“Yeah, where is Chad, anyway?” said Marcus.
“Do I look like I care?” said Devin.
“Well, maybe you don’t want to run into him later,” said Gina. “We should make sure he left.”
“Again,” said Devin. “Not really your concern.”
“They’re right,” I said. “What if he’s still here? What if he tries to hurt you again?”
“He didn’t hurt me, okay?” said Devin.
“He did,” I said. “You just showed us.”
Devin scowled. “All of you just mind your own business.”
“Maybe she wants to run into him,” Lizzy said, frowning. She turned to Devin. “You do, don’t you? This is just another one of your big scenes. Looking to create drama, as usual.” She shook her head. “I don’t get you, Devin Rhodes.”
“One of the many, many reasons we’re not friends,” said Devin. She turned to me, “Right, Cass?”
Gina, Lizzy, and Marcus were all looking at me. Devin was, too. It was only four people, but I was completely pulled in a million different directions. I resented—no, I was angry—that Devin had put me in this place. This place where I had to choose, over and over again.
I sucked on my lip. “Let it go, Devin,” I finally said. “They’re just trying to help.”
Devin’s eyes flashed with anger. She opened her mouth, then closed it and stared down at the ground. She loosened her grip on my arm.
“Hey, good luck with that one, Cass,” said Lizzy. “Come on, Gina.” She put her arm on Gina’s shoulders, and the two of them started to walk away. Gina turned back one more time and shrugged.
Then Devin, for the first time in forever, actually listened to me. She let go. She let go of my arm. I felt the release in slow motion, like in a movie, where I watched us separate, saw the actual, official act of our friendship ending.
“I knew you were really on their side,” she said. Her eyes blinked with fresh tears. “Thanks for nothing.” She took a deep breath, then ran off.
AFTER
THE CHARM SITS IN MY HAND. It’s so small, so light, the same as its twin that hangs from my neck. My palm closes around it.
“Lovely little piece,” says Mr. Cordeau. He’s pulling the car over, off of the road, down a small slope, into the woods. “One of my favorites.”
“No,” I whisper. I shake my head. “No, no, no.” I reach for the car door, but it’s locked. I scramble to find the lock, to undo it, to force myself out of the car and take my chances in the tall forest of pine, but I can’t get it to work.
“Oh, it’s childproof,” says Mr. Cordeau. He parks the car and turns off the lights. “Can’t be too safe nowadays,” he says, that awful smile still etched across his face. “Not that you’re a child, my dear. Fifteen already, aren’t we?” He reaches toward me, his coarse hand brushing my cheek. “Oh, yes,” he says, “quite the young lady you are. Why, you even have a young man now, don’t you? Not really the fat ugly duckling, after all.”
I pull away from him and hurl myself into the backseat. Mr. Cordeau grabs onto my leg. My hands grab hold of the back car door. I kick out, and even though I can’t see, I aim well and kick him in the face.
He groans, loud and angry, and I scramble into the backseat.
Mr. Cordeau has a bloody nose, a trail of red running from his large nostril down his stubbly face. He’s wiping it with a surprised, caught-in-headlights look.
“You little bitch,” he says, reaching for me with his large hands. “Your friend didn’t fight as hard,” he says. “Delicate flower that she was. But she tried.” His grin is slanted; it cuts his face into a weird diagonal. “She even got herself out of the car, God only knows how.”
I hold my bag up. My canvas zippered shield is all that stands between me and Devin’s killer. Her real killer. My killer if I can’t get out of this car. I push the bag into his face.
He grabs me by the hair, and my head slams into the car door. My forehead burns, and warm blood runs quickly into my eyes. I bring my hand up to my head and feel the spot where it hit the door. It’s warm and sticky, and there’s a Frankenstein-like gash where there used to be skin. “Devin was much more accommodating,” he says. “She told me how you treated her, all the terrible things you said. She came to me willingly, a soft shoulder to cry on. Poor little Devin Rhodes.” His eyes grow wide. “You drove her to me.”
“No, no, that’s not—” I choke as my heart pounds against my chest.
“Yes,” he says forcefully. “And then, when I needed her, she pushed me away. After all I did for sweet Devin Rhodes. Sweet Devin Rhodes, so much like her mother. I never meant for her to die. She shouldn’t have tried to run away.” His expression changes and is at once calm and quizzical. “You can understand that, can’t you?” He says this as though we’re having a normal conversation and he wants my honest opinion.
“Why?” I say. The word tastes like blood. None of this makes any sense. I just can’t wrap my brain around it.
“Pretty little Devin Rhodes,” he says. “Susan’s precious flower.”
My head throbs; my vision begins to blur. “Mrs. Rhodes?”
“Yes, Mrs. Rhodes.” He sneers. “She walked around like she was too good for me. She knew how I felt about her. I needed answers about Susan. I needed Devin to explain.”
“Mrs. Rhodes is married,” I say. I press myself against the backseat and search for a quick way out.
“You have a lot to learn, little girl,” he says. “Too bad you won’t live long enough to learn it.”
“No!” My heart explodes inside my chest.
