by Sarra Cannon
That remark garnered a few cruel laughs from around the room, and no matter how hard I fought against them, tears pushed at the corners of my eyes.
“Miss Freeman, do you need to be excused?” Mr. Foster asked, his expression one of annoyance rather than concern.
“I’m fine,” I managed.
“Good, then may I please continue?” He turned to finish explaining his formula and for a few minutes, everyone was quiet.
But Asher just couldn’t let it go.
“See, my theory is this,” he whispered, just loud enough that the five or six people closest to us could hear. “I think you and Hailey were secretly in love with each other. We all saw the way you guys were practically attached at the hip.”
“Come on, man, give it a rest,” Eric Mayer said. He was sitting directly behind me, and I guess he’d had enough of Asher’s crap, too.
“No, I’m serious,” Asher said, no doubt enjoying the attention he was getting for making fun of my tragic life. “I think what really happened that night was some kind of lesbian suicide pact. If we can’t be together, we don’t want to live at all kind of thing. Only, Marayah here didn’t die. I bet it was a real bummer waking up from the coma to find out you were still alive.”
Tears of anger and humiliation rolled down my cheeks.
“That’s enough, man, seriously,” Eric said.
“What? Did I make her cry?” Asher said, laughing.
I swiped at my tears and stood, stumbling over my backpack on the floor. That only seemed to make their laughter roar louder, the jerks.
I grabbed my book and my bag and ran from the room, unable to take it anymore. Mr. Foster called my name, but I didn’t dare turn back. I was sure that if I looked behind me, I would see the dark shadow of a snake slithering across the floor.
I wanted to scream until it hurt. I wanted to rip every door off every locker and tear this school apart.
What kind of asshole said things like that?
I’d always known Asher was a jerk, but I’d never realized just how much his words could hurt, because they’d never been directed at me like that.
I found my way to my locker and ran through my combination three times, but it wouldn’t open. Anger rose within me, boiling over. I wanted to slam my fist into the metal until it bled. I wanted to take the lock in my hand and crush it in my fist.
“Open, dammit,” I said.
But as I reached for the lock, a dark shadow wrapped around it like a cord and the dial began to spin, faster and faster. I swallowed, my throat dry and my heart racing.
I dropped my bag to the floor and pressed my hands to the side of my temples. “Stop,” I shouted.
The dial stopped turning at my command and the lock clicked open, the sound echoing through the empty halls.
What the hell?
I looked around, almost hoping someone else had seen that. Was that real? Or was I truly losing my mind.
With trembling hands, I opened my locker and slid my Calculus book inside. The stack of books and notebooks shifted suddenly and half the contents of my locker fell onto the floor at my feet.
Frustrated, I squatted down to gather up the mess.
That’s when I spotted the small teal notebook Hailey and I had used for passing notes to each other between classes.
I’d forgotten about it, but just seeing it again made me miss her all over again.
We’d gotten in trouble so many times for passing notes, we finally decided to start passing an entire notebook. If teachers asked, we were sharing homework assignments or returning something that belonged to a friend.
We’d spent an afternoon before freshman year started, giggling on my bed, decorating the entire back and cover of the notebook with stick figures and washi tape. With trembling hands, I opened the spiral notebook and looked through the first few pages of notes.
It was nothing that memorable or insightful. It was just a bunch of simple notes passed back and forth about what we’d overheard in the bathroom or the irony of Mrs. Baker wearing a scarf covered in tiny pictures of donuts.
Even though these notes didn’t say all that much, they were priceless to me. They were her words, and she would never have words again.
After thumbing through a few pages, I finally stood and started putting things back into my locker. The bell would ring any minute, and I couldn’t be sitting out here on the floor like a lunatic. That would only give jerks like Asher more reason to laugh at me.
I started to put the teal notebook in my backpack, but as I gripped the spine of it, a single piece of paper fluttered to the floor.
I bent over to pick it up, confused. We never slipped loose sheets inside, but the moment I saw the symbol sketched on the outside, my heart skipped a beat.
Three concentric circles with three triangles drawn inside.
It was the same exact symbol I had drawn in my notebook last night while I was dreaming.
I carefully unfolded the paper and stared at my dead friend’s handwriting. As I read it, I knew the words on this page would change the direction of my life forever.
Rayah, I wish I had more time to explain, but the clock is ticking, and I’m not sure how much longer I can fight against this darkness. Every second, I feel it watching me.
Waiting for me.
Sometimes, I barely feel like myself anymore, and it’s getting harder to resist.
I’m so scared, and I wish I could talk to you about this, but I don’t want it to hurt you, too. I don’t want to drag you into this mess, but I don’t know what else to do.
Just know that whatever it is, however it happens, if I’m dead—
It wasn’t an accident.
11
Find The Key
I stared at Hailey’s note, completely unable to react or process the words.
