And promised him a fluffed-up contract for waste disposal services that, as far as I can tell, never took place: a cozy arrangement. “So Optimal is a real family kind of operation, huh?”
Brent doesn’t answer right away and I can feel his gears shifting. Then he leans in to me, voice hushed. “I’m beginning to think you’re right about Optimal. Not about the waste. But there’s something funny going on in accounting. Now, this has to be confidential…”
“Of course,” I say.
“Optimal has been thinking of going public. It might be important. I’m trusting you.”
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.
If Optimal is going public, why risk violating compliance laws, why risk investigation and censure? There must be something bigger at stake. More and more, I’m convinced that Optimal’s been using its power and connections to bully, silence, and sway—and to keep everyone who might investigate them looking the other way.
The thunderous noise of cheering and stamping shakes the stadium and sends a vibration all the way to my chest: it’s the end of another school year, the start of a long, brown summer. Brent turns and kisses me without warning. Today his lips are warm, and his chest is warm, and he smells like soap and grass shavings: a clean, hopeful smell. I try to find my way down into some good feeling, but the crowd is too loud.
—
After the game I lose ten minutes with Brent making an excuse for why I can’t go out for a drink. He kisses me again, but this time he lands it right on the corner of my mouth, as if he wants me to think it might have been an accident. By then, the players have disappeared and there’s a chokehold of cars funneling out of the lot.
I backtrack to the gym, hanging back near a picnic table scored with decades’ worth of carved-in graffiti. The kids are in no hurry to get home: dozens of them circulate in packs, like wild animals, visible only by the flash and wink of their phone screens in the dark. A group of girls hunker down in the grass not far from where I’m sitting, and a group of guys doesn’t leave them alone too long before arriving to spark up a joint and start passing around a water bottle that must be full of something else. Eventually, the stream of traffic onto County Route 12 slows to a dribble and the parking lot clears out. But the kids remain, disrupting the quiet with a Morse code of teenage shouting and laughter.
The football players, now showered and changed and carrying duffel bags, emerge from the locker room in pairs. But Monty comes out alone. I have to shout his name three or four times before he looks up, already scowling, as if he’s still on the field and expecting to take a blow.
But then his face clears and splits into the exact same smile I remember from when he was a kid.
“Hey, Abby,” he says, shyly, which is just how he used to greet me as a kid. As if all these years, he’s just been waiting for me to show up.
I feel awkward hugging him, this half-grown giant, and remember anyway he didn’t like it, so instead I just nudge him with my elbow.
“You’ve been doing some growing,” I say.
He shrugs, but he looks pleased. “Football. What are you doing here?” he says.
“I came to watch you play,” I say, and when a smile steals over his face I really wish it were true. “Good game.”
“You shoulda been here for the real season,” he says. Then his face darkens. “I haven’t been playing as much. Not since…” He sucks back whatever he was going to say.
“You got in trouble, right? With Walter Gallagher?”
“You heard about that?” He looks at me sideways, and then, reading my face, says, “You talked to my mom?”
“I called her, yeah,” I say. Monty shuffles his feet. “What happened?”
For a long minute, he just stares down at the space between his ragged sneakers, suddenly morphing back into a kid. “Last Halloween me and some friends snuck onto Gallagher’s.” He looks up at me through his eyelashes—dark, long for a boy’s. “My friend Hayes wanted to steal one of Gallagher’s four-wheelers. We weren’t really gonna take one,” Monty hurries to explain. “It was just talk. We were just pretending we were going to. You know what I mean?” When I nod, he seems to relax. “Anyway, it was kind of a tradition to mess with Gallagher on Halloween, we weren’t even the first ones to do it.”
“And you got caught,” I say.
Monty nods miserably. “He let the dogs on us. Hayes almost got his leg taken off. But we were just messing around.”
“And you were pissed,” I say. He nods. “You said some stuff about Gallagher, threatened to get even.”
