Her head twists to the side, and she leans even closer so all I see is the side of her cheek, half her mouth, as she whispers, “I have to go.”
And then the screen goes black.
* * *
—
Long after everyone should typically be asleep, I hear my parents across the hall. My mom’s voice, high and fast. My father, trying to calm her. The tension fills the house, until it reaches my shoulders and I need to act.
They don’t hear me walking by their room, past the closed door. They don’t hear me on the stairs, or heading out the back door. If they notice the engine starting, they don’t come out to stop me.
* * *
—
There’s no one at Kennedy’s old house right now. All the lights are off, and the front door is locked. I go around back, let myself in the way Kennedy taught me yesterday, keeping a flashlight low and away from the windows.
Tell me what to do, I think, closing my eyes. “Liam,” I whisper into the emptiness. Nothing comes. I thought my brother wanted me here. I thought he was sending me a message, to come.
Nothing answers. Not even a flicker of a sign. The air conditioner kicking on, or a gust of wind rattling something in the vents. It’s just an empty house, in an empty field, under an empty sky.
I pull out my phone instead of my equipment and make a call. Kennedy’s face appears, barely decipherable in the grainy dark surrounding her. She sits upright. “Nolan?”
“I’m here,” I say. “Tell me what to do.”
She rubs her eyes, runs a hand down her face, then tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. I’ve woken her. She’s still in bed. “At my house?”
I nod.
“Okay,” she says, keeping her voice low. “Reboot the house. Let’s see if we can restart things to pick up the signal again. It’s the only thing I can think to do. There has to be something more. Something more than just pi, if that’s even what it is.”
She leads me with the sound of her voice to the garage, even though I’ve been here before. Still, I give myself over, letting her lead the way. When she instructs me to shut down the fuse box and flip it back on again, I listen. She sends me to the shed next, to make sure the computer is back online. “It should—running—and then…”
“Kennedy?” I shake the phone in the dark, as if I can jar her back into focus. “Hold on, you’re breaking up.”
The feed continues to cut in and out as I walk in the dark. But even as she disappears, I think I hear her voice.
I need to find a way back to my house this afternoon. Nolan rebooted the electricity and sent me a text to let me know it was done.
I haven’t slept since. I’m already sitting at the kitchen table when Joe emerges from his room.
He does a double take when he sees me. “Morning,” he says, sticking his head into the fridge. “I’ll get milk on the way home.”
“Okay.” I’m eating my cereal dry, crunching the Cheerios between my back molars.
“After school, the Albertsons invited you over. Until I’m back.”
I drop my spoon. “What?”
Something in my voice must resonate, because he shuts the fridge door, turning slowly. “To and from school, that’s it.” As if he could sense that I was already planning for Nolan to pick me up from school, drive me by our house, where I could pull the data and be back at Joe’s before he realized it—hopefully even before the school bus.
“Is this a joke?”
“No, Kennedy, this isn’t a joke.”
“Joe, okay, tomorrow I’ll do that. I’ll go to the Albertsons’ and stare blankly at these kids I don’t know. Totally fine. Just not today.”
He narrows his eyes. “What’s so important about today, Kennedy?”
I grasp for anything frantically. “You know I have finals. How am I supposed to study with a bunch of people I don’t know around?”
“How are you supposed to study when you spend all hours of the night running around with some guy?”
“Nolan,” I repeat, for the tenth time.
“Right. Nolan who is not your boyfriend, but who drove you to the house in the middle of the night so you could get these boxes. Nolan, who I literally never heard of a week ago, but who has been to our house to see you at least two times that I know of. Was it this Nolan who took you to see Elliot, too?”
I don’t answer right away. “Joe, haven’t you ever done something nice for a friend because they needed your help?”
He shakes his head. “Not like this, Kennedy. This is not a list of normal things you do for a friend. Especially not one you just met. Trust me on this.”
I glance at my phone, trying to sidestep him, but he puts a hand out. “And the second you leave this house, you’re going to be on the phone with him, am I right?”
I stop midstride and look up at him.
“Like I said, Kennedy. Not a friend.”
“I feel sorry for you, Joe. That every relationship you’ve ever had is only surface-deep.”
As soon as I leave the house, I’m on the phone to Nolan, just like Joe accused. Only this time, when he picks up, I can’t get Joe’s words out of my head. It’s true, Nolan is the first person I thought of this morning, the part of the day I was looking forward to the most. He asks me for my email so he can send me something, and it’s immediately something else to look forward to.
Is it normal to talk to someone first thing each morning and last thing each evening? To hold their hand in the dark in the house where your worst nightmare happened? To hide out in the room of their missing brother?
Is it normal to drive a girl you just met to a jail? To skip school because she asked?
Maybe not. But I wasn’t about to tell Joe the reason: It’s not that he’s into me, Joe. It’s that we’ve both simultaneously stumbled upon proof that the world is more than it seems.
* * *
—
A text arrives at lunch: Check your email.