Hailey had known she was in some kind of trouble. She knew she was going to die. But how?
There was no doubt in my mind that this was her handwriting, so the note had to be a year old.
But when had she put it here? And how had I missed it back then?
She must have written this right before she died. That was the only explanation about why I hadn’t found it earlier. School had just started back for our sophomore year, and she must have slipped it into our notebook that Friday afternoon before we left for the weekend. Instead of taking the notebook home, I had left it here in my locker.
And she’d died before I ever had the chance to see it.
I brought a hand to my mouth, silencing the terrified sob that tried to escape.
My best friend had been in terrible trouble, and I had done nothing to help her. Not only that, but I’d somehow gotten myself mixed up in it all.
I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t understand.
The space around me began to spin, and for a moment, I was scared I would pass out like I had in the kitchen my first day home.
I leaned against the cool metal of the lockers and took a series of deep breaths, willing myself to stay upright.
This note was proof that something more had been going on with Hailey. Something sinister that couldn’t be explained away by some toxicology report.
But what? What had really happened that night?
And what was happening to me now? The dream. The symbol. The locker. Something horrible was going on, and if I didn’t figure it out, I was going to die just like Hailey had died.
Before this moment, I’d been frustrated by the loss of my memories, wanting to make sense of the drug accusations and the death of my friend, but now, the truth was more important than ever.
My world had suddenly shifted off-balance.
What happened that night hadn’t just been some mistake or some teen tragedy caused by addiction or depression. Hailey was...
I couldn’t even force myself to think it, but the word was sitting there on the edge of my brain.
Murdered.
Her note didn’t give me much to go on, but it was obvious she’d been afrai
d for her life. She had been in some kind of trouble. Enough to try to tell me that if she died, it wasn’t what it looked like.
It wasn’t an accident.
This note changed everything. Someone had been watching her. Someone had killed her.
She said she was fighting against the darkness, but what did that mean? I closed my eyes and saw the black liquid bubbling from her lips and streaming down her face.
The bell rang and the hallway filled with students ready to go home for the day.
I took a deep breath and stuffed the note into the front pocket of my backpack. I tucked the spiral notebook into the main compartment of my bag, along with the books I needed to take home for the night. I closed my locker and headed for the front doors, hoping my sister would be out there, ready to go.
I was anxious to get home and read the note again. I had to find out the truth.
Mom had already arranged to take off early from work so she could pick us up today, so I expected her to be waiting. All I needed to do was make it home without anyone picking up on the fact that I was on the verge of a complete and total breakdown.
I needed time to process this and figure out what the hell I was going to do about it. I needed to look through the rest of my notebooks and make sure she hadn’t written anything else in there that might give me some clue as to what kind of trouble she was in.
“Marayah, hey, wait up.”
At first, I just kept walking, hoping that he would go away. I really didn’t want to talk to my ex right now, but he caught up with me, out of breath.
“Hey,” he said again.
“Hi, Troy. What’s up?”
I glanced around for my sister, but she was nowhere to be found. For now, I was kind of trapped.
“I’m really sorry about what that jerk said in class,” he said. “You know the rest of us don’t feel that way, right?”
I sighed. News travelled fast if Troy already knew about it. I really wasn’t in the mood to play nice.
“How would I know that?” I asked. “It’s not like anyone came to see me or tried to keep in touch while I was gone. How am I supposed to know how everyone feels about me if you’ve been avoiding me?”
He closed his eyes for a long moment and ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair. “I know. That was a really shit thing, Marayah. I wanted to come see you, but it just felt too real, I guess. I didn’t even know what to say to you or how to face you.”
“Did you ever think about how I must have been feeling?” I asked. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I couldn’t seem to make them stop. “I lost my best friend, Troy. Can you imagine what it was like to wake up six weeks later in the hospital and be told that she was gone and that I’d almost died? That I’d missed her funeral and would never get to say goodbye? Can you imagine what it was like to be accused of being addicted to drugs and alcohol? To be suicidal? Do you know what it was like to sit in that drab mental hospital day in and day out with absolutely no one to talk to about it? With no one who believed me?”
He looked away and backed up a few steps. “Shit, I’m sorry.”
My outburst had obviously scared the crap out of him. I took a deep breath to try and calm down for a second before I could speak again.
“Look, don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s a shitty situation all the way around, and we can’t change that. But I was really hoping that I’d come back to find out I still had at least a few friends around here who had my back.”
“If this is about Lena, I told you—”
I held up my hand. “Stop. This isn’t about Lena. It’s about needing to know I’m not completely alone in this,” I said. “Everyone’s worried about saying the wrong thing to me, so they don’t talk to me at all. And then apparently some people have their own very elaborate theories about what really happened that night and they feel free to judge me and my friend and make assumptions about what we were up to. But they’re wrong about all of it. No one has a clue what really happened that night.”
