I remembered arriving at the bonfire, the disquieting realization I was the only girl there, they’d been at . . . a cheerleading thing?
But wait, that hadn’t been this dream. My mind flashed back to Chris whispering that he deserved this as he pressed a shard of glass against his wrist, and I drew in a sharp breath.
“ . . . Tess holding up?” Derrick’s mom asked.
My name drew my attention away from the stars on the ceiling and back to their conversation.
“She’s okay, I guess.” Derrick didn’t exactly sound convincing. “Aside from the obsessive card-making.”
Card-making? I sank back down in bed, trying to get comfortable as I shifted through my memories. As I’d chatted with Liam, Finn, and the others, my unease about being the only girl there had dissipated. I’d known every single one of those boys my entire life. We might not have hung out much, but we had history. In retrospect, not my best judgment call, but at the time, they didn’t register as a threat. Then Josh heard something.
Thunk, creak, clack, clink.
No. I tossed the covers off me and stood, like getting away from the bed could somehow diminish the memory of the ceiling fan crashing down. Not memory, nightmare.
I swallowed hard. A nightmare I’d had the night Isaac died.
I shuddered. Okay, that was a really weird coincidence, but it didn’t mean—
“Finn!” Wren screamed as he stepped off the edge of the railing.
Okay. I was probably wrong. Please, be wrong. But . . . the sheriff was just down the hall. Surely, she could have one of her people swing by Main Street. Just to make sure.
You’re not clairvoyant, Tess. Derrick’s mocking voice intruded on my thoughts.
Of course not. Yet, I still found myself opening the door and walking down the hall, squinting against the bright light in the living room.
Before I could reach the sheriff, the phone rang. No.
I shrank into the shadows, feeling sick as she moved into the hallway.
“You’re kidding,” the sheriff exclaimed. “Yeah, no! Good call. I’m on my way.” She rushed back toward the living room. “If I’m not back by the time you need to leave for school . . .”
“Take the bus.” Derrick’s voice dripped with so much disdain, I wanted to hit him.
Finn was dead. I was sure of it. What did it matter if we had to take the bus?
“No, honey. You and Tess stay home.”
That got Derrick’s attention. “Someone else died, didn’t they?”
She didn’t answer.
“Mom!” He moved into my view, standing in front of the door.
“Derrick, I can’t talk about it. Just stay home.”
When she walked out the door, Derrick sighed, shoulders going slack. He turned and gave a start when he noticed me. “Christ, Tess. I didn’t know you were standing there.” He narrowed his eyes as he took me in. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You okay?”
“I think Finn is dead.” I followed him to the couch and filled him in on my dream.
“Dreams are weird,” Derrick reminded me. “I mean, yeah, I can see how having nightmares on the nights Chris and Isaac died would freak you out. But you’ve had nightmares almost every night since the bonfire. So it’s not that strange.”
I nodded. My whole theory seemed much less believable in here with the lights on. I mean, okay, his mom getting called in sort of did lend credit to my whole insane delusion, but she was the sheriff. She could have been called in for literally anything else. “But I saw them die.”
“Or you only remembered bits and pieces of the dream and your mind is filling in details you already know to rationalize it.”
I gave him a flat look. “Ceiling fan.”
“Okay,” Derrick admitted. “That was weird.” He fell silent for a moment. “If you’re right”—His voice made it clear he was sure I wasn’t.—“we’ll know soon enough. All we can do right now is wait.”
“Maybe I should make a card to pass the time.”
Derrick worked a muscle in his jaw at the venom in my voice. “You heard that, huh?”
“It was hard not to overhear you guys.”
“Sorry.”
I shrugged. “Hey, say whatever you need to say to get your mom off your back. But maybe next time, try something more believable.”
Derrick blinked. “Believable?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, remember how the football players aren’t my favorite people right now? I somehow doubt your mom bought that I’m making them cards.”
“Tess.” He climbed to his feet, eyes worried. “You drew cards for every single family who lost someone at the bonfire. You worked on them for days.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Tess, I’m serious. You don’t . . . remember?”
I searched his face for some sign he was joking and found none. “Show me.”
“Where’s your sketch book?”
Numb, I headed into his room to retrieve it, Derrick right on my heels. I didn’t even have a chance to flip through the pages before he snatched the book out of my hand and showed me page after page of drawings I didn’t recognize.
“I don’t know who this one was for. They all kind of looked like this,” he explained, then seemed to realize what he’d said. “I mean they all look good, but . . .”
I ignored his backpedaling and glanced down at the random lines drawn on the page. Not my typical drawing style. The sketch looked like an abstract idea of a tree, except . . . . I snatched the book from him, turned it upside down, and frowned. No, not that. “Hot dog or hamburger?”
“What?” Worry shifted to alarm on Derrick’s features.
“The way I folded the cards. Hot dogs or hamburgers?”
“Um . . . horizontally?”
