White Rabbit

by Caleb Roehrig

  Squeezing my eyes shut for just a second, I take a deep breath and then nod at April. “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  4

  Wordlessly, my sister bends down and drags a backpack out from under the bed, where it’s been hidden by the lacy curtain of a dust ruffle. She rummages through a couple of pockets before finding and extracting a fat wad of paper currency—rolled into a rubber-banded cylinder thick enough to choke a zebra—which she then hands over to me. “You can count it if you want, but it’s two grand. All yours, no matter what.”

  She probably means it to sound comforting, but I’m starting to feel the dry heaves coming on again. Nobody just carries around two thousand dollars in cash like that. It was either intended for something illicit, or was already used for something illicit, and as I sit there adding the tens to the twenties to the fifties, my misgivings redouble. It didn’t escape my notice that April had to search the backpack to find the money, or that from one of the bag’s zippers there dangled a highly recognizable keychain—a cast-pewter emblem of two intersecting lacrosse sticks. It was Fox’s bag, and Fox’s cash, and the less I knew about it the better off I’d be.

  “Okay,” I begin unevenly, cramming exactly two thousand dollars into the driest pocket of my damp cargo shorts, “how many people were at the party?”

  “Six,” April answers promptly. The math is easy, but the equation puzzling nonetheless: April + Fox, Peyton + Race, and Arlo + “some other people” = six. Before I can ask who the sixth person is, and why she’s being so deliberately evasive about it, she’s already continuing, “It was supposed to be low-key—just our group, you know? Fox was sick of having parties where half the school showed up and somebody broke something or spilled beer on his mom’s work stuff, so this was only our inner circle.”

  “So what happened?” Sebastian asks carefully, having not missed the defensive inflection in April’s voice. Clearly, there had been some sort of trouble even before she supposedly slept through a gruesome murder.

  My half sister goes quiet for a moment, just long enough for me to realize that what she plans to tell us will be edited somehow, and then she admits, “There was a fight. Arlo and Fox … got into a fight.”

  “About what?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs, appearing truthful enough. “I was out back, in the hot tub, and we heard the two of them shouting. By the time we made it up to the porch, they were throwing punches and stuff. Then Fox told Arlo to get out, and he left.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeats guiltily. “Maybe, like, a half an hour before … before I blacked out or whatever?”

  The ending of the statement is so blatantly hijacked and directed away from its initial destination that it leaves me momentarily at a loss for words, allowing Sebastian to interject, “So, as far as you remember, Arlo was long gone by the time you fell asleep?”

  “Maybe. I mean, I guess?” Immediately, April starts retreating back into Little Girl Lost mode, all Bambi eyes and self-deprecating chagrin, and I have to fight the urge to shake her again. “Like, I don’t actually remember hearing his bike leave, but even if he did take off, he could have come back while I was passed out, you know?”

  “Look,” I state, partly unhappy and partly relieved, “if Arlo killed him, you might as well take your money back. That dude fucking hates me, and he’s not going to tell me shit. Especially not if he did it.”

  Arlo Rossi had just graduated from Ethan Allen that spring, alongside Hayden, and he could quite possibly be Mother Nature’s most egregious act of criminal malpractice. Where Hayden effects the self-consciously preppy look of a sex-murderer from the 1980s, Arlo is equally committed to inhabiting the role of the stereotypical local badass; he has a motorcycle, an ugly haircut, and a tattoo on his neck that looks like a leopard barfing flames. He and Hayden had never exactly been friends, but they were both popular and feared—and their own personal Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing the school and its student body into spheres of influence, had designated me a zone of mutual hostility. Accidentally-on-purpose slamming me into walls for fun was one of the few things they enjoyed doing together.

  “You can at least try, though, right?” She demands indignantly. “It’s not like he’s gonna beat you up just for asking him a few questions!”

  I grit my teeth, exasperated by her cluelessness. “April, Arlo would beat me up for no reason at all, let alone if I start asking questions about a party where he might have just killed somebody. He’s not going to let me get past ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ before he puts a steel-toed boot up my ass!”