His forehead tensed. “What do you mean?” he asked. “I know we haven’t had a chance to really talk about it, but my mom told me you couldn’t really remember much from that night.”
My skin went cold. Something about the way he said that and the way his face tensed up made me wonder if he didn’t want me to remember it.
I stepped closer to him and looked around to see if anyone was listening to us, but no one else was paying attention.
“Troy, do you know something you aren’t telling me?” I asked. “Did you see us? Do you know where we went or what we were doing?”
He fidgeted with the strap on his backpack and cleared his throat.
“No, not really,” he said. “It’s been a long time since that whole thing went down.”
“But we were going out at the time, right? Did you go to the party that night?” I asked.
I’d been so caught up in my own strange memories of that night that I hadn’t even thought about the people who must have seen us at the party before we left. Maybe someone saw something important.
“I was there, but look, I don’t think now is the right time to talk about it,” he said, glancing around. “I don’t really remember much, anyway.”
He was lying to me. I could tell by the way he kept avoiding my eyes and shuffling his feet. He knew something he didn’t want to talk about. But why? What was he hiding?
“Troy, if you know something, you need to tell me,” I said. “If you feel so bad about abandoning me and dating someone else, then you owe me at least this. You owe me the truth. I need to know.”
“I have to go,” he said. “All I wanted to do was let you know I was sorry that guy hurt your feelings. Take care, okay?”
He didn’t even give me a chance to respond. He just bolted toward the doors to the school and disappeared inside, as if he couldn’t get away fast enough.
Frustrated, I kicked the base of the flagpole in front of the school and cursed.
This whole time, I’d known there was something more to that night. I’d known it wasn’t as cut and dry as Dr. Millner said.
There was a lot more to the story, and no matter how often people had told me I needed to move on, I’d been unable to just let it go.
Well, now I knew why. The truth was still locked away somewhere deep inside of me, and I was going to find the key, no matter how long it took.
12
That Wasn’t The Real Story
It took forever to break away from Mom’s curious questions about the first day back at school, but I finally convinced her that I had a mountain of homework I needed to get done.
Once inside my bedroom, I locked the door and threw my backpack onto the bed.
I paced the floor, running through everything I knew as fact.
There wasn’t much, to be honest. The doctors and even the police had asked me plenty of questions about the night Hailey died, but they hadn’t been particularly forthcoming about the details of what happened.
Dr. Millner wanted to focus on my recovery, so anytime I brought up my own memories of the accident, she steered me toward what everyone else believed to be true. I’d had no choice but to push my own strange memories to the back of my mind as best I could so that I could move on.
All I’d really been told about that Saturday was that I’d left home around three that afternoon. I’d told my parents I was going to a party over at Leslie Morrow’s house on the other side of town. Most of my class was expected to be there, and I apparently had planned to spend the night there with Hailey and several other girls from my class.
Hailey and I had both had high levels of drugs and alcohol in our system, so they said we must have had access to them at the party.
At some point, though, Hailey and I left the party in her car. No one remembered exactly what time we left, but right around midnight, we’d gone off the edge of the old wooden bridge near the abandoned factory.
According to what I’d been told, we’d both been thrown from t
he car. Hailey had died on impact, but I had miraculously survived. Police had arrived on the scene quickly, and I had been transported to Twin Rivers Hospital where I remained in a coma for nearly six weeks.
End of story.
Except that wasn’t the real story at all.
I had avoided asking for too many of the details, because I was scared to find out the truth. I was terrified that they were all right about us. In some ways, it was easier not to know.
But now, I had no choice but to face it. I had to hunt down every piece of this puzzle so that I could put them back together and figure out what really happened to my friend. And what was happening to me.
No matter how difficult the truth might be.
I sat down on my bed and unzipped my backpack. I dug out the spiral notebook and lay it and Hailey’s note on my bedspread. This is where I had to start. I turned to the first empty page of the notebook and started to create a timeline for that week.
I didn’t have much to go on yet, but I wrote down the few things I knew for certain:
Friday? Hailey writes note and slips it into my locker
Saturday - 7AM - Hailey’s morning run
3PM - Go to Leslie’s party
12AM - Car goes off the bridge (Medallion?)
It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
I needed to talk to people who saw Hailey the week she died. Her coach. Her mom. Our friends. The clues were out there, I just hadn’t gone looking for them yet.
I tried to think about what else might have happened during the week leading up to the accident. Every day since the previous summer, Hailey had gotten up at five in the morning to run before school. I couldn’t remember her exact schedule, but on school days, she would run three or four miles.
Saturdays, though, she left later and liked to run farther. She would run ten miles or more, choosing some of the rougher trails up in the mountains to increase her endurance. Sundays were her rest days.
She took her training very seriously, and she saw running as her ticket to a full scholarship to college. Something her mother never would have been able to pay for on her own. There was even talk about Hailey trying out for the Olympic team in a few years.