B00B9FX0F2 EBOK (3 page)

He felt like he’d see his heart pounding if he looked down, so he squeezed his eyes shut. He shouldn’t have said “IRL,” it was so cheesy. He shouldn’t have said anything at all. Jason waited as long as he could before peeking at the screen.

He breathed a deep sigh of relief. So what if it wasn’t happening tomorrow? She wanted to meet him, and that was enough.

W
ho are you taking to formal, Jason?” Kelly Drummond asked, pulling Jason out of his reverie. “Rakesh seems to think getting a date will be no problem. So which lucky lady are you going to ask?”

Not for the first time, Jason wondered why he sat with Rakesh’s friends at lunch. Some of them, like Lloyd Clifford, the star shortstop who Jason had met in Little League before he realized he sucked at baseball, weren’t so bad. For the most part, though, their table was filled with kids who were so terrified of being different that they behaved like lemmings. Jason wasn’t exactly shaving his hair into a Mohawk or painting his nails black, but the world outside Roosevelt High School seemed like a much more interesting place to blend into than the world inside of it.

“Don’t worry about Jason,” Rakesh answered. “Plenty of girls want to go with Jason.”

“Oh, like who?”

Under other circumstances, Jason’s feelings might have been hurt, but at the moment, he simply prayed Rakesh wouldn’t say anything about Lacey. He could begin to imagine what Kelly would make of him liking a girl he only knew on Facebook, besides the fact that she’d probably tell everyone who would listen.

“Jason’s got game you don’t even know about.”

“Speaking of game, are any of you watching the basketball team today?” Lloyd asked.

Relieved to be out of the spotlight, Jason shot one last nasty look at Kelly and went back to daydreaming about Lacey. He’d thought about asking her to the spring formal before. School dances hadn’t held much appeal for Jason in the past. The music was all Top 40 and kids were more focused on snapping cell phone pics of one another than actually dancing. But you were supposed to ask a girl you liked to a dance, and Lacey would make a good date — they’d stand in a corner and spot the funniest outfits, the poufy dresses and ruffled tuxes that jocks wore ironically but that just made them look foolish. He’d request Robyn for her, and might even venture onto the dance floor.

On their way to history, Rakesh asked Jason whether he’d brought up the idea of the formal with Lacey.

“Not exactly,” he answered begrudgingly.

“What are you waiting for? Kelly’s only gonna get more annoying about it.”

Jason knew he was right. Lacey said she needed time, and there was a month before the dance. Would that be enough?

“I don’t want to rush her,” Jason answered.

“Come on, you’ve been talking to her for weeks. I’m starting to think she’s just stringing you along.”

“Lacey doesn’t play games.” He said it as authoritatively as he could, but he couldn’t help but think of how they’d ended their last conversation.
Things are sort of … complicated right now
. What did that even mean? As much for himself as for Rakesh, he quickly added, “Besides, it’s a stupid dance. I don’t even care whether or not I go.”

Lowering himself into the dingy gray desk, Jason snuck a look at Facebook. Lacey had written him a long message. He skimmed it, and the tension in his chest eased as he read her jokes about her school’s band and saw that she’d included a long pro and con list describing her feelings about Vampire Weekend. It was the same old Lacey. Sliding his phone back into his pocket, he wondered what he’d gotten so worked up about.

He took out his notebook and instinctively turned to the back, where he jotted down lyrics, but he caught Rakesh peering over from the desk next to his. He quickly turned to a fresh page and wrote the day’s date in bold letters at the top. He willed himself to pay attention to the lecture, but there was a voice in his head drowning it out, one that sounded conspicuously like Kelly Drummond laughing at him.
Oh, like who?
Sometimes the idea of Lacey liking him seemed too good to be true. As his dad always said, when something seemed too good to be true, that’s usually because it was.

J
ason liked any homework that required his computer. For one thing, if he had to use the Internet, he knew he’d be good at the assignment. For another, being online gave him an excuse to check Facebook. The history project was so easy he could spend five minutes on Google, and then use the next hour to chat with Lacey. If she wasn’t online, he could at least compose a response to the Vampire Weekend pro and con list she’d sent him earlier.

Mrs. Kimball had warned her class not to rely on Google or Wikipedia, but Jason was convinced the forty-some-odd candles on her most recent birthday cake had blinded her to how useful they were. It’s not as if Jason trusted everything he found online, but he knew enough to recognize the kind of primary source she’d asked them to find. As he predicted, finding a scanned letter from the nineteenth century was easy. He clicked print, and was about to turn his attention to Facebook when he had an idea.

