The Scattering

by Kimberly McCreight

  “Do these people actually think this is good?” Jasper whispers to me. He’s listening to the girl up onstage, her face more and more flushed with each and every angry word. “All she’s doing is yelling.”

  “Come on,” I say, turning my attention back to Leo. He’s ducked under the bar with his rack of glasses and is headed past us toward the back, the kitchen maybe. I watch him disappear behind a door that swings back and forth on its tight hinges. “I think I see him.”

  IT ISN’T EASY for us to make it the rest of the way through the crowd, but eventually we end up at the same door. I hold my breath as I push through, startle when I let go and the door makes a super-loud snapping sound. But Leo—if he is Leo—does not twitch. He does not look up. He just keeps on with what he’s doing. Pulling out a clean rack of glasses, loading another dirty one into the dishwasher. But he has tensed. I can feel it.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” he says finally as he starts up the machine. He still hasn’t looked in our direction. And he is wound tight. But I don’t feel any actual anger coming off him. At least, not yet. Then again, we still have not made eye contact, which I get the sense is not an accident. “You’re supposed to wait around back, in the alley. I take the empties out at midnight.”

  Like he knows exactly why we are there. Maybe the girl in the green jog bra told him to expect us.

  I look down at my watch. “It’s not even ten p.m.,” I say, like that’s the important point—that we’ll have to wait two hours. “I need to find your girlfriend,” I say carefully, bracing myself for sudden blowback.

  “Oh yeah?” he asks, plucking a chipped glass out of the clean rack and tossing it into the garbage. Except it’s not really a question. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “I have something for her.” I dig Kelsey’s copy of 1984 from my bag and hold it out to him.

  Finally, he turns. As soon as he sees what it is, his eyes shoot back up to mine. And, wow, is he pissed. He steps forward and snatches the book from me so aggressively that I feel Jasper flinch. Leo flips through the pages, then glares at me some more. Yep. Definitely furious.

  “Where the hell did you get this?” he asks. Or accuses.

  “Kelsey gave it to me,” I say, getting ready to bolt out the door. Whatever I felt was going to happen—it wasn’t this. I have no idea what this is. I feel more lost than ever. “That’s why I’m here. She and I—”

  “Wait, who?” he asks. Confusion and disbelief have overtaken his anger.

  “Kelsey,” I say. “This is going to, well, sound crazy, but she and I were in this hospital together.” My voice rises at the end like it’s a question as my stomach twists. There’s no way to explain a crazy situation that doesn’t sound crazy. “And anyway, Kelsey gave me the book because, I think, we shared this connection.” Vague, I am going to stay vague—not mention the Outliers, not yet. “And then she helped me get out and—”

  “Wait, when?”

  “When what?” Now he’s more worried than angry—freaked out, actually.

  “When were you in the hospital together?” He steps toward me with the book raised. Jasper moves forward, too.

  “Um, this morning,” I say. “Kelsey helped me get out, and I’m hoping that maybe Gabrielle has heard from her. Because Kelsey was supposed to leave with me, but I haven’t seen her. I’m worried that she’s still in the hospital. In which case, I think we should go back to get her.”

  “Well, that would be hard,” Leo says. His voice is cold and flat. Dread—it’s the only thing he feels. Overwhelming dread.

  “Well, I know, it will be hard, but—”

  “Kelsey is dead,” he says with utter and undeniable truthfulness. “She’s been dead for months. I don’t know who you were with, but it wasn’t Kelsey.”

  21

  MY HEAD IS VIBRATING AS JASPER AND I STAND IN THE ALLEYWAY THAT’S alongside Delaney’s, between Concord Alley in front of the bar and the back where Leo has told us to meet him. Kelsey dead? I feel sick. Sick that girl who claimed to be Kelsey was lying to me. Sick that this Leo person might be lying to me now. Both feel possible. Or maybe I want them to be.

  Leo did agree to meet us in back at least. Not that he was happy about it. He also hadn’t been forthcoming with any additional information. Not even when I tried to press—and I did try to press.