Nolan came through. My email is full of scanned images. It’s the information on Hunter Long. His address in North Carolina, his pictures, the brief overview of the case, and his parents’ contact information.
I write back: Thanks. What are you doing? Are you at school?
I’m scanning through the documents in the school library, eating lunch in the corner, when my phone vibrates under the table with a new text: Sort of. What are you doing?
Eating lunch in the library. Reading through the file.
I’m halfway through my banana when the library door pushes open. I look up, and Nolan’s there, hands in the pockets of his jeans, standing near the entrance like he’s lost—because he is.
I’m already smiling when his gaze finds me at the corner table, and his face mirrors mine. He walks toward me and my stomach flutters, and Oh crap, I think, Joe was totally right. He must’ve been able to read it on my face, whenever I mentioned Nolan’s name. I try to hold it back so Nolan doesn’t see. Though from the way the girls at the next table are watching me, smirking, I have a feeling I’m a little too late.
“What are you doing here?” I ask when he sits in the chair beside me. Not across, beside. Pulling the chair even closer so he can look over my shoulder at the documents I’m reading.
“This seemed a little more pressing than gym today,” he says. “And I figured I won’t get to see you later, what with the whole grounded thing.”
“Joe’s making me go to the neighbors’ after school. I think I’m being babysat.”
He cringes. “Sorry about that.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“No, as you pointed out, I’m not that stealthy. It was probably because of me.”
I don’t argue, because it’s true. He’s not. Even now, people at the next table are looking at him. It’s nothing you can really put your finger on—j
ust the way everything comes together. The slight bend of his nose, the crinkle at the corner of his eyes, the angles of his cheekbones, the downslope of his lips. I noticed the very moment he walked into the library.
“How’d you get into the school? And find the library?” I ask.
“Just walked straight in when some adult got buzzed in. They held the door for me and everything. As for the library, you’re not going to believe this.” He lowers his voice and grins. “I asked. Turns out the average high schooler is not nearly as suspicious as you.”
“Well, welcome to West Arbor-Hell,” I say, smiling, which is how Marco introduced it to me.
He pulls the papers out of his backpack. “Figured it would be easier if you had the hard copies to look through. Better than on your phone, anyway.”
He sets some paper and pens between us. “Wait, did you bring a highlighter?” I ask.
He grins. “I came prepared.”
We spend the next twenty-six minutes highlighting relevant information and dates, seeing where the investigation into Hunter’s disappearance petered out, trying to track his whereabouts. Eventually, the overhead bell rings and my shoulders tense. “I can skip,” I say.
“No. Go. I don’t want you to get in any more trouble.”
“It doesn’t matter—”
“It does, though, if I don’t get to see you after school.”
He looks down at the papers then, as if embarrassed. I can feel my cheeks heating. I let my hair fall over the side of my face as I pack my bag so he doesn’t notice.
The bell rings again, and I’m officially late. He still doesn’t look up.
“Nolan,” I say.
“Yeah?” He’s shuffling papers, still looking down.
I put a hand on his shoulder until he turns his head. “Thank you for coming today,” I say.
I watch as his smile forms, and then I dart for class.
* * *
—
Marco catches me at my locker after last period. “Hey,” he says, angling his body between me and my locker door.
“Hey,” I repeat, tipping my head so he gets the picture to move out of the way.
He frowns and steps aside, but he’s still hovering over my shoulder. “What are you doing with that kid?”
“What kid?” I say, slamming the locker door.
“Uh, the kid who walked into the library, looking for you, even though he doesn’t go to our school.”
I had no idea Marco was in the library. “What’s it to you, Marco?”
His expression shifts, like I’ve somehow hurt him. Impossible. Marco didn’t care enough to be hurt. “You don’t have to act so mean, Kennedy. I didn’t do anything to you. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just didn’t know how to…”
I wave him off so he’ll just stop. He didn’t. He didn’t know how to act, or be, and I didn’t know how to tell him what I needed. We were young, and then we weren’t. Things got hard. He disappeared.
It wasn’t surprising, but it was telling, and it left me with no one, on my own. My friends were his friends. And when he left me alone, that was it. I was alone.
“Stop acting like this was my decision,” he says. “You seem so angry at me all the time.”
“I’m not angry. I’m…” I can’t find the word. Indifferent. Empty. Bitter. Maybe there’s a part of me that is angry, a little. Maybe it’s easier to be angry about things like that—my boyfriend didn’t come to see me after—than the other parts.
“Well, be careful, Kennedy. That’s all I wanted to say. That kid? Nolan? Two years ago, his brother disappeared. Did you know that?” I nod and keep walking. Marco hurries to keep pace. “Well, there were a lot of rumors. A lot of stories.” He looks side to side before leaning closer. “Including one about his brother’s girlfriend.”
I turn on him, narrowing my eyes. He holds out his hands, backing away. “I’m just saying. No one knows what happened, still.”
