Run Away

by Laura Salters

Sam propped himself up so he was sitting parallel to Kayla, and she rested her head on his football-­sized shoulder. In a soft voice, he asked, “Why did he . . . do it?”

  “He was bullied. Threatened. He was gay, and someone took a disliking to him. Just like that, no rhyme or reason.”

  A contemplative pause. “How are you doing? You know . . . it must be so hard . . .”

  She shrugged. “I’m trying not to think about it. I know that’s bad. I know I should be crippled with grief. But . . . it’s too hard. It’s too hard to think about. So I don’t.”

  A hand stroked her hair, even though it was matted and tangled from a day of water fighting, sweating, and dancing. “But Kayla . . . numbing the pain for a while will only make it worse when you finally feel it.”

  She spluttered with laughter.

  Sam looked shocked at her outburst—­comedy hadn’t been what he was going for. “What? Why are you laughing?”

  She could hardly catch her breath. “Isn’t that from Harry Potter? That numbing the pain line?”

  Sam’s cheeks went pink. “Oh, shut up. I was trying to be insightful . . .” He trailed off. Another hand traced down her jawline, from her ear to her chin, then gently nudged her head upward so she was nose-­to-­nose with him. His breath tickled her sun-­chapped lips, and he leaned in, tenderly brushing them with his.

  Kayla pulled away. It didn’t feel right. “No, Sam.”

  His eyes betrayed his hurt. “Sorry, I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.”

  “No, I mean . . . I don’t mean no. I mean not like this. Not while we’re talking about my brother. It feels . . . cheap. I don’t want to cheapen his memory.”

  “What? That’s not what I—­”

  “Yeah, but it’s what it felt like.” Kayla pushed herself up off the bank, losing her balance a little at the top. Sam didn’t follow. “I think we should go back and meet the others.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you there in a bit.”

  “Are you not coming with me? I don’t really want to walk back through the park by myself in the dark. Bangkok is . . . well, it’s Bangkok.”

  Sam rubbed his eyes. “Okay, Kayla. Let’s go back.”

  Her stomach twisted. Not an excited flutter of expectation, like only moments ago, but the sensation of reaching for a top step that doesn’t exist.

  It was a feeling she would come to know all too well.

  KAYLA AND SAM walked back through the park in silence. Her mind kept racing with things she wanted to say—­I’m sorry. I’m not angry. I’m not sad. Kiss me again. I promise I’ll kiss you back—­but her tongue felt too big for her mouth, and the words wouldn’t come. Sam walked two steps in front of her, scuffing the bottom of his dirty Converses along the dusty path.

  A branch cracked somewhere southwest of where they walked. Sam didn’t hear, but Kayla stopped abruptly and swung around. There was a silhouetted figure standing next to a thick tree trunk.

  She rubbed her eyes but couldn’t bring the shadowy person into focus. It was too dark.

  Her skin prickled. Why were they just standing there? “Sam, wait.” He stopped, bemused. “Who’s there?” Kayla called, lifting her voice.

  The figure jerked slightly. Cicadas rattled and hissed in the trees. The air was still humid.

  Sam muttered, “Leave it, Kayla. Why do you care who’s there? We’re in Bangkok, it’s not like—­”

  “I said, who’s there?” she called. Her voice trembled. Why am I getting so worked up about the fact there’s someone else in the park?

  The person started toward them, and as he walked under the ornate streetlamp, his face came into view.

  “O-­Oliver?” Kayla stammered. “What are y-­you doing here?”

  He grinned clumsily. He was slouching. Drunk. Drunker than them.

  “Just shh-­checking up on my favorite traveler . . . and her mate,” he slurred.

  Was he . . . winking? It was hard to tell in the dark.

  Sam rolled his eyes and turned on his heel. “Now you have another chaperone, I’m off. See ya.”

  “W-­Wait up, Sam,” Kayla said, running after him.

  “What the hell’s his problem?” Sam almost spat when she caught up. “Who lurks in the shadows like that? S’creepy.”

  “Yeah.” Kayla shuddered. Sam was walking too fast, and she was almost jogging to keep up.

