She twitched as if I’d hit her. I saw several expressions flicker across her face. Trying to figure out what approach to take, I figured. “I’m so glad it’s you!” she finally said. “Going old school for this one—potatoes in the exhaust pipe. If you stuff a few in there, they should shoot out when Ryan revs the engine. It’ll make a huge boom and scare the crap out of him. Then Eric can run him down for real. If he cooperates. It’ll be amazing.”
It took me a minute to process everything she was saying. For this one? Run him down for real?
I’d done some research before I talked to Eric, just to see what kinds of pranks someone could pull in a situation like this; I’d read a million articles on the potato thing. Which meant I knew that the potato thing itself wasn’t going to work; either the potatoes would fall out or the truck wouldn’t start. There was like a one-in-a-million chance that the potatoes would actually shoot out like she thought, but even if they did, they could really hurt someone.
Was that what she wanted?
My mind was racing; I could feel that my mouth had dropped open, and I probably looked like an idiot, but I couldn’t help myself. Because finally I was putting it together.
“For this one,” she’d said.
Time for act three.
I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to yell or run away. My ears were ringing even though neither one of us had said anything for at least a minute. No, not you, I thought. I’d wanted it to be someone else, but not like this. Finally some words came out, in almost a whisper. “It was you? All along?”
“At your service,” she said, with a little bow. She was trying to sound casual, but I could see her starting to shake. I couldn’t even imagine what she was seeing in my face now.
“I don’t—I can’t—” I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know where to start.
“God, Sam, I thought of all people you’d understand,” Astrid said. Her lip curled up and I couldn’t tell if she was sneering or trying to keep from crying.
“You let me think it was me!”
“Come on, you couldn’t really have thought that.” But there was a catch in her voice; she was trying to sound tough, but it wasn’t working.
“You have no idea what I was thinking,” I said, and I knew it was true. All this time I’d thought we’d understood each other, but I’d been wrong all along.
“Besides, it was better if you didn’t know,” she said. “You couldn’t get in trouble if you didn’t know the details. And I really liked hanging out with you, getting to know you—I thought you’d get it, but I wanted to be sure. I dropped enough hints; I thought you’d figured it out.”
I thought back on our conversations about karma. Had it just been her code for telling me all along? Her way of telling me not to worry, that I hadn’t done it? That she had me covered? It couldn’t be.
“Was it just you? Was it Eric, too?”
“Not exactly,” she said. She sounded calm; apparently if she’d had the urge to cry, it had passed. “He drove the night I got Trevor. But he was kind of pissed at how it all went down. I don’t think he realized just how mad I was. It’s a good thing I didn’t need his help—it’s not as hard as you think to knock someone out when they don’t see you coming.”
The baseball bat probably contributed to that, I thought. “What about Jason?” I asked. “Eric said he hadn’t seen him since they broke up. Was he lying?”
She shook her head. “Damian helped out with that one. We were so angry at what Jason and those guys did to Eric that we had to do something.”
“So none of this is about Hayden at all?” It was bad enough that Astrid was behind all of this, but somehow the idea that it was unconnected to Hayden made it worse.
“Of course it’s about Hayden,” she said. “That means Ryan’s the most important, for his sake and mine. But this part won’t work without Eric. I’ve been trying to make him see that, but he’s obsessed with taking Ryan down on his own.”
I took a step back, almost involuntarily. I felt the need to be farther away from her.
“Oh, come on, Sam,” she pleaded. “Don’t be like that. You know they’re monsters. They ruined Eric’s life, and Hayden’s, and Jess’s, and mine. And yours. They were destroying everything they touched and no one was doing a damn thing about it. I’m so sick of them being able to get away with it. Someone had to do something. You have to understand that.” She reached out toward me, as if to take my hand.
But I pulled back farther. “You hurt people,” I said. “Badly.” My voice was getting louder.
“They deserved to be hurt. A lot worse than anything I did. Jason mostly just got humiliated, and Trevor’s going to be fine.”
“What about what you were planning with Ryan? What did you think would happen, if it worked?” Now I was yelling. People were starting to look.
She shrugged.
“Did you even care?” My voice cracked. I couldn’t remember ever being this angry. Not at someone I could confront.
I’d been so worried that I was responsible, and then that Eric was, that it hadn’t even occurred to me to consider the possibility of Astrid being involved. To think about how I might feel. But now I knew.
It was awful.
It was so awful that it overshadowed my relief at the knowledge, finally, that it hadn’t been me.
Astrid must have seen something in my face. “I did it for Hayden,” she said softly.
As if that made it better. But it wasn’t even true, not really. “You did it for yourself,” I said, just as quietly.
She looked at me, as if trying to think of the words that would fix things. But there weren’t any. I felt like everything I knew about her had turned out to be a lie. I’d thought we were the same, that we’d been lucky to find each other, especially now, but maybe it wasn’t good luck. Maybe this was just another horrible way of reminding me that I really had lost the only true friend I’d ever had.
There wasn’t really anything I wanted to say to her, except one thing. “Please don’t do this,” I said. “Let Eric handle this his own way.”
