by Barry Lyga
“Why don’t we just open our own DNA lab and really go to town?” Liam joked.
“I bet that Indira lady could get us into a DNA lab,” Jorja mused.
“That’s actually a great idea.” Elayah perked up. Until this very moment, she hadn’t realized it, but there was a tiny part of her that wasn’t convinced her dad was a killer. DNA could prove it one way or the other. And at least then she could stop speculating. At least then—either way the cards fell—she would know.
“You’re forgetting, geniuses—we need the knife in order to get a DNA sample.”
They all turned to Liam. Jorja and Marcie groaned at the exact same time, which made Elayah wonder what else they did simultaneously. And, oh, that was so wrong! What kind of person thought about her friends having sex? Ick.
“It’s something to keep in mind,” Elayah said finally. “If we can get any kind of DNA, Indira might be able to help.”
“I just want to say one more time—”
“We’re not going to your dad, Liam,” Marcie said before Elayah could. “We don’t know how involved he is.”
Liam shrugged. “Fine. But from where I’m sitting, we’re out of leads, out of ideas, and out of possibilities.”
Elayah hated to admit it, but he was right.
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
She swore she would at least try to sleep in her own bed, in her own room, by herself. She left the door open, which she hadn’t done since the idea of privacy first invaded her thoughts in fourth grade. She needed to get past this, to transition from victim to survivor.
Her best efforts and intentions sufficed not enough—an hour after confirming her own exhaustion, she still lay awake, the covers too heavy when on her, her body too exposed when uncovered. With a sigh of resignation and annoyance, she hauled herself out of bed and padded down the hall. Her parents’ door was ajar, a blend of pragmatism and fear. No light glimmered within. Mom was alone in there, Dad at work.
Warm milk. That was what she needed.
As she approached the top of the stairs, though, she heard something. Froze in the dark.
He’s back.
He’s not back, El. It’s Antoine. Dad. Whoever. He’s home early.
Who was he talking to?
She crept down the stairs, skipping the spots that she knew creaked. Halfway down, the bluish light of an iPad made her come up short and crouch, as though the uprights of the banister offered any sort of shielding from view.
But her dad wasn’t looking in her direction. He was leaning forward in his favorite armchair, staring down into his iPad, where Liam’s dad loomed in FaceTime.
“… anything at all. I’m desperate here.”
“Marcus, I swear to you: You will be my first call as soon as I know anything.”
“I mean, how the hell did a knife get in there?”
“Marcus, man, seriously—I’m on it. We’re working every possible angle.”
“My little girl can’t sleep.” Dad’s voice was almost plaintive, the closest Elayah had heard to lachrymose since she’d busted her knee playing soccer as a kid. A kick gone awry, the ball tripped her up, and a goalie’s foot knocked her kneecap off-kilter, almost snapping it loose from its tendons. The pain, expansive and bright, had exploded out of her in a high-pitched wail.
Dad had charged across the field, shoving parents and kids and the ref out of the way, collapsing at her side and scooping her into his arms as she screamed in pain. He’d been both a comfort and a fright, his words soothing, his tone terrified.
She dug her fingernails into her palms. He was her father. Every memory and every cell screamed out for him and to him, but she couldn’t stamp out the image of him driving a knife into his own twin. Desperately and brutally, she yearned for it not to be true. There had to be an explanation.
“She can’t sleep,” Dad went on. “We have to figure this out.”
“I will, Marcus. I promise you.”
Dad nodded and said nothing for a moment. Then, suddenly, he said, “What about, you know, Peej? He had a knife like that, remember? Didn’t he?”
“We all had knives like that. But, yeah, I think Peej had one.”
Peej? Who was Peej?
“So? Have you talked to him?” Dad said.
The sheriff snorted. “‘Hey, Peej, how you doin’? Remember that knife you had thirty-five years ago? Where is it?’”
