“I didn’t tell her, and everybody knows,” Jules said.
Meredith turned to Kristy for confirmation on both these points. “Everybody,” Kristy said. “Every single person on the bus was talking about it. About you.”
It was a slo-mo moment, turning toward the school, a moment from one of those movies she sometimes watched on Saturday mornings with Evan, the old zombie movies, where you turn to sneak a quick look and all the zombies are staring at you. The crowd in front of the school was facing her as one unified wall, or at least it felt that way.
“How’d they find out?” she asked.
“Who knows?” Jules said. “But they know.”
Of course no one said anything, not in that initial zombie-moment. They looked at her sideways and there was a little bit of whispering, but mostly as she walked toward them, they just cleared a neat path leading to the main doors. Perhaps this was how Lisa felt sometimes, the path cleared before her, the sea of students parting to let her through, a path that led all the way up to her locker, next to which Lisa was not. In Lisa’s place were hundreds of tiny green ribbons, taped or glue-sticked to her locker, plus some messages on colorful Post-it notes—LOVE U, MISS U, COME HOME—as if Lisa might see these and be buoyed up, as if Post-its could somehow help. Meredith focused intently on her own locker, on its dull contents, and was surprised when she turned and there was Mr. Fulton, the custodian, standing at Lisa’s locker.
“Morning,” he said. He was a big man, bulky. All those times he had squirted hand sanitizer onto her hands, he hadn’t seemed so large. But standing by her now, in Lisa’s place, she felt tiny beside him.
“Hi,” she said.
“Looks like you and me are famous.” He smiled warmly. “How you doing anyway? You feelin’ all right?” He had a wide, expressive mouth that had before seemed friendly when it smiled. Probably this was the same smile he had always smiled. Probably it was the same wide smile he smiled at his own kids. But Meredith had a sudden thought, standing here at her locker, that Mr. Fulton could eat her.
“Okay,” she said. “I mean . . . I just got here.”
She had never spoken to him before. She didn’t know anything about him. He was in his fifties, maybe early sixties, older than her parents but not ancient, his mustache and beard sprinkled with gray.
He gave Lisa’s locker a little tap with his knuckles. “Went through it last week,” he said. “I opened it up for the police. Thought there might be a clue in there, in case she knew him, the man who snatched her.”
“Was there?” she asked quietly.
“A clue? No. Just what you’d expect. Same as yours or anybody else’s.”
How did he know what was in her locker? Or anybody else’s? Did he have keys to everything? The bell rang and people started streaming past her on their way to class. Someone bumped her from behind and she stumbled toward Mr. Fulton. He held up his hands to catch her but she caught herself, only grazed his open hands.
“I gotta go,” she said, closing her locker.
“Strange,” he said. “You being right next to each other here, and then being in the same spot when it happened. You all don’t run in the same crowds though, do you?”
“Not really,” she said. She thought it was weird that Mr. Fulton had some understanding of what crowds people ran in, the social structure of the school. But maybe that was all he did, while he swept with his giant flat broom and squirted out hand sanitizer. Maybe he knew everything. Maybe he had a big book that explained it all, a book with lines that connected people. Maybe he was keeping score.
“I knew when I saw you lying there on the floor,” he said. “I knew it was bad. I didn’t know how bad, but—”
“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.” Humiliating, that he had seen her on the floor. She couldn’t remember any of it, and now again the unpleasant thought: Why had she lain there for so long? What had she been doing, flat on her stomach, not moving, long after the danger had passed? God knows what he’d seen when he’d walked into the Deli Barn. God knows what she was doing or saying.
“You take care today,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said again. He had found her there on the floor. Maybe he had comforted her before the ambulance arrived. She managed to look him in the face for an instant, to make eye contact, to be polite. Was his face in the book? How many men had been in that book that looked just like Mr. Fulton, old men with wide mouths and little to lose?
?
Abby Luckett slid up beside her in the lunch line.
“You have to sit with us,” she said. “We need you.”
“What?” Meredith asked. She literally almost turned around to see if Abby was talking to someone behind her.
“We need to talk to you. It’s about Lisa.”
“Um, okay.”
There was a vacant seat at their table. The seat was sacred ground, an empty throne, and Meredith was apparently going to be the only one allowed to fill it. There were five other girls at the table. Before she sat down she looked across the lunchroom and saw Kristy and Jules watching her. Meredith felt like a spy. She had never wanted to sit at this table. Except maybe once or twice, just to see how it felt. And now she knew.
“We’re solving this, okay?” Abby Luckett announced as Meredith scooched her chair in. “We, the people at this table. We’re going to find her. Everyone else isn’t doing shit. We have to do something.”
Amanda Hammels turned to Meredith. “The cops are idiots,” she said. “They’re shit. Have you met them? They don’t know anything. They don’t even know where to start.”
“Um . . . ” Meredith said.
“She had guys following her all the time,” Abby said. “There were like three guys stalking her on Instagram. And one of them she said she’d meet up with. The guy is like thirty. She talked to him practically every day for the past month.”
“Did you tell the police about him?” Meredith asked.
“They’re not listening to us,” Abby said, scowling. “They look at us like we’re retards. They said they’d look into it, but I don’t think they’re really doing anything. They’re acting like it was some random thing.”
For a second Meredith thought about telling them about paging through the high school yearbook, that it didn’t seem to her like the cops thought it was necessarily random. Was that confidential? Was it against the law to tell them what the police had asked her?
“It wasn’t random,” Amanda Hammels said. “It was that skeeze from Instagram.”
“There are like twenty guys who are totally in love with her,” Abby said. “It could have been any one of them.”