I ran toward Regent’s Park, which, despite everything, was still my place of escape. I crossed the bridge and got away from the crowds of people on the street, but I was left with the same nagging parade of questions about all the chaos at home, now with added hows. Like, how I was going to deal with Alice’s and Lock’s questions about my dramatic runaway stunt. How I was going to survive another onslaught of police and press. And how I was going to figure out who was putting spare body parts in our rubbish.
A soft breeze blew around me, chilling my skin and my thoughts. I plodded on, trying my best to blend in with all the others who walked by on their way to a night performance at the amphitheater or home from the zoo, whining kids in tow. My feet took me to the bandstand first, like they always did. It used to be my place to hide from the world; now I came like a pilgrim paying homage to a religious shrine. Perhaps to ask for forgiveness.
I rubbed my thumb over the surface of Sadie’s locket—the one her grandmother had given her before she’d left America, which now hung around my neck. When Sadie had first shown me the insides, it held pictures of her and her grandmother, both at age fifteen, looking like twins through time. But when I’d received it via delivery two days ago, it had a picture of me on one side and Sadie on the other, both of us with daisies in our hair from the day we’d competed to see who could give out two bouquets of flowers first, one piece at a time. She’d won, which is why I had flowers behind both my ears. The locket had come with a note that said, “I understand yours is the face that replaced mine. I’m glad she had a friend like you.”
A friend like me. Would Sadie’s nana still be glad, I wondered, if she fully understood how I’d put her granddaughter in harm’s way?
I sometimes made myself stay at the bandstand, staring at the willow where my father had dropped Sadie’s body onto the muddy tree roots. It was a silly practice, but some days forcing myself to be there felt like a kind of remedy for my daily frustrations, where an injection of pain was the prescription. Wasn’t that the purpose of penance? To burn away the guilt with pain?
Still, the very last thing I needed that night was another dose of poison, so I purposely kept to the path that led toward the boat rentals. In the time since I’d lost my bandstand safe haven to Sadie’s memory, I’d taken to sitting by the fountain planter where Todd White had died, sometimes reaching up to touch the medallion that once hid my mother’s getaway cache, as though a bit of stone could hold the residue of her. But it was too public of a place for that night. I wandered—aimlessly, I thought—until I was unwittingly following the path where Lock had led me to our first crime scene, back when we thought it would all be just a bit of fun to make guesses about a killing in the park.
And then I was in the trees, in the almost complete dark, kneeling down by the clover carving that marked the place where my father had stabbed Mr. Patel with my mother’s aikido sword. My father had killed three times at least before he got around to Mr. Patel, but his death was the one I lived with day in and day out. In part, perhaps, because his was what started me down the path to discovering what a monster my father truly was. In part, because his was the only murder that seemed to matter to the people at my school.
It was getting harder and harder to face school. My family notoriety resulted in this odd mix of sympathy, scorn, and fear on the faces of the students passing by me in the halls. Drama class was another mix altogether. Lily Patel and her pack of hyena-beasties couldn’t quite force themselves to hate me outright when my face still showed signs that the man who killed her father had tried to do the same to me. But now that the swelling and cuts and bruises had healed enough for me to cover them in generous amounts of makeup, Lily’s friends had started turning every class into either a proper and overt shunning or a minefield of not-so-subtle, passive-aggressive commentary on my family tree, accompanied by nasty looks.
Neither fazed me much, but there was a bit of fun in calculating which they’d choose as I walked the theater aisle to the stage. The odds tilted decidedly toward commentary. Perhaps they were merely bad at shunning.
I would have preferred a bit of shunning last Friday, after being hounded all the way to school by an unyielding reporter, who actually believed I’d give her quotes for a profile about me. Instead, Friday’s drama class was another opportunity for the hyenas to loosen their jaws. I was privileged to overhear how a person with even a shred of decency would have at least transferred schools by now instead of making herself a daily reminder of their poor Lily’s loss.
I offered the girls my thinnest smile to thank them for their wise words and then wandered into the circle of chairs on the stage, taking my usual seat, directly across from Lily Patel.