They were alone.
“Go,” she hissed back into the room, and she took off down the empty corridor. She didn’t look back. She walked quickly out the double glass doors near the parking lot and into the rain.
The lot was still almost empty. She threw her backpack into the front seat of her Honda and crossed the car to the driver’s side. She opened the driver’s-side door and slipped inside.
Out of habit, Kinley flipped down her visor and caught her reflection. She looked pretty much the same as she always did. A little wetter, maybe.
If only her father could see her now.
She took a slow, deep breath, the same way she did before penciling in the first answer on a big test, and pulled the car up to the curb, as close as she could get.
The rain pattered across the windshield.
Kinley stepped out, leaving the front door open, and popped the trunk. It was empty. She wished, for a moment, that she had garbage bags or something to line the trunk with, so she wouldn’t get body on it. But she had nothing.
And that included time.
She heard the clatter of the door opening, of the bar being pressed and released, and then the slow shuffling of her classmates. She looked up. There they were, carrying their professor’s body over the sidewalk. The legs of his pants were sliding up, exposing the white skin of his calves, which were slick from the rain.
Down the road, in the distance, headlights appeared, two small circles of light.
“Hurry,” Kinley urged. “Someone’s coming!”
“Shit!” Ivy said, and Tyler tripped, dropping Stratford’s arm. It dangled down onto the wet concrete, and the rest of the group grunted. Tyler stood up and grabbed back on to the arm, heaving toward the car.
“Faster!” Kinley said, raising her voice. The group was hardly moving, and the headlights were growing steadily brighter.
“He’s heavy, Kinley!” Cade groaned.
The car was closer. Closer still. What if the car turned into the school? What if someone caught them there, hauling the dead body? Could they pretend they were taking him to the hospital?
She hurried toward the group and squatted down beneath the body, to position her hands under his midsection. “The car’s almost here,” she whispered. She remembered the stories about mothers who were able to lift cars off of their children in desperate times. Athletes who were actually able to channel their adrenaline to perform amazing, Olympic-level feats. She’d have to find that now. She’d have to be the one who got this body where it needed to go.
She had to be the one to save them.
Kinley bent down a little farther and took up more weight, her hands sinking into Stratford’s doughy midsection. She couldn’t think about it. She wouldn’t.
Kinley chanced a look back. The car was near the school. Near enough to see them with the rain? She wasn’t certain. She could hear it now, the engine, the tires on the wet pavement.
“Now lift. One, two, three!” Kinley bent her knees and gave the body a shove, and, like a giant, soggy doll, Dr. Stratford fell into the trunk. “Get in,” she commanded Mattie, who stood still, watching as she pushed the professor’s limbs in and then reluctantly climbed in after the others.
She sprinted toward the front seat and threw herself into the car, and hit the gas. Hard.
“Not too fast, Kinley,” Tyler said.
“I just want to get out of here.” She checked the rearview mirror and pressed down on the accelerator. The tires hissed over the slick pavement and rain pitter-pattered off the windows.
“Drive normally,” Tyler directed. “We don’t need any attention, okay?”
He was right. Of course he was right. Tyler probably knew everything there ever was to know about crime. Kinley forced herself to breathe slowly. Like in yoga class. Channel her energy. Find her center.
And then, the car was there. It slowed down and put on its blinker.
It was pulling into the school.
Her pulse went crazy.
The car was pulling into the school.
It was old—probably more than twenty years—and it was so rusted and dilapidated that she couldn’t even tell what color the car had originally been painted.
That was the kind of car you transported a body in.
It rolled past them, slowly. The night was too dark to see who was inside.
Why would anyone be here this late? Kinley gulped, and forced herself to leave the parking lot at a reasonable speed.
A few moments longer, and they would have been caught. If she hadn’t helped them . . .
“Where are your cars?” Kinley asked.
“I rode my bike,” Mattie volunteered. “I’ll get it later.”
Tyler shrugged. “Grounded. My dad told me to find my own way home.”
“My dad’s driver dropped me off.” Cade yawned. Actually yawned. Kinley stared at him in the rearview. What was wrong with him that he could actually yawn at a time like this?