“Can you see what’s going on?” Lindsey asks.
The way she’s parked, her view is obscured by a mangy shrub, but if I press my forehead against my side window, I see the strip mall perfectly.
“He’s at the gas pump,” I say. And after a minute, “He’s walking into Fast Gas.”
What’s weird, though, is that when he goes to pay, the checkout woman reaches under the counter and pulls up a plastic bag full of something. She rings up his gas and hands the bag to him, like it’s something he just bought, only it’s not. He went straight to the counter—not getting anything—then pulled out a wad of bills and handed them to her. So, what’s in the bag?
Something else weird: She doesn’t give him any change.
“What’s going on?” Lindsey asks.
“Good question,” I say, then describe what I saw.
“That’s taking skeezy to a whole new level,” she says.
“I know. What are we doing, Linds? This is such a bad idea. Maybe we should just—”
“He’s leaving!”
I squint at the parking lot. No red Mustang.
Lindsey backs out, then turns left onto West Main.
There’s a white truck and a green sedan between us, but ahead is Todd and his strange plastic bag.
“What do you think’s going on?” I ask. “What’s this have to do with Kyle?”
“I don’t know,” Lindsey says. “That whole exchange was super dodgy. Some kind of payoff or something? Maybe drugs?”
“Holy crap! Remind me why we’re following this guy.”
“It’s keeping my mind off Robert.”
“Are you kidding me?” I say loudly. And then, in case she somehow didn’t hear, “Tell me that’s a joke.”
“It’s a joke,” she says, though we both know it’s kind of not.
I don’t want to obsess on Charlie’s crappiness any more than she wants to obsess on Robert’s—but it’s not like I’m ready to throw myself under a bus just to avoid the subject. And this kind of feels like throwing myself under a bus.
“Plus,” Lindsey says, “we need to know what he and Kyle are doing. Last time, I was—” She pauses, takes a loud breath. “Last time, I had no idea what was going to happen. I had no—I can’t go through that again.”
It makes a weird sort of logic. As risky as it feels to be out here, following Todd, it might be riskier to sit at home, pretending we’re safe.
It’s starting to get dark, and Todd’s brake lights flash. “He’s turning left,” I say, pointing.
We’re pretty far out of the city by now. There are a few outlying neighborhoods, some trailer parks, and then mostly curvy country roads. The road Todd turns onto doesn’t look like it gets much traffic.
“Hold back,” I say. “Don’t let him see us.”
Lindsey idles in the median for a minute. By the time she turns, Todd’s car is out of sight.
“I don’t want to lose him,” she says.
“There’s nowhere to go but straight,” I say—though straight is a relative term. The road itself rises and dips with every swell of the land, curves around every hill.
We drive maybe five minutes, but it seems like forever.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere, Lindsey. Maybe we should head back.”
“Let’s just keep on for a little,” Lindsey says.
I try to text my mom, thinking at least she’d know where to start looking if this goes south, but my service doesn’t reach out here.
After another minute or so, we see the Mustang, not on the road, but parked outside a junky trailer. In the yard, abandoned kids’ toys, a metal ladder on its side, the carcass of a washing machine.
There’s nowhere to pull over that wouldn’t be conspicuous, so Lindsey drives by. Then, past the next curve, she pulls into a driveway and turns around.
“I saw a place back there, on the other side of the trailer, where we can park.”
She drives back the way we came, past the trailer, and then veers onto a grassy patch beside the road.
“What now?” I ask.
She stares ahead, considering. “We walk.” She switches off the car. “Veronica’s softball stuff is in the trunk. She’s got three or four bats.”
“Bats?”
“You know, in case we need to defend ourselves.”
“I’m betting the people in that trailer have shotguns, Lindsey. What’s a bat going to do against that?”
“They’re not even going to see us,” she says. “We’ll keep at a distance, stay hidden.”
“Okay,” I say. “That is officially the worst idea ever.”