  “I mean, maybe Kelsey isn’t dead. Maybe she’s missing or something?” I had offered when we were still inside Delaney’s kitchen, still waiting for Leo to agree to meet us. “I was in the hospital with her. That’s the truth.”

  “No,” Leo had said again, simply. “She is definitely dead.”

  And it did feel like he was telling the truth as he believed it to be. Though I have already learned that does not necessarily mean he’s right.

  Leo slid Kelsey’s book onto a high shelf above the dishwasher before dismissing us. I wanted the book back, but didn’t feel like I could argue under the circumstances, especially because he had agreed to meet us.

  I pull Rachel’s burner phone out of my pocket while we wait and turn it on. I don’t want to talk to her, but I can’t help checking in occasionally to see if she has learned anything new about my dad. As much as I don’t trust her, I have to believe she would at least be straight with me about that.

  I sit down on the curb as text after text comes through. Eight unread messages, all from Rachel, all some increasingly pissed-off version of: where the hell are you? No news at all about my dad.

  “Oh, okay, we’re sitting?” Jasper asks as he comes and lowers himself down on the curb next to me, then leans over to read the text. “Maybe she can explain,” Jasper offers. When I shoot him a nasty look, he holds up his hands. “I’m only playing devil’s advocate.”

  “Why?” I ask quietly. “She hates you.”

  “Gee, thanks,” he says. “I don’t know, but maybe that’s why. Why risk being mean to me?”

  “I don’t know.” I stare down at the disposable phone in my hands. “I have no idea what she would do, or why.”

  And that is definitely the truth. Do I actually think Rachel had something to do with my mom’s death? No, not exactly. But Rachel has done terrible things for money, or so my mom once said. And I already know now that anything is possible, that people are capable of much worse than I ever could have imagined.

  “You know, before I ended up in the hospital, I finally went to the police station to look at the case file from my mom’s accident,” I say.

  “Really?” Jasper asks. “I thought they kept saying no.”

  “They changed their mind. I wish they hadn’t. It wasn’t at all what I thought it was going to be.”

  “What do you mean?” Jasper asks.

  “There was—they found a vodka bottle. Like my mom had been drinking in the car before the accident,” I begin. And suddenly I am flooded with the horrible sense that I am missing the point. Like I felt on that bridge with those officers inching closer as I looked for Jasper. “And, I guess, I—”

  My voice cuts out. I am grateful that Jasper doesn’t say any of the annoying, empty things he might. Instead, he leans his body closer to mine and wraps an arm around my shoulders. And before I know it, I am curling myself against him.

  “It makes me feel like I never knew her.”

  “You can be wrong about some things,” he says, holding me tighter, “without being wrong about everything.”

  And for a second I almost believe him. Or I want to. And that is something.

  There’s a sharp whistle then from the far end of the alley. When we look, Leo waves us down, then disappears around the corner.

  I AM WALKING fast by the time we get to the edge of the building, not quite a jog but close. When I finally turn the corner, the alley is almost pitch-black and narrower than I expect, filled with trash cans and Dumpsters. I see Leo, someone else, too. But they are tucked back in the shadows. Kelsey’s sister, I am hoping.

  “Explain where you got the book,” Leo says. �
��The whole story, now. Or we’re gone.”

  Finally, the person he’s with steps forward from the wall and into the pale light. Even in the mostly dark, I recognize her right away: Riel. Level99, Riel. My heart drops. What the hell.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask, feeling betrayed yet again.

  “I ask the questions,” Riel snaps back. “You’re the one who has my book.”

  “Your book?”

  “Yeah, my book. Where the hell did you get it?”

  “From Kelsey,” I say, though already I have a very bad feeling that I am wrong. About so much. And then, far too slow, finally it comes to me. “Riel is short for Gabrielle?”

  “Very good,” Riel says flatly, then punctuates it with a slow clap. “Leo already told you that Kelsey is dead. So where did you get the book? Tell the truth, too, or I will ruin you in ways you cannot even imagine.”

