Put Me Back Together (37 page)

“I lost my phone and I totally forgot and—”

“That’s not even what I’m mad about. Did you even look at any of my texts?”

I’d only scanned them. I wanted to read through all of them right that second, but that would have meant taking my ear away from the phone. “No,” I answered lamely.

“We haven’t even spoken since you left me that stupid note on your pillow,” Emily said, her voice shrill. She always sounded like that when she was trying to scream instead of cry. “Mariella called me that night, hysterical, saying you were screaming at her. By the time I got to your apartment you were catatonic. It was terrifying. Katie, what the hell is going on?”

I sat down on the arm of the couch and realized that amid all of Lucas’s questions I hadn’t asked any of my own. Like what exactly had happened the night I’d waited for Brandon to come and find me. I hadn’t even known that Mariella had been involved at all, though that did explain the chicken stir-fry she’d left at my door with a note saying she hoped I felt better and to call her, which I hadn’t done.

“Oh, Em,” I said, my heart filling with regret.

“Obviously the story you told about the creepy guy in the building was a lie,” she went on. “Lucas totally freaked out at me for leaving you alone.” My glance darted back to Lucas. “I was so busy with packing and studying for that insane exam for my accounting class that I had no time to come by your place and scream at you.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t even bother replying. She needed to have her say.

“You’re keeping something from me,” she said. “I know you are. Something big. And you’ve been keeping it from me for a while.”

My heart broke a little as she said this, knowing hers must have been doing the same. The one thing Emily prized more than anything else was her belief that we told each other everything.

She said, “I just want to know one thing.”

“Okay,” I managed to say.

“Are you all right?” she said.

Lucas was sitting with his hands folded, his eyes riveted on me. “I will be,” I said, and then I continued, shocking even myself, “and I’m going to tell you everything. I promise.”

“Good,” Emily said before hanging up.

I slunk back to my chair and nibbled at my food half-heartedly as Lucas rubbed my back. “Be strong,” he said.

I guessed I was going to have to be.

An hour later I was in no mood to accompany Lucas to his exam, not after the calamity of that conversation with Em, but Lucas insisted. Even an offer to stay over at Mariella’s place wouldn’t sway him.

“If I could I’d take you into the exam room with me and make you sit right in front of me. That way you’d be in my line of sight at all times,” Lucas said as we walked through the windy evening toward campus, sauntering at Lucas’s usual pace. Apparently not even a final exam could make Lucas hurry up.

“I know what you’re after, Matthews,” I teased. “You’re only saying that because the top I’m wearing is kind of see-through.” It really was. I pulled the zipper on my jacket higher just in case.

“It’s what he’s after that I’m worried about,” he replied, his manner tense. I squeezed his hand. For the first time it occurred to me to wonder how he was dealing with the atomic bomb I’d dropped on him when I’d told him the truth. The thought of Lucas losing himself to the paranoia I often fell prey to made my stomach twist into knots. I didn’t want that for him. Nobody deserved that.

Not even me.

By a stroke of luck, Lucas’s exam had been moved to the fine arts building because of a water leak in Watson Hall. As part of their final grade, the fourth year art students had to turn all of Ontario Hall into a gallery with their own art on the walls, and I was eager to see the paintings of the advanced students. Walking down the hall toward the classroom we passed lots of students from our painting class, many of who knew us both by name, but for once Lucas and I weren’t the center of attention. We barely even merited a glance. Their eyes were glued to the art on the walls as they stood in clumps, evaluating aloud like it was crit day, debating which drawing or painting had the most merit. I couldn’t help but feel glad none of my work was on display. It wasn’t that I didn’t think my paintings would measure up. But I did feel my paintings that year had closed me in, locking me to the past, and I knew I wanted to tackle new subjects now, paint new things. I was ready to look ahead.

The crowded hallway seemed to reassure Lucas as we reached the door to his exam room. I knew he thought I couldn’t be in danger when I was surrounded by people. Of course, he wasn’t the girl who’d found a note threatening her boyfriend’s life in the middle of a busy coffee shop. But I didn’t point that out right then.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Lucas said, pressing a kiss to my lips that started out soft, but deepened as the moments passed. The hallway faded to nothing around us as his arms pulled me closer, his hands roaming dangerously close to my ass.

“I think you’re getting a little bit off topic,” I said, struggling out of his arms. The students filing into the exam room were either smirking or giving us dirty looks. We were sort of blocking the door.

“Can you blame me?” Lucas murmured. He tried to kiss me again, but I pushed him toward the door.

“Go!” I said. “Exam now. Kisses later.” I would have said something a lot dirtier than “kisses,” but there was a hallway full of people listening. But Lucas apparently had no such qualms.

“Oh, I plan to do a lot more than kiss you later, trust me,” Lucas said, giving me a smoldering look before flashing his dimples and strolling into the classroom, leaving me blushing with desire and embarrassment.

After that, I did get some attention, or as much as a group of preoccupied art nerds could muster. Naomi called me over to examine a black and white photograph of a crowded restaurant. For a short minute everyone wanted my opinion, as if by virtue of being Lucas’s girlfriend my thoughts held more weight, but when they found my take on the photo’s composition differed from theirs they quickly turned on me and my moment of notoriety was over.

As I wandered away from the fray, my mind drifted back to my call with Emily and I felt the weight of what was coming. Telling my family the truth would be even harder than telling Lucas, not because they were more important to me, but because they were there. They got the call that I was in the hospital and ran to my bedside. They shielded me from the reporters and stood by me through the trial. They were the ones I’d tested my lies on first.