“You got a better one?”
“We go home, make sandwiches, and watch TV.”
“Yeah, no.” Lindsey pops the trunk and slides out of the car.
I pull the knit hat back over my head, open my door, and join her.
Bats in hand, we walk toward the trailer in the gathering dark. This is stupid, I tell myself, so so stupid, and yet my feet keep following Lindsey.
When we get near the trailer, we cross the street and clamber off the road, into the woods. We make a wide circle around the property and, keeping to the trees, approach from behind.
Through a window, we can see Todd at a table. There’s a bearded guy across from him. They talk and drink. The bearded guy leaves the room. He comes back in with a package that he hands to Todd, who stuffs it in his jacket. Lindsey clutches my arm like we just got to the good part in a movie.
“Definitely drugs,” she whispers.
They both leave the kitchen, and for a minute we’re just watching the yellow glow of artificial light on a cluttered kitchen table.
Then we hear a car rev to life, and the sound of it driving away.
Criminals
Lindsey squeals, “I can’t believe we did that!”
“Shhhhhhh,” I say, though I don’t know who’s going to hear us out here. We’re slogging back through the woods. It’s not totally night yet, but it’s darker under the trees, and the glare from our phones helps light our way.
“That was unreal,” I whisper. “I think we may be criminals.”
“Superheroes, you mean.”
“Isn’t looking in someone’s window illegal?”
“Not if that someone has been stalking you and is heading up a drug ring!”
“I don’t think that’s how laws work.”
After a minute, Lindsey asks, “Are we lost?”
I stop and glance around. Every tree looks pretty much like every other tree.
“I don’t know. Are we?”
“I thought we’d be at the road by now,” she says.
“This is the way we came. I’m sure of it,” I say, though I’m only half sure.
I lean my bat against a tree and check my phone to see if I can find where we are, but I still don’t have a signal.
“Are you getting service?” I ask Lindsey.
She checks. “Two bars!”
“Pull up your GPS,” I say. “Where’s the road?”
She props her bat against her leg, taps at her phone, and squints. “Got it!” she says, then points in a direction about forty-five degrees to the right of where we’d been heading.
“Thank you, O Great and Powerful GPS!” I pick up my bat and we set off again, our feet rumbling through dry leaves.
“It’s just ahead,” she says, and after a minute more, we break through the edge of the woods, onto the roadside.
“Yes!” I have never been so relieved to see a black stretch of asphalt.
“Holy hell!” Lindsey stuffs her phone in her pocket and grips her bat with both hands in swinging position.
I look to where she’s staring. Down the road, just ahead of where we parked, sits Todd’s red Mustang.
Suddenly, being back there lost in the woods doesn’t seem like so bad a thing. The door to the Mustang opens, and Todd emerges, roughly the size of a bear.
“Um, um, Lindsey.” If my heart could pound its way clear
out of my chest, it’d be on the road by now, gasping like a fish on dry land.
“What the fuck, people?” Todd yells, crossing the road toward us.
Lindsey swings her bat. “Back off!” she shouts.
“Whoa, whoa.” Todd holds out his hands in a settle down gesture.
Following Lindsey’s lead, I raise my bat. “Stop!”
Todd takes another step to get clear of the road, then stops on the curb about ten feet away from us, hands on hips. “You following me?”
“Oh, really, you don’t like being followed?” Lindsey asks. “Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you started stalking us!”
“Stalking you?!” His outrage seems genuine, but maybe he’s just a good liar.
“We know about you and Kyle,” Lindsey growls.
“What do you know?” Todd takes a step closer.
“Stand back!” I jab my bat in his general direction.
“You and Kyle think you just get to mess with us. But we’re not—”
“Wait, wait. You think—” He rubs his face, amused. “You think that’s what this is about? Messing with you?!” He laughs like he just heard the best joke of all time. “I couldn’t give a solitary shit about either one of you. I wouldn’t waste my time.”
