by Laura Burns
How could she have been so dumb? It had never even occurred to her to go looking for the rest of the Wolfpack after they took off. But if she was committed to the group, really committed like she vowed to be, wouldn’t that have been her first instinct? Wouldn’t she have gone to them instead of Dr. Diaz?
All morning they’ve been trying to give me our alibi, Sarah realized. Nate and everyone else, they came up with a cover story for us, and they’ve all been telling it to me. They’ve been showing me what to do. I’m supposed to say the same thing. If anyone asks, we were all watching that movie in the den, and I was making out with Nate.
They were one another’s alibis. If they all stuck together, no one would be able to disprove their story. It was exactly what the Jager had said—doing this awful thing would make them closer as a group.
Except that meant Karina was really dead. Unless Sarah was being hazed. Or maybe her loyalty to the pack was being tested? Sarah felt like her head was about to crack open.
She took a shaky breath and made a decision. When she was with the Wolfpack, she would speak the lies she’d learned from them. Down in the den, movie, making out, Karina there. Karina there. But she promised herself, she promised her roommate, her friend, her pack sister, that she would find out the truth.
No matter what.
12
Sarah rested her hand against the cold metal of the door. The den had been one of her favorite places on campus, a place where she felt completely accepted and loved—where she felt safe. Her pack had always welcomed her here. So why was she so afraid to open that door now?
Because if she didn’t, Karina could still be alive.
Sarah could still imagine Karina down in the den, reading magazines while the prank on Sarah played out, letting out a giggle every time she thought of the look on Sarah’s face. But if Karina wasn’t there …
She couldn’t stand in front of the closed door forever. She’d promised herself she’d find out the truth. Checking the subbasement was the first step. Still, she took the two flights of stairs slowly. She checked the cells first, then the Bone Man room, even though there was no way Karina would sit around in that creepy place, then she walked to the den.
The TV was off. The sofas and piles of pillows were empty.
On the pile of pillows in the corner, that’s where she’d been making out with Nate last night. The movie playing, the laughter and screams of her packmates, all dull background music while his hands roamed over her body.
Sarah shook her head. That hadn’t happened. They kept saying it, but it wasn’t true. She could picture it so perfectly, but she remembered everything that had ever happened to her, and it just hadn’t.
She glanced around the room again. Karina wasn’t there.
Sarah felt despair rise up in her belly, and she shoved it back down. She wasn’t giving up yet. If Karina was hiding out, there was one other place she might be.
* * *
“Ethan!” Sarah yelled, not caring if anyone heard her. She banged on his door. “Ethan, I know you’re in there!”
The door flew open so suddenly that she almost fell into Ethan’s arms. He wore boxer-briefs and nothing else, and his dark hair was wild. Sarah’s cheeks heated up and she looked away. “Is Karina here?” she asked. Ethan’s room was the obvious place for her to hide. Karina wouldn’t even need an excuse.
“No.” Ethan pulled the door open wide enough for her to see his whole room. It was a mess—piles of dirty clothes, stacks of books about to topple—but he was the only one there.
“Then what are you doing in here?” she demanded.
“Well, Officer, I was taking a pretty epic nap, but I’m afraid I don’t have anyone to back me up on that story,” Ethan said sarcastically.
Sarah pushed past him and glanced around his room, searching for any sign of her roommate. “Karina didn’t come home last night. Izzy figured she stayed with you.”
“She didn’t.” The sarcasm vanished from his voice. “And you still can’t find her? Did you ask your cell?”
“It said she’s offline, and I haven’t seen her all day,” Sarah told him. “I’m … I’m afraid something happened to her.” She left it at that, afraid to betray the pack again.
“Wait. I thought you girls were doing something together last night,” he said, studying her face.
“We were in the library studying.” Ethan would never go to the library, so there was no way he would find out it was a lie.
“I thought you said she didn’t come home.”
