Watching Kady play with my sisters always made me imagine what it might be like to be married. To be Mr. and Mrs. Sisken and have a family of our own. Kind of freaky to be in high school and thinking about things like that, but Kadence could make me think all kinds of crazy things—like maybe even running away with her to Mexico. We could run a seaside bar where she could sing every night, and I’d mix drinks and make all this fancy Mexican food. Not like, for real. Just one of those stupid fantasies. But I don’t know. A little house here in Pine Grove wouldn’t be too bad. Some day.
Mason: Can I go back to your first question?
Kopitzke: You can do anything you’d like, Mason.
Mason: You asked me what Kadence and Lauren were like together. It just came to me. The best way to describe them…Do you know what mole sauce is?
Kopitzke shakes his head.
Mason: We did a food unit in Spanish class. It’s this sauce made out of chili peppers and chocolate. That’s the way it was with Kadence and Lauren—two very good but very different things that are exceptional together.
Spicy and sweet, I think. Although sometimes I don’t know which girl is which. You take one look at Kady with all her beauty and style and think, spice. Yet for all of Lauren’s sweetness, that girl has a wicked side too.
I almost say something more, then think better of it and close my mouth. Lauren would never hurt Kady. Not for real. She loved her too much.
I close my eyes. The fluorescent lighting is starting to make them burn. I hear a soft shuffle of something sliding across the table, and when I open my eyes, there’s a clear plastic bag on the table. The bag is sealed with tape marked: evidence and do not break seal.
Kopitzke: Do you recognize what’s in this bag?
I don’t answer out loud, but I nod my head. It’s a uniform shirt from Cuppa Cuppa. There’s an obvious bloodstain in the center, just under the logo. I understand what the detective’s showing me, and I understand his unspoken questions. Do I want to rethink my answers? Is Lauren DeSanto really the girl I think she is?
Thirty
Jude
Williams Residence
Saturday, April 7
2:09 p.m.
My boots crunch on the gravel driveway as I walk to the truck. I yank open the door and shove the bottle of Jack under the passenger seat. Soon I’m headed down the open road.
I end up driving aimlessly for a couple hours, listening to a rock station at full volume, screaming along until my throat and ears ache and some of the rage burns off. I only turn around when there’s just enough gas to get me back to Pine Grove. Rebel without a freakin’ cause, no joke. I flip the old radio dial roulette style, and it lands on Willie Nelson singing about all the girls he’s loved before.
“Yeah. You and me both, old man.”
Then as I pull back into town, Johnny Cash comes on, singing “Hurt.” Damn this is a good song. Like the exact song I was meant to hear right now. I pull off to the side of the road so I can listen to it without any distractions. I run a hand down over my face when it’s over, feeling…affected.
It’s only then that I look around and see that I’m stopped across the street from the junior high. It’s deserted since it’s the weekend. I didn’t mean to come here. Least I don’t think I did. Then again…isn’t this where everything always comes back to? Back to Lauren. Back to this place. The place where Lauren ditched me, where Kadence christened me “Zitzenstein” and “stalker,” where even God himself abandoned me.
I park and get out of the car, but not before I remember to grab the bottle of Jack. It’s freezing, the kind of cold that cuts through your coat and down to your bones, then through those too. The winter wind is like the Holy Ghost, my grandma used to say when she was knee-deep in her “special” tea she drank all day long—years later I learned the special ingredient was Southern Comfort. Accept Jesus in your heart, she’d say, and the Holy Ghost comes in so deep inside you, he’s down in your bones.
Always scared the crap out of me. Doomed from the start with DNA like that, I’m telling you.
I stride past the junior high, across the road toward the high school, then into the woods behind it. At least I know where my feet are carrying me now. Let’s go be a normal high school kid for once. Let’s go get drunk in the F.U. Fort.