“What about ‘it’s not your fault’? And that nasty bear? And the candy? The flowers?”
“Bitch, please! You’re off your fucking nut.”
“You really don’t know, do you?” I ask.
“Know what?” He spits out the words, and for some weird reason, it’s his anger that convinces me. This is no act. He’s clueless.
“Look, everything’s cool,” I say. “We made a mistake. We should all just go on home and—”
“Where you think you’re going?” he says. “Not after what you’ve seen. And you—” He points at me. “You spit in my face and shit. You got it coming.”
“I will cut you,” Lindsey snarls, which doesn’t make much sense in that she’s holding a bat, but it still sounds scarily badass.
It might be panic or rage or too little food and too much stress, but I am not having it. “WILL EVERYONE CHILL THE HELL OUT?”
In one motion, both Lindsey and Todd swivel their heads toward where I stand.
I say it slowly, pointing for emphasis, and with as much authority as I can muster: “We are not going to mess with you. And you are not going to mess with us. We didn’t see anything. We don’t know anything, and we don’t want to. Far as we’re concerned, you’ll never see us again. So we’re done here. Like you said, you don’t need to waste your time.”
Todd’s face is scrunched up like he’s trying hard to convert what I’m saying into English. It’s then that a green minivan passes us on the road, slows to a stop, and backs up to where Todd is standing. The passenger window rolls down and the driver, a woman by her voice, shouts out, “Y’all all right? Need me to call someone for you?”
“We’re good,” Todd says, but Lindsey yells over him, “Yes! That would be great! Could you do that?”
She runs behind the van to the other side of the road, and I follow. Lindsey bellows, keeping eye contact with the driver, not taking a breath: “Our battery is out, it just up and died, I think I have jumper cables in the back, maybe you could give me a jump, or you know, call someone, that would really help a lot, and…” The whole time she’s talking, she walks backward toward the Chrysler, and motions for me to do the same. “Maybe you’d have more luck than I did, let me see, I know I put my phone somewhere.…” She climbs into the driver side. I climb into the passenger seat. Lindsey starts the car. “Oh, look,” she yells over the engine, “it started, we’re good.” She gives the van lady a thumbs-up and peels out.
Driving way faster than is legal, Lindsey steers us toward home.
Never
Between yesterday and today, it’s like a hundred years have passed.
But in that time, my secret life as a spy left me with one certain truth:
“I am never,” I tell Lindsey, “never ever ever doing anything like that again.”
“Yeah.” She settles into the oversized beanbag chair in my room. “I don’t know what got into me. This whole thing—the weird packages, and then seeing Robert with Brianna—it has me on edge.”
I might call it over the edge, but whatever. I collapse onto my bed. “On the bright side, we now know Todd wasn’t the one leaving us ‘presents.’ We can cross him off the list.”
“Why was he visiting Kyle, you think?”
“Maybe he was… being nice?”
“Yeah, that sounds exactly like the Todd Firebaugh we know,” Lindsey says. She sits up, leans forward. “Here’s what I think. Kyle’s been in jail, right? That place is full of dealers. Maybe one of them needed someone on the outside for deliveries and stuff. So Kyle contacted Todd and set him up for a job. Meanwhile, there’s some guy behind bars who’s pulling all the strings.”
“Wow,” I say, considering. “You watch a crap-ton of cop shows, don’t you?”
“Knowledge is power, baby.”
“Have you seen Todd since yesterday?”
“At lunch. It was weird,” she says. “I mean, it wasn’t weird, which made it weird. I walked by him, and he just kind of nodded, like, Hey! And that’s it. Like, what the hell? We’re buds now? I don’t think so.”
“Maybe he thinks you’re tough. Oh my God, Linds. The sight of you with that baseball bat.” I start giggling. “I’m taking that with me to the grave.”
Lindsey laughs. “I told Taylor what we did, and she was about to hyperventilate.”
