by Barry Lyga
“And then Antoine disappeared,” Mom went on. “It was the week after homecoming. Right around the time they buried that thing. At first, everyone thought he’d just…” She gestured wordlessly and helplessly, sketching in the air. “I don’t know. We thought he was in a snit about something. We figured he was off sulking.”
“Really?” Elayah tried to imagine herself disappearing for more than an hour and her family and friends just shrugging their shoulders and not worrying about it. Someone would fire up their GPS locator and ping her phone in minutes.
“‘He, uh, probably hopped a bus to New York to see m’cousin,’” Mom grunted. Her impersonation of Dad was dead perfect—she nailed the bass tone of his voice, the almost-Southern inflections. Elayah laughed with delight. Who knew that parents could keep on surprising you?
“That’s what everyone thought for the first day or two. But he never showed up in New York.” Mom leaned back in the chair, tucked her legs under herself, still staring out the window. She kept stirring the coffee, never raising it to her lips. “And then a couple of days turned into a week. And everyone got scared. And it was a Black boy gone missing in a town that didn’t care about Black boys. A country,” she corrected herself. “We posted signs. We called radio stations, and we tried to get the TV people to come out. And then one day, the first postcard arrived.”
“From Mexico.”
“Yeah.” Mom looked down into her coffee, realizing it had gone cold in her hands. With a moue of disgust, she set it aside. “Anyway, that’s how your dad and I got close. Love close. Looking for Antoine.”
She dabbed gently at the corner of one eye with the pad of her finger.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
Mom shook her head. “It’s all in the past, baby. Nothing to be done for it. Why don’t you get some more sleep?”
She didn’t really want to, but the next thing she knew, she was asleep again.
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
Mom had—at last—gone home, lured there by the promise of a hot shower and clean clothes. She vowed to return as quickly as possible. In the meantime, a deputy was stationed outside the hospital room. Elayah was pretty sure this was overkill, but she felt better anyway. She had never really trusted the police, but the sheriff was different; he was Liam’s dad.
Then she heard voices outside her door. A moment later, the door opened and Liam, Jorja, and Marcie spilled in, bearing wonderfully greasy bags from Five Guys.
“You better not have brought the little,” she warned them. “I want the double or GTFO.”
Liam arched an eyebrow and presented a bag to her with an air of stage magician theatricality. “Double bacon cheeseburger,” he informed her with deadly seriousness. “Large fries. And, yes, we brought malt vinegar.”
Elayah had thought her ardor for Liam had grown about as much as possible, but his gift of salt-and-fat-laden goodness overwhelmed what now seemed a small, petty love.
“How are you holding up?” Marcie asked. She perched on the edge of the bed, primed to take Elayah’s hand or give her a shoulder to cry on at the slightest provocation.
“She’s good,” Liam spoke up from the foot of the bed. He’d brought a rubber ball and started bouncing it against the linoleum tiles, the sound echoing and boisterous in the enclosed space. “She looks good. I mean, fine. She looks fine. Are you fine, El?”
“I’m okay,” Elayah said. She couldn’t tell if it was the truth or not, but it seemed to be the thing to say in the moment. “I’m glad you’re here.”
And she was. It was a fluke of nature that led to their foursome, the confluence and coincidence of their parents—friends in high school—all having children at around the same time. Or maybe it wasn’t a fluke at all. Maybe nature itself bent and perturbed in the face of friendship, warped with its own special gravity.
Nothing but their parents’ connections would have brought these four together, certainly not for any length of time. Jorja was destined to be the next Margaret Atwood or Rebecca Traister, depending on which way the dice landed. Liam would end up on his first magazine cover soon enough… and then would never be off them for the rest of his life. Marcie’s ambition was to be the second or third female president of the United States—she was convinced, perhaps correctly, all things considered, that someone else would beat her to first before she was eligible to run.
