Between (23 page)

Richie and I are holding hands now, standing close together, swinging our arms back and forth as we get ready to head into class. “Sure,” he says, “why not?”

Josie seems almost disappointed. “Oh. Okay. Well, can you give it to me after school?”

“Come on,” I tell Richie, tugging his arm as I start to walk away, “we’re already late.” To my stepsister, I say, “Josie, you’ve got to get to Spanish.”

“Hold on, Josie. Let’s get something straight.” Richie grins at her as the three of us walk down the hallway together. “I’m not
giving
you anything. You’re a paying customer. Twenty bucks a pop. Okay?”

Josie’s trying to seem unfazed, but I can tell that she’s agitated. “Sure,” she says. “Of course.”

“He doesn’t care about her,” I tell Alex. “Not like he cared about me. You see? He wouldn’t give me any pills, but he’ll
sell
them to her. He doesn’t care and she knows it damn well.”

“Yeah,” Alex agrees, “you’re right.” He meets my gaze. “So what changed? Why does he care about her now?”

I narrow my eyes. I stare as my former self, along with my boyfriend and stepsister, stroll casually toward our classrooms, Josie’s and my heels clicking in a faint rhythm against the linoleum as we walk. “I don’t know,” I tell him, “but I think it must have been something big.”

Fourteen

There is no sleep for the dead; at least, not for Alex and me. We spend our nights in quiet loneliness, lost in our own memories—mostly we travel into mine together, but sometimes I go alone, and on occasion Alex will slip into his past, though I haven’t asked to go with him again. Aside from that, there isn’t much else to do except wait for the sun to come up, so we can watch our living friends and relatives as they go about life without us. I dread the end of every day, the inevitable quiet darkness, the lost feeling of seclusion that makes me ache for sleep that I know isn’t coming anytime soon.

It’s late September now, two weeks after we witnessed my scene with Beth in the girls’ bathroom. It’s the middle of the night, probably close to dawn. There’s no clock in my room anymore, but after so many nights spent here, gazing out the window, I’ve gotten good at reading the sky, at being able to tell where we are in the night based on the position of the moon.

“Someone’s outside,” Alex says. He’s standing at my window, staring at the street below.

“So?” I’m on the floor, beside my pile of old running shoes. In the dark, they look almost alive: tongues like mouths, laces pulled like expectant facial features through multiple sets of eyes. We watch each other.

“It’s your boyfriend.” Alex’s face is pressed against the window as he peers down the street. But there is no circle of breath on the glass from his mouth. “Maybe he’s going to sleep on your grave again.”

I sit up straighter. “Do you think so?”

Alex stares for a moment longer. “No,” he says. “He’s going somewhere in his car.”

It’s true: once Alex and I are outside, we watch as Richie works quickly, loading a small suitcase and duffel bag into his backseat. He’s about to climb into the driver’s side when a car turns down our street and its lights shine directly onto him, stopping him in his tracks.

“Shit,” he murmurs, closing the driver’s-side door, shoving his keys into his pocket. He stands beside the car, trying to look nonchalant. I almost expect him to start whistling.

Joe Wright, off-duty, in a maroon sedan with two car seats secured in the back, puts his car in Park and lets it idle in the middle of the street.

Richie puts his hands up. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I was out for a run, that’s all.”

“At four in the morning?” Joe looks around innocently. “It’s dark, you know.” He stares at my boyfriend, who is wearing a T-shirt, gray sweatpants, and the same flip-flops he wore to the cemetery a few weeks earlier, their soles still caked with mud from my grave. “You’re a lousy liar.”

“I’ll be eighteen in a month. I can do what I want.”

Joe cups his hands to peer into Richie’s backseat. “Your parents know you’re going on a road trip?”

Richie glances at his house. All the lights are on inside. “Hell if I know. They aren’t here.”

Joe nods. “What about school? It’s your senior year. You aren’t just going to disappear, are you?” His gaze drifts to my house. “Your new girlfriend sure would miss you.”

Richie stares at the bright moon dangling in the sky. He doesn’t say anything.

“Don’t you think people will find it strange? You disappearing in the middle of the night?”

“Maybe.” He shrugs. “They’ll get over it.”