“I bet. But at least she knows what we know.”
“Right,” Lindsey says. “Which is… what, exactly?”
“Well, we know that Todd didn’t deliver those notes… and whatever he’s up to with Kyle, it doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“But we still have no idea who did deliver that stuff,” Lindsey says.
“True. Maybe it was just some—I don’t know—someone’s idea of a joke? I mean, we haven’t gotten anything else.…”
“If we do, though,” Lindsey says, “if something else happens, we’re going to the cops. This is getting way too real. No more bats in the woods.”
“No more bats in the woods,” I agree.
“What about Charlie?” she asks. “Is he still giving you the silent treatment?”
I sigh.
“It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth,” I say. “It’s been, what”—I count it out—“five days, and not a peep.” After my ill-conceived stream of rage-texts, I texted Charlie twice. One an apology. One a meme of a ridiculous dog on some guy’s head. Then I deleted his number from my phone so I wouldn’t end up like one of those screenshots from the crazy ex.
No return texts, no calls. And in class? He’s pulled his hood back up and ceased to notice me.
To be fair, he’s ceased to notice anything. Period. The hermit crab retreats into his shell.
It’s not surprising, I guess. Even so, I am surprised. Not the good surprised either. But the one where I discover a knife I never saw before sticking out of my chest.
Wow! That’s a big knife. Where did that come from, anyway? Oh, and gee, it smarts!
I remember Charlie on that first night, outside Bobby’s Barn—how he asked, Will it hurt to find out?
It turns out that was a pretty crappy question. Because it does hurt. Like a mousetrap to the tongue. But all over, inside.
“God, this trial!” I say, eager to talk about anything else. “I just wish it would get over with.”
The three of us—Lindsey, Taylor, and I—have met individually with both of the lawyers at this point. The defense attorney, Mr. Wirtz, is a younger, beardless version of Mr. Hayes. Same questions, less obviously southern, and slightly more smarmy.
“It’s amazing,” I say, “to think how much power those lawyers have. If you suck at your job, some innocent person could die.”
“Can you imagine ha
ving to defend Kyle, though?” Lindsey asks.
“That would be the worst. I mean, you’re sitting there with a guy you know killed someone in this horrible way, and your job is to help him get away with it. Really?”
“I don’t know how they live with themselves,” Lindsey says. “I’d rather sell crackers and shower curtains at Big Lots for the rest of my life. At least I could go home and know I’ve brought some joy into the world.”
“Well, people do love their crackers and shower curtains.”
Next Day
Another restless night, and it’s Charlie Hunt’s fault. How, I wonder, can someone be so present by the sheer force of their absence?
So I decide: I’m not doing this. I simply will not hurt anymore. And if that means I don’t feel anything else, so be it. I tell whatever’s in me that’s all pissed and confused and achy over the lack of Charlie Hunt to shut the hell up. Then, brick by brick, I build a soundproof wall between me and it.
In English Friday, I raise my hand to debate loudly, if not exactly logically, the relative merits of Conrad’s use of God imagery in Heart of Darkness. I flirt with the thick-necked guy in gym. And when I trip over my feet while missing a volley, I make a spectacle of my own great sense of humor.
So while I’m out on my evening run, is it any surprise that I’m numb when Charlie turns up by the river, like something snagged on a tree branch after a flood.
“Hey!”
I know the voice, look back, and there he is, in the woods beside the path.
“Wait up!” he calls.
I turn around, jogging in place, and let him catch up.
Then I stop cold, hands on knees, breathing hard, glancing up.
“What?” I say, disgusted at my heart for its rebellious little flip.
“You should keep walking,” he says, “so you won’t cramp.”
I straighten and fall in beside him.
“I kind of disappeared, I guess.” His voice is low enough I have to strain to hear him over the water.
“Whatever,” I say, meaning, Hell yeah, you did.
How She Died, How I Lived Page 17