Chapter 27

Alice

Monday morning and everybody seems to have forgotten about the body found in the basement of the house where we partied just last weekend. They've forgotten about me.

One of the cheerleaders had a party on Friday, and somebody drove a car into the lake, Runy tells me as we walk toward my AP History class. So that's the big gossip now.

I try not to care that nobody invited me. They think because I'm weird it doesn't hurt when I'm left out. But it does.

In the wild, animals that are different, that have the wrong markings or the wrong color, they're shunned, cut off by their group, making them exposed and vulnerable. These animals usually die. Or they're killed.

Sometimes that's how I feel. Like I'm too different. Like I won't survive.

It's a dark thought, and I wonder if maybe I shouldn't have canceled my appointment with Dr. Pam yesterday. But I couldn't face it. I stayed in bed reading for most of the day, a book of useless facts Jack bought me.

Knowledge is power, he likes to say.

I actually love it. Did you know a caterpillar has four thousand muscles? And that blue whales' arteries are so big, a fully grown person could swim through them?

Runy and I round a corner and spot Jinx and Maya. I lift a hand to wave, but they don't notice. They're too busy speaking to each other in furious whispers.

I feel that throb again, a quivering desperation. Like I'm being left out.

Runy heads off to Spanish, calling hello to Maya and Jinx as he passes. They glance up and catch sight of me. Something flashes on Maya's face. Shock. Dismay.

Confused and mortified, I duck into my classroom. I sit at the back and bend to yank up my socks, which are bunching in the toes of my boots, making my skin crawl all over. After a minute, Jinx comes in. She looks flushed, embarrassed. She slides into the seat next to me.

Our teacher hasn't arrived yet, so students are sitting on desks, chatting loudly. A girl near me is chewing gum, popping loud, obnoxious bubbles. Someone else is tapping a pen over and over, the sound grating at my ears.

"Everything okay?" I ask Jinx.

For a minute, she doesn't look at me. Something's wrong, but I don't know what. Then she lifts her eyes, and what I see there takes my breath away. Anger. At me?

"Maya's the one you should be talking to, not me," she says.

Mr. McCafferty enters, and everybody scuttles to their seats. He's a crotchety old man with ear hair and a bulbous nose. He tosses his battered briefcase on his desk and pulls out a stack of papers—our essays on how the Spanish-American War affected foreign policy. There are groans as he moves around the class handing them out.

He drops mine onto my desk. "Your essay was one of the finest I've seen. Well done, Alice."

Blood rushes to my face as everybody turns to look. I feel their collective eye roll, their disdain. This is why I hate doing too well. The attention is like fire ants under my skin.

"Right." Mr. McCafferty unsnaps a red whiteboard pen and writes a quote on the board. "The past is in the past: True or false?"

Devin, at the front of the room, raises her hand. "False. The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future."

"Theodore Roosevelt," Mr. McCafferty says, writing it on the board. "Good."

"But Abraham Lincoln said to walk slowly but never look backward," Jinx argues.

"Raise your hand, please, Miss Lee," Mr. McCafferty reprimands her.

Jinx smirks. "Which one?"

The class laughs, and Mr. McCafferty glares. The class begins discussing the merits of moving forward versus looking back, of the past weighing us down or shedding it like a skin and moving on.

I'm jotting notes when a weird buzzing fills my brain. That distinctive wobble shivers across the room. The lights start to hum, and a horrible pressure fills my head.

I blink, and there's a man sitting on Jinx's desk.

This isn't real, I know that. But the ground under my shoes, the seat under my butt, the wooden desk under my fingers, it all feels real. I need to wake up. Wake up.

This man is not my dad. He has a scruffy beard. Deep-set blue eyes. He is covered in blood, a hole in his shoulder, dark and oozing. Weirdly, this makes me think of spiderwebs. We need a spiderweb to bandage it, like they used to do in ancient Greece.

Or we could try the first aid kit, the rational side of my brain screams.

Rational? still another part screams. Nothing about this is fucking rational!

The man's head turns so he's facing me.

Half of his head has been blown off, shards of white bone and fleshy chunks of writhing pink where his brain used to be. Blood drips down his face, shimmering like black oil in the fluorescent lights. He skewers me with an angry glare, his one eye a glistening, dark pool.

I am frozen, lashed to my chair, my heart pounding so wildly, I've gone tingly all over. I know him. I know this man.

I hear a scream. Several seconds pass before I realize it's my own.