“Damn it, don’t laugh!” Elayah recoiled a bit at the anger in her father’s voice, so seldom heard.
“I’m sorry. Look, it’s not like back then. We’re not all together all day, every day. Peej is… you know. And a lot happened back then—”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah, look—”
“What about him and Katie, remember? Huh?” A sneer surfaced in Dad’s voice. “I know you remember that. What about that?”
“We were kids,” Liam’s dad said with a touch of I’m a cop in his voice. “We all did a lot of very stupid things, Katie included. Do you really think one of them killed someone over it?”
“No. Don’t be ridiculous. But look—a lot of weirdness happened, right? Something went down that we didn’t know about.”
Liam’s dad suddenly looked off to one side. “Marcus, I have to go. I’m working this. I swear to you. We’ll figure it out. All of it. Take care of your family, and let me take care of the rest.”
A moment later, the iPad screen went back to the FaceTime interface. Elayah crouched on the steps, staring at her dad as he stared blankly at the iPad until it went to sleep on its own.
1986: KIM
The day after her fight with Dean, Kim went to church with her family, as she did most Sundays. She’d been attending First Lutheran as long as she could remember—Reverend Parker was like an uncle to her, and she always enjoyed the time spent in the murmuring quiet of the nave.
This Sunday, though, she was out of sorts. The argument with Dean, his anger, her own exasperated disappointment: These emotions clashed, jousting for a pointless victory, eventually fusing into a hot, heavy ball of lead that sat in her belly like the first aching hours of her period.
When the service was over, she emerged blinking into the autumn light, glad for the release. Sitting in the pew had felt like punishment for the first time in her life. Restless and aimless, she’d wanted nothing more than to fling her limbs about her, to pull at her hair, to leap into the air. To do. To feel.
“Free at last, free at last,” said a familiar voice. “Thank God A’mighty, I’m free at last.”
It was Jay, dressed in tan slacks and a blue blazer, his tie burgundy and nubby, squared off at the bottom like Alex P. Keaton’s. He approached her from behind as she lingered near the door to the church. Her parents were still inside, chatting with Reverend Parker and some other parishioners.
She shouldn’t have been surprised to see Jay; his parents occasionally guilted or otherwise cajoled him into joining them on Sundays.
“It’s just an hour,” she told him, a little more frostily than she’d intended.
He shrugged; he appeared for all the world to wish he had a cigarette to light at that moment, leaning against the doorjamb with a relaxed insouciance, his grin lazy and unfocused.
“I have better ways to spend an hour. Wouldn’t you rather be with Dean?”
Now it was her turn to shrug. They hadn’t spoken since the previous night. She didn’t know when they would speak. Or what they would say.
Just then, a kid strode by, his poorly knotted church tie tugged loose around his neck. As he passed them, he turned back for an instant, his eyes traveling up and down. Kim’s jaw tightened. She wore a simple black dress, lace sleeves, hem below the knee, but the kid acted as though he were scoping her out on the beach in a bikini.
Worse yet, she recognized him.
“That’s him,” she mumbled.
Jay perked up a bit, glancing around. “Who? Who’s him?”
Embarrassed that she’d spoken aloud, Kim knew she had no choic
e but to answer.
“That’s the kid who told me I had the best ass in school. The freshmen voted.” She strove for neutrality in her voice, but some awkward, mutated Siamese twin of anger and pride shambled forth instead.
Jay checked over her shoulder, scrutinizing the runty little pimply pipsqueak. For a moment, she thought he was going to march down the church steps, stride over to the kid, and hit him. The idea thrilled and repulsed her.
“Take it as a compliment,” he said instead. “And he has no shot with a girl like you, so you win.”
She didn’t know exactly what a girl like you meant. What kind of girl was that? Was she? Both comments were supposed to be compliments, she knew, but they didn’t feel that way. Still, Jay smiled as he spoke, and for once there seemed to be nothing devious or ulterior in his expression.
