We Can Be Heroes

by Kyrie McCauley

  This post was taking off, too. It was being shared on other platforms. What were hundreds of comments on the last mural were thousands now. And more than fifty thousand likes.

  Beck switched over to the Bell Firearms account, and sure enough, it was gaining traction there, too. There were hundreds of comments on their last post, and the conflict in the comments was exactly what Beck expected. There were a lot of people speaking up about gun violence, about Bell and Cassie. But there were just as many pushing back.

  Either way, it was a lot of attention, which was great for the message they were trying to send. And dangerous for their own anonymity.

  “You’re playing with fire now, Beck. People are talking about this. Putting it all together. They’re already saying it’s a couple of kids. They’ll trace it back to you eventually.”

  “Who is saying that?” Beck asked.

  “There’s talk in town. At the hardware shop. The grocery store. It was all the buzz at the Loft the other day when I grabbed some coffee.”

  “You’re hanging out at the Loft these days?”

  “Hey, I may be dying,” Grandpa said. “But I’m not dead. I keep up with the—what did Cassie say? I keep up with the trends.”

  He was right. Cassie did say that.

  “It’s really important, Grandpa.” Beck sat down on the bench beside her grandfather, her hands brushing over the map in front of her. Cassie was still in that van. They couldn’t stop.

  He sighed. “I figured it was. Which is why I’m thinking the Old Mill instead of the train station. It’s also abandoned, out of the way. But it faces those open fields on the Warren Farm . . . you know, the ones—”

  “—the ones they use for the Sunflower Festival.”

  Grandpa smiled, winked. “Precisely.”

  Beck wrapped her arm around him and squeezed. “Thanks for watching out for us.”

  “Be careful, Beck. Be really careful here. You are a grown-up now, and these are grown-up choices you are making.”

  “You don’t think it’s worth the risk?”

  “That’s not my call to make. I’m proud of you for fighting for Cassie. That matters, Beck. It matters a lot. But don’t give up your whole future fighting the past, okay? You gotta take care of yourself sometimes, too.”

  “I know,” Beck said, kissing his cheek. “I’ll be careful.”

  There was a knock at the barn door.

  Grandpa stood, passing the paper and the map to Beck, but whoever it was didn’t wait to be let in.

  “Good morning, Mr. Jones. Hoped I might have a minute of your time.”

  It was Steven Bell.

  Beck was on the far side of Lola’s car, sitting down on the bench. Bell couldn’t see her from the doorway. So she slipped down beneath the wide desk, folding the map and slipping it into her back pocket.

  What the hell was Steven Bell doing here?

  “A minute? I got a minute,” Grandpa said, stepping forward.

  Mr. Bell reached out his hand and Grandpa walked past it, back to Lola’s car, lifting the hood.

  “A quick minute,” Grandpa clarified without looking up.

  Grandpa had never had any love for the Bells.

  “I’m here for your granddaughter,” he said.

  Grandpa stood, wiping grease off his hands onto a towel.

  “What do you want, Steve?” Grandpa asked.

  “There’s an art program in New York. For talented kids. I know a few people on the admissions board, and well, I’d be happy to make a call. See if we can get Tribeca in.”

  “It’s Beck,” Grandpa corrected. “And no, thank you.”

  “You don’t even want to talk to her first?” Bell asked.

  “If Beck wanted some fancy art program, she’d have applied for it,” he said. “She doesn’t need your help. And the Jones family doesn’t ask for favors.”

  Steven Bell was handsome and golden-haired, just like Nico. He was fit, and tall, and he usually had a smile on his face. A smile that never reached his eyes.

  “It’s hardly a favor,” Steven Bell said. “It’s one phone call. I make phone calls like that all the time. To the art board. To the sheriff . . .”

  Steven Bell let the sentence trail off. Let the words linger in the air. The sheriff. The art.

  He knew. Or he suspected, at least.

  This wasn’t an offer for help. It was a threat.