Hamburgers. I stared at the page, a sickening feeling growing in the pit of my stomach. “So I ripped it out, and—” I moved to do just that, but Derrick put his hand on my shoulder. “No, you made copies onto card stock. Remember? Mr. Gilbert sweet-talked Mrs. Atkins into printing them for you?”
“Mr. Gilbert sweet-talked Mrs. Atkins?” What the hell had I missed?
“I’m going to call Mom.” Derrick announced, reaching for his phone. “You’re still losing time. You need to get to the hospital. They need to do, like, scans and stuff.”
I shook his hand off and stepped away from him. “I’m fine.” I flipped through the sketchbook, but all the remaining pages were empty. New book?
I rummaged through the room, searching the desk drawers for the old book.
“Tess.”
“Just a minute.” I glanced under the bed. Jackpot.
“Tess, this is kind of—”
He broke off when I ripped pages out of my sketchbook. “What are you doing?”
“I think,” I began, folding the paper like a card. “The other drawings—mmph—” Holding up a finger, I motioned for Derrick to wait a second and ran my tongue along the crease. With careful precision, I pulled the paper until it separated, rending the drawing in half. Setting the two halves of the drawing on the bed, I turned them both so the un-torn side, the long edges of the page, faced one another. The lines matched and solidified, like nonsense splashes of color joining across puzzle pieces to reveal a larger image. My abstract drawing of an idea of a tree didn’t look so abstract from this angle. Leaves carpeted a patch of forest floor beneath a narrow foot. The page cut off before reaching the ankle. But given the polka dots painted on the toenails, I felt reasonably sure it was mine.
I glanced up in time to see Derrick’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
“Are part of a bigger picture.”
Chapter 22: Derrick
Tuesday, September 20th
I USED AN X-ACTO knife to cut Tess
’s pictures in half while she oriented the pages together. We’d been lucky with the first card because the edges matched up line for line. They didn’t always.
Even though we’d pushed all the stuff in my room to the walls and cleared all my junk off the floor, we risked running out of space. Tess lined up all the pages in a large square like a picture frame. Every time we found images that grouped together, we moved them to the middle of the square.
“This would be so much easier if we could tell which pieces were edges or corners or if we knew if it even has edges.” Tess turned one of the sheets upside down. “God, Der, what if I’m not done drawing it?”
“Then we’ll add to it as you go.” I rushed to my desk and took out a piece of blank paper to use as a grid. “Can you number the back of each card?”
“Oh, good idea.” She turned and dug through her bag for a pencil. She flipped over each drawing and wrote a number while I drew gridlines across the page. “Done.”
“Great.” I took a few minutes to fill the few positions we’d already worked out onto the grid before we got back to work.
“I wish I liked coffee,” Tess said with a yawn. She grimaced when she saw the indentions the carpet had left in her hand.
“Want a Monster?” I held up my unopened energy drink in offering even though she’d already declined before my trip to the kitchen.
She wrinkled her nose, but rose to her feet, staggering toward me in a half-stretch. “Yeah, sure.”
I passed her the can and studied the incomplete picture. “How did you even do this?”
It was impossible to tell if the individual pages she’d drawn were right side up or upside down or sideways. Each rendering was a split image, but we couldn’t tell how they fit together in the bigger picture.
“I don’t know.” She tapped her nails against the top of the drink three times and popped the top, grimacing as she took a sip. “Mrs. Minchkin keeps warning me about repressed memories and subconscious reactions to trauma. I figured she meant dreams and triggers and the like, but puzzle drawings?” Tess shook her head. “This is like . . . . What was that movie? The one where the guy thought he had super powers, but he actually had a brain tumor?”
We’re getting stupid tired, I realized, grabbing the can from Tess and taking a swig. It’d been awhile since we’d stayed up late working on some project or another. Man, what I wouldn’t give for a simple and easy research assignment right now. “Frequency?”
“No, that was the one with the time traveling radio.” Tess’s eyes lit up at the memory. “I loved that movie.”
“I think we still have it on tape.” Mom had missed the DVD phase completely, only recently jumping straight into digital copies. Consequently, Tess and I had spent a lot of time watching old movies growing up. “Augh, what was that movie?” Not remembering the title was going to drive me nuts. “I know exactly what you’re talking about. There was the thing with the sunglasses.” I made circular motions with my hand. “And the—”
“Phenomenon!”
“That’s it!” Mystery solved. Why were we talking about Phenomenon again? Right. Magical-power-granting tumor. “They would’ve found something like that when they did all those scans on you.” I gave up on the page I’d been studying. “But I don’t think anyone’s brain could draw something like this, even with a tumor. One picture upside down I could see, but fitting together like this without drawing the whole thing first?”
“Well, I didn’t draw the whole thing first.” Tess gave me a flat look. “And making this on purpose, brain tumor or not, seems a bit more likely than these pieces just coincidentally fitting together to make a bigger picture.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but my brain stumbled over what the alternative could possibly be. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Tess moved back to the puzzle, kneeling on all fours above it with her neck craned. “I think not making sense is our new normal. You know I’m honestly starting to wonder if I turned into a werewolf.” She laughed crawling forward, one hand poised above the pages. “I mean, there was a full moon, an unidentified beast eating everyone alive, and now a weirdly cryptic puzzle. It kinda fits.”