Which left Elayah…
Elayah, who had—in the words of one early report card—“almost limitless potential.” Who was “the smartest kid I’ve ever had in my class.” (Ms. Bachman, eighth-grade social studies.) Who “thinks around corners,” according to a guidance counselor. Who “could be anything she wants to be,” said her violin teacher. She could code. She could paint, a little. She could do obscenely complicated math in her head.
It was magnificent, and it also sucked donkey balls. (Liam’s favorite expression of discontent.)
There had been studies years ago that showed that when you presented consumers with multifarious choices—like, say, fifteen different types and brands of jelly—they had a harder time deciding, took longer to make up their minds, and were less satisfied with their ultimate selection than those who’d chosen from a narrower band of options.
Elayah feared buying the wrong jelly. Only the jelly was her life.
When she had “almost limitless potential” and “could be anything she wants to be,” the panoply of options whelmed her. And now it was senior year and decisions loomed in the middle distance, and Elayah feared that she would put herself on the wrong path, choosing a set of initial conditions that would result in a suboptimal outcome.
Sometimes, it really sucked to understand chaos theory.
“What have you been up to?” Marcie asked.
“Other than, y’know, getting your neck to stop gaping wide open.” Liam had figured out how to “walk” the ball back and forth over the backs of his fingers.
“Liam!” Marcie snapped.
“Don’t be a dick,” Jorja admonished, and punched him in the shoulder.
“Wait, I can’t say pussy, but you’re allowed to say dick?”
“You can’t say pussy, but you just did!” Jorja threw her hands up in the air. “Have I taught you nothing in all these years?”
She snatched the ball away from Liam as though taking a toy away from a toddler midtantrum. “And balls are for good boys who don’t say stupid things about gaping neck wounds.”
“Dick, balls…” Liam crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m feeling harassed.”
“Congratulations,” Jorja said dryly. “Today you have become a woman.”
Elayah couldn’t help laughing at Liam’s hangdog expression.
“Do the police know anything yet?” Marcie asked. She clearly yearned to lean forward and hold Elayah’s hand, so Elayah moved a bit to make it easier for her. She did it more for Marcie than for herself but had to admit it felt good.
Would have felt better if it was Liam, though.
Her eyes flicked to him now, waiting. Marcie had set him up perfectly, and she waited for the list of things he would conjure that the police knew.
But instead of rising to the challenge of Marcie’s question, he simply turned both palms up to show he was empty-handed. “It’s not like TV. It takes time.”
Marcie nodded, still clasping Elayah’s hand. “But what does your dad think?” she asked Liam.
Liam pursed his lips, deep in thought for a moment. “Not sure. We haven’t had our usual homicide-consultation meeting.”
“Well, now you’re never getting this back,” Jorja said, and stuck the ball into the waistband of her jeans, where it jutted out like a horror-movie tumor.
“You two.” Marcie had the maternal tone down pat. It didn’t work on Liam, though—he’d never had a mom to smack him down. “This isn’t why we’re here.”
Liam flashed his supermodel grin and laughed shortly. “My dad hasn’t told me anything. Can I please have my ball back now?”
J
orja shrugged indifferently. “Was that so difficult?” Then, almost as a peace offering, she handed his ball back to him.
The four of them dove into their food with a vengeance. For Elayah, it was the first real food she’d eaten since the dinner hours before her throat was cut, and with her friends making snarfing, growling eating noises around her to match her own, she could almost pretend the late-night attack had never happened.
Almost. Because every time she swallowed, she was too aware of the tug at her stitches, the pain as her throat worked its peristaltic magic to get the delicious burger and fries down.
“What’s new in school?” she asked as brightly as she knew how.
Jorja, sitting in the chair Mom had vacated, made a show of exaggerated chewing. The bright overhead lights reflected off her glasses, hiding her eyes, rendering her expression inscrutable. Jorja was tough to read under the best circumstances; this didn’t apply.
Marcie sat on the bed, closest to Elayah. She grinned weakly, swallowed hard. Said nothing.