He nods again, so droopy with obvious misery he looks like a cartoon bloodhound. “I wasn’t serious, though,” he says.
“Did you start that fire at Gallagher’s?” I ask him, as gently as I can.
“No,” he says immediately. “Hell no.” And I believe him. “Sheriff Kahn’s just got it in for me,” Monty says, on a roll now, huffing with anger. “He’s never liked me, ever since sixth grade he caught me spray painting this old wall behind the plant. No one even goes back there.”
I take a deep breath. “Look, Monty, I have to ask you something. I need you to be honest, okay?” He nods. Despite the fact that he’s six foot three, minimum, and broad as a plank, his face is sweet as a baby’s. “What happened between you and Tatum Klauss?”
“Nothing happened,” he says. He barely gets the words out. “How’d you hear about Tatum?”
I don’t answer, and I don’t let the thread drop, either. One of my law professors once told me you could defend any liar on the planet, so long as he didn’t lie to you. “Did you threaten to hurt her?”
“I would never hurt Tatum,” he says quickly, and he winces, as though the idea is painful.
“Sheriff Kahn says Tatum complained about you,” I say. Poor Monty. “According to Tatum, you wouldn’t leave her alone.”
“Yeah, well, I was just trying to get her to listen.” A hoot of laughter from the group of high schoolers seems to startle him.
I know that kind of laughter: like the hooting of an owl sighting a mouse. Sharp. Predatory.
“Listen to what?”
He looks away. A muscle tightening in and out across his jaw. “It was nothing. Some stupid game with her friends. But they aren’t her friends. They don’t give a shit about her.”
The Game. A bad feeling scratches my neck. Probably coincidence. But still. “What kind of game?”
But Monty feels the currents changing. Despite his size, despite his football jersey, in Barrens, Monty isn’t a hawk, but a mouse: and like all prey everywhere, he knows when there’s danger in the air. The black mass of high schoolers is restless, shifting, swelling with sudden sound. “Look,” he says, and I can tell he’s impatient now. “It was just some stupid-ass game with some older dudes, piece-of-shit nobody suckfaces. But Sheriff Kahn didn’t ask them, did he? Just because they got flashy cars and tighty-whities.” He shakes his head. “I was just trying to help her. I was just trying to—”
He breaks off suddenly, as the mass of kids lobs a single word in our direction, again and again. Freak. Freak. Freak.
“Tatum’s friends,” he says, in a strangled voice. Then: “I gotta go.”
He takes off to the parking lot at a half jog, sticking as close to the gym as possible, head down, as if he might slide by, invisible. Not that easy. Never that easy: a water bottle misses his head by inches, then an empty beer can, clattering off the side of the gym just as he disappears around the corner.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“You should be careful, miss.”
I’m not sure who says it. Turning, for a second I’m not even sure the comment was meant for me, but then a shadow comes toward me. A girl. With the calm air of all beautiful girls, as if the world is pouring toward them and they only have to stand there and wait. She repeats: “You should be careful.”
“What are you talking about?” I say.
There’s a pause. She picks her way across the grass, wobbling a litt
le; she’s drunk, or maybe just having trouble finding her footing in the dark.
She stops a good twenty feet from me, edging into the light.
I recognize the waterfall of blond hair. Wide-spaced blue eyes. A face uncannily like Kaycee’s.
“I said you should be careful,” she repeats. “He might kill you. He might burn you to death.” When I say nothing, she adds: “He carries bombs in his backpack. He acts normal but his head is all screwed up.”
“Who?” I ask automatically.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” is all she says, and turns away.
“Sophie.” She freezes when I call her name. “Sophie Nantes, right?”
She doesn’t turn back to me, but I can see her stiffen.
I swallow hard. “Congratulations on the Optimal Stars Scholarship.”
She does turn around then, just for a moment. Just enough that I can see the way the words have taken her whole face and funneled it down into a hard look of hatred.