“I knew it would only be a matter of time before you figured out what happened. I can’t have you telling everyone, can I?” he says, gripping my arm as I try to pull away.
I have to get out of here. I don’t have any more time. This is it. And then I feel it again, feel her again, Devin wraps herself around me. Her breath, warm on my neck, pushes against me. My head turns just slightly, urged on by her invisible touch. My head lowers and then I see it, silver and shining from the floor of the backseat. I see what she’s trying to show me. Right next to me. A tire iron. Oh, no. Oh, Devin, I think. Oh. Devin.
I reach down quickly and grab the tire iron in my hands. I squeeze it tightly, then bring it down on Mr. Cordeau’s head. He falls down into the front seat, his huge body slumping over. The tire iron slides from my fingers.
Mr. Cordeau moans. My own head pounds, but I reach over him and click open the door locks. Then I reach back and open the back door. I’m still bleeding from the gash above my eye. I tumble quietly out the back door and onto the damp grass. My brain thumps inside my skull, and I can’t get up. I lie there, looking up at the night sky, at the stars that dot the blackness, and I think, Is this it? Will this be the last thing I ever see? Is this the last thing Devin saw, too?
“I’m sorry, Devin,” I whisper. The words lift themselves into the humid air. “Devin, I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Then I see lights. Red lights, and they’re flashing. A police car and a maroon van pull up. The maroon van, I think, from the mall?
“She’s by the car!” someone shouts.
“Cordeau’s still in there!”
Two men hop out of the maroon van. One I don’t know, but the other is Detective Williams. The police car door opens, and two cops come out. And then, despite the red and white flashing lights, everything, at least for me, goes dark.
Before
I TOOK A QUICK LOOK BACK AT MARCUS and then ran after Devin. I didn’t know why, but I needed to catch up with her. What else could I do?
We ran through the almost empty food court. I wasn’t used to running, and my heart banged around in my chest, and my lungs tightened and squeezed, trying to get hold of some air. My cargo pants began to slip down, so I grabbed them by the drawstring and held on.
“Come on, Devin,” I called to her. If she heard me she didn’t act like it. She didn’t even turn when I called out to her.
Then, sud
denly, I was following her outside the mall, through the revolving door and into the parking lot. It was dark outside, although the mall gave off a neon glow. Bright-white headlights were everywhere. “Stop it already,” I called to her. “This isn’t safe!”
Devin paused by a red sports car and leaned over, clearly out of breath. She turned toward me. “Stop following me, Cass. Go home. Go home with your boyfriend, or to your mommy. Leave me alone.”
“No,” I said. “Please, Devin, let’s talk about this. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“Get lost, Cass,” she said. Then she took off again.
I couldn’t keep up. I was running out of breath. “How’re you going to get home?” I yelled.
“What do you care?”
I realized then—oh, it was so freeing! I didn’t care. Why had I even chased her out there? This was what I’d wanted all along, wasn’t it? To be free of her. To let go. She didn’t deserve me.
I slowed down.
Devin turned and saw that I’d stopped running. We were out of the parking lot, down the road from the mall, and it was dark. Darker still since only a small sliver of moon hung in the sky. Devin, still far from me, stopped running, too. Her blond hair reflected the orange hue of a nearby streetlamp. We walked toward each other, like two cowboys at a duel, and I wondered then, even then, if it was for the last time.
“You said you’d always be there for me,” she said.
“I was there for you,” I said. “For too long.”
“You left me,” she said. “You were supposed to wait.”
“I came right back,” I said. “You can’t expect me to sit on the bench and wait for you forever. I need to have a life, too.”
“That’s great, Cass,” she said. “Really great. Well, have a good one.”
I threw up my hands. “I’m so sick of this,” I said. “I’m so sick of you. It’s not all about you! Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes it’s about me!”
“What are you talking about?” she said. “Who else do you think wants to hang out with you? Who else listens to you play your stupid guitar? Who else tries to help you better yourself?”
It would almost have been funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. “Gina and Lizzy were my friends. I think maybe they still are.”
“They weren’t your friends,” she said. “They were mine. Notice how they ditched you, too, after our fight?”
“That’s because I sided with you.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” She shook her head and smiled. “Go off with your boyfriend, Cass. Consider yourself lucky you found someone who doesn’t mind the fat.”
The words tumbled out of me, taking on a shape and a life of their own. “I hate you,” I said. “I hate you, Devin Rhodes. You know what? I don’t care what happens to you anymore. Go run off—do what you want. I hope you don’t come back. I hope you never come back!” I took a deep breath. “I never want to see you again!”
Devin stared at me, her self-important smirk gone. She blinked a few times, and I couldn’t tell whether her tears were real. “Cass?” she said.
“Devin, I…” She was still looking at me, maybe waiting, I thought, to hear what I was going to say to her. What I was going to say to make this all better, like I always did. But this time I didn’t. I stopped myself and pushed whatever words were on their way out back in.
The connection between us shattered, like tiny in visible shards of glass falling softly onto the asphalt.
