With an irritable sigh, I looked down at my phone, and then back at the mansion. Eddie Sward was watching me through the library windows, arms crossed and jaw tight, and although I couldn’t see him, I was positive Mr. Walker was behind him. Did I really want to sit down on the freezing-cold fountain and wait twenty to thirty minutes for one of my parents to drive all the way out here to the middle of nowhere, with both men staring daggers at me the entire time?
“Fine,” I said resignedly, moving around the front of the vehicle to the passenger side. As I belted myself in, I forced out a grudging “Thanks.”
“No problem,” Kaz said. The engine purred to life with barely a whisper, and the car did a weightless three-point turn before cruising down the drive through the topiary. The seats were covered in soft leather, still smelling like a showroom floor, and some bass-heavy music thumped at a low volume from the speakers.
We were quiet until we reached the road, by which point the silence between us had begun to feel like a third passenger. Unable to bear it any longer, and anxious to take preemptive control of the conversation, I blurted out, “This is a really nice car.”
“Compliments of the Doctors Bashiri,” Kaz replied with a self-conscious smile. “I won’t pretend I don’t like driving it, but sometimes it makes me feel really conspicuous. Like, people look at it and immediately think that I’m spoiled, you know?” Then he laughed a little. “Well, okay, I guess I am kind of spoiled, but I try not to act like it.”
“I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but if your parents are paying for your car and your tuition, why are you working at the toy store?” I was genuinely curious, although the second I heard the question out loud, I realized it really did sound kind of rude.
Kaz didn’t seem to mind, though. “My parents … I love them, but they think that if they give me money, they have the right to tell me how to spend it. I got sick of having to justify literally every purchase I ever made—like if I wanted to eat McDonald’s or download an app, I had to clear it first. Try explaining to your mom why you want to buy sexy underwear, you know?” He shot me a grin, and the image that rushed into my mind made my face feel hot. “Having a crappy job means having money that’s just mine, that I can spend on whatever I want to. I can’t tell you how good that feels.”
“I think I understand,” I said. It sounded an awful lot like what January had said when I’d asked her the same question—working at the toy store was a way she could take control of her life away from her stepfather. I was starting to see why she and Kaz could relate to each other.
Almost as if he could read my thoughts, Kaz then asked, “How are her parents doing?”
“About as you might expect,” I answered, because getting into detail was too much to unpack at the moment. “Her mom is having a breakdown in a Munchausen syndrome kind of way, and her stepdad is worried about the political ramifications.”
Kaz screwed up his mouth for a moment, but even the strange look on his face couldn’t detract from how hot he was. I felt my annoyance becoming more entrenched. What is it about effortlessly good-looking people that is so aggravating? Gently, he then asked, “How are you handling it? I mean, it must be hitting you pretty hard, too. After what we saw in that field…”
“I’m okay,” I said quickly. I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to believe that there was a happy ending out there, that I could find an explanation for the blood-drenched hoodie that meant January was still okay—and if it turned out I couldn’t, well, I sure as hell did not want to have to face those particular demons in the passenger seat of Kaz’s fancy car. “I’m just tired.”
I gave him my address, which he programmed into his GPS, and then we drove in silence for a time before Kaz cleared his throat and said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but how did you and January start dating?”
Considering the events of the afternoon, it sounded like a loaded question, but I decided to answer anyway. “She was—is best friends with my best friend’s girlfriend, so we all just started hanging out a lot, and then … I don’t know, we decided to take things to the next level.”
The thing was, January and I had always been something that was a little bit more than “just friends.” I couldn’t totally explain it. When I flirted with her freshman year, it wasn’t just camouflage; I felt something. I felt connected to January in a way that I didn’t feel connected to other girls, even if the physical part of the equation was always elusive. When Madison Reinbeck shoved us into the kitchen pantry at the Walker mansion for a lamest-of-the-lame round of Seven Minutes in Heaven at a pool party the previous June, I’d actually been really excited to make out with her.
“Um, I hope it won’t make you uncomfortable if I admit that I’ve actually wanted to kiss you, like, pretty much every day since the beginning of last year,” January had confessed breathlessly when we’d finally come up for air. My head was spinning, and I was so relieved to feel something for a girl that I actually giggled.
“You’re really good at it,” I’d said, which was probably the stupidest, lamest thing any guy has ever said, ever—but January didn’t seem to mind.
“Does that mean you want to go out with me?”
It was an uncompromising question and, emboldened by the dizzying head rush of the previous seven minutes, I took it by the horns. “Yeah.”
“Well then, ask me, dumbass!”
And that was January, in a nutshell. And now … was she ever coming back? Would I ever see her again? I’d made a mess of things in our relationship—maybe we both had—but a sharp pain speared through my chest as I considered the possibility that she might really have disappeared from my life forever.
“Listen…” Kaz began, and even though I was grateful to have my thoughts suddenly interrupted, I recognized immediately where he was heading with this particular opening gambit and briefly considering forcing open the door and rolling out into traffic. “I’m really sorry about what happened in the barn.”
“Let’s not talk about it, okay?”