Staring at a charcoal drawing of a swing set in a back garden, I felt myself growing angry, and for once my anger wasn’t aimed at myself. I was angry at the lies themselves and all the chaos they’d caused. I was angry that I’d wasted so much time hating myself. I was angry that now I had to face the prospect of hurting my family again. If Lucas was right and what happened really wasn’t my fault, then the only person to blame was the same one I was hiding from. And I was angry about that, too. I was furious with Brandon Tomko for the mess he’d made of all our lives: mine, Tommy’s, the Wesleys’, his parents’, my parents’, Emily’s, the whole country’s.

The door to the art studio at the very end of the hall stood open. Wandering inside, I found my final painting sitting on the easel where I’d left it. In the painting I held Tommy by the hand and the train tracks ran beneath our feet. Tommy was smiling. It was a painting of what might have been, or almost. But there was still that sky above us, filled with threatening clouds to the east, and the figure lurking behind, dressed in black, waiting for just the right moment to spring.

“You did this,” I said, my eyes narrowing on that black form, almost melting away to nothing in the trees.

“Keep telling yourself that, Katie Kat,” a voice said, and I spun around, flattening myself against the wall so hard I smacked the back of my head. It began to bleat with pain, or maybe that was my internal alarm telling me to run, run, run.

There was nobody there. The studio was empty, and when I stepped out into the hall I saw the other students were still congregated far down at the other end, out of earshot. Nobody was close enough to tell me if they’d heard it, too. Pressing a hand to the back of my head, I backed away from the doorway to the studio, still unsure if I’d imagined it or if Brandon was going to leap out of a shadow. When I hit the opposite wall with my back I staggered. I was having trouble breathing. Air, I needed air.

Pushing through the door to the stairwell, I scrambled down the two flights of stairs and fell out into the night. The wind was blowing harder now, a gale beginning to build, and the air forced its way into my lungs, leaving me gasping. I looked up at the stars as my breathing returned to normal and thought that no matter how many times I painted it I could never really capture the immensity of that sky, or the horror of it. That sky had watched as Brandon had killed Tommy. It had been the only witness. That sky knew the truth.

Truth or lies—that was what it always came down to. My lies or Brandon’s truth—neither really covered what happened that day. Maybe no article or painting or piece of testimony ever could. Maybe trying to make right something that was so wrong to begin with was the real problem. No truth I told would ever bring Tommy back. No lie would fill the gaping hole in his mother’s heart. Maybe the trick to moving on with your life was saying goodbye.

I closed my eyes and painted myself into the clearing. The train tracks ran ahead of me and behind. The sky was blue and clear. And I was not running or bleeding or crying. I was still. The woods were peaceful, just like I hoped he was. Just like I hoped I would someday be.

“Goodbye, Tommy,” I whispered. As I opened my eyes again, a star winked brightly, exactly above my head. I knew it wasn’t Tommy, but it made me smile.

“Alone at last,” a voice said, and I knew it was him. I would have known that voice anywhere. I’d been hearing it in my dreams for six long years.

Brandon Tomko had found me.

22

My first thought was that he was shorter than he was in my nightmares. We’d been the same height once, and he was taller now, but not by much. I estimated about two inches. That random thought echoed in my brain—
Two inches isn’t much
—as he took a step toward me and I could see his face more clearly. Then all the air was sucked out of my lungs and I couldn’t breathe. It was as though the world went still—no movement, no sound. There was just Brandon and me and the moment I’d been dreading every day since Tommy Wesley died.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Katie Kat,” Brandon said. His voice was the same, but with a rough quality to it that I associated with worn-out old men. Men who tiredly stalked the woods at night looking for their next victim. Men you didn’t want to run into in the dark—oops, too late.

“Really? Seems to me you found me last week,” I replied, surprised to find that my voice wasn’t shaking, though my hands were. “At least that’s the impression I got from the knife you stabbed through my pillow. I’m not the one who’s been hiding, Brandon.”

He flinched when I said his name, almost as though I’d insulted him. “Well, aren’t you lucky,” he sneered. “You’re free to grab hot chocolate and kiss your boyfriend and take naps in the park and go to class. You don’t have to hide. What a great life your lies have bought you.”

Take naps in the park? Did he mean the day Lucas and I had visited the basketball court in Christie? Had he followed us there, too?

I tried to stem my panic by wrapping my arms around my stomach tightly, clamping down. It didn’t work.

“I lied because I had to,” I said.

He chuckled humourlessly. “You had to. How convenient. I guess the fact that your lies threw me to the wolves was just a happy coincidence, then. None of your doing, really. Since you
had
to.”

His words sounded so familiar, filled with blame, with reproach.
It’s all your fault, Katie
, they hissed.
You’re a liar, a coward, a hypocrite, Katie
. All these years I’d thought it was my own voice haunting my thoughts. Now I realized it was Brandon’s voice I’d been hearing all along.

“Now who’s lying?” I said. “I’m not the reason you were locked away, Brandon. I didn’t kill Tommy Wesley, you did.”

His eyes burned into me, fixed on my face. His entire demeanour changed, becoming somehow menacing simply by the shifting of his weight, the movement of his shoulders. In that moment, as he stared at me, I began to regret coming out the back door of the building. Though there were campus paths leading off in every direction, all the streets were out of sight. The halls inside the building might have been filled with people, but outside it was quiet, the campus nearly deserted. Nobody could see us right now. I was all alone with him.