  “The way he looks at you . . . it’s gross. I mean, I don’t blame him, but . . .”

  Kayla smiled despite the queasiness building in her belly. Was Sam jealous?

  They kept walking in silence. After a ­couple of minutes, she looked back over her shoulder to see if they were being followed. But Oliver was gone. There were only shadows in his place.

  Chapter 9

  July 5, England

  AN UNBLINKING RED light. More uncomfortable silence. A ticking wall clock. The bitter smell of Dr. Myers’s coffee.

  It was their second meeting, a week after the first, which already felt like a lifetime ago. Kayla clenched her fists, watching her knuckles turn white. Her fingernails, which hadn’t been cut for weeks, dug into the palm of her hand. She found the painful sensation strangely relieving. She decided not to think any further into that.

  “Take all the time you need,” Dr. Myers said.

  More silence. Tick, tick, tick. The sound of the persistent clock was like a cheese grater on Kayla’s nerve endings.

  The only option, she thought, was to talk over it. “Gabe was gay.”

  Dr. Myers looked up. “I see. And how—­”

  “We all fully supported him,” Kayla interrupted. She’d started now, and to stem the flow of her monologue would be counterproductive. “He came out last year, and it just kind of . . . fit. My mum cried, at first, then gave him a hug. My dad slapped him on the back and told him he was bloody brave for telling them. My nan was a little off about it, but she’s old-­fashioned like that. She soon got used to it.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “Honestly? It never really bothered me. I was proud of him for coming out, obviously, but I just never understood what the big deal was. And like I said, it just kind of fit. It wasn’t unexpected.”

  “I see.”

  Kayla stared into her hands, examining the crescent-­shaped indents her nails had left behind. They still stung a little. “We were all so supportive. We loved him to bits. He brought a boy around, once, before they went on a date. My dad gave the guy a stern talking to, like he would if I was seeing someone, and said stuff like, ‘You take care of my son, now,’ just like it was normal. Which it was. My mum quizzed him all about it when he got home. She put the kettle on, and despite his bashful grin, she insisted he told her everything over a cuppa. What Zack’s parents did, did Zack offer to pay for the meal, did he smell nice. It didn’t work out with Zack—­he didn’t smell that nice at all—­but we just knew everything would be fine.

  “Everyone loved him. He did well in his exams, and he helped his friends study by sharing his notes. He played rugby for the town, and he went to parties and gigs too. He loved music. Not as a performer, though—­everyone in our family is rhythmically challenged. And he’d recently told my parents he wanted to go traveling after school, and he was so excited for that. He was just a normal seventeen-­year-­old. Liking the same sex was nothing but . . . a side note.

  “But then he started getting these messages. On Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. At first, they were nasty, but not threatening. ‘You make me sick, you fucking faggot.’ ” Dr. Myers flinched at the profanity, though she tried her best to disguise it. Kayla swallowed the bile rising in her throat and continued. “ ‘You disgust me. You’re sick.’ That kind of thing. Disgusting, disgusting abuse. Then . . . then they got worse. Much worse. They said they were going to . . . They threatened to anally rape him, because ‘that’s the way you lik
e it,’ and then they said . . .” Kayla cleared her throat. “Then they said they were going to rape me in front of him, to show him how it should be done.”

  A pause. Dr. Myers was initially lost for words, but she recovered quickly. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Kayla. Really, I am.” She blew out through her lips, causing them to vibrate. “Was there a police investigation? They can be difficult to deal with when you’re grieving.”

  Kayla shook her head. “No. Not an extensive one anyway. Once they’d ruled it as suicide, what was the point? Online bullying is, sadly, very common. That’s what they told my bereaved parents, anyway. As if Gabe was just another statistic.”

  “I understand that must have been difficult, Kay—­”

  “You don’t, though. Nobody does, and nobody ever will. I desperately need somebody to blame, somebody other than myself, but there’s no one. The social media accounts were anonymous, all under different names. Whoever it was—­if it was only one person—­used different e-­mail addresses to set up each one. And we never found the messages on Gabe’s laptop until after . . . you know. So it’s not like we can just ask him who had it in for him.”