“Well.” There was nothing more to say. Jay was Dean’s best friend, and so, through some transitive property of relationship algebra, he was Kim’s friend, too, but she really had nothing in common with him other than church and Dean.
“Well,” she said again, “I should get going. I have to finish up a project for social st—oh no.” For in that moment, she realized that she had left her social studies notebook, along with all her project notes, at school on Friday. She’d spent Saturday planning and preparing for her night with Dean (an effort both silly and tragic in retrospect), figuring she would use Sunday to complete her time line of the Underground Railroad.
But the notebook was at school, and the project was due second period on Monday. There was no way to finish it on time. She could ask for an extension, throw herself on Mrs. Lawson’s mercy, and hope for the best.…
As she worried at her lower lip, her distress snagged Jay’s attention. “What’s wrong?”
She told him. Jay once again appeared to wish for a cigarette to dangle from his lips. He’d always had a James Dean sort of carriage, married to a casual insolence that was potent but impersonal. He didn’t hate you; he hated the universe into which he’d been born.
“Where’d you leave it?”
“I’m not sure. Somewhere between fifth period and last bell, I must have left it on a desk or something. It could be in trig, band, or history.”
Jay grunted at that and stared off into the distance. With a little cast-off shrug, he fixed his eyes on her. “We’re friends, right? I can trust you, right?”
She’d never known Jay to ask for trust. For that matter, he’d never called her a friend before, either, but he no doubt assumed the same transitive property she’d assumed.
Still, she answered in the affirmative for both.
At her assent, his face split into a broad and genuinely happy grin. “Great! Can you be ready in an hour?”
“For what?” she asked, perplexed.
“You’ll see,” he said mysteriously. He had no cigarette to flick into enigmatic darkness, but as he wandered away, she imagined he had.
Jay picked her up at her house an hour later.
He said nothing as he pulled up, simply drifted to a stop in front of her house and waited. She tugged open the door to his car and slid in. She’d never been in Jay’s car before. It was cleaner than she’d expected, with a faint odor of french fries and hot dust.
“Where are we going?”
“To get your notebook.”
Soon, they pulled into the driveway encircling the school. Instead of turning into the student parking lot, Jay drove through the bus pickup area and made a right, cutting through the faculty lot, then followed a small, one-car-wide strip of pavement around the back of the building, where two lonely parking spots abutted the school near a dumpster.
What was going on? Was there someone working on a Sunday who would let them in?
Jay killed the engine and waited a moment before hopping out. “Come on,” he said to her when she didn’t move.
Clambering out of the car, she rushed to a gray door set into the redbrick facade. Jay had practically run there, and she followed his lead for no reason she could identify.
A moment later the door opened. A jangling cluster of keys hung from the lock.
“Where did you get those?”
Jay ushered her into what seemed to be a workroom of some kind. There were metal shelves against the walls, loaded down with tools, rows of rough brown paper-towel rolls, and more. “Got the keys from Dean,” Jay told her.
Dean? But—
Well, wait. Dean was the SGA vice president. Maybe that’s why he had keys to the building?
Sure. That made… It made some kind of sense.
Didn’t it?
Maybe.
But why had he never mentioned it to her, then?
The room was dark, lit only by the rectangle of the open door, which Jay soon shut. She didn’t have time to think any further—before her eyes could adjust to the dark, Jay took her elbow and led her through the workroom and out another door into the hall. Dim light filtered in from windows at either end of the hall. They were somewhere near the gymnasium, if she had her bearings right. It was easy to forget how massive the building was. On an average school day, she hustled to and from the same six classrooms and the cafeteria.
“Pretty cool, right?” he asked.
Her brain and her dry mouth said no, but the rest of her body begged to differ. She had to admit to the thrill of being here when she wasn’t supposed to be. Her vision seemed clearer, her hearing more alert. Even smell was enhanced—chalk dust from the distant eraser trays, janitorial disinfectant.