“No, I think we have to,” he insisted obliviously, and I committed my gaze to the roadside. Trees and shrubs rose on both sides of the car, the season slowly whittling their limbs down to the bone as more and more leaves dropped away. “I mean, I guess now you understand why I was so surprised when you made it sound like you thought I was trying to hit on January. She knew I was gay. It’s not like it was some big secret, or anything, so it kind of threw me for a loop when I realized that you didn’t know, that she’d never told you.” I remained silent, and after a moment, he added, “I guess that’s really why I wanted to apologize this morning. If January was keeping that from you to make you jealous of our friendship, then I realized I couldn’t exactly trust that she’d been totally honest with me about you, either. The truth is, some of her complaints about you sounded really…”
“Fake?”
“Indulgent. Like she secretly enjoyed being upset about them. Obviously I didn’t know enough about you at the time to know they weren’t true, but milking the pathos of having a selfish boyfriend seemed to make her weirdly satisfied.”
I thought about my theatrical ex-girlfriend, and how her personal drama meter had always seemed perennially stuck at ten. Certainly she’d had enough legitimate reasons to complain about her life; why had she needed me to be a villain, too? I took a breath. “I’m sorry I was rude to you that day I came into the toy store. It goes without saying that I didn’t know better, but I wish I had.”
“Thanks.” There was a tense moment then that seemed to last about fifty years before he spoke again. “I’m sorry about the hayloft, too. I—I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.” His eyes were riveted on the road ahead of us, but his face was turning pink. “I got caught up in the moment, I guess, but I was a complete idiot. It was the wrong time, and the wrong situation, and I should’ve known.”
“You made a mistake. Forget about it,” I said, sincerely hoping he would.
“You know,” he
continued lightly, as if it would make me feel better, “January actually told me that sometimes she wondered. She said she wouldn’t even have been mad, she’d just have wanted to know.”
I gritted my teeth. “Wanted to know what?”
“You know. That you’re gay.”
“I’m not gay, though.”
“Flynn—”
“I’m not gay!” I insisted defensively and, it must be said, a trifle hysterically. “I’ve already told you that I’m not gay, Kaz. How many times do I have to say it? What do I have to do to get the point across? I’m! Not! Gay! Get it? Understand?”
The dark slashes of his eyebrows drew downward, and in a peevish voice he stated, “You kissed me back, Flynn. It wasn’t all one-sided up there. I understand if maybe you’re freaked out about it, but you can’t pretend that it didn’t happen. I was there, remember? And it was a really good kiss.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said desperately. “Okay? I don’t know what I did or didn’t do—I was surprised, and it all just happened really fast!”
“It didn’t happen that fast,” he countered pedantically. “I kissed you, and you didn’t stop me. Instead, you stuck your tongue in my—”
“I DIDN’T STICK ANYTHING ANYWHERE,” I declared shrilly. I was sweating, and I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but inside that car at that moment. If a chasm in the earth opened up in front of the Lexus right then, and we plummeted straight down to hell, I would have cheered.
“I know what happened. I know what I felt,” he said quietly, moving on from my tongue to the other body part that had betrayed me in the hayloft. “You don’t have to be ashamed, Flynn.”
“I’m not ashamed, I am straight,” I lied, clutching tightly to the leather cushion of the seat. “I’m not talking about this anymore, so just drop the subject!”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,” he replied in a sober way, and was then mercifully silent for the remainder of the drive to my house. Still, as he pulled up to the curb, he said, “Let me see your phone for a second.”
“Why?” I asked suspiciously.
“I want you to have my phone number, in case you ever want to talk.”
“That really won’t be necessary,” I said breezily, and tried to let myself out. The door wouldn’t open, though, and the buttons on the armrest wouldn’t respond, either. I glared at Kaz. “The child locks are on.”
“I know.” He smiled, pleased with his own cunning, stomach-melting dimples appearing in his cheeks. “Let me see your phone.”
“Are you kidding me? You’re holding me hostage?” I gave him an imperious look, but he merely held out his hand, palm up. Annoyed, I slapped my phone into it. If that’s what it took to free myself, then fine. “I’ll just delete it the minute you let me out of the car.”
“At least I can say I tried.” He entered his information into my contacts list, returned the phone to me, and disengaged the safety locks. Impatiently, I shoved the door open and started up the walk to my house. Behind me, Kaz called out, “You know you can call me anytime!”
“Don’t hold your breath,” I retorted, jamming the phone into my pocket and hurrying to the front door, every step an excruciating exercise in self-consciousness, aware that he was watching me the whole way. I could have erased his entry right there, while he was looking, and driven my point home—but I didn’t.
He’d said I was a good kisser; he’d said he wanted me to call him. I was embarrassed and confused and upset and thrilled all at the same time.
That fleeting kiss had been more intense, more exhilarating, than any kiss I’d ever shared with a girl—more exciting even than my seven minutes in heaven with January—and I could still feel my lips tingling where Kaz’s had touched them. The memory made my heart speed up and the pressure build in my groin again, and no matter how complicated it made things, I could at least admit to myself that it had been incredible. I wasn’t going to call Kaz, but having his number in my phone was like a souvenir of that intoxicating moment in the hayloft. It was something I couldn’t talk to anyone about, not even Micah, but it was an event I could relive over and over in my head as often as I wanted, and his number was my proof that it had happened. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it.