I clamp my mouth shut as thirty teenage faces swivel to mine.

I try to stand, but my feet are tangled in the legs of my desk. My arms windmill, and the desk flips, taking me with it. I land hard on my side, legs trapped. Nervous giggles ripple around the room.

"Freak," someone mutters.

"Miss Harper . . ."

My classmates have become meaningless shapes, jabbering, meaningless sounds. Voices rumble, pencils clatter, fabric swishes, whispers shush. They get louder and louder. It's too much for me.

I cover my ears as Jinx stands over me. Her lips are moving, but I can't hear what she's saying over the other sounds splintering in my ears.

And then a loud crack breaks through the noise. Mr. McCafferty slamming a paperweight against his desk.

"That's enough!" he roars.

There's that hard wobble again; the lights dim and then brighten. The bloody man is gone.

Jinx helps me to my feet. I am beet red, mortified, as everybody just stares.

I can't do this.

I grab my coat and backpack and run out of the room, down the hall, bashing through the doors and bursting outside.

It's started to snow, the sky the color of ash. I unlock my bike with shaking fingers and start pedaling frantically. I have to get out of here. I don't know what's wrong with me.

I'm so scared and so sad and so alone, and all I want is to be close to my family, to feel less lonely, so I head for Killer's Grove, to the place I last saw them.

The cold bites at my exposed cheeks, my nose. It burns my eyes, tears rolling down my cheeks as I pedal.

I stick to the roads, which have been cleared of snow. I quickly reach the lake. The water is blacker than usual in the creeping winter light, a chill breeze rustling its surface like rumpled silk. I blow through a stop sign, veer right, the house we partied at last weekend appearing in my peripheral vision.

I stop, watching as officers in high-vis jackets move around the yard, parting the bushes, digging in the garden. Dogs strain against their leashes, noses pressed to the ground.

"I wonder if they've found anything," Isla says from behind me.

I don't turn around, but I hear her laugh. The sound sends ice trickling down my neck. She's not real, but something about the way she's laughing feels cruel.

"At least they're looking." Isla's voice has turned accusing. "You aren't. Not hard enough, anyway."

I'm trying, I think.

"Then where are they?"

"I don't know!" I snap out loud.

A cop turns at the sound of my voice. I get back on my bike and pedal hard until I reach Killer's Grove.

It's darker under the cover of the trees, like they're huddling closer together. The road is an empty ribbon of white unfurling in front of me. I drop my bike to the side of the road by the pine tree with the gash in the bark.

A gust of wind lifts fresh snow off the ground, swirling it around, wrapping icy tendrils over me. I yank my gloves off, run my fingertips over the ridges of the tree's scar, then to the scar on my forearm.

Freak.

I pull out my phone to google a name: Theo Moriarty.

The name on the paycheck.

Service here is crap. It takes forever for my search results to load, but it all comes back like a slap to the face.

I'd woken to the sound of angry voices. I heard Mom from behind their door, "Pete, no!" then the crack of wood as it splintered. The low, dull thud of something smacking the wall. And then Dad stumbling out of their room, storming downstairs.

I followed Mom up to the attic and found her hunched on a chair, looking pale and tired.

"Who was he?" I asked her. "That guy I saw you with?"

"I don't know who you mean."

"I saw you go into his house."

"Oh, Alice." She shook her head. "Sweetie, it isn't what it looks like."

"Who is he?"

"Someone I used to know."

"What does that even mean, Mom?"

She sighed, rubbed her hands over her arms. "I knew him in college."

"Knew him or knew him?"

"We were together a long time ago, yes, but it isn't that way now. It's ... complicated."

"Affairs always are." My voice was acerbic.

"You have to trust me on this. Theo was ... helping me with something."

Theo. That was his name.

Theo Moriarty.

Finally my search results load. Instagram. Facebook. A couple of random business sites.

And then, on page two, a news article.

Theo Moriarty, a contractor and builder from Boston, had been reported missing by his wife last December when he failed to return home after a job one weekend. He had a history of drug dealing, he'd served time for burglary, assault, embezzlement. Nobody looked very hard and, unsurprisingly, he was never found.

There's a small, grainy picture of Theo Moriarty. I squint and pull my phone closer to my face.

It's the man who was sitting on Jinx's desk in my classroom.

The memory of him, his head blown off, settles on me like Jell-O. I start to shake. My whole body. Even my teeth chatter. I slide down to the ground, my back against the tree.

