Before.”
Filippa, as always, was quickest to understand. “Not a word about Halloween,” she said. “Or the assassination scene, or anything else.”
“So, what,” Alexander said, “before last night, everything was just fine?”
Filippa’s face was perfectly blank, and I could already picture her sitting across from some rookie police officer, back straight, knees together, ready to answer whatever question he threw at her. “Yes, precisely,” she said. “Before last night, everything was fine.”