She nodded, then knelt back down and started picking up the potatoes and putting them back in her bag. “I thought you’d understand,” she said, not looking at me now.
In some ways I did, but not in the ways that mattered. She wasn’t who I thought she was, who I’d wanted her to be. And now I had to face being alone again.
I walked away.
I hadn’t asked Astrid a lot of the questions I’d meant to; I wanted to know how much Eric knew, if her other friends did too, why she’d decided it was her job to take the bullies down in the first place. But did it matter? I’d lost her—or she’d lost me, really—and with that, I’d lost the prospect of a new group of friends. Maybe the problem was the whole idea of groups; as soon as more than two people got involved in anything, so many things could go wrong. There was the bully trifecta, three idiots all but sharing one brain; Astrid’s old cheerleader friends, who’d dumped her when Ryan did; her new friends, helping her plot revenge against the bullies without even seeming to realize that they were condoning violence themselves. I was almost inclined to think that what they were doing was worse—there was no question what the bullies were, because they did most of their harm in the open, but Astrid’s crew did everything in stealth, leaving someone like me to take the blame.
Who needed a group? What was so bad about having one best friend, anyway?
I missed Hayden as much as I had since he died. I missed him so much I finally didn’t even feel bad thinking about it; I just sank into it, let it roll over me in waves. It was the closest I’d come to crying, and if I hadn’t been like two feet away from a field full of people I mostly didn’t know or couldn’t stand, I might have just said fuck it and started bawling.
I didn’t, though. Not that I cared so much about what any of those people thought of me most of the time, but I had some pride. And there was no way, absolutely no fucking way, I was going to stand around crying in a cornfiel
d—soybean field, whatever—and let Astrid and her friends think she’d reduced me to tears. But I couldn’t seem to manage standing up anymore; I let myself fall to my knees and stared at the ground, trying to pretend everyone else was gone. I heard the song I’d been listening to in the car playing over and over in my mind, with its references to loving people who lied to you. That wasn’t going to be me. I was done with lies, with secrets and hidden things. I would get over Astrid, in a way I might never get over losing Hayden. I was fine with being alone.
And then I felt the tap on my shoulder.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
I COULDN’T IMAGINE ASTRID would have dared come back. But I braced myself when I looked up, just in case. No Astrid, though. Just a small, scared-looking girl with short spiky hair.
Jess.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked. Her voice was high pitched and as quiet as I’d have expected from someone as shy and withdrawn as she seemed to be.
I stood up. I must have been a foot taller than her. “Sure,” I said, trying to sound like someone who had his composure, which I was not. “Do you mind if we go over by the bonfire, though? I’m freezing.” It was true; the air had gotten even colder as the sky darkened, and my sweatshirt wasn’t nearly warm enough. But really, I didn’t want to be able to see Astrid.
She looked up at me and gave a little nod. We walked closer to the fire, where it was warmer, and found a dry patch on the ground to sit.
“Are you okay?” Jess asked.
She must have seen everything, so she had to know I wasn’t. But I didn’t want to think about that; I wanted to know why she’d asked to talk to me. Now that we were right next to each other I had a chance to see her more clearly, to imagine how Hayden would have seen her. She wasn’t a particularly pretty girl; everything about her was tiny, almost too much so. Her eyes were small and set close together; her mouth so little that her lips were just two thin lines. Her hair was clipped short and I could see her miniscule ears, their lobes just barely large enough to contain her stud earrings. “I’ll be okay,” I said, and I wanted it to be true.
She looked back at me, and I became aware that I was staring. But then she gave me a shy smile, and I got it. I could see why Astrid had imagined them together, could see how she and Hayden fit, how her size would make him feel strong. And they’d fallen for each other without ever having met in person; I had no idea whether Jess had asked Astrid to point Hayden out, but if she had, clearly she’d found him appealing in some way. I’d always thought people who started relationships online were nuts, but now I wondered if they knew something I didn’t. There was something so pure about it, how Hayden and Jess had based everything they felt on who they were, on who they knew the other person to be, and maybe they’d been right.
“Astrid talks about you all the time,” Jess finally said, softly. “And he did too. I’m glad we have a chance to talk. I thought maybe if I explained things to you, you’d understand a little better.”
I understood why she didn’t want to say Hayden’s name out loud. She was dead wrong if she thought she was going to change my mind about what I’d just learned, though. But I didn’t want to stop her from telling her story. “I wasn’t sure you were real at first,” I admitted. “When Astrid told me about Athena, I thought maybe it was her.”
Jess laughed. “Hard to imagine,” she said. “It took Astrid a long time to get over Ryan. I think maybe it didn’t happen until Hayden told her about you.” She swallowed a little after saying “Hayden,” but it seemed to loosen her up.
“What do you mean?”
“She had a thing for you just based on what he’d told her, before you even met. I think she set me and Hayden up with the idea that someday it would be the four of us, together.”
I felt my throat close as she said that. Why couldn’t Astrid have found me sooner? Trusted me sooner? Maybe I could have stopped her from doing what she did. I don’t know that I could have stopped her from wanting to, though, and right now that was the real problem. But I wasn’t here to talk about Astrid. “Can you tell me what happened? At the party?”
