The Girl in the Headlines

by Hannah Jayne

  I waited for Nate to say something about the lush backyard, but his eyes were on me, wide, focused, his lips pressed together in a thin white line.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  “No, but what choice do I have?”

  “You could run. We could run.”

  “I didn’t do this, Nate. But I’m going to find whoever did.”

  “And what? Clear your name? It doesn’t matter if you did it or not, Andi. You’re guilty. You’re all over the news. Do you think people are going to change their minds about you? That you’re going to become the sympathetic victim daughter? You’re not, girlie. You and me, we’re leftovers. We’re afterthoughts.”

  “Then why are you still here?”

  A muscle flicked along Nate’s jawline, and he focused on my chin, then looked at the ground. “I’m just trying to be a friend.”

  “Then be a friend and either help me out,” I said as I sucked in a shaky breath, “or leave.”

  Nate paused for a beat. “So how do we get in?”

  I approached the fence and looked for a mound or a lump, something to close the two-foot gap between my head and the fence. “Little help?”

  “I thought you were tough?” He made a basket with his hands, and I positioned my foot for my boost.

  “I am tough,” I said from the top of the fence. “I’m also short.”

  “So?” he asked when we were both on the other side. “Do you have some sort of hide-a-key or anything?”

  “No.”

  “Window open.”

  “What?” I straightened, my eyes following to where Nate was pointing.

  “Window. Second floor though.”

  It was my bedroom window. On the left, bubblegum pink curtains waving in the two-inch gap left open. I didn’t dare look at Josh’s room right next to mine, picture window identical to mine, his every-sport-pattern curtains pushed as far open as they would go. Josh hates the dark. He hates any tiny shadow, even after I click on the light to show him they aren’t real.

  He must be so scared right now.

  “I can get in.”

  I crossed the backyard in four long strides and grabbed the lowest branch on the craggy oak that was putting cracks in our foundation. I swung to an alternate branch and shinnied my way up another four feet until I was seated comfortably, shoulder height with my window. “Coming?”

  Nate was at the base of the tree, staring up incredulously at me. “You couldn’t get over the damn fence but suddenly you’re all supergirl climbing a tree?”

  I dangled my legs over the branch and shrugged. “I did gymnastics until the eighth grade. Come on.”

  Nate took a step back and pulled a hand through his hair. “Why don’t you just let me in? I’ll wait here and be your lookout.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “Are you sure? It’s a super easy climb.”

  Another step back, this one tiny. “I’m just saying it’s better to have someone looking out for you. From down here.” He pointed to the ground.

  I studied him. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Was he going to run the moment I got in? Call the police and get me caught? I scooched farther out on the branch, and Nate’s eyes went saucer-wide.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting this window open.” I leaned over and stuck two fingers through the gap, then worked like mad to push the thing open. “It’s stuck.” I was trying to throw my weight behind it, and I heard the leaves slapping one another as the branch swayed.

  “Get down. You should get down right now, Andi. This was a bad idea. A stupid idea.”

  “Why?” I said. “If I can just get it—”

  “Stop!” Nate’s voice was sharp, and when I whipped around to look at him, I saw that his face was pale and he had a hand pressed against his chest.

  “Is someone here? Did you see someone?”

  “No.” He was panting. “But you’re going to fall and kill yourself. And you’ll probably fall on me, and then I’ll die. Just—just get down. This was a bad idea.”

  In spite of myself, I felt my lips press up into a stupid grin. “You’re scared.”

  “What? No.”

  “You’re scared for me.”

  “Scared of you maybe,” he said in a low voice.

  “Come up here.”

  “No.” Nate was not looking at me. He was kicking at the splotchy grass underneath the tree. “No.”

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “Why, Nate Whatever the Hell Your Last Name Is! You can’t climb a tree, can you?”

  That got him. He looked up, a snarl on his face. “Of course I can climb a tree. I climbed a fence, didn’t I?”

  “But a tree is so much more…” I waggled my arms.

  “Can you please just hold on, you giant nut bag?”

  “Unsteady.”

  He stepped closer to the tree trunk and squinted up at me, his voice a low hiss. “If you must know, I don’t like heights, okay? I’m not crazy about them. So could you just either get down or get in that window and grab your underwear or whatever?”

  I considered continuing to frighten and play with him, but I couldn’t. He may have been a weirdo who lived in a motel and was afraid of heights, but he was the only friend I had.

  “Okay,” I said, giving the window one final tug. It opened, and I shinnied over the branch, rolling over the windowsill and into my bedroom.

  I think I expected something about it to be different, but everything was the same. The smell. The blast of warm air that always seemed to be home.

  But it’s not home anymore. It never will be again.

  A sob lodged in my throat, and I gripped the blankets on my bed, half-heartedly considering climbing in, pulling the covers up over my head, and praying that this whole thing was a terrible dream.

  A pebble rattled against my window frame, and I jumped, electricity rattling through me.

  “Hey!”

  Nate’s hoarse whisper floated up. “Everything okay?”

  Twenty-Eight

  I turned around, putting my bag onto my bed.

