by JJ Strong
“Cullen?” she said. “Should we call Cullen?”
“Do you trust him?”
“Do you?”
We stared at one another, waiting for the other to answer. That’s when the doorbell rang. As soon as I heard it, I was floored with the understanding of how badly I’d screwed everything up. Not only for myself, but for everyone. I couldn’t keep Mom happy, and I couldn’t keep Bri happy, and I’d just single-handedly ruined the life of my only friend in the world.
Bri was already in motion. She shoved open the window near her bed, letting in a burst of cold air, and moved to the door. “Stay here,” she said. “If you hear the cops, go down the roof.”
She was out the door before I could say anything, but if I had stopped her I would’ve explained that there was no point in sliding off the roof and escaping into the woods. I was fifteen years old and, I was certain, wanted for murder. All I owned was a twenty-dollar bill left over from the money I’d taken from Dad’s closet. Where exactly did she expect me to go?
There was some talking downstairs that I couldn’t make out. It sounded like a man at the door talking to Dad and Bri. I sat on the bed and tried to breathe. I don’t know why, but I thought about how I hadn’t showered yet, and I tried to straighten my hair quickly but then thought about how stupid that was and stopped doing it. I stood and paced the room. My heart beat. My stomach turned.
The door opened, and in walked Bri.
After her came Cullen.
Bri shut the door behind him. He smiled and winked at me. I was so mad at him that if my mom weren’t sleeping in the next room, I would have tried to strangle him. But I was afraid of doing anything that might upset the balance of the day and somehow set off a chain reaction that led to my being found out. So I sat there and tried not to look at him.
For a long time nobody said anything. Cullen leaned against Bri’s dresser, while Bri came and sat next to me on the bed.
“Anyway, I guess we should get going,” he said.
“Going where?” Bri asked.
Cullen peered across the room, out the window. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to sit around here waiting, do you?”
“What the hell were you doing?” I said.
“When?”
“You tackled me. You . . .”
“I didn’t tackle you.”
“This is all your fault! You did this!”
“I didn’t load the gun, Ray. I didn’t pull the trigger.”
My fists were shaking at my sides, and I told Cullen through clenched teeth—clenched so tight that it hurt when I finally relaxed my jaw moments later—“This is your fault.”
He stood there in his cool leaning pose. I wasn’t only mad at him for what happened in the store. That was a big part of it, of course. But what enraged me even more was all the stuff in the days leading up to the robbery. How cool he always made himself seem. How strong. How brave. When the whole stupid thing was fake.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine by me.” He laughed a little. “I didn’t shoot anybody, Ray.”
This was exactly the type of thing Cullen would say, and he said it all calm and composed, which just made me angrier and angrier.
I felt hot and moved to the window.
“Maybe it’s okay,” Bri said. “Maybe he’s not dead.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
“But how do you know?”
“I just know!” I said.
“Well, you had the mask on, right? Maybe—”
“Amir knew,” I said. “He knew everything.”
“Okay, well, there has to be something we can do. Something . . .”
Bri trailed off, and it was just as well, because I’d suddenly stopped listening. Through the window I’d seen something move in the woods. Again I felt too hot, so I stuck my head out the window. It smelled like cold rain outside. A dark figure moved on the other side of our fence. It was a person, no doubt about it.
I heard Bri’s and Cullen’s voices but was no longer registering words. I was under the wave now. The figure moved closer to the fence and stepped into a gap in the bushes that separated our yard from the woods. My heart leaped when I saw his face. He was looking, one at a time, into each window of the house. And I shook with fear.
He found me in the corner window and smiled. An unhinged smile. The look of a person who had no fear. Who would do anything and go anywhere and take any risk or challenge posed to him. He pointed at me. Why? I thought. Why is this happening?
I wanted to duck away from the window, but something kept me standing there, staring at Amir like I was in a dream.
I heard Bri saying my name. “Ray,” she was saying. “Ray, what are you thinking?”