“Right. Well, we had a fight,” she lied. “Izzy said some crap about how you’re a horrible boyfriend, and Karina got mad and stormed off.”
Ethan scratched his flat belly. “So the usual?” he said. “What were you doing during this fight?”
“I was on Izzy’s side,” Sarah said.
He laughed.
“We figured Karina went to find you after she left. Like I said, she never came home.” Sarah pushed down the image of Karina’s dead eyes.
“Let’s go.” Ethan stood up and grabbed a T-shirt off the back of his desk chair.
“Go where?” Sarah forced herself to watch him as he pulled his jeans up over his lean hips. She knew he’d make fun of her if she was too shy to watch him getting dressed.
“Go find Karina.” He put on his boots, then glanced at his cell. “Let’s get out of here before lunch period ends. It’ll be easier to get off campus with everyone milling around.”
She’d almost forgotten it was a school day. English felt like forever ago. For a moment, she had a crazy desire to go to her next class, pretend everything was totally normal. She wanted what being in the Wolfpack would give her, that life Nate had described. If she just went to class, just followed along with what Nate said, maybe she could keep that life.
It wouldn’t be hard to convince herself that she’d been in the den, making out with Nate … She could almost feel it, almost hear the sounds of the movie …
“Are you coming?” Ethan asked.
Almost.
“Yeah. I’m coming.”
* * *
Sarah stopped short when Ethan started across the lacrosse field. Behind the stands, there was a hedge higher than their heads and so thick she couldn’t see the other side. He was leading them to a dead end. “Are you screwing with me?” she asked. “I thought you wanted to find Karina.”
“I do.” Ethan didn’t even glance back at her. He kept walking right toward the hedge. “I marked it with an old piece of brick,” he muttered. Eyes on the ground, he veered a bit to the right. “Here.”
“What are you talking about?” In spite of herself, Sarah walked over and looked. A piece of red brick sat half buried in the dirt at the base of one of the bushes. “And this means what?”
“It means the path leads here. Or led here, I guess.” Ethan dropped onto his belly and army-crawled toward the hedge. “You might get leaves in your hair,” he called back.
Sarah watched his legs disappear beneath the massive bushes. What he said hadn’t made any sense. But nothing had the entire day. She’d been knocked completely off-balance and couldn’t seem to find a way to recover.
“I’m not waiting, Sarah.” Ethan’s voice sounded muffled.
Feeling like an idiot, Sarah dropped to the ground. She couldn’t see anything but leaves in front of her face, and as she crawled forward on her stomach, she had to just hope that she wouldn’t smack face-first into the trunk of the bush. If it had a trunk. She hadn’t read anything about evergreen shrubs, and there hadn’t been much ornamental vegetation in the crappy Toledo neighborhoods she’d lived in.
Small branches whapped her in the face, so she closed her eyes and kept moving until she didn’t feel them anymore.
“I think you’re safe now,” Ethan said, sounding amused. He didn’t seem at all worried they wouldn’t be able to find Karina.
Sarah opened her eyes—and gasped. In front of her stretched a wild, overgrown field with weeds and gr
ass at least a foot high. All the school lawns and sports fields on the other side of the hedge were emerald green and perfectly cropped, but here it looked like the no-man’s-land on the side of an interstate.
“Welcome back to reality. You’re always talking about it, so I’m sure you’ll be comfortable here.” Ethan held out his hand to help her up, and Sarah took it, too thrown by the landscape to reply. “Sanctuary Bay Academy doesn’t bother with the world outside its boundaries.”
He set off across the field, and now Sarah could see that there was indeed a path through the weeds—a narrow dirt path, the unplanned kind made by people walking. There had been a path like that across the patch of land between the 7-Eleven and the bus stop at her second-to-last high school. Everyone had been too lazy to stick to the sidewalk on their way to buy Slurpees after school.
“Who made the path?” she asked after a minute. There were so many other questions, but for some reason that was the one that bothered her.
