He shook his head. “No.”
It was then that Ivy finally gave voice to what she’d been thinking all night. “It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t Mrs. Stratford, was it?”
Mattie shrugged. “It wasn’t her car. And if she’s driving that piece of junk, I don’t know where she’d get such a nice truck. It was really, really swank.”
“Oh.” Ivy sat back a little, her only theory deflated. Who else had reason to suspect them? Had someone else been there, watching?
“I’m scared to leave here,” Mattie confessed. He squeezed her hand tighter.
“Me too.”
He shifted. “And I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid we’re going to get caught, Ivy. With people following me, and Tyler’s parole officer saying he knows what happened . . .” Mattie shook his head. “Maybe we should come forward.”
“No.” Ivy shook her head. “No way. If we were going to confess, we should have done it the first night. It’s too late now. And maybe . . . maybe Tyler’s parole officer was just trying to get him to confess to something. Cops do that, you know.”
Her brother did that, at least.
Plus, if she confessed, she couldn’t bear to think of the way her parents would look at her after they had stood up for her before.
What her brother would do after the way she had embarrassed him.
“This isn’t going to turn out well,” Mattie whispered. “One of us is going to turn up dead, Ivy.”
Ivy drew her hands away and crossed them over her stomach. She rocked back and forth, a leftover nervous habit from when she was a little girl.
“What do you think we should do?”
Mattie paused. “What if . . . what if I just took the blame?”
“What?” Ivy’s heart did a funny flip. Like she cared. Really cared. “No, Mattie. No. Why would you do that? You did nothing. You were pulled into the classroom. Pulled.”
“I helped ditch the body, same as everyone else.” He shrugged a shoulder. “I could do it, easy. Besides, I’m the one being followed. Maybe, for whatever reason, whoever did it only suspects me. If I turn myself in, maybe it’ll all go away.”
Ivy stood up. “No, Mattie. I’m not going to let you do it. Out of all of us, you’re the only one who deserves better.”
“Maybe not,” Mattie said very quietly.
“If you confess, I will too.” Ivy stood up and put her hands on her hips.
“No way. I’ll say you weren’t involved.”
“I’ll say you weren’t involved.”
It was then that Ivy did something completely unexpected. She leaned over the railing and kissed Mattie.
She kissed him on the lips.
She kissed him harder than anyone was ever supposed to kiss people who had recently been admitted to the hospital.
And he kissed her back. He kissed her back a lot more passionately than someone in a relationship should have been kissing someone else.
And they most likely would have kept at it—if the door to the hospital room hadn’t swung open, and if Mattie’s aunt hadn’t walked in, tears streaming down her cheeks, her face as red as a ripe strawberry.
She stopped in the middle of the room and gasped, her pudgy hand over her heart.
Ivy jerked away from Mattie. “Sorry, Ms. Byrne,” she said, backing away. “Um, Mattie, I’ll . . . I’ll catch you later, okay? Uh . . . feel better.”
“You don’t have to leave,” Ms. Byrne said kindly, but she was already looking at her nephew. “I see you’re feeling much better, young man.”
Her cheeks burning, Ivy grabbed her handbag off of a chair and rushed out of the hospital room.
It was only when she walked out the emergency room exit to the nearly empty lot that she remembered she was scared to be alone.
Mattie
Monday, June 29
Mattie knew one thing in his heart: he deserved to go to prison. And maybe it wasn’t for an actual crime that he deserved it (if you didn’t count dumping a body, of course). It was for something else. Something so low he could never, ever forgive himself.
Cheating on Derrick.
Twice, now.
Twice.
Yes, Ivy was hot, but so were a lot of people. And yes, he was fuzzy from the concussion. But he’s sworn it up and down, every single day. He would never cheat again. Not on a test—which was why he was in this mess in the first place—and not on his boyfriend.
His aunt was busy fluffing his pillow, which she had declared “too flat for hospital use” (as if that were an actual thing).
“You like that girl?” she asked, a little smile sneaking around the corners of her mouth.
“We’re just friends.”
“Mmmmm.” She chuckled. “Looked like a good friend.”
“Yeah. I guess.” Mattie felt like he had swallowed lead. His whole body was weighed down with guilt.
She stopped fidgeting with his pillow and grabbed his shoulders, pushing him back onto it. “I was on the phone with your mother and father on the way here. Do you want them to come?”