Rain dripped from the trees, and Amir’s damp hair looked like black paint smeared on top of his head. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and held something up between the bushes to show me—a gun. The same one I’d so stupidly dropped in the store.
“Ray,” Bri said again. “What is it?” She stepped over to me and looked out the window to see what I’d seen. But when I turned back to where Amir had been, there was now only the woods, the trees gray and dreary but somehow innocent-looking in their bareness.
“What did you see?” Bri asked me.
I turned to Cullen. He gave me a look that seemed to say he already knew what I was going to say. Like he knew exactly what I’d seen.
“I know a place,” he said. “Nobody will find us.”
“And what then?”
“We lay low till we figure out our next steps.”
I took a quick breath and nodded at him. He smiled a little, his eyes jumpy with excitement. This was exactly the type of stuff he got excited about. And it was, I remembered now, exactly the type of thing I had asked for.
“Ray,” Bri said. “Can you talk to me? Are you sure about this?”
I looked out the window and didn’t answer her. The screen door downstairs squeaked open. Dad’s arm appeared briefly and out ran Lincoln, who sprinted to the spot where Amir had been, and you could see even from up here that Lincoln was trying to bark. But of course no sound came out. He rose with his two front legs against the fence, and he looked so sad, snapping his teeth, flinging his head all over, warning everyone about invisible demons, wishing, just this once, that someone could hear him.
Brielle
THE MINUTES I HAD SPENT in the car with Roman during the robbery had been awful. He’d pulled a thin bottle of vodka from the pocket of his cargo pants. He wouldn’t stop gulping down liquor, pulling at his pants, and talking—constantly talking and wiping a spittle of saliva that fizzed at the corner of his mouth.
“I like blondes,” he told me.
“Okay.”
“I don’t even like brunettes.”
Anxiety over Ray in the store with that loaded gun welled in me almost to the point of exploding, and if I could have pushed a button and made Roman disappear from the world forever, I would have done it.
“Cullen can keep you,” he kept saying, his words sloppy, while he held a chapped hand to the side of his head as though trying to keep his skull from tipping off his neck. At one point he tumbled out of the car and stepped into the neighboring alley, polishing off the vodka and tossing the bottle against the side of a dumpster, where it shattered in one high, clean note. Beside the dumpster, Roman unzipped and relieved himself.
One benefit of our visit to the Pine Barrens was that I could recognize a gunshot, though I would have recognized this one anyway. It was just one of those unmistakable things. Roman didn’t even flinch at the sound of it. He kept drunkenly at his business without looking up, so I climbed into the driver’s seat, hit the gas, and left him there.
And that was how I found myself staring into the store, looking for my b
rother, and meeting, so oddly, the eyes of Amir. The resonance of the shot still dying in my ears, I saw a masked Ray scrambling down from a muddy slope to the sidewalk, leaping into the passenger seat, slamming the door, and screaming at me, “Go!” Cullen stepped into the door frame of the store. In the rearview mirror, twenty yards away, Roman lurched down the road, pointing at the car.
“Go!” Ray shouted.
Once again, I hit the gas. The tires squealed and whined, and the car fishtailed briefly before I righted it.
I drove without purpose or direction until Ray breathed, “There,” pointing to a sign for the Turnpike. I don’t know why he pointed there, and I don’t know why I obeyed him. We had no destination in mind. We were just getting away. Once we passed through the toll, Ray mumbled something about pulling over that I was sure I’d misheard, until he hunched over like he’d been kicked in the stomach and said again, louder this time, “Pull over,” which finally I did. Ray rolled out of the car and into the halo of a pale orange streetlight, where he doubled over and vomited.
When he was back in the car, as we approached a sign for the George Washington Bridge, I asked him what had happened.
“I shot him.”
“But what happened?”
“I shot the guy. I don’t know. I shot him.”
“Where should we go?”