  I should get stuff. Stuff? What does one need when packing up a life? My eyes went to my overfilled bulletin board with the pictures of me and Lynelle and our friends and even one of Cal, but it felt like I was looking at someone else’s memories. None of those people knew me. All those people assumed I had come to campus to fight Lynelle, as an angry fugitive who wanted to steal her phone. I blinked and tried to breathe, then started throwing handfuls of underwear and socks, T-shirts and jeans into my bag. I grabbed the framed picture of my family and packed that too, murmuring “shut up, shut up, shut up” to the niggling voice in the back of my mind that told me that was some other family with some other girl.

  I also grabbed the fat envelope I kept stuffed in my top drawer. It was thick with bills—birthday money, pizza money, extra dollars for “walking-around money” as my dad called it. Two extra inhalers from the bathroom medicine cabinet, a tube of ChapStick.

  I heard a pebble on the window and remembered Nate was down there: this life, that life. Before I went downstairs, I glanced through Josh’s open door to his rumpled bed, the tangle of clothes and games and soccer balls on his floor. On a whim, I rushed in, stuck my hand between his mattress and bed frame, and pulled out my dad’s iPad that Josh had commandeered. It was now mostly clogged with games, and he lost it seventeen times a day (it was always right here), but I thought it could be helpful.

  I went down the stairs with tunnel vision. Suddenly, I didn’t want to see anything. I knew the family portraits over my shoulder by heart: me at six waving with finger-paint-covered hands while wearing a construction paper crown; a formal wedding shot of Mom and Dad; a casual shot of Mom, Josh, and I laughing on the beach; Josh in soccer gear, ball perched on his hip. They were portr
aits that marked years of a life that I was no longer allowed to live.

  My tread started to slow the closer I got to the first-floor landing. My throat started to close, and the stench of industrial-strength cleanser stung my eyes. I froze when I saw the yellow police tape haphazardly rounding the living room.

  It happened here.

  A sick curiosity bubbled up inside, and I wanted to look, but everything else—heart, soul, brain—told me to keep walking, told me what I would see would only burn itself into my brain rather than give me any kind of peace of mind.

  I stepped into the garage, going for the side door. It was the only door that the police hadn’t bothered to tape off—not that breaking police tape was where I drew the line—and I let Nate in. He bobbed his head but said nothing, and we walked in silence.

  The smell was stronger when we stepped into the kitchen, and I gritted my teeth against it. Nate looked around, and I wanted to explain things to him: the pictures on the wall, that the bathroom was down the hall, because this was my house. The house I grew up in, the house that I conjured up when anyone mentioned the word home.

  But now it wasn’t mine.

  Something else lingered in the air, countering the heavy smell of chlorine bleach and fake normalcy. I couldn’t place it, but it made the hair on my arms, on the back of my neck, stand up. Nate brushed my bare skin, awkwardly extending his arm. I couldn’t help it—I fell into him.

  I didn’t see any blood. I didn’t see any bodies or anything amiss. It was our house, and there in the hallway, nothing was different or out of place, and maybe that was why I broke down—because I was different. I was out of place. I never actually belonged here. It didn’t matter to my parents, to me, to Josh, but now that was all that mattered. I was me. I wasn’t one of them. They were the victims, and I was the suspect.

  The reality crashed into me, and my whole body stiffened. I bit my cheek until I tasted blood: something solid and real. As long as I was the prime suspect, the person who did this, who caused this, was walking free, was walking safe. I needed to get justice for my family.

  “We could just leave, you know,” Nate was saying, his lips brushing against my hair.

  “I can’t. I won’t.” I stepped away from him and began to pace a small circle on the heavy pile carpet. “My parents weren’t involved in anything that would put them in danger.”

  “Well, can you see anything that’s blatantly missing?”

  I looked around the house, and although the smell was getting to me and it looked like a bomb went off around the windows and doors, the rest of the house was soul-clenchingly normal. My sweatshirt thrown over the back of a dining room chair. Josh’s dinosaur boots that never made it into the closet.

  “Other than the soot…”

  Nate nodded toward the doorjamb. “Fingerprint dust. It’s a bitch to clean off.”

  Who was going to clean it off?

  I shrugged.

  “Your mom and dad have an office or anything?”

  I led Nate down the hall, jaw clenched and commanding myself to move my feet forward, focus on nothing but the walk down the hall. Don’t linger, don’t look at pictures, don’t sink into the comfort of home, because this isn’t home anymore. I pushed one foot in front of the other, my mind racing with stupid thoughts like Should I take off my shoes to avoid detection? Can I turn on a light?

  I didn’t want answers, because I didn’t want to know any of those things. I didn’t want to be the expert on walking undetected through a crime scene. I didn’t want any of this.

  “Computers?” Nate asked when we turned into the office.

  I glanced around. “Not here.”

  “Police probably took them.”

  I nodded, realizing my laptop wasn’t on my desk upstairs either.

  Nate stiffened. “Do you hear that?”

  “No.”

  “It sounds like someone tried the door.”

  “The police?”

