by Barry Lyga
This man before her probably hadn’t been the one who’d cut her. It wasn’t just the voice and the lack of a beard—Shaving cream and a razor, ever heard of it? a persnickety voice in the back of her head asked—but some ineffable, unquantifiable sense that extruded from her beyond the usual five. Her mom might have called it woman’s intuition. Her grandmother—Dad’s mom—would have called it heavy gut. I know what I know, Nana was given to say. I know it in my heavy gut.
Elayah didn’t truck with mysticism or the vaguely sexist notion that women had an intuitive understanding of the world to compensate for logical shortcomings. But as she took the knife from Marcie, felt its heft, its weight, she knew what she did believe in: common sense. Righteousness. Responsibility.
The knife felt good and right in her hand.
Standing with it, staring straight ahead at the man. Maybe he’d cut her. Probably he hadn’t. But it didn’t matter. He was here. He was now. Guilty or not, he abutted the sin at every border.
Her throat burned. Her eyes flared wide, then narrowed, her breath coming hot and hard and fast.
“Tell. Us,” she rasped in a voice not her own, and the next thing she knew, she brought the knife up in a wide arc that made Marcie jump back. Jorja shouted out; Liam uttered a wordless, strangled syllable.
But she blocked it all out. The world blurred and smeared around her, funneling into a single tunnel of clarity that centered on the bound man.
She slashed down with the knife. Felt something solid that yielded, then a cry of pain, but it wasn’t enough.
Liam was there. She struggled against him, but he was too strong. His fingers found the underside of her wrist and pressed—hard. The knife fell from her nerveless hand.
“Get her out of here!” Jorja yelled. “Get her out of here!”
LIAM
With Marcie’s help, he managed to drag El out of the room and into the tall grass behind the building. El was screaming. Garbage syllables. Fragments of curse words. Tears spattered the air around her as she jerked her head back and forth.
“You’re okay,” Marcie swore over and over. “You’re okay.”
“I’ll never be okay!” El yelled, breaking away from Liam’s grasp. “I can’t even sleep in my room! I can’t even close my eyes in my own bed! Because of him!”
Marcie did what Liam could not—she hugged El, enfolding her loosely in her arms, then spoke softly into her ear.
“I just want everything to be normal again,” El sobbed. “And he wasn’t going to tell us anything, so I wanted to hurt him, to make him talk and…”
Liam watched as El trembled in Marcie’s arms, whether from rage or shock, he couldn’t tell.
Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved the guy’s phone. It was a newer model and it had been turned off, so the face recognition didn’t work when turned on—it demanded a pass code Liam didn’t have. But the lock screen…
He showed the phone to El. “This is who you attacked,” he told her.
The lock screen showed the time and date, but more crucially, it showed a picture. The man they’d abducted. Arms around a young woman with hollow eyes who smiled a deep, exhausted smile. In her arms, she cradled a swaddled infant.
A father.
“Ah, crap,” Elayah said. She disentangled herself from Marcie and pressed a palm to her forehead. “Crap. I… I’m sorry, guys. I just… I just lost it there. I just…”
“We understand,” Marcie said without checking with Liam first. But, yeah, he supposed he understood.
“I felt…” El shivered. “I felt the knife go in. Did I—”
Liam checked his phone, which had just buzzed. “Text from Jorja. You slashed up his leg, is all.”
“I’m starting to see how it could have happened,” she said.
Marcie and Liam exchanged a glance. “What do you mean?”
“Whatever our parents did. Whatever they covered up. I get it. It’s so easy.”
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
Back inside, Jorja knelt, wrapping a white gauze bandage from her backpack around the man’s upper leg. Red dots peeked through the gauze. Elayah watched and felt nothing but the hollowness of self-recrimination, the sensation of knowing you owe someone an apology but being unable to give it.
The emptiness filled quickly with a war between her anger and her fear of that same anger.
They huddled briefly in a corner. Jorja ran a white noise app and left her phone at the man’s feet to cover their conversation.
“Can we all agree this is a bad idea now?” Liam asked.