—
Back in my day, the Game was an open secret, a tradition everybody knew about, even the teachers. But sometime around my senior year the Game took on a new dimension: instead of just the prettiest girls, the hottest girls, the senior boys started targeting the weirdos, the loners, and the unpopular girls, too.
But by then it wasn’t just about the pictures anymore. The big scheme was in the shakedown that came after: money, blowjobs, and behind-the-stadium handjobs demanded as payment to keep the photos from getting back to parents, sisters, teachers.
That’s what happened to Becky Sarinelli. And if Condor took the photos, he must have been the one to release them, too.
Which means: Becky was one of the few girls who didn’t pay up.
It doesn’t totally surprise me to find out the Game is still going on. Things like that have a way of carrying down, generation to generation, twisting the way viruses do, becoming more powerful and bleeding across borders to high schools around the world.
But Monty mentioned money and flashy cars, and I can’t see that he would have talked that way about any of the local boys. Even the richest kids in Barrens are still lucky to inherit their father’s old Ford when they turn sixteen.
So what kind of men is the Game attracting now?
It shouldn’t matter. Joe’s right. I should focus on what Optimal is doing now. Monty and his girl problems don’t come within a hundred yards of my business.
Except I can’t shake the feeling that they do.
Every time I close my eyes, I walk back through Kaycee’s paintings and stop behind the largest one of all: a girl barely etched in pale color, a screaming mouth and eyes rolling wide like a panicked horse, and around her, a group of men, tall and narrow as tombstones. White teeth, clean angles. Flash.
Chapter Thirty
Monday morning, Flora comes to hail me at our brand-new office behind Sunny Jay’s, where Condor works. Now not only is Condor across from me at home but he is next to me at work as well. Flora waves her arms overhead like an aircraft marshal trying to get me to wheel-in right.
“Environmental Testing Labs sent results of their tests,” she says, before I’ve even cleared the door. “We’ve been calling.”
“Already?” I ask. Normally getting results from ETL is like waiting for aliens to come to Earth with gifts.
“Lead,” she bursts out, before I can ask. “Lead five times the legal limits.”
“Is it true?” I turn to Joe.
He responds by wordlessly passing over the report: preliminary investigation of the chemical and hard metal composition of the Barrens, Indiana, public water supply. The document is short and straightforward: the reservoir is filthy, contaminated not just by lead but by trace amounts of mercury and industrial pollutants with unpronounceable names. Of course, the report makes no claims about the source of the pollution—it will be our job to link it to Optimal—but this gives us more than enough to take a formal complaint to the judge.
So why don’t I feel like celebrating?
This evidence is enough to justify closing up shop and heading back to Chicago. We could easily do the rest of our work there, from our own homes and our own beds. I could get the hell out of here. And yet…
All I can think about is Kaycee. Coughing up blood. The dizzy spells, the passing out.
“Who’d you have to rub-and-tug to get these back so quickly?” I ask. There is the abstract truth: documents and numbers and theories. And then there is the real truth: Gallagher’s ruined crops, the wreckage of his life savings; little Grayson, with a soft head and a malformed brain; Carolina Dawes and her son’s itchy rashes.
“Actually, I can’t take the credit on this one,” Joe says. “Your prosecutor friend Agerwal leaned on them himself. It turns out he was serious about taking corruption out of Monroe County.”
“An honest politician. Who knew?” Everyone’s watching me, waiting for me to look happy. I keep rifling through the stack of pages, turning the words and charts back and forth. “What are the symptoms of lead poisoning again?”
“Skin irritations, for one. Rashes, like people have complained about.” Joe ticks the symptoms off on his fingers. “Long-term exposure can lead to birth defects, major cognitive disorders.”
“And Gallagher’s complaints about his yield are in line with the agricultural effects,” Flora puts in. “It all fits.”
“It fits with what people are reporting now,” Portland speaks up. Thank God I’m not the one who has to say it. “But it doesn’t fit with what happened to Kaycee Mitchell.”
