by Kara Thomas
Today, Jules was late. Jen lingered by her locker, wondering if she should just head for class on her own. She watched another minute tick by on her phone before looking up and seeing her at the end of the hall: Juliana, her forehead glistening with sweat, a bright pink headband pushing her hair from her face.
Next to her, Carly Amato was laughing at something. Jules spotted Jen; she broke away from Carly, waving at her.
“You didn’t tell me Carly was in your gym class,” Jen said, once Juliana had made her way to her.
“Was I supposed to?” Juliana fanned her face with her English notebook. “What’s your problem with her, anyway?”
I’m pretty sure she’s a cokehead. It was an awfully heavy accusation to be flinging around.
“I don’t have a problem with her,” Jen said.
“Whatever.” Juliana brushed past her, into Mr. Ward’s room.
Jen stood in the doorway for a moment, stricken. Juliana had whatever-ed her. Whatever was a door slamming in your face; it meant I am annoyed but I don’t care enough to fight with you. In a lot of ways it was the worst thing you could say to a friend.
Juliana didn’t look back at Jen as she strode up to Mr. Ward and flashed him a pass for her vocal lesson in the choir room. Mr. Ward sighed, pointed at the whiteboard where the page numbers for tonight’s assigned reading were listed. Jules copied it down into her planner and was out the door by the bell.
Jen’s eyes pricked, her lungs compressing with that panicked feeling she got over crying in public. The last time she’d cried in class was after a math test in the seventh grade—the only test she’d ever failed. The boys who sat behind her made fun of her all day; crying in class felt like her body’s way of betraying her. She kept her head bowed while Mr. Ward battled with the girls sitting on the ledge by the window, sunning like turtles on a rock.
“Pleeeeeease can we open the window?” Hailey Rosenfield fanned herself with a marble notebook.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Ward pleaded.
“We are sitting.” Hailey nudged her shoulder into her friend’s. The girls giggled, whined about how they just came from gym. Poor Mr. Ward looked like he was barely out of college.
Jen tuned them out, looking up from her notebook only to copy the journal prompt on the whiteboard. Discuss the setting and how it contributes to the mood of the story. She couldn’t think, couldn’t even remember what she’d read of Wuthering Heights last night.
Juliana was pissed at her. Jen couldn’t think of a time when she’d honestly made Jules mad. It was hard to do, which only made it worse that this stupid argument was over Carly Amato, a girl Juliana had only known a couple of months.
I’m not okay. Jen didn’t realize that it was all she’d written in her notebook until Mr. Ward asked if everyone was done writing, if anyone wanted to share their response with the class.
When the bell rang, Jen tore the page out of her notebook. Crushed it and tossed it into Mr. Ward’s wastebasket.
By the time she got to her locker, she was crying. She buried her head.
A soft tap on her shoulder. Jen found herself face to face with Ethan McCready.
She’d known Ethan since they were kids; she hated that people called him Ethan McCreepy, and she flinched every time one of the soccer guys smacked the back of his head whenever they passed by his seat on the bus.
But if she was being honest with herself, Jen knew that Ethan wasn’t making it easy to defend him. In middle school he’d stopped talking to everyone but two of his friends—computer club boys plagued by ill-fitting jeans and cafeteria pizza breath. It was rare to see Ethan not hunched over a desk, the hood of his sweatshirt up and his earbuds in, no matter how many times teachers told him to take them out.
Most damning of all, though, was that Ethan could, in fact, be extremely creepy. The first time Jen saw him, he’d been watching her.
She was in the woods behind her house, scouring the creek for water-polished rocks, when she heard twigs snapping. She stayed crouched, motionless, hoping to see a deer when she looked up. Instead, it was a boy with a bad haircut in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
“Hi,” he said. “What are you doing?”
Jen held out her palm. Ethan came closer, inspected the rock, which was as smooth and white as a pearl.