I come up to the ramshackle wooden structure and pull open the flimsy door. It’s Saturday, so no one else is here. Yep. This is my way of doing high school. Without any of the actual students. I already have the top off the bottle and send a healthy swig down my throat before collapsing onto the nasty gold-plaid couch.
Christ, that burns. I manage not to cough like a pansy. I take another swig and lay my head back on the couch until I’m looking at the slanted tin roof of the shack.
I relax into the couch. Or try to. Damn, this couch is uncomfortable. I shift my butt trying to get in a comfortable position. It’s impossible.
Something’s digging into my thigh. That’s the problem. I frown. Whatever it is doesn’t feel like a spring or slipped frame board. Closing my eyes, I try to ignore it for another couple minutes until finally I’m annoyed enough to check it out. I get off the couch and crouch in front of it.
I lift up the cushion and frown. What the hell? There’s an old army tack box hidden under the cushion. A space has even been hollowed out to fit the box. I can’t decide if it was genius to try to hide something out in public like this or a totally dumb-ass move.
I stare at the box for a moment wondering if I should open it. Who the hell am I kidding? I flip open the latches and lift the lid. Inside is a laptop wrapped in three coats of plastic and sealed in one of those big vacuum Ziploc bags. It takes me no time to unwrap the laptop and flip open the cover. The battery is still thirty-seven percent charged and there’s no password. Curiouser and curiouser. After all, if you’re gonna leave your laptop out in public, at least put a password on it. I click around trying to find out who this fool is.
Opening the My Documents folder gets me subfolders labeled by class. I click on some of those files and find drafts of assignments. A few more clicks and I get a paper with none other than Kadence Mulligan’s name at the top.
What the hell? I jerk back from the laptop like it’s gonna bite. Is this some kind of trick? A way for the cops to get more physical evidence against me? My fingerprints on her laptop or something?
I take a few steps around the small room, looking back and forth. Crap, crap, crap. I drag my hands down my face. I need to think for a second. Who the hell would be trying to frame me? And how did they know I’d be here? I didn’t even know I would come here until I stopped the truck.
No. I try to calm my racing heart. No one’s trying to frame me. I push open the door to the fort and look outside. No cops. No reporters jumping out and shouting, “Gotcha!” either.
I shut the door again and stare down at the laptop. The screen stares back. Damn thing’s taunting me. Kadence’s laptop. How the hell did it get here? Lauren said the cops didn’t find it with Kadence’s stuff, so everyone assumed it went missing when Kadence did. So how’s it here?
I sit down and pull it into my lap again. My fingerprints are already on it, so why not? I close all the document files and look through the other folders. In the My Pictures folder there’s only a bunch of images of Kadence performing at shows. Self-obsessed much? With that a bust, I’m not expecting much when I click on the My Videos folder.
But I don’t find videos of her performances. No, this is something else. Diary-type videos for YouTube that she must never have posted. If she had, they would’ve been playing them on all the news shows. There aren’t any dates, but in the first video she talks about it being winter and wearing a scarf to protect her voice. In another she’s talking about Lauren and even me in a roundabout way.
It’s crazy, watching these. I hated this girl. She’s being her normal, super-artifi
cial self in these videos. All I’m-so-friendly and Gosh-darn, aren’t-I-likable? It’s why I slipped up even after the meds were out of my system and would videotape her sometimes. I wanted evidence. Like if I could catch her in the moments where she was showing her true witch face, then I could…I don’t know, prove to the world that she wasn’t what they all thought. Or at least prove it to Lauren.
I can’t help clicking and watching the next video and the next and the next. I frown as the tone of the videos starts to change. Then I get to the last one.
Wait, what?
I thought I knew Lauren DeSanto. But I was wrong. The Jack Daniel’s is forgotten, the cold is forgotten. I stare at the blank screen after the video finishes. Kadence’s words ring in my head. Lauren was never the girl that I thought. I’m not the first person that she’s done this to. Stabbed in the back.