“Don’t know. It was here when I got here,” Ethan replied. “Not that I found it right away—it leads straight to the asylum, but it kind of dumps you in the middle of nowhere at the edge of the school. I always figured there must’ve been something else there before the Academy. That the path used to lead to something other than a giant hedge, but the school just dropped some sod on top of it and that was that.”
“Asylum?” she asked uncertainly.
“That’s right, Sarah, we’re going to the nuthouse.” Ethan didn’t bother to look back at her. He didn’t care whether she followed him or not.
Sarah let the silence stretch out while they tramped through the field. What’s missing is garbage, she suddenly realized. Usually on unused land, among the overgrown grass and weeds there would be litter. Here there was only pristine but crappy-looking nature. It made the whole empty field seem creepier somehow. Emptier. Sarah drew her thin sweatshirt tight around herself. The wind was cold. They had to be heading toward the water.
“I thought we were looking for Karina,” she finally said. Not that they would find her, since she was dead. Sarah pushed that thought away. She didn’t know for sure. She had to keep reminding herself that she didn’t know what the truth was. There had been no body.
“That’s right. If she’s not at school, she’ll be here.” Ethan stopped and gestured down at the building that stood in front of them. Sarah gasped in surprise. Two seconds ago there had been nothing but grass and sky, and suddenly there was a two-story-high brick ruin beneath them.
“We’re on a hill,” Sarah said, shaking her head to clear out the dizzy feeling this place was giving her. The building was tall, but even the roof was below where they stood. “Or is it a cliff?” The ground at her feet dropped down sharply, and the brick building stood at the bottom of a chasm she hadn’t even noticed. “I would’ve walked right off this drop-off.”
“Yeah, the weeds block your view of it,” Ethan agreed. “First time I came here, I fell and slid all the way down to the asylum. It was fun. I broke my arm.”
“This is the old insane asylum?” Sarah stared at the crumbling building. It was much bigger than just the ugly tower she’d seen from the boat on her first day. It was easily as big as the Sports Center—or at least it had been before half of its walls fell down. “They built it in a hole?”
“It’s more like a notch, actually,” Ethan said. “The drop-off is steep, but at the bottom the ground is flat again, and it stays flat all the way out to the bluffs. So the asylum isn’t in a hole. It’s more like the Sanctuary Bay Academy is up on a mesa.”
“I saw part of it from the boat, but the rest was hidden by the trees, I guess. I had no idea this was all still here, rotting away,” Sarah whispered. She wasn’t sure why, but it seemed wrong to talk loudly.
“You probably saw the ruin, the one up here,” Ethan said. “That was doctors’ quarters or something, I figure, because it’s not down in that hole where the patients were. It’s that way, near the edge of the cliff.”
Sarah squinted into the distance, following his gesture, and she could just barely make out the brick tower.
“That one is fenced off because it’s crumbling. I don’t go in there because I don’t want to end up crushed to death. I’m not as stupid as your boyfriend thinks.” Ethan pointed to the ground at his feet. “The path leads to these stairs. I figured that out after I broke my arm.”
Sarah glanced down, startled. She hadn’t even seen the narrow staircase that led down the hill. It was a rickety, ancient-looking wooden structure that hugged the wall of the drop-off. “This place is freaky,” she said, gripping the splintery railing tightly as she climbed down after Ethan.
“My theory is that they chose this island because it had a natural little shelf where they could trap the lunatics,” Ethan said. “They couldn’t get up this cliff except by these stairs, which were locked.” He jumped off the bottom of the staircase, making the whole thing shake. “See? Iron gate.”
Sarah was too busy trying to figure out how to get down the last two steps, which were broken nearly in half, to look up.
“You have to jump.” Ethan’s voice held a challenge.