After that day, he showed up sometimes. After Jen told him she wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, Ethan brought a book from the library filled with glossy pictures of reptiles and amphibians. If they were lucky, they caught toads in plastic beach buckets, but Jen always made him put them back.
Jen thought about inviting Ethan over for dinner, like she did with Susan all the time, but she was too embarrassed to ask her mother. She hated when her mother asked her about boys, and the last thing she wanted to do was admit that she’d been spending time alone with one.
And then Ethan ruined everything.
The summer between fourth and fifth grade, they’d been catching tadpoles. Jen saw a cluster of them, wiggling beside the rock where she and Ethan were crouched.
She cupped her hands and scooped them through the water. “I got some!”
Ethan put his hands over hers to stop the tadpoles from escaping. When Jen looked up, he was watching her, and her gut told her exactly what was going to happen.
His mouth landed on her upper lip, and she thought maybe he’d missed. Before she could blink, his lips found hers. When he pulled away, she tasted Sour Patch Kids.
“I’m sorry,” he said. And Jen ran back to her house, leaving her pail behind.
She’d lied to Juliana and Susan about her first kiss. Said it was with Joe Halpern in the dark of a movie theater in the seventh grade. By then she hadn’t spoken to Ethan in years—she hadn’t gone back to the creek after the tadpole day. She sat far away from him on the bus and avoided his eyes when they were assigned to the same table in art class.
When she noticed the hair that had started cropping up on his upper lip, she got a funny feeling in her stomach.
“You dropped this,” Ethan muttered, and then he was gone.
Jen unfolded the paper. Recognized the words she’d written in her journal at the beginning of class. I’m not okay.
Ethan had scrawled out a response: Do you want to talk about it?
Jen flushed, even though it was impossible for anyone to know what had just happened. She stuffed the note in her pocket and headed to the cafeteria, forgetting that she and Ethan shared the same lunch period.
Her table was already packed; Mark Zhang had his arm draped over Bethany Steiger’s shoulders. Bethany rolled her eyes and pushed his arm off her, even though everyone knew they’d been hooking up since the summer.
When Mark saw Jen, his face lit up. Bethany looked like she tasted something foul, and Colleen examined her nails, trying to look as oblivious as possible.
Everyone also knew that Mark Zhang had had a thing for Jen since she was a freshman.
Jen didn’t look at them as she settled into her seat. Colleen looked up at her. “Have you been crying?”
Jen lifted a hand to her cheek. Her face was probably still beet red, and the tear or two that snuck out of her eyes in Mr. Ward’s class probably smudged her mascara. “No. Just don’t feel well.”
“You look like crap,” Bethany said. Colleen’s eyes widened with horror.
“Like you have a fever or something,” Bethany amended. Jen wasn’t going to take Bethany’s bait. She was always doing that—making nasty comments, diamond-knife-thin cuts that you didn’t realize stung until much later.
“I know what will make you laugh.” Bethany smirked over her iced tea, looking at something at the table behind Jen. “McCreepy is showing a full moon.”
Jen’s stomach puckered: Mark Zhang howled with laughter. “No way. He broke his belt after gym. Lemme see.”
Colleen tilted sideways, crushing her shoulder into Jen’s so Mark could lean across the table and gawk. Jen refused to turn around and look.
Mark’s laughing reached a crescendo, and his friend, some other jerk of a football player, joined in. “Yo, anyone got a quarter?”
Bethany dug a coin out of her change purse and handed it to Mark. Before Jen realized what he was doing, Mark stood up and lobbed the quarter at Ethan. Jen spun around in time to see it bounce off Ethan’s back and onto the floor. Ethan’s shoulders went stiff, but he didn’t turn to face them.
“Damn it,” Mark said. “Come on, Beth, you take a shot.”
The rest of the table laughed as Bethany held a quarter between her thumb and forefinger. As Bethany examined it, Colleen buried her head in her food. Jen watched Bethany in horror as she tossed the coin at Ethan.
Mark hooted. “So close! Who’s next?”