  “We need to get out of here.”

  Nate stepped into the hall, and I was on my way when something in the closet caught my eye. It was the leather briefcase that Mom and I had given Dad when I was ten. He had just gotten tenure, and we made a special dinner while Josh bounced in his baby chair, and Mom presented Dad this beautiful briefcase with his initials scrolled in gold, and my name and Josh’s were on the card. I had never seen the thing before Dad opened it, but the way he smiled and cooed made me so proud that I blurted, “I picked it out!” and he stroked my hair and kissed my forehead. My hand closed around the handle when I heard the rattle of the door and Nate’s hiss.

  “Come on!”

  I snatched the briefcase, jumping at my reflection in the plate glass window.

  Only it wasn’t my reflection.

  Short hair. Wide eyes.

  Mouth dropped open in shock.

  I screamed, and Nate darted halfway through the doorway, grabbed my arm, and pulled. We flew down the hall as the person outside yelled—something muffled but mad, something like “Get out!” or “Call the police!”

  I paused, frozen, watching the lock on the front door slide.

  Nate grabbed my bag while I clutched my dad’s briefcase. “We have to get out of here!”

  The front door cracked open.

  “Andi?”

  It wasn’t Nate’s voice.

  Twenty-Nine

  I couldn’t hear our footsteps over the thud-thud-thud of my heart as we ran out though the back door and tore across the yard. We were over the fence and halfway down the frontage road when the sirens pierced the night, low, insistent wails in the darkness. Sweat was running down my face, my lungs felt like they were going to explode, and the briefcase was thumping against my shins in a painful rhythm.

  “I have to stop,” I panted. “Just for a second.”

  We were in a clump of trees, and Nate obliged. I followed him behind a bush and sat, taking a puff from my inhaler while my eyes adjusted to the star-speckled night sky. I could see the police cars turning down our street, one after the other, sirens whooping. I imagined my neighbors coming out, one by one, heads swerving as the police arrived at the house.

  “Who was that, Andi?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  Nate’s brows were knitted. “He knew you.”

  The voice was vaguely familiar. And the eyes, the dark brows pulled low…

  “He was wearing a baseball hat,” I said, “pulled pretty low over his eyes, and there was glare from the glass.”

  “But you didn’t recognize him?”

  My pulse slowed as my mind raced. “I do—but I don’t,” I said miserably. “It’s like nothing in my freaking head works anymore!”

  “We need to get back to the motel. The cops will be searching out here any minute.”

  I chanced one last glance over my shoulder where the lights from the police cars were flashing in their red-and-white pattern. I heard a dog bark and stiffened. Nate’s eyes widened.

  “We’re going now.”

  * * *

  I wasn’t entirely sure how we got back to the motel, but we did, and I sat on the floor, paralyzed, not from the lung-wrenching run but from the absolute terror and certainty that I was found out, that the police would be at Nate’s door with their salivating dogs in a matter of minutes.

  “Who was that, Nate? Who was it?”

  Nate set a mug in front of me. “You tell me.”

  I breathed deeply, bringing the mug to my lips and expecting the warm aroma of tea or cocoa or even the Midnight Inn’s terrible black-as-tar coffee, but frowned. “What is this?”

  “I told you. Orange Crush. Probably flat. Sorry.” He shrugged. “I don’t have anything harder. Or, you know, Starbucks-ier.”

  I should have cried knowing that my last sip of freedom was going to be a horrendous-tasting
flat soft drink, but I had to grin. Nate’s smile was kind, and he was sitting on the floor with me, our knees touching.

  “Think, Andi. You said you knew the voice.”

  “I can’t—I can’t right now. Just give me a minute. Let me do something else.”

  “Okay. You can put your clothes away, I guess. I can clear you out a drawer.”

  I looked around at the stuffed-to-the-gills motel room. “Here?”

  “Got someplace else to go?”

  I shook my head no. I had nowhere else to go, but I didn’t want to believe I could stay there either, hiding out in a crappy motel with a boy I was starting to feel things for in the shadow of my shambles life.

  “What’s in the briefcase?”

  “Nothing,” I said, brushing my palm over the soft leather. “I just wanted it because I gave it to my dad. A pretty stupid thing, I know.”

  “There’s clearly something in here, Andi. Did you not notice it’s about fifty pounds?”

  I frowned, unzipped the center portion, then upturned the entire thing on the spare bed. Papers flopped out. Manila file folders, some pens, a smattering of receipts fluttering down to the gross bedspread.

  “Wow.” Nate look impressed. “This could potentially give us a hell of a lot of information.”

  A tiny wave of exhilaration fluttered over me. “You really think there could be clues in here?”

  Nate shrugged. “It’s worth a shot. This everything?”

  I poked around in the pockets of the briefcase. “Looks like it.”

  “Did your dad have any other papers lying around? Bills, bank statements?” Nate didn’t give me a chance to answer before he batted at the air. “Nah, police probably took all that stuff.”

  I blinked. “I know they took our laptops and, I guess, phones and stuff. But paperwork?”

  “They probably went through everything.”