Without any warning, Joe opens Richie’s car door and reaches across the backseat. He emerges clutching a bouquet of flowers. White lilies.

“My favorite,” I murmur. “He’s going to put them on my grave.”

“What are these?” Joe asks, frowning. He rests them on the hood of the car.

Richie is not intimidated. “They’re none of your business. Hey, you don’t have a warrant. You can’t just go through my stuff.”

“Who are these flowers for?”

Richie crosses his arms. He stares at Joe, silently defiant.

“You know,” Joe continues, “when I saw you on the boat, I knew I remembered you from somewhere. It took me a while to figure it out.” Then he taps his nose with an index finger, pointing at Richie. “Prom night, last spring. Right? I even wrote up an incident report. You and Liz sure were steaming up those windows.”

Richie puts a hand on the driver’s-side door. “Can I leave? I’ve got somewhere to be.” He reaches for the flowers; in a swift motion, Joe closes a hand over Richie’s wrist.

“I’ll go with you. We need to have a talk.”

“We’ve talked plenty.”

“What am I gonna find if I look through those bags you’ve got in the backseat?”

“Nothing.” Richie tries to wriggle his arm away.

“Nothing? Then you don’t mind if I take a look.”

“You don’t have a warrant.”

Joe levels his gaze. “Don’t need one, buddy. It’s called probable cause.”

Richie glowers at him in the moonlight. Finally, he says, “Whatever you want. Go right ahead.”

With great interest, Joe unpacks both the duffel bag and the suitcase. Initially, there doesn’t seem to be much out of the ordinary: in the suitcase, there are clothes, books (
The Great Gatsby
,
Slaughterhouse-Five
, and
Gravity’s Rainbow
), and a map of New England. The duffel bag holds more clothes, a few unopened packs of cigarettes (which Joe confiscates, to Richie’s obvious annoyance), and the same framed picture of the two of us—the one from a track meet—that used to sit on Richie’s desk.

Once he’s gone through everything, Joe stands back, frowning in dissatisfaction, tapping a finger to his lips.

“See? There’s nothing.” Richie seems smug, wiggling his toes in the cool night air. “Can I go?”

Joe takes a long moment to stare at him. He looks around: at Richie’s house, at my house, and then at the car again. Without a word, he strolls to the back of the car and opens the trunk. My boyfriend’s mouth drops. Joe tugs at the floor of the trunk until he pulls it free, exposing the space where the spare tire should be. But it’s not there; instead, there’s the all-too-familiar
Great Expectations
, along with a brown paper bag.

My boyfriend is clearly trying to play it cool, but I notice that he is visibly sweating now. He opens his mouth to speak, closes it, opens it again. He stares at his feet in what seems like regret. I can guess what he’s thinking: if he were wearing running shoes, he’d be able to sprint away.

It’s no surprise to me when Joe opens
Great Expectations
and finds it full of drugs and money. But I’m completely unprepared for what he discovers in the paper bag when he tugs it free of its contents.

“Holy crap,” Alex says, taking a big step backward—as though anything could possibly hurt him.

But Joe steps back, too. His eyes are wide open, a grown man—and a policeman, at that—suddenly nervous to be alone on the street, in the dark, without so much as a pair of handcuffs to subdue my boyfriend.

Richie is frozen for a moment. His gaze flickers from the trunk, to Joe, then back to the trunk. In a single, swift motion, he leaps forward and closes his hand around the object that came from the paper bag.

It’s a gun.

Joe rushes toward Richie, but he’s too slow. With the gun pressed to his chest, almost in an embrace, my boyfriend turns on his heel and begins running down the empty road, his flip-flops beating in frantic rhythm, his getaway via car gone suddenly awry.

Richie is fast; Joe doesn’t even try to chase him beyond a few feet. He stands on my street, stunned—this is obviously more trouble than he’d anticipated on this early morning in our otherwise sleepy town.

Aside from the drugs that Richie has left behind, there’s something else: as Joe picks up the paper bag again, a memory card, so benign looking, so tiny that it could almost go unnoticed, slips from the bag and bounces onto the ground, falling underneath the car. Out of the corner of his eye, Joe sees the memory card as it lands.

He bends over and picks it up carefully, holding it between his thumb and index finger. Then he raises his arm, bringing the card into the moonlight. The three of us all stare at it.