He’d never Googled Lacey. Every piece of information he had about her, she had given him or he had gleaned from her status updates. As he typed her name into his search bar, he felt a twinge of guilt about cyberstalking her, although he wasn’t expecting it to turn up much. He’d searched for his own name last year and found a veterinarian specializing in large animals;
a Hawaiian painter whose work looked like it was influenced by Woodstock flashbacks; and a private investigator who promised thoroughness, discretion, and sensitivity to the pain of a cheating spouse. Three quarters of the way down the second page of results was his postage stamp–size Facebook profile picture — one of the few photos of him that didn’t make him look either deranged or like an overgrown eight-year-old.

He hit enter, and scanned the page until his eyes registered the by now familiar photo of Lacey from her Facebook page. He clicked the text automatically, but the moment the page loaded he realized he’d made some sort of mistake. The headline glared at him from the screen.

TEEN KILLED; BODY FOUND AFTER LOCAL PARTY

He blinked. On the monitor, Lacey’s name blinked back at him. He rubbed his eyes. It was still there.

TEEN’S BODY DISCOVERED IN
BRIGHTON BACKYARD MONDAY

After Brighton High junior Lacey Gray was reported missing over the weekend, a body believed to be hers was found yesterday in the backyard of Steven and Grace Choi.

Lacey Gray, a budding musician and volunteer at the Hanson Place Soup Kitchen, was last seen at an unsupervised party at the Chois’ house on Friday night. According to several sources, she did not return home after the party, and on Saturday morning friends and family began a frantic search for the honor roll student, who had never disappeared before.

Grace Choi, who was in Florida with her husband at the time of the party, discovered the body after returning on Monday morning, and immediately called the police. Despite numerous
requests from the
Brighton Times
, the Brighton Police Department has neither confirmed that the body has been positively identified as Lacey Gray, nor the cause of death, but a memorial service for Gray has been scheduled for Saturday morning at the Brighton Unitarian Church on Johnson Avenue.

The Gray family has declined requests for interviews, and, through a lawyer, asked that their privacy be respected in this difficult time. Brighton High principal Lynn Darnell released the following statement: “Lacey Gray was a kind, vivacious young woman with a bright future, and her loss will be felt deeply by those who knew her and by the entire Brighton community.” Darnell added that grief counseling will be available to all students.

In addition to her parents, Ed and Leslie, Gray is survived by her brother, Luke, a senior at Brighton High School, and cocaptain of the lacrosse team that took home the state championship last year. The family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Hanson Place Soup Kitchen.

His brain sprinted through the possible explanations: It was another Lacey Gray, it was another town called Brighton, it was all just a terribly unfortunate coincidence. The problem he couldn’t get around was the photo. The photo he knew better than any photo of himself, better than any photo of anyone. It was Lacey’s profile picture. Frozen, mid-laugh, the girl of his dreams was right there in front of him. Maybe he was hallucinating. He pinched himself — hard. It hurt, but none of the text in front of him changed.

I got termites in the framework — both of us do.
The cheerfully desperate lyrics rang in his ears.

Jason felt dizzy and nauseated. He clicked the red
x
to close the on-screen window and stared at his computer. He tried to focus on the photo of the Mountain Goats playing live he’d saved as a desktop background, but everything went blurry. It had to be some sort of mistake. Or a joke. Rakesh was playing a prank on him. It wasn’t a funny prank, but Rakesh had crossed the line before. He’d once witnessed Rakesh, with tears in his eyes, telling a girl from another school he had terminal cancer, and he wanted to spend some time with her before he died. When she’d figured out what was actually going on, she was so horrified that she’d never spoken to him again. He’d tried to send Jason to smooth things over with her, but as soon as she realized Jason had known Rakesh was healthy (if stupid) all along, she splashed a glass of water on his face.

Even though Rakesh would go to great lengths for a laugh, this seemed out of his scope. Everything else on the
Brighton Times
website looked completely legitimate. More than that, the details were too real. He hadn’t told Rakesh — or anyone — that Lacey had a brother named Luke. And really, when you thought about it,
nothing
about this situation was funny.

He glowered down at his laptop accusingly. A very small part of him wanted to hurl it out the window, walk out of his room, and never think about Lacey again, but a bigger part of him needed to get to the bottom of this. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure his door was shut — the last thing he wanted was for his mother or, worse, Mark, to casually saunter in to drop off his laundry or inquire about the homework that was definitely not getting done — and reopened his browser.