  “Anyway, Cassandra always told us how talented—”

  “Don’t you dare talk about Cassie,” Grandpa said, his voice low. “And I said no. Get the hell out of my garage, Steve. I’m busy.”

  Steven Bell backed away, hands in the air.

  “I’m just trying to help. We go way back, you and I.”

  “Just because I used to work for you doesn’t mean you own me, Steve. You’ve always had a hard time understanding that since you took over the company. That’s why I left.”

  Beck didn’t know that.

  “You are a skilled engineer, Mr. Jones. You shouldn’t be running a car shop. You should still be with Bell, designing the next big thing. One of your design ideas is still our top seller.”

  “And I have to live with that.”

  “Not for long, I hear,” Steven Bell said. “Our company still offers excellent health care. You should come back. Let us take care of you.”

  “I think that’s enough,” Grandpa said, directing Bell to the door. “Steve, it’s the same problem now that it always was with you. You get what you want, and you don’t care who you hurt along the way.”

  “That’s just called being a successful businessman,” Steven Bell said.

  “It’s called being an asshole,” Grandpa said, and shut the door in his face.

  The barn was quiet for a minute, and then Beck crawled out from under the workbench, still clutching the newspaper in her hands.

  “He knows,” she said.

  “He guesses,” Grandpa emphasized. “If he knew, it would have been the sheriff here, not him.”

  Beck was nervous for the first time since they had started this. Not for herself, but for her grandpa. His mechanic shop. His fragile health. And for Vivian, who still had a real shot of getting out of here. Following her dreams, even if she thought she’d set them aside.

  Beck didn’t want to fuck that up for them.

  “What about the other thing he said? About better health care.”

  “Beck, honey, they could put me up in the presidential suite at Walter Reed—give me better medical care than anyone else in this country is getting—and it wouldn’t make a difference to this cancer. Even if it would, a few extra months aren’t worth the price of my soul. I washed my hands of Bell two decades ago, and for good reason. Steve Bell doesn’t give a damn who gets hurt by his guns.”

  “Maybe we should stop,” she said, even though the words hurt her. Even though she was thinking about Cassie. Maybe they could find a different way to give her that closure she needed.

  Unfinished business.

  Maybe Beck was right in the first place, and they should’ve just burned the headquarters down.

  Grandpa put his hand on Beck’s shoulder.

  “He’s trying to get rid of you, honey. Fancy art program in New York? Bell is looking at unprecedented pressure on his company. And you are doing that.”

  Grandpa smiled, pulled the newspaper from Beck’s hands.

  “Medusa,” he said, studying the photo. “It’s good art, Beck. And it’s working.”

  It’s working. Beck said the words again in her head. There’s pressure on his company.

  A hundred thousand likes. Debates on gun control breaking out in the comments.

  And Cassie’s name, repeated again and again, by friends, strangers.

  Invoked in the name of change.

  Beck took out her map and looked at their next mural, marked by an X and the name of the woman from a Greek myth that Beck planned to paint there.

  This one was Cassie’s pick.

  Andromeda, she�
�d explained, was sacrificed to a monster to keep her city safe.

  Cassie

  The story I’m telling them,

  the whole story,

  from the beginning,

  could be the length of an epic Greek poem

  called “Things I Kept from Vivian and Beck.”

  So many secrets. Lies. Half-truths.

  It happened quick—I was in

  over my head

  treading water so hard

  I couldn’t call for help

  even from them.

  I watch the hurt in their eyes

  as these truths come out now

  and it is a dull, throbbing ache

  to tell my friends, even now,

  even in death.

  I didn’t tell them

  when I started sleeping with him.

  I didn’t know how to tell them

  it happened before I was ready,

  before I really understood

  what he was doing.

  If I’d told them I felt shame

  they’d have told me

  that the shame belonged to him.

  But I didn’t tell them

  so they couldn’t tell me.