“I’m not ready to concede that,” Jorja announced with placid calm, as though she hadn’t just bandaged a freaking knife wound. “If anything, he’ll be more afraid of us now.”
The logic was unassailable and grotesque.
“How badly did I cut him?” Elayah’s own voice echoed in her ears.
“It was pretty deep,” Jorja said after a moment’s hesitation. “But nothing I couldn’t bandage up. It’s not like he needs stitches or anything.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Liam’s sarcasm made Elayah’s stomach lurch.
Jorja arched an eyebrow. Summers, she was a camp counselor and had passed multiple first aid courses with flying colors. They all knew she could assess and bandage a wound. Other than the eyebrow, though, she let Liam’s snark go unanswered. It wasn’t the time.
“We shouldn’t be fighting among ourselves,” Marcie reminded them. “We need to learn whatever it is he knows.”
Jorja glanced over at the man on the chair. “We already know this for certain: He’s not a Craigslist find or a TaskRabbit. He would have started spilling whatever he knew already.”
“He’s clearly a ninja.” Liam’s acerbic tone made Elayah’s head hurt.
“That’s not what Jorja’s saying,” she snapped at him. “She’s saying this guy is clearly loyal to whoever sent him. You don’t buy this kind of loyalty online.”
Liam held out his hands, palms out. “Whoa. No need to gang up on me.”
“Jorja’s right,” Marcie said. “El did us a favor—he’s gotta be scared now. So let’s see what he’ll tell us.” She took the knife from Jorja and marched over to the man, first stooping to shut off the white noise. Then, with a calmness and aplomb that made Elayah’s throat pulse again, Marcie laid the flat of the blade against the man’s collarbone.
“Who sent you to the statue and then to meet with us tonight?”
The man gritted his teeth. Even with his face half-covered, he was clearly in pain. Tears dripped out from under the blindfold, and beads of sweat dotted his temples. “I’m not telling you anything,” he managed after a moment. “You’re the ones who know everything already.”
Marcie held the blade steady. Turned to face the others. She mouthed, WTF?
What did that mean?
LIAM
He hasn’t seen any of us,” Liam said as they huddled again in the shadows and beneath the umbrella of the white noise. “We can let him go or just scoot and call an ambulance to come get him—”
“He’s gotta know I’m involved,” El pointed out. “How hard would it be to figure out who my friends are?”
“It’s all speculation,” Jorja said, waving off the mere notion of any sort of threat. “He can’t prove anything. We all just deny it. He’s not bleeding out or anything. His wound has clotted already.”
“Great, so we only hurt the guy a little bit,” Liam said. “This is still kidnapping and assault, plain and simple. And I hate to break it to you, but just because we’re under eighteen doesn’t mean we’re gonna get off. In Maryland, they send cases like this straight to criminal court.”
El regarded him as though he’d just recited the first chapter of The Westing Game from memory. (Her third-grade talent show talent. Needless to say, she didn’t win.)
“Oh, come on!” Liam exclaimed. “My dad’s the sheriff! Of course I know that!”
“Maybe…” El worried at her lower lip. “Maybe it’s time to ba
ck off.”
Marcie and Jorja both shook their heads. “No way,” said Marcie.
“We’re in too deep now,” Jorja added. “The only way out is through. We’ve already kidnapped the guy. Now we have to see this through. It’s our only option.”
Liam sighed. “There’s got to be another way.”
“I don’t know if there is,” Marcie said. “This is our best chance to figure out what’s going on.”
“He’s not talking. Unless you’re willing to start cutting things off…”
El spoke into the silence Liam left at the end of his declaration. “And the science is pretty clear: Torture doesn’t actually work. Not really.”
“What if we let him go?” Marcie asked suddenly.
“Finally, someone is talking sense!” Liam exclaimed.
“Follow me here,” she said, speaking quickly before Jorja could interrupt. “What if we cut him loose and then follow him? At some point, he’s going to return to whoever hired him or whoever he’s helping, right?”