He keeps moving until he’s swallowed up by the crowd. But his words keep echoing inside my head.
* * *
—
After school, I head over to the Albertsons’, and I stare at their children, and they stare back at me.
They’re twins in the freshman class—Lacy and Riley, but I don’t know which is which. Only that one has shorter blond hair than the other. They wear identical bathing suits, wrapped in identical towels, and they whisper to each other in some coded language, like I’m some specimen to examine.
Their mother brings a bowl of fruit to the patio table out back, overlooking the pool. “Can I get you anything else, Kennedy?” she asks, but I shake my head, my gaze fixed on the surface of the water, the way the sunlight reflects sharply off a subtly moving current.
“Are you coming in the pool?” the one with shorter hair asks, a spear of watermelon visible in the corner of her mouth.
I start to say no, then think, Why not? I take off my shoes and, still in my shorts and shirt from school, I step off the edge. I sink under the cold water, and I scream.
I’m underwater, looking up at their blurry figures above. I see them standing side by side and hear their voices in unison, muffled by the water: One, two, three—and then their simultaneous splash pushes me farther away. I stay that way, near the bottom, until they get too close and my lungs burn.
* * *
—
Joe comes to get me when he arrives home, thanking Mrs. Albertson, like I am a child who must be watched. I walk home, dripping wet, daring him to say something. Daring him to ask. But he doesn’t. He disappears down the hall and comes back with an old beach towel, frayed at the edges, wrapping it around my shoulders. His hands stay there, firm, like he’s holding me in place, scared I’ll disappear like the rest of them.
“I’d ask what you’ve been up to,” he says, “but that seems like a stupid question.”
I crack a grin despite myself. He steps back, arms hanging loosely at his sides. He takes a deep breath. “Sorry I sent you there. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time here, Kennedy. In case you couldn’t tell.”
“Joe, you have to trust me. I’m not a child.”
“Except, technically, you are. And I’m the one responsible for you.” He runs a hand through his hair. “We have to trust each other.”
He waits then, until I silently nod.
Joe sighs, like he’s relieved. But his moment of calm seems short-lived. “I’m having trouble sleeping, too,” he says. “With the trial. The lawyers wanted to try hypnosis, in the hopes of filling in some of the gaps that night, but I don’t know what’s best. I don’t know whether that will make it better or worse.” I know what he’s implying: whether Elliot’s memory of that night will destroy him; whether the not-knowing is for the best.
Standing in front of me, while I’m drip-drying just inside the front door, Joe looks suddenly younger, out of his depth. Alone.
“Did you know any of Elliot’s friends?” I ask.
“Not really,” he says, refocusing on me. “Why?”
“I’m just wondering. I’m wondering if they’ll be called up for the trial. To talk about the type of person he was.”
He looks me over slowly from the kitchen beside the foyer. “You’re only going to be asked about the facts, Kennedy. What you saw.”
I nod slowly. “But what if there was another explanation?”
He shakes his head. “Don’t do this, Kennedy.”
“No, Joe, listen, please. You wonder, too, right? Why would he do it? Have you talked to him? Has anyone talked to him?”
He spins away from me, walks to the kitchen, places his hands on the counter. Shutting down, again. Then he breathes deeply and turns to face me. “Okay, come sit down.”
“No, I don’t need to sit—”
“Things are going to come out in t
he trial, Kennedy. Things you need to be prepared for.”
I half-listen, not sitting, but at least standing in the kitchen. “What sort of things?”
“The sort of things that tighten up the case. Listen, it’s not just that his prints are all over the weapon. There was a large amount of gunshot residue found on him. You know what that means?”
I shake my head, but not because I don’t understand. Because I don’t believe it.
“It means they have even more evidence that he fired the gun, Kennedy. An expert will testify to that.” He sighs. “The police believe he shot…her. And then Will tried to wrestle it away from him. And then he shot him, too.”
I shake my head. It’s not possible. My brother studies and builds things. He’s funny in a self-deprecating way. Of the two of us, he’s the rule-follower. The responsible one. He goes to school, and he comes back home, and he tolerates my presence when I have nothing better to do. My brother pales at the sight of blood. He has never hurt anyone. Let alone our mother.
“That makes no sense. Come on. It was the same as every other night. There is no reason he’d get Mom’s gun just because. There has to be another reason. Maybe someone else was there, and he was protecting—”
“Kennedy, stop. Everyone at the college…” Joe runs a hand back through his dark hair, but he doesn’t continue.
“Everyone at the college what?”
Joe sighs. “Everyone at the college noticed the tension between Elliot and your mom. They weren’t getting along. There are several witnesses who heard them arguing in her office in the days leading up to…Come on, you had to notice. That’s what people will say, if called to testify.”
“No, that’s not true,” I say impulsively. But what did I really know? Did they avoid each other at meals? Walk silently to the car in the mornings, with a telling gap between them? Did I hear Elliot’s voice cutting down my mom while I was talking on the phone with Marco?
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