Jen’s throat was closing. She wanted to scream at them, but something was stopping her. And then Ethan stood up. Pulled his pants up and tugged his shirt down. His face was eerily calm as he strode over to the garbage can, holding his empty tray.
He stopped by their table and dropped a quarter in front of Mark. “I think this is yours.”
Mark held Ethan’s gaze as he reached and smacked the tray from Ethan’s hands. What was left in his carton of fruit punch spilled over Ethan’s sneakers. He held Mark’s gaze. And then he smirked.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Mark wasn’t smiling anymore. The table was silent. Ethan’s smirk seemed to have unnerved them.
Ethan didn’t answer. His gaze slid over Jen, as if he didn’t see her at all. She watched him walk away, and at the last moment, when the rest of the table had resumed conversation, laughing awkwardly, Jen saw it.
The way Ethan folded the fingers on one of his hands into the shape of a gun.
I haven’t texted Ethan McCready since I found the note he left in the house across the street. I don’t want him to know that I know who he is. He probably didn’t expect me to figure it out. He had saved something of Jen’s, but how would he know she saved something with his handwriting and that I had a way of tying it back to him?
I don’t want to scare him into doing anything. Especially not when he knows where we live. If I told my parents about Ethan being in the house across the street, about his taunts, Tom would go DEFCON 1 and Ethan would never be able to contact us again.
If I want to keep my family safe and get answers at the same time, I have to keep my mouth shut.
When I get last week’s AP chem quiz back on Friday, there’s a big fat “52%” at the top, circled in red pen. Practice is no better; Coach shouts at the sophomores for erupting into giggles during warm-up, and midway through our third run-through of the new competition routine, Coach stops the music.
Next to me, Rachel looks like she’s going to crap her pants. But Coach locks eyes with me instead. “Your fouettés are sloppy, Rayburn.”
The weekend feels like a small mercy. When I get downstairs on Saturday morning, Tom is coming through the front door, cradling a paper bag from the deli. Mango dances around his heels, smelling the bacon-and-egg sandwich he gets every weekend.
“Oh good, you’re up. Got your cinnamon raisin bagel.”
“Thanks.” My heart is beating in my throat. Tom looks at me, eyebrows pinched together. Do you know I took the phone?
As if he’d even say anything if he did. He falls into step with me on my way to the dining room.
“What do you think about coming to the range today?”
Tom brought me to the gun range when I turned sixteen in the spring. My mom almost had an aneurysm when she found out, and there was some shouting and Tom saying I should know how to protect myself.
When I asked Tom the following weekend if I could go to the range with him again, he said to let Mom warm to the idea first.
Neither of us mentioned it again. I know exactly what this is about: Tom thinks I’m having some sort of freak-out because of the security camera and Ethan McCready things, and he figures a refresher in self-defense is the answer.
I follow Tom into the dining room. “I don’t know. Mom might get pissed.”
Tom looks at me as he sets the deli bag on the table. “Mom doesn’t need to know every little thing that happens around here.”
I decide that he found the unlocked drawer and knows that I was in his desk. This father-daughter day at the range is a recon mission; he’s going to confront me about the phone, ask what else I saw in the drawer. For the first time ever, the thought of being alone with him unsettles me.
“I’m meeting Mike there,” Tom says, as if reading my mind. “In case that sways you.”
Mike Mejia is Tom’s partner. I have no doubt that when he got married, he devastated every woman in his life who isn’t a blood relative. All four of us were invited to the wedding in April. Tom let Mike’s new stepdaughter, an apple-cheeked four-year-old, step on his shoes while he whirled her around on the dance floor. Even my mother, three flutes of champagne deep, got up from the table to dance when they played her favorite song.
Mike is popular around here. Tom used to tease me about how I had a crush on him when I was a kid. Now the thought makes me want to throw up, because Mike is Brandon’s age.
Something lights up in my brain. Mike’s first year on the job was the year of the murders. He might be able to give me insight.