Above it all, the awareness of Jay close by, too confident and too relaxed. He’d known exactly where to park, to keep his car obscured from casual view.
“How often do you do this?” she asked.
He grunted. “Dean didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
Jay nodded in satisfaction, but his eyes betrayed a small wonder. “Let’s get your notebook.”
They tried the band room first. It was locked, but Jay had a key. He lingered in the doorway, watching idly as she checked her band locker, then her desk. When she found nothing, she made a cursory check of the entire room, on the theory that someone else had seen the notebook and tucked it away. The whole time, she was aware of his eyes following her. Unlike the pimply freshman, his gaze was unworrisome and benign. Let him look. It was Jay.
“Not here.”
He nodded. They headed to the math wing, where she had trigonometry. Her desk was empty, as were all the rest. Once more, she did a quick recon of the entire room, just in case.
“You sure it’s not just in your locker?” he asked her as she joined him at the door.
“Positive.”
In her social studies class, they hit pay dirt. The notebook—a green marbleized cover with HISTORY stenciled on it in purple ink—lay on Mrs. Lawson’s desk. Someone must have turned it in to her after finding it.
She snatched up the notebook and breathed easy for a solid ten count.
“Let’s celebrate,” Jay said brightly. “I’m thirsty. Let’s get a Coke.”
Without waiting for her assent, he led her to the teachers’ lounge, unlocked it, and flipped a light switch. It was dingier than she’d expected, with a worn sofa and a cheap set of plastic chairs ringing a scarred linoleum-topped table. A corkboard pinned with notices hung between a refrigerator and a Coke machine.
Jay rocked the machine back and forth until it almost fell over on him. He braced it for a moment, then wrestled it back into place. With a hollow, clanking complaint, a Coke can clunked down into the dispensing slot.
Jay handed the can to her. “I’ll get another one.”
She demurred. “No. We can share. It’s okay.”
They sat on the sofa and shared the Coke, taking polite sips, as though neither one wanted to drink the last of it.
“Thanks for helping me,” she said, handing over the can.
Jay offered a one-shoulder shrug. “Sure.”
The silence seeped into the room like fog, swaddling them
in seconds. Kim couldn’t bear it. “I… I didn’t see your mom in church today.”
She’d meant it as a casual icebreaker, but Jay’s jawline visibly tightened, and she pressed herself slightly against the arm of the sofa, as though that could provide protection from his anger.
He swigged from the can. “So, Dean told you.”
“Told me what?”
That look of bewildered wonderment from earlier returned to his face, stronger and more prevalent now. She’d never seen Jay confused by anything; he projected absolute confidence at all times. Total control.
Handing over the can, he clasped his hands together and stared down at them in his lap. “My mom’s in the hospital. For depression.”
Kim held the Coke can like something that had died. “Depression,” she said.
“It’s not like…” His fingers twined around each other so hard that they went alternating white and bright red. “It’s not like she can just get happy, okay?”
“No, I get it.” She set the Coke can down on the floor and put a hand on his shoulder. He flinched. “My cousin had… was… had depression. Was depressed. He, uh…”
Jay turned to her. “So you get it?”
She nodded.
He stood and ran a hand through his brush cut hair. “Man. It’s like I’ve been walking around with something in my backpack for months and couldn’t take it out. Dean really didn’t tell you?”
Dean hadn’t told her a lot of things, apparently. One part of her was angry at him for holding out, but another part understood his loyalty to his friend.
“Dean’s pretty good at keeping secrets,” she told him, standing. “I’m really sorry about your mom. I’m glad she’s in the hospital, though. Getting help. That’s a good thing.”
“No one understands.” Jay didn’t—couldn’t?—look at her. “People are all like, Can’t she just get over it? But it’s not like that. It’s something in her head. Something’s wrong in her head. But when you say that, people think she’s crazy. When they first told me, that’s what I thought. I thought, My mom’s nuts.” He ground his fists in his eyes.