  “There was a girl in the hospital who said she was Kelsey, and I had no reason not to believe her,” I say. “She gave me the book. She said she was going to sneak out with me, too, but then I lost her. She was amazing at blocking, too, just like it describes in the book. I honestly thought she was Kelsey, I swear.” And I know I should probably leave it at that, but I can’t. “I mean, is there any chance that—”

  “Kelsey is dead!” Riel shouts, and I can read her easily now—suspicion and rage and pain. So much that it takes my breath away. “And I know she’s dead because I was the lucky one who found her.” She points a finger hard at her own chest. “I saw her skin tinged blue. A needle sticking out of her arm.”

  The horror that passes through Riel when she says the word “blue” makes me feel hot and nauseous. And in that moment, I am reminded of how only weeks ago I might have mistaken that feeling for my own. Now, I can see the difference. But still, it is awful all the same.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. For making her even think about that.

  “You should be,” Riel says, and when I try to read her again, that weirdly flat shield of contempt is back. It must be her way of blocking.

  “Yeah, it’s different from in the book,” she says. Because she knows that I’m reading her. Has a decent idea even of what I’m thinking, maybe. She is good at this Outlier thing, too. Maybe as good as Kelsey was. Better than me, I am pretty sure. “If you make yourself a wall, it’s pretty obvious you’re blocking, right? At least to another Outlier. Using another feeling as cover? Much smarter. But that’s not in our book because I only figured it out recently, after your dad killed Kelsey.”

  “What? My dad did not kill Kelsey. He didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Well, he’s the reason she’s dead, and that’s close enough for me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If he had told Kelsey more about his research earlier, what he’d found out about her, then maybe I could have helped her. Maybe I could have made it so she didn’t have to numb herself with oxy and a whole bunch of other shit, so much that she’d end up OD’ing.” But Riel does not believe my dad is to blame, not deep down. I’m not sure if it’s deliberate that she stops blocking me. But I can read her clearly for a moment. And in her center is only grief, and guilt. “And so, yeah, when Quentin came looking for Kelsey and told me what your dad was hiding, I jumped at the chance to help shred your dad’s data. Which, by the way, is all I thought I was doing: making it so he couldn’t cash in.”

  But Riel did lie; that isn’t lost on me. Quentin didn’t trick her by lying. She offered to help to get back at him.

  “And meanwhile you helped get Cassie killed,” Jasper says.

  “That sucks what happened to your friend,” Riel says. “But if your dad had come clean from the start, none of this would have happened.”

  “He was trying to protect us,” I say, though it may be more true that he was trying to protect me.

  “Well, he did an awesome job,” she says, her voice thick with something worse than contempt. Something that she wants me to feel.

  “Somebody has him now anyway,” I say. And then realize that’s the best-case scenario. “Or something happened to him. Maybe they even killed him. So that should make you happy.”

  Riel doesn’t even flinch. Instead, she shrugs.

  “It’s amazing what they think they can keep secret.” She sounds insulted. “Or how far they’ll go to try.”

  “So who was the girl I met?” I ask. “And how did she have your book?”

  “I have no idea,” Riel says, but then something occurs to her. “Wait, what did she look like?”

  “Long, curly dark hair,” I say. “Oh, and she has an infinity symbol tattooed on the inside of her wrist.”

  Riel looks in Leo’s direction, then shakes her head again. “I should have known it was her.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “There were three of you, right?” Riel goes on. “Three original Outliers from your dad’s test. Or that’s what he told me when he called to warn Kelsey about Quentin, when it was way too late anyway.” I am glad that my dad at least called. “That girl with the tattoo is the third Outlier. And I can promise you if she was in that hospital it’s because she wanted to be.”

  The guard. You were talking to him, too, that’s what Ramona had said to Kelsey. It had only been in passing. Not a comment that had really stuck with me. But maybe that was the link. That the Wolf had been Kelsey’s way in, when the rest of us wanted out.

  “How did you meet her?” I ask.