“Well, what do we have here?” Joe says out loud.

Alex looks at me. “Do you know what’s on it?”

I search my mind for an inkling or recognition, anything at all that would give me the slightest clue as to what kind of information might be stored in the tiny card. But I have no idea.

It could be anything, I guess. It could be private information about me or Richie, or maybe something I can’t even imagine. But there will be no opportunity for me to protect the contents, to keep them from the rest of the world. Richie can’t do it, either—not now. All he can do is run away from the heap of trouble he’s gotten himself into. And all I can do is wait.

Fifteen

There are cops everywhere. It’s a scene that I’ve grown way too familiar with over the past month: chaos caused by something gone terribly wrong. There are throngs of my neighbors huddled on their front porches, most of them still wearing pajamas or bathrobes, watching with tired but wide eyes, captivated by the unfolding drama.

“It’s like entertainment to them,” I tell Alex, disgusted. “Like a soap opera or something.”

He presses his lips together in thought. “They’re just curious.”

“Yeah, well, I wish they’d mind their own business. Like my family hasn’t been through enough. Like they need everyone gawking at them.”

The police are searching Richie’s house. His parents—called home from their Manhattan apartment in the middle of the night—stand on the sidewalk, watching as uniformed officers emerge from their home carrying bags of evidence—evidence of what, though?—from my boyfriend’s room.

When Mera and Topher show up at my house—they’ve been giving Josie a ride to school lately—Josie ushers them inside, where my family is sitting at the kitchen table, my stepsister intermittently crying and sending frantic text messages to Richie, who’s nowhere to be found.

Joe is with them, leaning against my parents’ fridge, drinking a cup of coffee.

“What can we do?” my dad asks. He appears to have lost maybe twenty pounds in the past few weeks. His face is ashen, eyes glassy and somber. “I don’t believe Richie could have had anything to do with … with what happened to Liz.” My dad has always liked Richie. And of course, he’s right—Richie never would have hurt me. I feel pleased that my father is so convinced that, deep down, Richie is a good kid who really loved me. But there’s still obviously something very wrong.

“We don’t know that he did.” Joe blows on his hot coffee. “We have to find him before we can jump to conclusions.” He stares at my stepsister. “Josie? Any ideas?”

She looks at Topher and Mera. It seems ridiculous that they’re even here. They’re both shrinking into a corner of the room, hands in each other’s back pockets, as usual. It’s like they don’t even know how to stand beside each other without one groping the other. Their clinginess has always annoyed me. Today I notice that they’re wearing matching outfits: jeans, red sweaters with a gray argyle stripe going down the front, white dress-shirt collars peeking out from their necklines, and identical gold bracelets around their wrists.
Puke.

Almost imperceptibly, Mera nudges Topher. He glances at her. “What?”

“Tell them.”

“Oh.” Topher stares at the ceiling, his mouth slightly agape. “Right.”

“What’s that on his teeth?” Alex asks.

I roll my eyes. “It’s a whitening strip.” Topher, like all of my friends, is fully dedicated to his personal appearance. But he’s also a smoker. To combat the inevitable yellow teeth that accompany the habit, he uses whitening strips twice a day, every day. Right now, he reaches into his mouth, plucks the plastic strip away, and takes a long moment to run his tongue over his teeth as everybody else stares at him, anxious, waiting.

He rolls the plastic into a tight ball and hands it to Mera, who holds out an open palm. I know for a fact that he’s got a tiny bottle of mouthwash and a roll of dental tape in his bookbag, and that he’s dying to rinse and floss before he has to—God forbid—interact with anyone besides Mera. But it’s clear that nobody’s willing to wait.

Lowering his head, awkwardly covering his mouth with a hand as he speaks, Topher says, “Richie came by my house early this morning. He wanted to know if I could lend him some money.”

“I was there,” Mera adds. “He was pretty upset.”

“There she goes again,” I tell Alex. “Always has to be the center of attention.”

Joe leans forward with interest. “Did he say what it was for? Did he tell you he was leaving?”

Topher shrugs. “Not really. He just said he needed it.”

Immediately, I think of Caroline and the money she stole from my bathroom.

“How much did you give him?” Joe asks.

“Um, not very much.”

“How much is ‘not very much’?”