  I didn’t tell them

  that the road trip we took last year

  was just after the first time

  he said he wore a condom,

  but didn’t,

  and I went into that drugstore

  for a pregnancy test

  and panicked and bought

  blue hair dye instead.

  I didn’t tell them how

  I sobbed with relief

  a week later when I

  got my period.

  I didn’t tell them

  his reaction when we got home.

  When he saw the blue hair

  and his hand slipped into it.

  To move it around, I thought,

  because it shone so brilliantly

  in the sunlight.

  Then that hand wrenched my hair,

  twisted against my head,

  and he asked how I dared

  to ignore him for two days

  and come back looking

  like this.

  I didn’t tell them

  that I cried when he let me go

  and promised to dye it back

  or that when I looked across the

  hallway, I saw Mr. Bell standing there,

  watching us.

  I didn’t tell them how I waited,

  tears running down my face,

  for him to yell at Nico

  and say how wrong it was

  and take me right home.

  But all he did was say

  that dinner was ready.

  I didn’t tell Vivian and Beck then.

  But I tell them everything now.

  I let it fuel their sparking anger,

  their determination to

  make someone pay.

  To make Bell pay.

  For looking the other way.

  Vivian

  CASSIE HAD ALWAYS LOVED THE TRAGIC heroine.

  Juliet.

  Antigone.

  Eponine.

  Gwen Stacy.

  So Vivian wasn’t surprised when, during the summer they were all twelve years old, Cassie became obsessed with a poem called “The Lady of Shalott.”

  “So she gets in the boat and dies?” Beck asked when Cassie finished reading it to them. Confusion shaped her whole face, from the curves of her orange-red brows to the wrinkles on her nose, distorting hundreds of soft brown freckles.

  “It’s romantic,” Cassie insisted.

  Vivian didn’t see it, and for once, Beck agreed with her.

  “But why do these women always end up dead?” Beck asked even as she helped Cass drag the rowboat off the back of her grandpa’s truck. They waved goodbye as he drove away, and then they began to carry it down to the edge of the lake.

  Besides, it didn’t matter that Beck didn’t understand why Cassie wanted to do this. Because if Cassie—theatrical, emotions-always-brimming-at-the-surface, about-to-burst-into-song Cassie—wanted them to reenact her favorite poem, well, Beck would do it.

  Beck did anything Cassie asked.

  “They’re being punished, for being strong. It’s called symbolism,” Cassie said.

  “It’s called being morbid,” Beck countered. Beck’s curls kept falling out of her messy bun and into her face, and when she reached up to tuck it back, the end of the boat swung down into Vivian’s shin.

  “Shit, sorry,” Beck said.

  “Language,” Vivian scolded, glaring at Beck and reaching down to rub her leg.

  Beck rolled her eyes.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she drawled out.

  Vivian could have kept sparring, but she let it go. It was summer. The heat was turning humid and sticky, just the way she liked it—perfect lake weather. And there they were, at the lake. Everything was right with the world, as far as Vivian was concerned. Bruised shin and ridiculous friends and all.

  In return for Beck’s fierce loyalty, Cassie fought hard for Beck. She was the one who insisted that Beck had a soft side. Vivian thought of it more like the underbelly of a cat. They might expose it, might look soft and inviting for a moment, but pet at your own risk. Those claws were sharp and on standby. But Cassie forced the issue. She said it was good for Beck to feel big things. That if the two of them didn’t draw her out, she’d be like a clam in a shell buried two feet under mud, churning pearls the world would never see. Cassie saw it as her own personal mission to dig Beck out of the darkness, and was always pulling Vivian into her plans.

  Which was how they all wound up at the lake, playing out a scene from a poem, under Cassie’s careful stage direction.

  Which began with a debate over who should play the Lady of Shalott in the first place.

  “It has to be Beck,” Cassie insisted. “She has red hair.”

  “What does that matter?” Beck asked.