I stare at the laptop, mind racing. The other girl Kady talks about, the one who had to leave school, has to be Mary Blake. I watch the video again, paying attention to every word this time. Lauren slept with her boyfriend and totally destroyed her confidence until she moved away from our school. And then at the end of the video, Kadence shakes her head and swipes at her tear-stained cheeks: I’m going to go sing at her coffee shop. And afterward…she is going to answer for what she’s done.
My mind floods with everything the people we’ve talked to over the past week have said. How, when Lauren explained to Caleb how Kady had outed him to his father, he responded, “You know what? She told me the same thing about you.”
Why’d I assume that Kady had been the one who was lying, not Lauren? Yeah, there were a few moments here and there when I wondered. When Lauren’s reactions to things seemed a little off. Or sometimes I’d wonder why she wasn’t talking about Kady more…But that was Lauren, I thought. She was funny that way. It didn’t mean she didn’t feel it just because she wasn’t showing it like other people did.
But what if she…No way. Or could she…?
Christ. I squeeze my eyes shut and push my palms into my forehead. Because then again, all I could ever see was Lauren. I was always blind to anything else.
I flip through the week’s events like movie clips. Mary shouting, “You ruined my life!”
I let the new thought in. What if it really was Lauren who had hooked up with Nick and set Mary up with Donny? I slide my palms down against my eyes. This is too much. Christ, if it’s true, if it was Lauren who was the master liar in this game, then maybe she was actually capable of hurting Kadence. Of covering it all up. The possibility hits me like a punch to the guts.
But maybe not. I scrub my hands the rest of the way down my face.
I could be jumping to the wrong conclusions, couldn’t I? Could Lauren still be innocent in all this? My conversation with Kadence didn’t exactly go down like she made it sound. It was back in early January, but she made it seem like it was recent. And I certainly never “bared my soul to her.” I didn’t tell her about Mason’s interest in Lauren because I was “genuinely worried” about anything—least of all Kadence. It was just a last card to play in my already fizzling plans for revenge. I’d stopped the meds in December, and I felt lost.
Kadence hardly seemed that impressed that I’d “gotten myself together and moved past all the hurtful things” that they’d done to me either. In fact, she laughed in my face when I told her that I was Nathan. I didn’t feel pissed or vindicated or anything much at all after the conversation. Just…empty. There wasn’t satisfaction in revenge, it hit me then. It just made for this vague, ugly feeling in my stomach. I let most of it go at that point, except for the occasional impulse to catch Kady out and unmask her for the fake she was.
But it strikes me now that maybe both girls were twisted, not just Kadence. Lauren certainly spent enough time around Kady to have picked up her tricks.
So what the hell’s really going on? And why is Kadence’s laptop here, still with battery life no less? Kadence’s parents could be strict, with her dad being army and all. I guess I can maybe understand why she couldn’t keep a laptop full of personal thoughts in her house. She could have put it here before she ever went missing. If no one’s used it since then, it’d still have battery life after a week and a half. But why hide it here in such a public place and with no password on it? Kadence was smarter than that. Above all, she was smart.
But then again, so is Lauren. She’s the one who made their lyrics so powerful. The lyrics kept their music from being too sugar sweet. Christ, if Kadence had been writing the lyrics, I don’t even want to think about how shallow those songs would be. Lauren was the one slipping in the literary stuff and writing lyrics that had people on the Internet making .gifs like crazy and reposting them everywhere. Not that anyone remembers that now that they’ve all turned on her. Damn it, how can I still feel so much for her, even while I’m thinking she might have done something to Kady?
The darkness in you calls to the darkness in me.
I wish I had my notebook to write that down. I say it again in my head, and then over again once more. The darkness in you calls to the darkness in me.
I close up the laptop. Then, on inspiration, I slip the bottle of Jack into the Ziploc bag, place it in the tack box, and secure the latches. The next visitors to the F.U. Fort will find a nice surprise.