“Cass, I—” She stopped and looked down at the ground. Then she looked back at me. “Good-bye, Cass.” She turned around and kept walking.
Fine, I thought. Fine, let her go. But I watched her. I watched as she walked off into the silent, black night. Then she turned, her eyes lingering on me for a moment, and it looked like she was going to say something. Call out to me. She stared at me, and her whole face softened, and it was as if the anger, the wild anger that had just been there, had disappeared. She offered up just the slightest smile, and I thought she was going to walk back over to me. It will all be okay, I thought. Everything will be okay. But then she didn’t. Instead she turned back around and kept walking. I didn’t follow her.
I thought about calling out to her. I thought about telling her it wasn’t safe. It wasn’t safe for her to walk off into the darkness by herself. Even when I saw the hue of red taillights pass slowly by the bank of trees behind which she’d disappeared, I thought about doing that. But it was dark, I was tired, and I was still angry. So I didn’t. That’s it. I just didn’t.
So that night, after I caught a bus ride home with Marcus, our hands linked the whole time, and after I ignored Mrs. Rhodes’s calls and texts because I didn’t feel like having to tell her what happened, and after I climbed under the covers of my bed and thought about what it was like to be with Marcus and what it would be like to be with him again, that night, I slept soundly at first, because I’d stood up to Devin. I’d let Devin know it was no longer all about her. And until things could be that way, we couldn’t be friends.
But still, after a few hours, I climbed out of bed and stared out my window and wondered what exactly she was doing. I wondered, after all, where she was. I wondered how she’d gotten home, what she was thinking about. Those stars—those same stars that saw everything—I wondered, did they know? Did they know if she was safe?
When the phone rang in the middle of the night and it was Mrs. Rhodes again, looking for Devin because she still hadn’t come home, and my mother was standing in the doorway to my room in her nightgown, clearly annoyed, shaking her head, hand on her hip, I lied. I lied because I knew I’d made a mistake. A huge, crazy, terrible, selfish mistake. I lied and said we went our separate ways at the mall. I lied and said I hadn’t seen anything. I lied and said nothing happened.
And when they found her, nineteen hours later, battered and broken at the bottom of Woodacre Ravine, I knew that I had done nothing to stop her from ending up there. I let her go. Because of a stupid fight, because of my stupid silence. I might as well have put her there myself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AT ITS HEART, Devin Rhodes Is Dead is about unwavering friendship and the things we do for those we love. I am fortunate to have so much love and friendship in my life.
With deepest gratitude I thank the following people:
First and foremost my parents, Anne and Irving Wolf, for supporting me through it all, forever and always.
The National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) and Mackinac Island Press for honoring Devin Rhodes Is Dead with their generous award and for giving my book wings. I am truly grateful for the opportunity.
Julie Ham, my fabulous editor, for her insight, intelligence, kindness, enthusiasm, and patience, and for bolstering me through every step of this process.
Kelly Murphy for the stunning cover art.
Everyone at Charlesbridge for believing in me and bringing my book to life.
The faculty, staff, and student body of Vermont College of Fine Arts, particularly my awe-inspiring advisors: Margaret Bechard, who explained to me that something actually has to happen in a book; Marion Dane Bauer, who taught me concision, heightened my senses, and helped me find a way inside my characters; Tim Wynne-Jones, who forced me to really think about character motivation and plot; and Ellen Howard, for her humor, sage advice, and friendship.
My dear VCFA classmates, The Unreliable Narrators (who are, in fact, most reliable). You took in a stray student and gave me a home. I can’t imagine a more wacky, wonderful, and incredibly talented group of women with whom to share my world. You are all my “writer rocks.” Special thanks to Teresa Owens Smith, Sarah Tomp, and Sharry Wright, who read early drafts of this novel and, with their brilliance, helped make it shine.
My earliest readers, Felicia Liss Block, who always listened even when my stories were too scary; and Adina Nack, would-be illustrator and professor extraordinaire, with whom I planted my first story seeds while we hid at the top of the staircase at Gra
ndma’s house.
My never-weary, always cheerful band of friends/ readers, for helping to keep my BIC (Butt In the Chair) and my spirits aloft: Debbi Michiko Florence, Eric Luper, Stacy Hitsky, Jennie Riegler, Dena Weiner, Beverly Marmor, Helen Kampion, Pam Swerdloff, and many others. Whether it was writing advice, pep talks, critiques, or watching my kids so I could write, thank you all for proving that friendship always, always trumps chocolate.
My in-laws, Susan and Gary Kam and sister-in-law, Cindi Thaw, who often watched my boys during the early years so I could finish my degree. My Aunt Susan and Uncle Myron Nack, and cousin Jaime Nack, who were my West Coast cheering section. My brother, Michael, who enabled me to stretch my imagination with our early childhood make-believe.
My grandparents, Sally and George Schneider and Bucky, Molly, and Rose Wolf for their constant and unconditional love. I wish more than anything that you were here to share this with me.
And, lastly, my three greatest joys, my husband, Jason, and my boys, Ben and Zach. You make everything possible. I love you very much.
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