Expecting Jorja to protest, Liam was surprised to find her eyes wide with interest and possibility. “I could order some gear off of eBay. We could put a tracker on him.…”
“We’re not waiting for you to get stuff sent to you from eBay,” Marcie said gently.
“We should do this tonight,” Liam said. “Now.”
“Not tonight,” Jorja said. “We leave him here tonight. Let him stew for a while. Then we reinterrogate him in the morning and cut him loose whether he answers our questions or not.”
El heaved out a sigh. “I’m not on board with leaving this guy here all night long. He could get away. Or something could happen to him.”
Deep inside, Liam felt relief that El was now starting to think of the guy as a person, not a human pincushion. “I’ll stay with him,” he said. “I’ll come up with an excuse. It’s not a school night; no big.”
Jorja agreed with a shrug. “But look,” she said, “we swear. Right now. No matter what happens, we never talk about what we did tonight.”
Three hands piled into the center. El held back.
“This is what they did, isn’t it? Our parents. They did something bad, and they covered it up.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Liam said gently. “Maybe they were covering for a friend. Or maybe this is more complicated than we think.”
She sighed and put her hand in the middle. “Okay. I swear.”
As soon as they were gone, Liam marched back into the building and stood before the man, arms crossed over his chest. A part of him—a louder and more persuasive part than he liked to admit—wanted to start pummeling the man and not stop until the guy either talked or couldn’t talk. This man was connected somehow to El’s night of terror, to the mystery that had brought them all here, to this ridiculous and frightening and dangerous pass. Beating the man within an inch of his life would satisfy some dark and barbaric instinct.
Yeah, for El’s sake he wanted nothing more than to bash the man’s head against the wall until it cracked open. But instead, he picked up the knife where Marcie had left it on the nearby counter. “Okay,” he said, making his voice husky and whispery. “I’m going to cut you loose. When you hear the door close, you can take off the blindfold and leave.”
He took a deep breath and slipped the blade of the knife between the man’s hands, where they gapped just enough to leave room to cut the zip tie.
“Remember,” he went on, “I still have the knife. And you’re injured. If you try anything, it won’t end well for you.”
He began to saw away at the zip tie.
“Thank you,” the man said, his voice cracking with relief and sincerity.
Shaking the tiniest bit, Liam broke through the zip tie. He figured there was about a fifty-fifty chance of the guy actually adhering to his guidelines. And he knew he wouldn’t really stab the guy. So the whole situation was fraught. He was bluffing with not much of a hand. This could all go wrong so quickly and so badly.
The man sat perfectly still. Liam jammed the knife through his belt and backed out the door, keeping an eye on the hostage, who did not move, not even as Liam edged out the door.
1986: JAY
Unable to tolerate prattling Miss Leister in Brit lit, Jay decided that he would just bail on reading chunks of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English (not Old English, the way some idiots kept saying). His A was guaranteed anyway. As soon as the bell rang, he dashed out of class and ducked into the lavatory, where he fumbled in his backpack for a pad of hall passes. He ripped one off and quickly filled it in, signing it illegibly. That was the key to a good fake hall pass—an unreadable signature.
Exiting the lavatory, he nearly collided with Dean, who was ambling along, his backpack heavy, a brace of comic books tucked under one arm. “Want to skip Leister and all her whan that Aprill crap today?” Jay asked.
Soon, they were both headed toward the cafeteria, then turning left to make a loop around toward the auditorium. As long as they popped into Brit lit before it ended and flashed their passes, they’d be all right.
As they passed the auditorium and turned toward the hallway that led to the outer doors for the 4-H greenhouse, Jay paused at the case that held the Cup. Dean didn’t realize until he was halfway down the hall, then turned back and waved furiously for Jay to join him. But Jay ignored him, staring at the Cup.
Dean returned to his side, and Jay, without a word, stepped to one side and pried open the door to the auditorium. The chamber was dark. He tilted his head to Dean and then slipped inside.
“If we get caught in here…,” Dean said.
“We won’t. Stop being a grandma.”