  “She showed up at the house a couple weeks ago trying to get Kelsey to do something with her,” Riel says. “I was her second choice when she found out Kelsey was dead. Like I was going to run off and do whatever she wanted. It sounded like Quentin had tried to use her, too. But she wasn’t looking to help anyone but herself. She was damn good at reading people, though. I’ll give her that. She must have grabbed the book when she was here. And by the way, she added shit to the book. We never wrote about being an Outlier in there. Back then, we didn’t know yet.”

  “What did she want you to do?” I ask. Do you think you’re an Outlier too? is what I really want to know. But it seems pointless to risk annoying her when I already know the answer is yes.

  “Who knows? I never let her get into specifics,” Riel says. “Some way to ‘cash in’ on being an Outlier. She kept going on and on about how she and I could ‘help each other.’ She must have thought I was pretty fucking stupid—actually, no, I think she was pretty fucking stupid. Running around assuming everyone wants money? I don’t want money.”

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  She considers the question for a minute. Then turns to stare at me hard.

  “Justice,” she says finally. And I feel a flash of disappointment, like she already knows she’s failed.

  “Riel, we should go,” Leo says, looking around nervously. “It’s getting late. And with everything going on, I don’t think we should hang around here.”

  “But . . .” I start. Please don’t go is all I can think to say. I already know, though, that pleading won’t persuade Riel to do anything. “The other girls. They’re still in that hospital.”

  “Riel,” Leo says, impatient. “We should go. Seriously.”

  “I know,” she says, walking toward him. Leo and Riel start down the alley, but Riel stops and turns back to me when she’s gotten a few strides away. “Well, don’t just stand there like an asshole. Come on.”

  22

  NO ONE SPEAKS AS LEO DRIVES US AWAY FROM DELANEY’S AND OUT OF Cambridge. Soon we are on I-93, leaving the city of Boston behind. As the lights shrink in the distance, my chest loosens a little. Even though I know that bigger problems lie ahead and not behind.

  Jasper glances back at me from the front seat, where Leo insisted he ride. Riel is in the back next to me. These are their precautions. What purpose they serve, I’m not sure. But I knew better than to argue.

  Jasper is worried about me. He is worried about himself. I can feel that so clearly it’s almost like he is shout
ing it at me. He is hoping that I’m right that we should go with these excellent liars. I am, too.

  “Where are we going?” Jasper asks when we have driven in silence for more than fifteen minutes.

  “My grandparents have a house on Cape Cod,” Riel says, like this explains everything. “We can’t stay in Cambridge. Thanks to you bringing Kendall—”

  “I didn’t bring Kendall,” I say. “He sent me.”

  “Whatever,” she says, but more mildly. Like she knows the difference and maybe even believes me, but is also determined not to change her negative opinion of me in general. “Somebody else came by, too. Somebody we didn’t know. Could have been a coincidence, but I don’t think so. We were on borrowed time in Cambridge.”

  Riel rests her head against the window, eyes toward the darkness.

  “Why are you helping us now?” I ask. Her change of heart is nagging at me.

  She closes her eyes. Shrugs. “Because I can,” she says. And for a second she lets me feel her guilt. “Because you need me to.”

  I WAKE UP disoriented and cloudy. I don’t know how long I was out, but we are now in the middle of the tall Bourne Bridge, arced high above the water. When I was little, crossing that bridge was always the dividing line between the Cape and civilization, between life and summer bliss. I wonder now what waits for me on the other side.

  Soon we are snaking along Route 6, which runs the length of the Cape. I recognize it, too. I try to hold tighter to my old sense of this special place—of sand and dried pines and hermit crabs and biking on the rail trail—but it’s already slipping away.

  A few minutes later we turn off onto a much narrower paved road, which turns quickly into a dirt one, we bump slowly along. Another minute or two more, and I see water through a break in the trees up ahead. We hit a wooden bridge too fast, our tires rumbling hard over wooden planks. My teeth rattling.

  “It’s one of the little private islands,” Riel says, like we all spend a fair amount of time in such glamorous places.