My phone rings. I answer it, but all I hear is static. "Hello?"

I check my phone, heart revving, hands tingling. One bar.

"Hello?" The static continues, followed by a breathy whisper.

I hang up, but the phone immediately rings again.

This time, the display says it's my grandma. I punch at the phone. "Grandma!"

"Alice, what's wrong?" she says.

I dissolve into sobs I can't seem to control. Panic unfurls in my chest. I can barely breathe.

"He's dead!" I wail.

"What? Who . . ."

Isla stands across from me. She shakes her head, like she's disappointed in me. I drop my head to my knees, my face numb with cold.

"Alice, who ..." Grandma's voice cuts out, and then she's back. "... you there?"

"Grandma?" Still only one bar.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I . . ."

A hollow, fuzzy sound comes down the line. Grandma doesn't answer. My phone beeps. Shit. It's lost service.

I shove my phone in my pocket and scrub my eyes with my sleeve. I pull the pictures of my poor bruised mom from my backpack and hold up a lighter to the first one. It blackens and curls, the flame a hypnotizing blue-orange.

I touch the flame to the next picture. And the next. Mom's bruises melt away, disappearing into ash that I cover, like my lies, with snow, the white once again pristine.

Like it never happened.

This secret is safe, at least. Secrets, I've learned, are dangerous. Like caterpillars bursting out of their self-made coffins as butterflies, changed, transformed, secrets can turn into lies. And once they fly out into the world, there's no way to get them back. If anybody sees these pictures, they'll think my dad hurt her. But it can't be true. We were happy. Broken and happy, like bits of beautiful, shattered glass.

Overhead, a branch cracks from the weight of the snow. I pull my camera out of my backpack. The urge to take pictures is strong, and I'm done resisting it.

I snap pictures of the tree, the way the gash cuts across it; the snow, how it piles on the dead tree branches; the woods, shards of muddy light scattering between the boughs. I keep walking, documenting, photographing.

The camera lens is an unwavering eye, the pictures appearing on the screen bathed in a strange, ghostly light, cast in the shadow of everything that happened. I follow the line of the path where I ran, snapping pictures, little witnesses to everything I see. Eyes are unreliable. So is memory. But photographs capture everything. Maybe they're the only truth I'll ever have.

Eventually I reach a snowy chasm, deep and craggy, trees prickling its jagged edges. It isn't massive, just a narrow cleft in the earth's surface, maybe a few hundred feet long.

I turn around, return the way I came until I burst through the foliage and reach the road. I stop and stare at it, memories rising in me like steam off a field.

He didn't hear me at first. Didn't see me staggering through the trees to him. But from where I hovered at the edge of the forest, I could see my dad illuminated in the car's headlights.

He was bent over something. Or someone? A body lying there on the cold pavement beneath him. His back was hunched and shaking, an awful sound coming from him.

I opened my mouth to say his name— Dad! —but a twig cracked under my foot.

Dad whirled, eyes landing on me. And in his face I saw everything. A frenzy of rage and resentment and fury carved by jagged shadows and blurred by snow.

He lifted one hand. In it was something black, menacing. And a scream wrenched out of him. "Run! You're next!"

I staggered back, almost falling, scrambled to regain balance. And then I turned and ran. Back into the black forest, branches slapping at me, my eyes blinded by snow.

I don't let myself think about it very often. What it means. You're next.

Somewhere in my peripheral vision, there's a flash of messy blonde braids. A childish giggle. Isla.

"Wait!" I fling myself after her, back into the snow-draped forest. She keeps moving, pulling away from me. I speed up, panting, my arms pumping as I try to catch up. "Isla!"

She stops, turns to face me, her body half-hidden in the shadow of a tree. A sudden rushing fills my head, water roaring, like I'm under a waterfall. Pressure fills my head, so crushing that I cover my ears, bending at the waist.

"What do you want from me?" I scream.

And then I'm standing in the middle of a black road, icy rain splattering my face. Lightning flashes, and I briefly see trees bowing low, a fast-moving river. A shadow moves, just out of reach.

And then it's dark once again.

"You don't want the answers to your questions, Alice." Isla's voice echoes over the rushing water in my head.

"What do you mean?"

The rushing suddenly disappears, replaced by the heavy thud of footsteps. I whirl.

Standing behind me is Detective Jess Lambert, watching me with those bright amber eyes.

"Who are you talking to, Alice?"

I look around me.

But Isla is gone once again.