  Dr. Myers considered this for a moment. She mused, “Maybe that’s for the best, as unlikely as it may seem. You’ll never get closure if you’re constantly seeking answers that don’t exist. And having someone to blame, to channel all your anger toward, can hinder the healing process. Some ­people find themselves constantly dreaming about exacting revenge, and if you have a face to attach to that, it can quickly become an obsession. An obsession that ultimately will destroy you, without ever soothing your heartache.”

  GABE HAD A birthmark on his forearm. It was shaped like nothing, really, not a perfect heart or five-­point star like in songs or poems. Just a splodge of pigment that she had tried to lick off when she was tiny, thinking it was melted chocolate. She’d always had a rampant sweet tooth.

  For some reason, she couldn’t get that birthmark out of her head. Would it still exist? Would it still be a quirk of nature, a sign of life, imperfectly printed on his skin? Or was the death long enough ago now that it had started to melt away into the earth?

  Kayla had once voiced a similar thought to Sam. He’d found it strange, even morbid, that she was so concerned with the physical details, not the emotional implications. She didn’t know why, really. Thinking about it from an scientific perspective seemed to hurt less than the alternative. She could deal with the fact that Gabe’s body would eventually become a part of the earth—­a simple shift in energy that’d ultimately claim us all. But what she couldn’t grasp was the fact that he’d never pop his head around her door again to ask if she’d like a cup of tea (strong, with milk and two sugars, just how she liked it) or flop down onto her bed, sinking into the memory-­foam mattress and insisting that she had to listen to this new band he’d discovered on YouTube.

  More than just simple grief, the unbearable boredom of being pent up in her parents’ enormous house all day was suffocating Kayla. Nobody told you how dull it was to be in mourning. Did it make her a monster to admit that?

  It had been nearly four weeks with no clues, no new developments. No reason for hope. The police hadn’t contacted her with any further questions since her meeting with Shepherd. Even though she hadn’t been a suspect for a while, she’d still expected them to be in touch again. She shook off the uneasy feeling that had settled on her shoulders. Shepherd’s strangely disengaged demeanor had left her cold.

  With nothing else to do, she’d read every magazine imaginable, devoured every book on her parents’ bookshelf, given the cleaner a hand with the housework, and even honed her baking skills to perfection with a rather impressive Victoria sponge cake, which her nan had crowned the finest in all of England.

  She hadn’t been out running yet. She used to love it, pounding the English countryside with her beat-­up, muddy trainers. She was never very fast, or particularly graceful, but there was something therapeutic about the rhythm of her thudding feet and deep breathing. Her mum had bought her pair after pair of shiny new Nikes, in vivid shades of neon pink and girly turquoise, but she still loved her old school PE trainers, molded to her feet with hundreds and hundreds of miles built into their worn-­down soles and fraying toes.

  Running gave her time to think, to plug in her headphones and put one foot in front of the other until she’d left every bad grade, traumatic breakup, and argument with her drunken mother behind her on the grassy fields, muddy trails, and potholed roads. But she had a feeling that now, her issues were too great to be cured by the simplest of remedies, and that terrified her. She was too scared to confirm her fears—­to be stranded in a field, miles from home, with only her own thoughts for company.

  No, she didn’t feel ready to run yet. Instead she did something she hadn’t done in a long time: opened the shiny laptop her parents had bought her for passing her A levels. It was wafer thin and ultra-­professional, and all Kayla had ever done on it was read pop culture blogs. Until now.

  Forget what Dr. Myers had said. She needed someone to blame, and she was going to find them.

  Aran Peters. The sum total of Kayla’s communication with the wiry-­haired, pointy-­faced Aran had been his attempts to fondle her blossoming bosom at their end-­of-­school dance, age thirteen and a quarter. Kayla had told her friends she batted him away in disgust. She’d actually granted him an overdress graze and a slobbery kiss, resulting in the tangling together of their clunky braces. But she was far too concerned with her reputation to admit that.

  After that incident, she and Aran went their separate ways, to different schools in different counties. Now it was time for a reconciliation.