“Fine.” Sarah didn’t give herself time to hesitate. She simply stepped off the side of the steep staircase and dropped to the ground. The impact sent a shock wave up from her knees to her back. It was only four feet or so, but it still hurt. To cover, she turned to examine the gate. It was made of rusted iron, and had an old lock in place. “Why couldn’t they just climb up onto the steps from the side?” she asked. “The same way we got off?”
“Twelve-foot-high bars.” Ethan pointed to the dirt next to the staircase, where a section of iron fence was lying. “The stairs rotted away enough that the fence fell off.”
The bars each had a sharp spike on the top. Sarah felt a wave of horror. “So the inmates were trapped at the bottom of this … notch. With the cliffs and the ocean on one side, and this hill they couldn’t climb on the other side.”
“Well, it was an insane asylum,” Ethan pointed out. “I’m sure they didn’t want the crazies wandering all over the place.”
“God, you’re such an asshole,” Sarah exploded. “We’re talking about people. Human beings.”
He shrugged. “I suffer from compassion fatigue. We go in over here.”
“Wait, what?” Sarah called, hurrying after him as he headed toward the brick building. There were windows on the first floor, and none on the second floor. Rusted iron bars covered the broken glass of the ancient windows. “What do you mean, you go in?”
“Karina and I. We come here sometimes to … have our privacy.” He smirked. “She enjoys getting loud.”
Sarah winced. This place was horrifying—it was nothing more than a crumbling old prison where people were locked away without windows, trapped on an island, and stuck in a hole with no escape. “You guys use this as a romantic getaway? That is truly messed up.”
“Nobody from the school would ever find us.”
“How did you find it, then?” she asked. Ethan led the way to a place where the brick had collapsed, creating a hole in the wall. He stepped inside. Sarah followed, shivering a little as she left the sun behind.
“My first try at looking for an escape route meant heading toward the water,” he said. “It’s an island. Every way off is going to involve the ocean. So I spent my first six months at Sanctuary Bay exploring every inch of the coastline. It’s hard to miss this place.”
The room they stood in was some kind of wardroom—rusting metal beds lined each side of the long, narrow space. But Sarah was too busy staring at Ethan to take it in. “What?” she cried. “Are you telling me you were serious all this time? You’ve been looking for an escape route for real?”
He stared at her, shaking his head. “Haven’t I told you that about a million times?”
“Well … yeah,” she said. He had. It simply hadn’t occurred to her to believe him. She’d figured it was just part of his I-hate-this-school s
htick, which she also didn’t really believe. It had always seemed like one more way for spoiled Ethan Steere to feel that the best things in the world still weren’t good enough for him.
“I haven’t found a way off yet,” Ethan said, “but I have managed to spot a few places where I can be alone. Off the grid, like here. It’s not escape, but it’s … temporary escape, I guess. Mental escape.”
“From what?” Sarah asked, baffled.
“Sanctuary Bay. All the activities and made-up lacrosse games and rah-rah stuff.” He ran his hand through his hair and gave a little shudder. “Sometimes I just need to get out of there, be where I can think my own thoughts, you know?”
“I guess,” she answered, although until today, she’d never wanted to leave the campus.
Ethan headed deeper into the room, his eyes scanning the decaying mattresses, the jagged, broken bed frames.
“Why did you come here in the first place if you hate it so much?” Sarah pressed. “There’s got to be a thousand kids like me who would die for a chance to go to Sanctuary Bay. Who would love to take your spot if you don’t want it.”
“You think I had a choice?” Ethan gave a bitter laugh. “I’d gladly let the plebes take my place if I could just get off this damn island. Alive, I mean.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“You tell me. My brother never made it.” Ethan stopped walking and stood still, his back to Sarah. Something about the hunch of his shoulders made her want to go over and hug him.
“I didn’t even know you have a brother,” she said.
“I had a brother.” Ethan turned and looked her in the eyes. “Philip. He was five years older than me.”
Sarah was transfixed by the sound of his voice. It sounded hollow, like it belonged to someone else.
“What happened to him?” she whispered, almost afraid to hear the answer.