“I figured that’s what you wanted to know,” Jess said. “Astrid told me you blame yourself for what happened. And I know she thinks she’s responsible, too. But it wasn’t either of your faults. It was mine.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said.
“But I know what really happened. You only know what you saw at the party.”
“Please,” I said. “Tell me whatever you can.”
She spoke slowly and softly, and I had to lean in to hear her.
“I had this idea that when Hayden actually saw me he’d change his mind and take off, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it. I knew I had to meet him in public, so I could hide if something went wrong. Astrid said the party would be perfect. Hayden and I weren’t sure; we weren’t exactly party people. But Astrid assured me it would work—that girl’s house was huge, and there were all these rooms where we could go off and talk, and it would be less awkward than just the two of us alone somewhere. If we met in person and it didn’t feel the same, she would leave with me. Astrid and me spent the whole day together getting ready, and the plan was that Eric would pick us up and take us over there a little early, so we could get settled in. I’m not so great with crowds.”
“Me neither,” I said. I could hear the fire crackling.
“When Eric came to pick us up, he was a mess. Red eyes, mismatched clothes. He couldn’t talk—he just drove us to the party and then indicated that we should get out; it was clear he wasn’t coming. He held up his phone, like we should call him to pick us up. But Astrid wouldn’t get out of the car.”
“Yeah, he told me what happened,” I said.
“I bet he didn’t tell you how freaked out we were, though. You have to understand, Eric usually has it together. I’d never seen him like this, and I don’t think Astrid had, either. She kept asking him if he needed anything, if he wanted to talk, and he kept shaking his head, but it was pretty clear that he was about to start crying again. She asked me if I’d be okay for a little while and I told her of course I would, that she should go talk to him. He needed her more. I’d manage at the party by myself until she could come back. She didn’t want to go, but it was obvious that she had to.”
“That’s what she told me, but she made it sound like she ditched you.”
“See, that’s why she thinks it’s her fault, and that’s why she’s wrong.”
“Tell me the rest,” I said, and shifted a little to get closer to the fire. I was still cold, though I wasn’t sure how much of that was from the chill outside and how much was from how anxious I was to hear what had really happened.
“Eric dropped me off, and I thought I’d just go in and find a quiet place to hide until Hayden got there. Astrid had pointed him out to me at school, so I knew who he was even if he didn’t know me. I was so excited to finally meet him, to introduce myself properly. And scared, too, but kind of in a good way.”
“I get it,” I said, and I did. “But I’m kind of confused about one thing. Why didn’t you just meet him at school? I know you wanted to be somewhere public, and school’s pretty public.”
She looked down. “It’s embarrassing,” she said, and tugged on her earlobe. It reminded me of Astrid, pulling on her hair extensions. “It’s just—I’ve never been on a date before, let alone kissed someone. And I know I’m weird-looking and quiet—”
You’re not, I wanted to say, but she was, and we both knew it.
“—and I was scared. I was afraid Astrid had been wrong, that he wouldn’t like me, and I’d gotten so attached to who we were online, I didn’t want to mess it up. I knew it couldn’t go on like that forever, but if something bad was going to happen, if he took one look at me and decided it wasn’t going to work, I didn’t want to have to get through the
rest of school. I wanted to be able to just go home.”
There were other, better ways, I thought, but then again, what did I know? “So why didn’t you stay until we got there?”
“Because Ryan and his buddies got there first.”
Of course.
“I don’t know what his problem is, but he really has it in for Hayden,” she said. “He’d found the chat logs—Hayden must have left the game open one day, and Ryan had gone in and read them.”
“Maybe he saw Hayden looking happy for once,” I said bitterly.
“Could be,” she said, her tone matching mine. “Anyway, he must have seen me looking around, or even just looking totally out of place at that party, both of which were true—he came right up to me. ‘You’re Jess, aren’t you?’ he asked. I told him I was. He looked me up and down and started laughing. ‘I’m Hayden’s brother,’ he said. ‘He asked me to give you a message.’
“I got kind of excited. I didn’t know much about Ryan, really; I knew he and Astrid had gone out but she didn’t like to talk about it. And I knew he and Hayden didn’t get along, but Hayden didn’t say much about it either, and I thought maybe things had changed. Maybe Hayden being happier was helping him deal with his family.” Her little mouth twisted. “Pretty presumptuous of me, right? To think I could make a difference to someone I hadn’t even met?”
“But you did,” I said.
Jess picked at a patch of dried grass from underneath her leg. “Well, I figured out pretty quickly that I didn’t understand things at all,” she said, with some bitterness. “Ryan’s message for me was that Hayden had looked for me at school, now that he knew my real name. And he was horrified to think that I was who he’d been talking to. He wasn’t coming.”
“That wasn’t true!” I yelled. “We were on our way!” I felt like I was watching one of those horror movies, where the viewer knows the killer is coming but the victim doesn’t. I knew what was happening, but I was powerless to stop it. I wished there were some kind of rewind button I could press.
Playlist for the Dead Page 18