“I thought you wanted me to meet you.” Lena stopped me with my fingers on the handle of the car door.
“I did. I didn’t know about the curfew, though. Sorry about that. I shouldn’t have asked you to come.” I wasn’t the type to apologize, so I wasn’t sure why I was bothering now. All I knew was that Lena had chosen to be blind, but when Brody’s body turned up, she couldn’t pretend any longer. Not once she’d made the connection. I began to climb into the car.
She took another step forward. “You’re not going home.”
I hovered, partway in, partway out. “Yeah. So?”
She shook her bangs away. “Then why call me? Or better yet, why leave now?” The thing was, Lena didn’t seem angry or scared; instead she seemed like a girl whose boyfriend was breaking up with her.
You know something now, Lena, I wanted to tell her. You know something and I don’t want to have to hurt you, but I will … if you get in the way.
Lena had been useful. She’d been my eyes and ears during the day. She’d been part of my new ritual celebration at night.
When I looked at her, I saw the girl kneeling and crying on the asphalt and found a tiny cranny in my entire destructive being that wanted to save and protect her. But even more than that, I felt a sort of sisterhood with her and all the other girls on the videos. “I told you,” I said. “I didn’t know about the curfew.”
“Wait,” she said before I could close the door. “I know what you did. What you’re doing now.” White-hot fury passed over my face. Don’t threaten me. Don’t back me into a corner like an animal. Because despite the desire to protect her, despite the kinship, I couldn’t quit.
“Oh?”
Lena glanced over her shoulder, toward the tattoo parlor behind us. She hugged her frail arms around her body. “You killed them. Both of them. The boys that hurt me…”
“It wasn’t just you. There were others. Me for one.” My lips curled over my teeth as I wrestled back the memory.
“I know you saved me. You’re the only one who’s ever done something like that for me. Everyone else would have thought I deserved it. But you stopped them. I’m not going to tell anyone. You can count on me.”
I tried to read her face for any hints of insincerity, but couldn’t find them.
“Get in,” I said. “Before anyone sees us.” She obeyed. We sat side by side, the radio turned to low. “Okay, then tell me what you know.”
While I stared out the dust-streaked windshield, Lena filled me in on the news reports and the theory that a killer had come back to Hollow Pines County.
“I suppose that gives me a little less room to work with, then, now that people are paying attention.”
“What are you going to do?”
I leaned back into the headrest and closed my eyes. “Work faster, I guess.”
I listened to the sound of her swallow. “And how are you going to do that?”
I hummed as I thought. What I needed was to process in bulk. Like an assembly line. Or a fast-food restaurant. But processing in bulk meant they needed to be in bulk. Which meant—“You know anything about editing video?” I opened one eye to ask.
*
BOTH OF OUR faces were cloaked in the shadows of the school building, which completely hid the moon from view. I held Mick’s camcorder tightly in my grip. “I don’t know about this,” I said. An uneasiness had settled in my belly at the thought of entering Cassidy’s territory where I didn’t feel at home as I normally did in the dark, abandoned places of the city.
Lena fiddled with a key ring and fitted it into the lock. “It’s fine.” She twisted it and wrenched the door open, propping it open for my entry with her elbow. “I’m here all the time.”
I peered into the high school auditorium, lit only by the glow of a few sparsely placed battery-operated emergency lights.
Inside, velvet curtains hung on either side of an abandoned stage. I kept my footsteps light. Rows of empty seat backs stretched upward on a steady incline. My teeth were set on edge. I peered up into the rafters where the sleeping spotlights hung, waiting. The school felt like her. Cassidy. It was as though I could feel her imprint now that I was inside, haunting me like a ghost.
Lena let the door fall shut behind her. Her eyes twinkled in the dark as if the stars had come inside with us.
My eyes began to adjust and I hopped up on the stage. I strode to the center and stared out at the imaginary audience, picturing what it’d be like to have a spotlight blinding me. “Look at you,” I said with a note of pride and trying to ignore the invisible presence of something other. “Breaking and entering already.”
The thought was attractive to me even in my discomfort, the idea that we were invading Cassidy’s space, taking over another piece of her life, or at least we could try.
She crawled up on stage after me, crossing toward the back where the set pieces of a play loomed like forgotten dolls. The mural behind her depicted waves of grain and an old windmill. Lena gleefully kicked back into a wheelbarrow, crossed her legs, and propped herself up to look at me.