“Let me change,” I say.
* * *
—
I sit in the backseat of Tom’s car so we can pick up Mike. He gives me a “Hey, kid” and a flash of a smile.
“Hi,” I say. “How are Anna and Danielle?”
“Good, good. Anna made me sleep on the couch for forgetting the mashed potatoes from KFC, but good.”
“I remember those pregnancy hormones,” Tom says. “Phoebe threw a glass at me because I made a joke about—” Tom eyes me over his shoulder. “Well, a dirty joke.”
“Ew,” I say.
They launch into work banter, then gun talk, and I close my eyes, trying to buoy myself against the nausea that comes over me every time we drive on these winding country roads. Triple B Gun Club is twenty minutes north of Sunnybrook, but it may as well be another state, culturally speaking.
The owner of Triple B remembers me from when I was last here in the spring, so she doesn’t hassle me too much with the mandatory safety briefing. Tom ushers me through the door dividing the lanes from the lobby.
The pop-pop of guns going off sends my shoulders up to my ears. Tom puts a hand on my back and guides me to the lane he’s rented for us. He sets me up with his .22 caliber pistol and keeps his eye on me as I adjust my ear protectors and safety goggles.
I assume the proper stance and aim the gun at the paper target, a sickly skinned cartoon zombie. My index finger trembles around the trigger.
“Remember,” Tom says. “Don’t expect it.”
I fire off ten rounds. All hit the zombie’s belly and not the bull’s-eye on its head.
“Here.” Tom takes the gun from me when the chamber is empty. “You have to relax your shoulders. Watch my stance.”
I step aside and let Tom take his shots at the zombie. The first round pierces cleanly through the zombie’s head. He fires the rest off in succession, his shoulders taut, eyes laser-focused, and I’m hit with a rush of nausea.
Was it this easy for him to fire his gun at Jack Canning? Did he hesitate?
Did he go into that house expecting to kill Jack Canning?
Tom turns, motions for me to come try the gun again. I shake my head. “I don’t want to.”
“Why? You were on the right track. You were leaning to the left a bit—”
“I don’t want to shoot the damn gun.” The sound that comes out of me is guttural. Mike and the woman in the last lane must have hear
d me, because they’re staring.
“I’m still carsick,” I say. “Can I please just wait in the lobby?”
“Of course.” Tom’s forehead pinches, and I tear out of there without looking back.
On our way out, the range owner flags us down and gives us a 20 percent off coupon for the bar and grill next door, which she owns too.
After the hostess seats us in a booth and takes our drink orders, Tom and I head straight for the salad bar. I drop some mixed greens and pale tomato chunks on my plate, keeping an eye on Tom. One of the waitresses, an older woman with a face like a basset hound, has recognized him and pinned him at the other end of the salad bar. Tom nods politely at whatever she’s saying, a held-hostage look on his face.
I finish dressing my salad plate and slide into the booth across from Mike. There’s a sweating glass of Diet Coke on the table in front of me; I didn’t even see the waitress bring it over.
Mike cradles a bottle of Heineken, eyeing me carefully like I’m a skittish cat. “How the hell have you been, kid? How’s junior year going?”
On the quick walk over here, he and Tom seemed desperate to avoid the subject of my behavior inside the range. What are you doing for the Giants game tomorrow? Man, Beckham Jr.’s been lazy this year.
“Okay, I guess. I’ve been busy with dance team and stuff.” I hesitate, peeling the paper tie around my silverware into little strips. “Can I ask you something? Without you telling Tom?”
Mike’s eyes swivel to Tom at the salad bar. He sets down his bottle. “Depends on how much trouble you’re in.”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s about something that happened at school a while ago.”
Mike’s eyebrows shoot up.
“Do you know who Ethan McCready is?”
Mike nods and sips from his beer. Wipes away a wet spot on his upper lip. “Yep. I’m the one who interviewed him about that little list of his.”