  Aran Peters was an IT whiz, and not just in the quite-­good-­at-­making-­spreadsheets way that most school-­taught kids were. He was ruthless when it came to learning everything he could possibly know about computers. He’d mastered the basics by the end of primary school, and had a solid grasp of the most sophisticated systems in the country by the time most teenagers were discovering Bacardi. Once, he’d hacked into the school’s server and awarded everyone in their year a 100 percent grade in all of their mid-­semester exams. He was twelve then. Afterward he had bigger fish to fry. He compromised a national exam board and swapped what were meant to be AS level essay questions with replacements that a particularly slow Labradoodle would find easy.

  Kayla had no idea where Aran was now. He could be at university, possibly studying for his Ph.D. already, or he could be working in a top secret government facility specializing in homeland security, or something equally heroic. Either that or he’d gone down the route of digital mafia boss and currently had control over ninety-­nine percent of Western civilization. Knowing Aran, both were equally plausible scenarios.

  Eventually she found his school’s alumni website, where she came across an article on his resounding success at one of the best universities in the country. He’d completed a four-­year curriculum in eighteen months, achieving the highest marks ever recorded by an undergraduate Information Technology student. He’d be attending the same university again in September, to complete his Ph.D. at the ripe old age of twenty. Perfect.

  She clicked on the university’s website and browsed the list of staff, identifying the way in which their e-­mail addresses were composed: joe.bloggs@ldmuniversity.ac.uk. Assuming the students would have similar accounts, she started typing a message to the address aran.peters@ldmuniversity.ac.uk.

  It was worth a try. Especially considering what was at stake.

  Chapter 10

  July 6, England

  KAYLA CHECKED HER e-­mails as soon as she woke up, one eye peeled opened as she stared at the glaring screen of her laptop. Nothing.

  She dropped her head back onto her pillow, allowing the laptop to slide into bed next to her. She’d been hoping for a faint glimmer of hope before midday—­she wasn’t exactly looking forward to
meeting Kathy Kingfisher, Sam’s mother, for the first time. These things were awkward enough when the love interest was still alive.

  Realizing it was already ten-­thirty, Kayla rolled reluctantly out of bed, wrapping a fluffy white dressing gown around her and slipping her unsightly feet into a pair of matching slippers. Both garments had been stolen from a hotel in Dubai by her outraged mother, who was convinced the maid was stealing from the minibar and leaving them to foot the bill. To exact revenge, she’d pilfered not only the complimentary miniature cosmetics—­standard behavior in hotels—­but also the dressing gowns, slippers, and bath towels. The hotel had charged her through the teeth, and the excess baggage charges at the airport amounted to more than the original cost of the flights, but her mother had insisted that was beside the point.

  Kayla glanced into the mirror. Weren’t the bereaved meant to gaze upon their own reflections and declare that they no longer recognized themselves? Everything still looked to her as it always had. Her deep tan was fading, her waist-­length dark hair was as unruly as ever, and her generous breasts and rounded hips hadn’t shrunk in the slightest.

  Her interest in her appearance had almost completely evaporated. Still, she wanted to make a good impression with Kathy, and so forced herself to brush her hair, apply some dried-­up mascara she’d found at the back of a bedroom drawer, and pick out the nicest day dress she owned: a floaty, buttercup-­yellow affair with a delicate daisy print. Why was she so worried what Sam’s mum would think of her? She spritzed some floral, overly sugary perfume onto her neck—­in case Kathy hugged her—­and borrowed a dainty black leather watch from her mother’s impeccably organized jewelry box. Her heart twitched as her fingertips grazed the woven bracelet that sat next to it on her wrist. She pressed her eyes firmly together until the moment of intense grief had subsided.

  It wasn’t even eleven yet.

  Time to check my e-­mails once more.

  Still nothing.

  KATHY KINGFISHER WAS quite obviously grieving. Kayla tried not to feel embarrassed that the middle-­aged woman sitting opposite her in a busy coffee shop was sobbing loudly into a sodden handkerchief, drowning out the clattering noise of the cappuccino maker grinding coffee beans and ferociously frothing milk. She tentatively handed Kathy the paper napkin that had been placed underneath her lemon and poppy seed muffin.