FIFTEEN
IT WAS 4:00 A.M., when I ran out of excuses for staying up and finally had to crawl into bed, that I could no longer stave off my encroaching apprehensions. The second I closed my eyes, the darkness in my room filled with swarming ravens, black feathers flashing as they were drawn by the scent of my ex-girlfriend’s blood.
The hoodie burned like a sun in my mind, its hideous red-black stain a depthless tattoo etched into my memory. No matter how many ways I tried to argue it with myself, no matter how many angles I viewed it from, my hopes lost ground against my ascending conviction; unable to blank my mind, the thoughts trampling the air from my lungs, I was forced to admit to myself that I’d known—from the second I’d recognized what lay at my feet in that meadow—that January was really dead. There was no other explanation.
Regardless of her bitter antipathy to the Tammy and Jonathan Walker Show, I simply couldn’t see January doing something as diabolical and operatic as tossing fake blood all over her clothes and then hiding somewhere, calmly watching an entire community go into an uproar when they were found. If it were a hoax, the police would figure it out in very short order, and my girlfriend would go from being a tragic figure to a national pariah in the blink of an eye—at which point no university of any esteem would want to have her as a student, no matter the outcome of Mr. Walker’s election. It would unquestionably mean the end of her California dreams, and she was too smart and too driven to compromise that goal for such short-term satisfaction.
But if she hadn’t left her things in that meadow, tangled in duct tape and soaked in blood from who-knew-what, then someone else had. Someone else had. Her clothes hadn’t been deposited somewhere obvious, somewhere they’d be found immediately—and they hadn’t been sent directly to the Walkers like a severed finger, accompanied by a demand for payment, either—which meant they were not a message. They had simply been dumped, an inconvenience, abandoned there by someone who had apparently first spilled January’s blood, so much blood, and then … what?
My pulse raced, my palms were clammy and damp, and I gasped for air as I began to face that she was gone—really gone. We’d shared so much, and it seemed impossible to me that I would never again be able to tease her about the warty old lady on the bus—you look just like I did when I was your age!—to fantasize together about life in California, to listen to the familiar rhythms of her bitching about her rags-to-riches life story. I’d never be able to apologize for hiding from myself in our relationship, to confront her about the lies she’d told Kaz and Reiko, or to ask her just what Anson had really overheard between her and Jonathan. There was a hole in my life now where January Beth McConville used to be, and a year of friendship, four months of dating, and a lifetime of inside jokes and little memories had vaporized irrecoverably.
Finally, at 6:00 a.m., a wrenching, unearthly howl erupted from deep in my throat. I curled up in the fetal position and sobbed until my stomach ached and I couldn’t breathe. I cried like that for an hour or so, and finally, numb all over, I fell asleep as the morning sunlight was at last beginning to dispel the ravens from my bedroom.
My parents let me take the next day off from school, and I spent most of the morning trying to figure out what I could do with myself besides playing BioShock, trying not to think about the day before, and wishing I had more weed hidden in my breath mints container. Micah and Ti came over in the afternoon, their parents having called them in as well, and the three of us spent several emotional hours sharing our favorite memories of January. Micah wouldn’t look either of us in the eye when saying her name, and it was clear he believed she was dead; Tiana was defiant, however, and refused to let either of us get away with using the past tense.
The afternoon was cathartic, grief and doubt erupting in stormy bursts; but Ti did eventually get us laughing when she reminded us of the time that Señora Findlay, our erratic Spanish teacher from freshman year, had been haranguing the class about our collective failure to pass a pop quiz, while January, standing unseen in the doorway behind her, had simultaneously mimicked the woman’s every exaggerated physical movement to perfection. She’d received detention for a week when she was discovered, but it had been worth it.
We ordered pizza, made root beer floats, told more stories, and seesawed between laughter and tears for the rest of the day. By 8:00 p.m., I was physically and emotionally exhausted, my body hurting all over like I’d been dragged six blocks by a panicked horse, and I fell asleep in the living room.
It rained torrentially the next day, and school was a gloomy affair. A makeshift shrine to January had been set up outside the theater: a picture of her mounted on a blank paper canvas underneath enormous letters reading BRING JANUARY HOME; all around her photo students had written personal messages. Half of them said we miss u! or some idiotic variation thereon, and many of them were from kids January had hated unabashedly. That afternoon Jonathan Walker gave his press conference demanding harsher sentencing laws in cases of crimes against children, and received the very outpouring of support that Eddie had predicted. Even teachers were talking about it.
Then, later that evening, all hell finally broke loose.
I thought there’d been a horrible glitch in the matrix when I got home from school, and Micah and I found ourselves standing outside my house and staring at the cop car parked in my parents’ driveway. It was as if the previous Thursday were being repeated all over again; with a wave of nausea, I tried to think if I had any other friends who were suddenly unaccounted for. Micah and I stuttered our good-byes, and I walked stiffly to the house, feeling chilled straight through to the bone as I pushed open the door and let myself inside.
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