The article was dated in October. Three and a half months before he and Lacey had begun talking. Right around the time he’d messaged her the first time. Slowly, nervously, he read the entire story again. His eyes scanned the words “body discovered” and “her loss will be felt deeply by those who knew her” and the sensation of a sharp dagger slicing through his entire world was replaced by a dull throbbing in his gut. It was an upgrade, he decided. Maybe the next phase would involve numbness kicking in.

He clicked back to his search results and opened the next story. This one was dated in January. He did some quick calculations in his head and figured it had been written shortly before he’d first heard from Lacey.

AFTER TRAGIC ACCIDENT,
TOWN STRUGGLES TO RECOVER

Three months after the sudden loss of a beloved teenager, her family and friends gathered together on a cold but bright morning in Brighton Park to celebrate her life. The school year, which started out promisingly for Lacey Gray, has been cast with a dark pall since October when Gray fell to her death during an unsupervised party hosted by a classmate. Her passing has been called a tragic accident, and Brighton High’s class of 2014 has felt her absence deeply. “We didn’t want to wait to dedicate a yearbook page to her,” says Gray’s friend and classmate Jenna Merrick. “We wanted her family to know we think about her and miss her every day.”

Merrick led fundraising efforts to open the memorial in Brighton Park, and tears shone from her eyes yesterday as she stood next to the copper sculpture depicting a young girl
dancing. Ed and Leslie Gray, Lacey’s parents, and her brother, Luke, looked on, at times breaking down into tears, other times laughing as their daughter’s friends took turns remembering Gray as a charismatic, promising young woman whose time on this earth ended entirely too soon.

Belinda Burns, longtime Brighton High English teacher, spoke of Gray’s passion for poetry, and read verses from Rumi aloud to honor Lacey’s memory. Those lines were engraved on a plaque that was unveiled beneath the sculpture. The plaque was a gift from the Palmer family, whose son Troy is a Brighton senior and one of Luke Gray’s closest friends.

After attendees observed a moment of silence, they were invited to share their memories of Gray. “There wasn’t a band she didn’t know,” recalled Max Anderson, a friend who had gotten to know Gray during their guitar lessons together. Anderson, who regularly performs in Brighton’s smaller venues, played one of Gray’s favorite Bright Eyes songs in her honor.

To close the ceremony, Ed Gray offered a few words. “This morning I would have traded anything in the world to spend even one more day with my daughter. But hearing what she meant to all of you, to this community … it makes me feel like her spirit is still with us. Thank you for keeping her alive.”

Jason massaged his temples and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he was surprised to find tears on his cheeks. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was grieving. Wiping them away, he clicked through the photos that accompanied the story. In the first, the smiling Lacey he’d been falling for over the past several weeks gazed out of the screen at him. He took
a moment and stared back, trying to figure out what she was trying to tell him, but her face remained forever stuck in that moment of joy, inscrutable as ever. The sculpture Lacey’s friends had dedicated to her depicted a girl dancing, arms out to her sides, palms open, head tilted, a serene smile spread out across the copper face. In the third picture, a photograph showed Lacey as a young girl, twirling with a friend in a grassy field. It was clearly the moment the sculpture had been modeled on. “Lacey was as much a sister as a friend,” Jenna Merrick (pictured at age 8, with Lacey, above) remembered. “I can’t imagine what life looks like without her.”

Me and J Money have been friends practically since we were born — we’re family at this point.

Lacey had typed those words to him. Except maybe she hadn’t.

The strangest part was that this was what he’d wanted to find. Not her obituary — that had never even crossed his mind. But evidence that the girl he’d been talking to was real. That she was as beautiful and smart and lovable as she seemed over IM. And she was all of those things. Everything she’d told him about the bands she loved, about learning to play guitar, about the New Age English teacher, all of that was exactly as he wanted it to be. It was like he’d been searching for a glass of water and instead found himself at the edge of an ocean armed only with his hands. As he tried to scoop out the water, it slipped through his fingers and a moment later he was up to his waist in it.

Half an hour before, he’d been sure Lacey was the solution to all of his problems; now he had no idea what to think. His
head had filled with fog, and his body felt more tired than it ever had in his life. It was quickly becoming clear this wasn’t a minor mix-up or a joke Rakesh was playing on him. But the truth seemed impossibly distant and dark. If it wasn’t a prank, did that mean he was talking to a ghost? Or did it mean Lacey Gray was still alive?