Joe frowns. “Not you, too,” he says to Portland. Then: “You guys, this is a slam dunk. CEAW’s going to funnel some more funds into another round of testing. In the meantime, we can get out of here. If I never see a cornfield, or a shotgun, again, it’ll be too soon.”
“Snob.” I try to make it sound like a joke, but I can’t even force a smile. My mouth is dry. Tongue like a sock. I should be thrilled, but there’s too much miring me here in Barrens: the freaking barn fire, and Monty, I believe, wrongfully accused. My dad falling apart before my eyes. Brent kissing me all the time like I’m his girlfriend or something. Misha. Condor and his daughter and her hula-hoop.
Shariah and her baby’s tiny head. Lilian McMann’s daughter, in nothing but her socks.
The bribes.
The Game.
“What about a corruption case?” I blurt out.
Joe shoots me a puzzled look. “Why do you think Agerwal took an interest? He’s all over it already. I spoke to him this morning, and gave him your notes—on Pulaski and the connection between Optimal and Clean Solutions. Clean Solutions looks like a money dump, just like you said. Any luck, we’ll be home in Chicago right in time for dollar oysters at Smith and Wollensky.”
I can hear how truly excited Joe is about getting home—back to his life in Chicago, where a gay black man blends right in. Where he’s easily juggling a rotation of seven boyfriends and can be seen with any one of them in public. Back to the perfection of his city apartment, filled with fabulous eccentricities, a state-of-the-art sound system, matching wineglasses, and an odd “water feature” that’s essentially just a fountain.
It’s another reminder of how different he and I really are. The prospect of returning to my condo—brand-new, impeccably clean, modern, and practically empty—fills me with dread.
I know now that there’s a hole inside me. A hole that can’t be patched or filled with files or paperwork or legal cases or new clothes or miles or happy hours or bartenders.
This was never about the water. It’s not even about Kaycee, not really.
It’s about me.
“This is exactly what we came to do, Abby,” Joe adds, softer now.
But that’s where he’s wrong.
—
When I was a kid, the reservoir was the biggest body of water I’d seen, and it was the center of the whole world. The south side was always the good side, the area with people whose parents had jobs as ele
ctricians and telemarketers and, later, at Optimal. On the west side is a wild nest of woods. The east side is where the skeleton of Optimal gradually rose up, like a shipwreck in reverse.
And to the north, there’s an old dump of ramshackle homes, a lot of them empty, the trees growing thick between them. It’s only a mile walk through the woods from my dad’s house. A mile of woods that I played in as a kid—I would sit with my back against a rock, surrounded by trees, imagining I could live there forever like a fairy when I knew my mother was dying. Where I played hide and seek with Kaycee, and where we buried Chestnut.
I take the dirt roads instead of the woods, roads baked in heat. Flies buzz over something dead and, through the trees, the reservoir shimmers.
When I climb out of the car, I feel a little like I’m on the wrong side of a microscope. Here, too, the residents run their sewage straight into the trees down the hill. It can cost four grand for a new water hookup, and no one around here has that kind of money. They must be filling their taps and showers with water from the reservoir, like all the poorest families do. No wonder Shariah’s kid was born disfigured.
Shariah Dobbs lives at #12 Tillsdale Road, which is hard to find because these roads are more like pathways and none of them have signs. She isn’t home, so I scrawl a note on a scrap of paper I unearth from my bag and tuck it into her mailbox along with my business card.
Returning to my car, my eyes land on the one-story house across a yard littered with car parts. A mailbox leaning off the front door is labeled Allen. It’s a common enough name, I know, but I hesitate, rolling my keys in my palm.
Cora Allen was one of Kaycee’s and Misha’s best friends. Misha told me that she wasn’t doing so well, that they weren’t in contact anymore. It’s amazing how poorly the golden girls of Barrens High have fared.
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