He tightened his jaw, said nothing.
I gazed north up the Hudson and felt sick. The river disappeared into the black horizon, which was dotted with spots of light where people were living lives that were not mine. Ray breathed shortly and wiped a palm across his eyes. I exited just before the bridge. Again I asked Ray where to go. He was looking at his hands, lost, not hearing me.
So I took us home. I didn’t know if it was the right move, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. For all its faults, home was where things were safe. Where we could think. And plan. And wait for Cullen.
* * *
Less than twenty-four hours later, on Christmas Day, we ran away from home. Cullen drove us across the Pulaski Skyway at dusk. The structure’s tangle of steel flitted past, and beyond that was a drab industrial landscape. To the east, a low fog blurred New York into a figment of sickly pale colors. Cars whipped by on the left. The lanes were too narrow and the edge of the bridge too close. I had the car’s heat blasting on my face because Ray was intent on keeping his head propped next to his opened window in the backseat, his eyes, I could tell from the passenger side mirror, watering against the nasty whip of cold. The wind echoed through the car, and behind it thumped the rhythmic roll of tires over bridge joints.
We crossed into Jersey City. Cullen explained that he’d come here once for a thing with Roman and had taken note of a perfect hiding spot, in the event he ever needed it. I was certain “a thing with Roman” meant drugs. With Roman it was always drugs—buying them, selling them, taking them.
By the time we parked across the street from the abandoned house where we were to spend the night, the day had grown dark. Just four thirty, but already night. We stood on the sidewalk and eyed the massive building rising above a border of long-dead, overgrown shrubbery. Ray was so pale and looked like he might vomit again. The place reminded me of the front building of a run-down insane asylum in our neighboring town that everyone always claimed was haunted. When Cullen directed us through the bordering thickets and then proposed investigating the house, Ray finally burst into tears.
Cullen and I were silent. My eyes drifted again toward the dilapidated house. A demented, demonic star was painted across the front door, visible in the glow of nearby streetlights. Shutters hung at twisted angles. Weeds and roots pushed up through the concrete steps, slowly ripping them apart. Ray cried silently. I put a hand to his shoulder, but I don’t think he felt it.
Cullen was eyeing the house too, but in a different way than Ray and I were. He was calculating, not worrying.
“I don’t want to go in there,” I told him.
Cullen reached into his pocket and produced a wallet. He flipped through a thin stack of bills. “Okay,” he said. “How about we get some food? Something hot to drink. And then come back.”
I moved to speak, but Cullen cut in: “We could sleep in the car, but I honestly think we’ll be better off in there. Police will bother a bunch of kids in a car, but nobody’s been inside this place in a long time. If we’re freaked out, so is everyone else. We’ll be safe in there. I’m telling you.”
I glanced at his stack of bills again. “What about a hotel?”
“We need this money to eat. It’s not much.”
I knew Cullen had more money than that. Why hadn’t he brought more with him?
We walked maybe a mile through Jersey City, out of this run-down, seemingly abandoned part of the city to where the place started to come to life—brownstones, parked cars, the glow of corner markets—and slipped into a mostly empty diner on a quiet street. A Christmas tree, doused in blue-silver tinsel, stood beside the counter, which was strung with primary-colored bulbs. Some old version of “Frosty the Snowman” crackled through unseen speakers.
Against our protests, Cullen ordered food for all of us, insisting that we’d find an appetite once it arrived. This proved true for me. I chewed down a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast, and as the warm food settled in me, I realized how light I’d felt throughout the whole day—as though gravity might betray me and let me float away like in a recurring dream I had where, in a panic, I would grasp at the brittle ends of tree branches before drifting up into the suffocating atmosphere. But the food weighed me down now, and I felt centered for a moment. Ray was supporting his head with his palm, staring off to a place I would never see, his heaping plate of food untouched.