  “He’ll talk to me.” Sebastian says, surprising us both. I glance over at him, but his gaze is fixed on the floor, his posture taut as a leather strap. When he looks up, I see conflict swimming in his eyes—fear and conviction chasing each other on an endless loop—and he takes in a deep breath. “We get along okay. We’re not, like, friends or whatever, but he’ll probably answer the questions if I’m the one asking.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I say automatically, the rejection backed by a symphony of collaborating motives. Where not so long ago I was full of excuses for why I wanted to see Sebastian one more time, I now only want to get him out of my life again. I’m still angry, still hurting, and—worst of all—still attracted to him, even after one week of panic, four weeks of tearful misery, and another week of trying to pretend he’d stopped existing. I’d convinced myself I could be over him, but now every time he looks at me, smiles at me, touches me, it feels good—which feels horrible; I’m starting to realize that I’ve never stopped missing him after all, and it terrifies me. “If you drop me off at my house, I’ll get my mom’s car. I’m pretty sure she’s in bed by now.”

  “You just said yourself that Arlo won’t talk to you,” he counters, scrubbing his palms up and down his thighs in agitation, “and Race probably won’t, either. I’m cool with those guys, though. Face it: You need me.”

  April watches this exchange with narrowing eyes, and finally, she gives voice to the question that I’ve also been wanting to ask all night long. “Bash, what are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Um…” Sebastian freezes, blinking a distress signal. “We were … I was at a party—at the same party as Rufus when you called. And I’ve been out here before, so I offered to give him a ride.”

  The explanation clearly doesn’t make sense to her. “But—”

  “Where does Arlo live?” I interrupt, seizing the reins of the conversation. There’s a lot I want to know about Sebastian’s reappearance in my life—in spite of my better judgment—but I sure as hell don’t need for it to come out in front of April. Besides, no matter how much my ex-boyfriend may have hurt me, I still feel the need to protect his secret. I had the right to come out on my own terms taken away from me, and it was devastating; no amount of self-righteousness would make me feel good about watching it happen to someone else. “Because, believe it or not, he’s never invited me over before.”

  April just looks at me blankly, and then alley-oops the question to Sebastian, who offers a bewildered shrug. “I don’t know, man. I’ve never been there, either.”

  “Awesome.” I give an acerbic sigh. “We’re off to a great start—we’ve got no idea where our prime suspect even lives. Not to be pessimistic, but what if we finally figure it out, and then he’s not even home because he’s lying low somewhere? You know, trying to avoid getting pulled into a murder investigation?”

  “I can call him,” April suggests.

  “Don’t.” My tone is so forceful that she actually recoils. “April, if Arlo is the one who murdered Fox, then he’s also the one who expects you to take the fall for it. Whoever left you here made sure your phone was sitting right next to you. Don’t you get what that means?” My response is another empty look. “It means they wanted you to call the police! They wanted the cops to come out here and find you all stoned out of your mind and covered in blood, lying next to the dead bod
y of your boyfriend in a house filled with drugs known to cause violent episodes!”

  “I told you I didn’t take anything—”

  “Fine! Whatever,” I snap irritably, deciding not to make an issue out of it. There’s no time. “Whoever did this is pretty confident the evidence will incriminate you, and they’re expecting you to wake up and use your phone. If Arlo did it, and you call him, acting all casual, like, ‘Oh, I was just curious to know where you are right now—no reason!’ he’s gonna know something’s up. You’ve gotta be radio silent, April. I mean that.”

  “Okay.” She puts her hands up in a sulky surrender. Strangely, then, her eyes slide to Sebastian again before darting back to me. “There is someone else who would probably know where Arlo is. Who might even … you know, be with him.”

  “Who?”

  April fingers a silver charm bracelet that encircles her wrist. “Lia.”

  Sebastian and I both stiffen at the same time, and I feel my eyes turning to granite as I refuse to look his way. His voice is guarded and perplexed as he seeks to clarify, “Lia Santos?”