  “Practically all the tragic heroines are redheads,” twelve-year-old Cassie explained with a sigh, rolling her eyes at them like this was common knowledge. “Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t write them.”

  “No, you’re just obsessed with them,” Vivian groaned. The heat was getting to her. There were a bunch of other kids there, on the side of the lake, swinging from a rope and somersaulting into the water.

  Vivian wanted to jump in, too.

  “If I get into the boat will you leave me alone?” Beck asked.

  “Honestly, probably not,” Cassie answered with a shrug.

  Beck climbed into the rowboat and lay down, red mess of curls sprawled all around her. Cassie nodded, content with the vision of peaceful demise that Beck presented.

  But to Vivian, there was nothing peaceful about the image before her. Beck was an angel of vengeance, her hair a ring of fire surrounding her. Beck was something wild and fearsome that she would never fully understand, but that she would always be a bit envious of.

  Vivian wished she could let it all go—the pressure she put on herself, the anxiety. The need for perfection. Beck never seemed to feel those things.

  Cassie and Vivian set to work, tucking flowers all around her, framing her body with the blooms they’d just pulled from the marshy earth surrounding the lake.

  Vivian leaned in close, reaching for the far side of Beck. When Vivian’s braid slipped over her shoulder, it tickled Beck’s cheek and she laughed, her soft breath on Vivian’s neck, and Vivian pulled back, overwhelmed by her nearness. Beck had always kept Vivian at such a distance that she’d grown used to it, and the sudden closeness made Vivian’s chest ache with something like longing.

  Is this what it was like for Cassie to be close to Beck? To see this softness all the time?

  But Beck must have felt it, too, because she jolted beneath her. Sent the flowers flying.

  “Nope, can’t do it,” Beck said, climbing out of the rowboat, knocking their carefully arranged flo
wers off her as she moved.

  Five minutes later, after a brief but ferocious spat between Vivian and Beck, where Vivian called Beck hopeless and Beck called Vivian impossible, it was Cassie as the Lady, lying in the boat, with Beck and Vivian doing a terrible job at pretending to grieve her.

  “It should be Beck in here,” Cassie said from the boat.

  “Shh,” Beck said. “You’re supposed to be dead, remember?”

  “You guys are terrible at acting,” Cassie said, opening one eye in accusation.

  Vivian reached for the fallen flowers, starting again.

  “Ready?” Vivian asked when everything was arranged just so.

  With a push, they sent Cassie out into the water.

  They stood on the dock and their argument resumed.

  They were totally unaware that in the middle of the lake, Cassie’s rowboat was taking on water.

  Vivian realized only when she heard a splash.

  Someone was in the lake, swimming to where Cassie’s boat had been just a second ago.

  “Cassie!” Vivian yelled, running to the end of the dock.

  She’d have jumped in, too, but he’d found her. The boy who swam in after her.

  He helped Cassie get back to the dock. Kept his hand on the small of her back while she climbed the ladder.

  Nico Bell.

  The next day, the paper called him a hero.

  It was so strange to Vivian now, to think of how much that one summer afternoon had shaped their lives. That if they hadn’t been arguing, Beck or Vivian might have noticed the crack on the side of the rowboat, and not sent Cassie off into the water. That if they’d been looking, they would have seen it take on water, and one of them would have been swimming out to help her. Cassie wouldn’t have developed a massive crush on Nico Bell the summer she was twelve.

  And then maybe when she was sixteen, she wouldn’t have fallen for him so fast. Maybe she wouldn’t have fallen for him at all. Nico, the golden son, who grew up thinking that the world was his for the taking. That Cassie was his for the taking.

  When the world didn’t give her to him, he took her anyway.

  Even after he killed her, the headlines were still about him.

  Bell heir murders ex-girlfriend and self in tragic modern Romeo and Juliet.

  And it wasn’t just the one. So many were like it that Vivian had to leave her phone turned off, because soon any red news alert was enough to make her sick, even when it wasn’t about the shooting.