Liam, having scoffed down his food first and fastest, leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. He shrugged. “The usual. Stocks up; bonds down. Reporters there, believe it or not. I told them you were squirreled away in a secret government training facility, learning jujitsu and how to shoot guns in order to become a supervigilante, dedicated to eradicating crime everywhere. But never, tragically, able to get the one criminal who hurt you. Pretty good superhero origin, right?”
“It’ll do,” Elayah said. “Are there really reporters?”
“Circling the school like sharks after someone busted open a blood piñata,” Liam recounted.
“A blood piñata?” Marcie exclaimed. “Liam!”
“Racist and stupid,” Jorja reproved him.
Liam shrugged. “I didn’t say whose blood.”
No one had a rejoinder to that.
“Are we gonna talk about it?” Marcie asked eventually.
Liam sighed heavily. “I guess we have to, huh? I say Rams/Pats in the Super Bowl, but the season is still young and—”
“Not now,” Elayah said. “Please.”
Because it was time, she realized. Time to be serious. The moment had been stalking her for a while now, creeping along, keeping to the shadows. Until this instant, when it pounced. She was ready.
Liam swallowed audibly. “I don’t want to.”
“El’s ready,” Marcie insisted.
“What if I’m not?” Liam fired back.
Jorja shot her arm out, arcing her wadded-up burger wrapper into the air. It sank into the trash can without so much as brushing against the rim.
“It has to be done,” she told Liam. “We don’t have the option of not talking about it.”
Liam banged the edge of his fist against the wall. “Would you change your mind if you knew your dad was going to jail?” he said, his voice smoldering and ready to ignite. “Because that’s where this is all headed. One of our parents in jail.”
He told them about his conversation with Mr. Hindon. “‘They were the ones who did it, after all.’ That’s what he said. He meant buried the time capsule, but it’s more than that.”
“Yeah, you said before—”
“I was kinda joking,” he told Marcie. “But, well, yeah. I mean, look—there’s the knife, right? And I’m pretty sure that was blood. So we’re saying someone was killed. And one of our parents did it, and then came after El. The only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t my dad. I heard him getting up in his room when it all went down.”
“My dad was at home, too.” Jorja hmmphed.
“Were you awake at two AM?” Liam replied. “You saw or heard him in the house?”
Jorja went silent. Elayah wondered how it felt for the child of a defense attorney to be so thoroughly lawyered.
Marcie shrugged. “My dad doesn’t live around here. I don’t know where the heck he was last night. Probably shacking up with his latest girlfriend. And who cares about my mom—it was a man, right, El?”
Elayah nodded. The peanut-oil-coated ball of fried potato in her gut felt like a baby ready to start kicking. She laced her fingers over her belly the way she’d seen pregnant women do and leaned back, parsing her words carefully before she spoke.
“The thing is,” she said at last, “I don’t trust any of them. Not even your dad, Liam. Not entirely.”
“Come on!” Liam protested. “He couldn’t—”
“It’s not that. But he could be covering something for someone. Right?”
“Nope.” Liam shook his head fiercely. “Not my dad. He takes this stuff seriously.”
Elayah slumped back against her pillows. The pleasant fullness from the burger and fries had morphed into a thick, clunky lumpiness in her gut. She was suddenly enormously tired, but her mind refused to let her give in. There was a mystery to solve, and her own life could depend on it.
The door opened and Mom stepped in. Her nostrils flared for a moment, scenting the burgers and fries, and her worried expression relaxed into something that was almost normal. Almost pre-attack.
“It’s great to see you guys,” she said, “but Elayah needs her rest, so I’m going to ask you all to go now.”
LIAM
Jorja showed up at Liam’s house before school the next day. Liam was slipping on his shirt when Pop opened the door and ushered her in.
“Whassup?”
Jorja fidgeted, stalling until Pop disappeared into the kitchen, where he began yelling at Dad about something involving eggs. A joke involving two gay men with a child but no woman occurred to Liam, and he filed it away for the next time an egg fight broke out.