  “Yeah.” April winces apologetically. “She and Arlo came here together. They’re … well, anyway, I didn’t know if you knew about them.”

  “No.” Sebastian sounds totally hollow. “I didn’t.”

  * * *

  On the last Friday in May, I emerged from seventh period like a zombie, the act of putting one foot in front of the other requiring a superhuman effort. I trudged heavily through the halls to the classroom where the writers and editors of the Front Line met after school, and slumped into a chair. There was nothing I wanted less than to spend one more hour sitting in a room full of oblivious people, pretending not to be heartsick and destroyed, but my mom couldn’t pick me up until after the meeting—and it wasn’t as if I’d have felt any less terrible in a different environment.

  And there was always the chance, I pathetically allowed myself to believe, that Sebastian would show up this time.

  It had been exactly six days and nineteen hours since the last time I’d heard from him—six days and nineteen hours of unanswered texts and phone calls, of obsessively checking his Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts for some indication of what he was thinking, of trying to figure out how I could fix whatever I’d done wrong.

  I was literally nauseous. We’d been together for four months—four months! The surreptitious smiles when no one else was looking, the heart-pounding kisses stolen in empty hallways or at our secret spot behind the theater, our date nights watching dumb horror movies and eating pizza, making out in his bedroom while his parents thought we were studying for a quiz in biology; it had all been so great and so exciting, an endless series of doors opening onto more meaningful, more important kinds of happiness. How, after all that, could he just shut me out with no explanation?

  Sebastian was a no-show at the meeting that day, though, and I placed my cell phone on the desk in front of me where I could see it in case he decided to text, the minutes ticking by unbearably as boring story ideas were pitched, reviewed, and assigned. There was a pep rally taking place in the gym, concurrent with our meeting, and the occasional interruption of cheers and rhythmic foot-stomping underscored our incongruously dull debate over whether it was appropriate for the Front Line to openly criticize the actions of certain faculty members.

  Mr. Cohen was in the midst of splitting the finest of ideological hairs, simultaneously extolling the virtues of free speech while imploring us to keep our opinionated pieholes shut, when the urgent and approaching shriek of tennis shoes against linoleum in the hallway outside grabbed our collective attention. Two seconds later, Ramona Waverley—a pushy junior who was inexplicably, fiercely dedicated to the cause of our crappy high school newspaper—exploded into the room. Her face flushed and her eyes wild, she immediately exclaimed, “OMG, you guys! Oh em fucking gee!”

  Mr. Cohen frowned with his entire body. “Ramona—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. C.,” she apologized gravely for the profane outburst, “but this is, just, like, I mean. I was at the pep rally, okay? And, like, we have to write about this in the paper, Mr. C., because literally everybody is going to be talking about it!”

  “Talking about what, Ramona?”

  And so she told us. “Okay, you know how, like, at the rallies, teachers and players get up and say stuff to pump up the crowd? Like, giving speeches and whatever? Well, right after Coach Kowalski spoke, Bash got up and took the microphone—even though he wasn’t supposed to—and right in front of literally everybody, he begged Lia Santos to take him back! He said he’d never stopped loving her, and that breaking up with her four months ago was the biggest mistake he ever made, and then he got down on his knees and asked her to be his girlfriend again! And he actually started crying when she said yes!” Ramona could barely breathe. “It was the most romantic thing ever. Seriously, I almost died. Everybody almost died. This has to be in the paper.”

  The room burst into conversation. Some girls up front cooed about how they wished a guy felt about them the way Bash felt about Lia, and a few cynics placed bets on how long this particular on-again phase would last for the mercurial supercouple.

  I just stared at my cell phone through a solid, shimmering wall of unshed tears, aware that something meaningful and important had just broken inside of me.

  * * *

  Into the dead silence that follows April’s unexpected disclosure, as she avoids looking at Sebastian, and Sebastian avoids looking at me, I speak through wooden lips. “Well, then, I guess our first step is talking to Lia.”