They felt their way down the left-hand aisle. Backstage, they flicked on one of the lights, a pale, dull yellow for the stagehands to see by while the principal preached the gospel of utter boredom or the drama club put on one of its twice-yearly plays. Jay dropped onto a rolled-up carpet; a puff of dust erupted like a cartoon fart.
Dean waited a moment, then, with a shrug that could have been intended for Jay or for himself, joined Jay on the carpet. “What’s up, Doc?”
“You think Brian jerks off too much?”
Dean spluttered laughter. “Why are you even thinking about that?”
“He’s always asking me to buy porno magazines for him. And I do. And then he wants new ones.”
Dean considered this. “Wow, is he wearing them out or something?”
They exchanged a look of disgust at the idea.
“He just looks at a lot of porno, is all,” Jay said. “A lot.”
Dean gazed at him, eyebrows hunched in thought. “You didn’t bring me here to talk about Brian whacking off.”
“My mom’s in the hospital.” As soon as he said the words, Jay regretted it. It felt like deliberately stripping off armor just as you were about to joust. It had tumbled out of him, a moment of unchecked, brute honesty that would never have happened with someone else. He hoped Dean hadn’t heard.
But Dean was sitting right next to him, those stupid comic books tucked under his arm. Why did someone as smart as Dean read that junk?
“What happened?” Dean asked.
“Nothing happened.” Jay shrugged. He had to slough it off now, skin himself, let the ragged, scaly remains of his vulnerability float tattered in the wind while a newer, stronger flesh lay bare.
“C’mon.” Dean’s blue eyes had clouded, swamped by trouble. Dean was like a girl that way—he actually cared about this stuff. Maybe that was why Jay had let his guard down.
“She’s depressed.”
Dean blinked a few times. “I don’t get it.”
Heaving out an exhausted sigh, Jay shook his head. “It’s not like… like she just feels bad or whatever. It’s like a disease. In her head. But not like she’s crazy or anything,” he added quickly.
Dean nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, man. I’m really sorry.”
“Whatever.” Jay stared ahead, seeing nothing. Mom had been a
wreck for a while now. Most days, she didn’t even rouse herself from bed, and on the days she did, she usually just lay on the sofa. Not even watching TV—just lying there. It reminded him of the day after John Lennon had died; he’d come home from school to find Mom on the sofa, sobbing, The White Album clutched to her chest like a life preserver in the North Atlantic Ocean. Nothing he’d said or done could shake her loose for the rest of the day.
And now… well, recently it had been as though Mark David Chapman was going around killing a different Beatle every single day, then moving on to the Stones, the Monkees, and every other band Mom loved. Every day was a day of mourning. Every day was a disaster of epic proportions, the Dearborn house gone funereal and near silent with the vast stillness of Mom.
Then she went into the hospital. And the silence just grew. Jay came home from school. Dad came home from work… some nights. Other nights, he had board stuff. Or he just… didn’t come home. Not until Jay was already in bed.
“Are you okay?” Dean asked.
The consolation, the concern, the goddamn pity in Dean’s voice—they were the straw that broke the camel’s back. Jay flashed a tight, dishonest smile. “I’m fine. Hey, we should come back here tonight.”
Dean goggled at him. “Just the two of us?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I thought we weren’t going again until the end of the semester. To change our grades.”
Jay grinned. It was as honest and as true as what he’d said about his mother. “I’m gonna tell you something.…”
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
After a fitful night’s sleep in Mom’s bed again, Elayah waited impatiently, glaring at reporters through her living room window until Jorja and Marcie showed up in an Uber. She ran from the house to the car, where Jorja already had a door open. They took off before a single reporter could get to a car to follow them.
She’d spent the night in and out of sleep, her dreams haunted by shadowy figures in a murky fog. Every time she awoke, she lay still in the darkness next to Mom, half expecting the door to explode open with cops serving a warrant for her arrest. She couldn’t help thinking they’d done the wrong thing—beyond even the kidnapping. They should have let the guy go. It had gone too far, and they should have just let him go.