I squeezed his hand, then felt Cassidy watching us, monitoring. I pulled it away. “Just us,” I said.
“Um, Tor?” Owen nudged me. “You might want to take a look at this.” He tilted the screen of his phone toward me. I recognized the basic blue-and-white background of the Lie Detector message boards.
I snatched the phone and scrolled the page. I couldn’t reach the bottom. It was as if the comments on the Hunter of Hollow Pines thread went on forever.
“The number of posts has more than quadrupled in the last hour,” he said.
“Are they about…?” I clicked the screen off and shoved it back into Owen’s lap like it was contaminated. Adam, I thought, but didn’t say it.
“Some of them.” His mouth formed a hard line. “But if the rate continues, more than five hundred people will have viewed the comments by tomorrow. It’s out there, Tor, and I’m not sure you can stop it.”
I refused to let myself contemplate how much time Adam had had unsupervised this morning once we’d arrived at school. Had it been fifteen minutes? Thirty? Would that have been enough? And if so, enough for what?
My throat was parched. I folded my hands in my lap and stared at the podium and Principal Wiggins behind it. “Then no more mistakes,” I said. “We have to make sure there’s nothing else to get out there, okay? It’s simple. We just have to be perfect.”
We can be perfect.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Stage 3 of the experiment will revolve around a new energy source for the subject.
*
The administration locked the doors. Off-campus lunch privileges were revoked. All PE classes were held indoors until further notice. For the rest of the day, we’d been trapped inside a cinder block cage with what felt like a shrinking oxygen supply. At the final bell, students rushed for open air. I was one of them. I grabbed my things and headed straight for the stadium to wait out football practice. At this point, there was no way I was leaving Adam alone. Not in Hollow Pines. Not with the Hunter on the loose. And … for other reasons, too, reasons that lodged painfully in my throat like a pill that refused to go down. Reasons that couldn’t be true. They just couldn’t be.
I scaled the stadium steps to a spot a few rows from the top bleachers. It looked like every sport except for the football team had canceled practice today. But this was Hollow Pines and this was Homecoming we were talking about. The show must go on, I thought drily. I popped off the orange-and-black pin fastened to my shirt and tossed it into my bag. My books made a loud clang when I plopped them down on the metal bleacher beside me. The seat was hard and cool. Up high, a strong wind swelled, peeling back the covers of one of my textbooks. I pinned it in place, then wrapped my arms around my knees, shuddering in the unexpectedly brisk air. The weather was changing. Above me, stray leaves fluttered before falling onto the sidewalk below.
I searched the field for Adam’s face as Coach Carlson took the team through warm-up drills. A familiar rush of panic crowded my lungs when I couldn’t immediately find him underneath the matching helmets and hulking football pads. The panic settled without fully disappearing once I spotted his uniform, number 88, and could just make out the swatches of dark hair and deep-set eyes hidden behind the bars that covered his mouth, chin, and nose.
In the background, a wide border of yellow crime scene tape marked off the outside of the boys’ locker room. A lone news van lingered a few feet off, and the occasional black-coated official ducked under the tape and jotted things down in a notebook.
The body was gone. But the image of the missing eyes still haunted me, so much so that I startled at the sound of another pair of feet clomping down the bleacher aisle toward me.
“Boo,” Owen said with a smirk, catching my jolt to attention.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.” I let go of my knees and crossed my legs underneath me.
“That would hardly qualify as sneaking. I literally walked right in front of you.” He swung his backpack onto his hip and unzipped it. “Anyway, I wanted to show you something.”
I glanced back to where Adam had just flattened a teammate on the field. I felt the curve of a small smile on my lips. He was really good. “What?” I asked.
Owen flipped open a spiral notebook and took a seat beside me. “This,” he said, pointing.
I held back strands of my hair and leaned over to see. “It looks like a map.”