  Without another word, I get up from my chair, march to the bedroom door, and stomp out into the wrecked family room, where the air still reeks of Fox’s curdling blood.

  5

  The effect of my furiously dramatic exit is undercut pretty quickly when I remember that my shoes and tank top are still in the bathroom, and I have to go back and get them. I instruct April to collect her cell phone from the kitchen and, before either Sebastian or I can react, she snatches up a hand towel from the countertop and wipes her prints off the hilt of the knife. Defiantly, she announces, “I’m not going to jail for this. I didn’t kill him, and I’m not going to let anybody frame me for it, either!”

  It’s too late to stop her, and I don’t have the energy to speculate about what will happen if the cops learn what she’s done, so we just usher her out of the cottage and down to where Sebastian’s Jeep is parked. As we back our way into a three-point turn, the Whitneys’ cottage looks eerily inhabited, windows spilling warm light onto the porch and bushes, and I can’t suppress a small shiver as I think about what waits inside.

  My fingers bother the seat belt again as I wonder how much time we’ve got. Every minute that passes is another opportunity for someone to find the body, someone to call the police. I’m pretty confident no one has alerted them yet; if any of the neighbors had heard the murder being committed, the place would have been swarming with cops way before Sebastian and I made the thirty-minute drive out here. And, to that point, the prospect of the hour here and back will probably discourage the party’s guests from returning to the lake house so late at night, on the off chance anyone forgot something.

  I repeat these facts to myself like a mantra, trying to stifle my anxiety, but it doesn’t help much. Whoever punched all those holes into Fox is someone whose behavior I’m not sure I can predict; they left April’s phone where she could reach it, presumably hoping she’d do the obvious—call her parents, or the police, and put Fox’s murder on the map—but there’s no way to be absolutely sure they don’t intend to drop a dime on her and tip off the authorities themselves. What I’ve agreed to do is a huge gamble.

  How far, I ask myself, am I really willing to take this quixotic performance before I hold April to her promise of going to the police, anyway? And how much do I really expect to learn from the cast of stuck-up, hostile characters who attended Fox’s party? Next to nothing, if I were to be honest; but for
two thousand dollars, I’d be willing to bang my head on a literal brick wall, so I figure I might as well give it a shot.

  As the Jeep glides down that darkened tunnel of trees leading back to Route 2, I sneak a glance at Sebastian out of the corner of my eye and feel a perverse wave of pleasure when I see the tense and brooding look in his eyes. A malicious part of me—a part I’m not so proud of—gleefully anticipates what’s about to come.

  It was difficult, not being able to tell people about dating Sebastian—and lying to Lucy, in particular, was excruciating—but I knew how sensitive the subject was. I understood the fear of damaged friendships and sobbing parents, the dread of the world turning against you because a twist of biological fate makes you Different. Keeping our relationship hidden wasn’t always easy, but I did it because I cared about Sebastian. I did it because he needed me to, and because I’d have done almost anything for him.

  * * *

  By the time the Front Line reconvened for its first meeting after winter break, I’d come to a horrible realization: I had fallen—hard—for a straight boy.

  The more articles Bash and I worked on together, the more I learned about him, and the more I began to let my guard down. He started laughing at my jokes, sharing secret thoughts, and even teasing me in a way that made this squirmy ribbon of warmth begin twisting in the pit of my stomach. I’d begun looking forward to those after-school meetings—to seeing Bash Williams smile as I walked through the door, to feeling the buzz of goofy self-consciousness if I caught him looking my way when somebody else was speaking. I’d really begun looking forward to watching his cute, perfect butt move whenever he happened to be walking in front of me.

  It was awful. Bash Williams was not only friends with my sworn enemies, he also had a girlfriend—and everybody knew he and Lia were epic. The problem was that I couldn’t avoid him without quitting the paper, which I really didn’t want to do, and I couldn’t be close to him, either, because my stupid feelings kept getting worse.