I walk back to my dad’s truck, the laptop tucked under my arm. I breathe in the cold, biting air. There’s something about winter. It’s so crisp, clean. Another cutting wind blows in and I think about Grandma and her Holy Ghost again. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized she wasn’t talking about an actual ghost, that it was supposedly the part of God that was like the wind. I breathe in deeply, letting the wind into my lungs.
I like the idea of breathing in a little bit of God on this insane day. It brings a calmness that I haven’t felt in a very long time. I’m going to confront Lauren. But the rage that drove me out of the house is gone. I’m not afraid either, no matter what I find out. Either Lauren DeSanto is a twisted liar, maybe even a murderer, or she’s innocent. That I’ll finally have some answers to the riddle gives me a sense of peace. Soon I will know who Lauren really is and why she left me all those years ago.
I’ve been mixed up for a long time now. Maybe it was never about becoming a new man, and maybe I was never really a monster. Maybe I’m just me, and it’s time to figure out who that is.
Either way, it’s time to learn the truth.
Thirty-One
Lauren
DeSanto Residence
Saturday, April 7
7:00 p.m.
I lie in bed, staring at the fake stars on my ceiling and thinking about how much more time I spend staring at them than at the real deal. Kadence helped me glue them up there when we were in eighth grade. Even after my birthday bedroom remodel, the stars remained. Kadence always told me to reach for the stars. “Reach for the stars before they burn out,” she’d say. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
It seems so symbolic. I thought what I had was real. With Kadence. With Jude. Now everything is more confusing than ever—it’s been a fake, glow-in-the-dark kind of life, and right when I finally get what I’ve been reaching for, it’s nothing but plastic.
After finding Coco earlier, I left the search party and came home. I actually managed to fall asleep for a few hours, but now I am all but swallowed up with my own self-pity. Which sucks. It’s not anything I’m proud of. I’m thinking that I’m basically a pathetic mess, probably destined for a mental breakdown, when my window rattles so loudly I nearly have a heart attack too.
BUM…Ba-BUM. BUM…Ba-BUM.
Jude.
I didn’t answer his earlier call or his text because I wasn’t ready to talk to him and I didn’t understand how or why he was out of jail.
I’m still not sure my head is clear enough to talk to him, but there’s nothing I want to do more. I want answers. I deserve
answers. After everything the detectives showed me this morning, I deserve to know the truth. I need to know why Jude was spying on us. Filming us. Was it some form of irony? A joke? Finally doing what we’d falsely accused him of all those years ago?
And helping me investigate Kadence’s disappearance, was that a joke too? Was any of it real? Those moments I thought we’d connected…that kiss…
The knock comes a second time. Still I hesitate. When a long, drawn-out silence follows, I panic that I’ve waited too long. I launch myself from the sheets and yank open the curtains. My heart stutters, then pounds against my sternum when I find Jude standing there, facing my window. I might have even given a little shriek.
I open my window, but he doesn’t come in like before. Instead, he shakes his head and curls his fingers, beckoning me to follow.
For several seconds, I stand there and stare at him, backing away. Is he serious? I shake my head. No way.
He tilts his head slightly to the side, studying me in that way he sometimes does. I squirm uncomfortably, like a worm that’s been washed onto the sidewalk after a rain. Completely exposed.
Jude steps toward me, bracing his hands against the window frame. “I take it the detectives showed you some stuff?” His blue eyes are piercing as he searches mine. “Do you really think I’d hurt you, Ren?” But then a shadow crosses his face, and I don’t know. I really don’t know.
My heart is beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. I stare back at him. Breathless. And then my answer comes to me: “No,” I whisper, my raspy voice almost giving out on that single word.
And the thing is, I mean it. I spent years side by side with Kadence Mulligan, the master liar, the queen of feigned sincerity. Enough to recognize a lie when I hear it now. With Jude, I only hear the truth. “No, I don’t think you’d hurt me.”
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