“The bite marks were closer to a bear than a wolf.” But they hadn’t been right for either. I reached for another page, considering. “Unless you’re talking a standing wolf man-type werewolf.” Who knew how that would register? “But that still wouldn’t explain how you got to my house so fast.”
“Because otherwise, a werewolf makes perfect sense. Damn those details.” I could hear the smirk in her voice as she stretched to reach another page. Her leggings inched down just enough to reveal a lacy black trim.
“Huh? Oh, yeah, happy to help,” I sputtered as she straightened up, pulling her shirt down. Maybe my reply didn’t make sense, but I felt pretty proud I’d managed a coherent sentence.
Tess held up one page to the other to see if it was a match.
“Holy shit.” I jerked forward snatching the page out of her hand and set it next to another drawing. What I’d thought were vines was actually rope lashing Tess’s hands to something long and wooden.
“Find the rest of it,” Tess demanded rifling through the pages until she found another edge that could connect to the stake. Now that we knew what we were looking at, the picture came together quickly. When we finished, Tess and I stood, edging back to my door to take in the horrific tableau.
There’d been a bonfire all right. But Tess had been at the center of it, bound to a stake wicked-witch style. Her head lolled, and fire licked at the long dark hair obscuring her face. On the edges of the pictures, I could make out the football players circling her with symbols painted on their faces. If I squinted, I could see the same symbols drawn on Tess. “Tess, did they do this?” Something about the picture seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“I don’t know.” Her voice sounded small, and when I looked at her, I could see the blood draining from her face as she grew ashen with fear.
“I mean, they couldn’t have lit the fire or you would have had burns on you, but that’s the dress you were wearing. Do you think—”
“I don’t know!” Her voice rose, frothing with panic. “Don’t you get that? I don’t know! I don’t know how I drew this. I don’t know if it happened. I don’t know what any of this means. I. Don’t. Know! What do you think you’re doing?”
I lowered my cell phone. “Taking a picture.”
“No! Delete it, and let’s . . . I don’t know, burn that. I don’t want to see it anymore.” She moved toward the puzzle.
I got in front of her to hold her back. “Tess, we need to look up those symbols. We have to find out what they did, what this means.”
She shook her head. “No. Derrick, you were right, okay. I forgot for a reason. I don’t need to remember. I don’t want to remember. Don’t make me remember.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the puzzle, off Tess, bound, helpless, and surrounded. Rage coursed through my veins.
She swallowed hard. “You’re not going to stop digging, are you? Of course you’re not, why would you? I wouldn’t if it were you.” Tess slid her hands through her hair and turned away from me, taking deep breaths to compose herself, but judging by the way her voice warbled when she spoke, she wasn’t having much luck. “How am I even supposed to react to that?” Her nails scraped against her scalp as she drew her hand into a fist.
“Hey, hey. Tess, come on.” I reached for her and drew her to me. “It’s okay. Whatever happened, you’re safe now, okay?”
She stiffened, her shoulders bunching together, her small frame shaking with the effort of holding back tears before a loud hiccup escaped her throat. She sagged, going limp against me, her arms sliding through mine so tight they constricted my breath.
“It’s okay, you’re okay.” I felt stuck in a loop of useless
phrases, but I couldn’t seem to stop speaking. With every repetition, she cried harder, burying her face into my shirt. My arms joined my voice in mutiny, and I found myself stuck in a pattern of tightening my arms around her, loosening them, stroking her hair, rubbing her back, and—as though truly determined to make this as awkward as possible—patting her shoulder, ’cause that’s helpful.
“Derrick,” she sobbed, clinging to me like I was the only thing holding her up. “What did they do?”
“I don’t know.” I rested my chin on top of her head.
She took a deep shuddering breath and drew back. My hands moved of their own accord, tucking the hair plastered to her cheeks back behind her ears.
“Oh.” She wiped the tears off her face with another deep breath. “I got snot all over your shirt.”
She sounded so contrite, I laughed. “Yeah . . . I can feel it.” I stripped off the shirt and offered it to her. “Tissue?”
She laughed, stepping back. “God, I’m such a mess.”
“It’s also really late,” I added. “We’re tired, we’re emotional, and our energy drinks are crashing. If you feel like you need an excuse, I can give you thousands, but you really don’t. This has been a weird week.”
She laughed again. “Yeah.”
I caught her eye. “It’s okay if you need to . . . break every now and then, you know. I don’t mind.”
Her eyes got moist again, and she blinked furiously. “Thanks. I think—” She stretched then shook her hands out. “I think I just need some sleep.”
“Oh, yeah. Of course.” I moved toward my door, but her arms wrapped around me in an impulsive hug.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Anytime.”
We lingered there for a second that seemed to stretch out into eternity. Her lips parted. I could feel her heart pounding against my chest. Or was that mine?
Blood and Other Matter Page 14