“I talked to Marse last night,” Jorja said. “She was on with El all night. I know she seemed okay yesterday when we were there, but according to Marcie… she’s not doing well.”
Liam cracked his neck to one side then the other. “Okay. Talk.”
“It’s one thing during the day. When people are around. But she didn’t sleep well last night,” Jorja said with the reluctant air of someone breaking the Girl Code. “Even in the hospital. She was texting all night. Marcie and I got to talking, and we think… we think she needs a distraction. She needs to do something.”
Unsure of his line in this impromptu one-act play, Liam said nothing and simply crossed his arms over his chest to wait her out.
“I think we should look into the time capsule stuff. Try to figure out what happened back in 1986.”
Liam froze in place and stared at her.
“Liam. Say something.”
“Sure. How about… have you lost your mind?” He hissed this last, coming over to her and grabbing her by the arm. “Look, I don’t try to cook Pop’s steak tartare, and I don’t investigate crimes.”
“I’m not saying we’re going to solve a crime or anything. I’m just saying we take the stuff from the time capsule and try to match it up to our parents and whoever. See what we can find out about what happened back then. Your dad will figure out the deal with the knife. We’ll just…” She shrugged. “We’ll just nibble around the edges. El comes home tomorrow, and being home will only make it worse for her. This’ll give her something to think about. A distraction.”
Liam shook his head and stepped away from her. He’d been through a lot with Jorja, but this was too much.
“Come on, Li. For El.”
He was 100 percent dead set against it until she said that.
They were the ones who did it, after all.
Mr. Hindon’s words scrabbled like desperate mice in the back of Liam’s head all through school that day, colliding with Jorja’s crazy idea, bouncing off poor El’s savaged throat. He couldn’t focus in any of his classes, which—truthfully—wasn’t much different from a typical day for him. But today’s distractions seemed more pernicious, more demanding. He went through English and drama and couldn’t recall a single damn thing he’d allegedly learned in either of them.
At lunch, he plopped down with Marcie and Jor
ja.
“Guys,” Liam said.
They were the ones who did it, after all.
Did it.
It.
Did what? What, exactly, had their parents done?
“Guys,” he said again, this time clearing his throat to get their attention. Marcie looked up from her phone, her eyes a little puffy. Had she been crying? Over what—El?
“I think El’s getting cabin fever,” Marcie said quickly. “She just texted me that she’s actually watching live TV.”
“Alert The Hague.” The two of them chuckled over Jorja’s comment, the only clue Liam had that it was a joke. He had no idea what The Hague was. He offered an indulgent grin, an expression that said, Not really funny, but I’ll crack a smile for you out of pity. His default response to jokes he didn’t understand.
“Did Jorja tell you our idea?” Marcie asked. “About looking into the time capsule stuff? The knife?”
Liam shook his head. “Look, I’m up for whatever will help El, but do we really want to go poking around into that stuff? We might not like what we find.”
Marcie sat up straight, slamming her phone down on the table. “Why, Liam? Because you think one of our parents tried to kill El?” She pointed to herself and Jorja as she said this.
“Hey…” Jorja put a hand on her shoulder, but Marcie shook it off.
“We know that’s what you think, Liam,” she went on. “Because it can’t be your dad, because you saw him at your house that night. So what you’re saying is that either my—”
“You’re both upset because of El,” Jorja interrupted. “No point fighting between ourselves. This is when we need to come together.”
“Truce.” Liam held up both hands. Dad always said that 90 percent of police work was convincing people they didn’t really want to commit crimes in the first place. Sometimes it paid to lay back and play it cool.
“Look,” Jorja said, “we don’t have to accuse anyone of anything. But if we figure out what happened then, maybe we’ll know what happened now.”
Jorja and Liam stared at each other across the table. Liam considered a sudden belch—he’d always been able to burp on command. It would certainly puncture the seriousness of the moment. But for the first time that he could remember, he wasn’t sure he wanted to skewer gravity.