By the time we’d trekked back to the castle, we were exhausted enough to be brave about entering. All three of us yanked and pried away a rotting plank of wood that had been nailed over the front door. Cullen and Ray shouldered open the door itself, pushing a blockage of concrete and lumber out of the way. We paused in the great hall of the building, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the dark.
We followed Cullen up a decaying staircase. On the second floor, Ray stopped and stared into an adjacent room. Moonlight spotlighted the far wall of the room, where the carcass of a cat had been nailed, legs splayed like a star. Ruddy handprints and spots of mold dotted the wall around the cat. In the morning we would see that the prints had been made with blood, dried now and faded. We would also see the roiling nest of maggots in the cat’s innards on the floor. I took Ray by the arm and led him away. He kept his eyes fixed on the pinned carcass and tripped along behind me.
The next day I woke at dawn, cramped close to Ray around the remains of a small fire. Cullen had worried about the smoke escaping through the hole in the roof, but we couldn’t light a fire in an enclosed room, and it was too cold to go without one. Cullen was gone now, though. It was only Ray and me.
I squirmed out of our sleep pile, leaving Ray to stir briefly and then curl back up on the floor. I stepped out into a crisp and pale day-after-Christmas morning, watching Cullen climb through the bushes and pull specks of leaves from his hair as he walked toward me.
“I need to call home,” I announced to him.
We walked two blocks to a pay phone, and I took a quick breath as I slotted in two quarters and dialed, steeling myself against whatever lingering softness squirmed deep down inside me.
Dad picked up on the first ring and said, “Hello,” in a quiet voice. No doubt he was lying in bed, Mom asleep next to him.
“Dad, it’s me.”
“Brielle?”
“Ray and I are okay. I wanted you to know.”
Any story I told him would have to involve being somewhere with one of my friends—people he could call, lies he could check up on. And I didn’t have any friends I could trust to back me up.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Te
ll me—”
“We’re okay, but we can’t come home. I’m so sorry. We’re okay. I love you.”
I hung up so he didn’t hear the rupture of tears that followed. It felt like a cheap seam had split apart on my face, and I cried and cried, wondering how I would ever repair the gash. I walked, wiping my nose, heaving dry, hollow breaths, reining the world back in through the hot blur. Cullen paced two or three steps behind me, which was exactly where I wanted him for the moment. Finally I stopped at a street corner one block from the water, realizing I didn’t know where I was going or how to get back to Ray.
“What’s the plan, Cullen?”
“It’s okay.” His hand was on my hip. “Amir’s coming.”
“Amir? Why?”
“We’ll talk to him about what happened, and everything will be fine. I promise.”
“What about his brother?”
“He’s not dead.”
“What? How do you know?”
“I know. Trust me. We’re in the clear. Everything is one hundred percent totally fine.”
“Oh God. We need to tell Ray!”
“We will,” he said. “We will. Let him rest for now. He needs it.”
I knew enough by this point that a promise from Cullen didn’t mean what he wanted it to mean, but, at the same time, it was hard not to believe him when he knew what you really wanted. And what I wanted was for everything to be okay. He kept promising me that it would be. Malik was alive. I so wanted to believe that. It was only a matter of time now, I thought, before this somehow worked itself out and we could go home.
The morning was warming up, so I shed my heavy coat and soaked up the precious bit of sun fighting through the gray. We toed a narrow wall along the water’s edge, walking south toward the castle, the water slurping against the narrow, rocky beach. Normally I’d have cherished the sight of the Statue of Liberty glowing out there, a speck of beauty in an otherwise drab, wintry landscape, but today I didn’t feel like looking at it.
We moved through a construction site toward a redbrick warehouse. A rusty backhoe sat in a ditch of weeds. A finished condominium tower stood at the far end of the lot, with an unfinished one right next to it. It was impossible to tell which parts of this place would come alive again after the holidays and which parts were dead for good. The door to the warehouse was chained and locked—a slipshod job that reminded me of the chains they put on the front doors of our school after hours.