The Escape (13 page)

Avery knocked on Fletcher’s door. She bounced on the balls of her feet while she waited for someone to answer. She was about to leave, figuring no one was home, when she heard movement inside.

“Avery?”

“Hey, sorry. I called your house and your cell, but no one answered.” She shoved a handful of papers toward him. “You weren’t in school today, so I picked up your homework.”

Fletcher’s expression was blank.

“I know. Exactly what you wanted, huh?”

Fletcher’s face broke into a wide grin. “You’re right. I would have rather had…well, just about anything else. But the delivery girl is cool so it’s all right.” He immediately looked down at his feet, and Avery could see his cheeks reddening—much like hers surely were.

“Can I come in?”

Fletch nodded, and she stepped into the foyer’s twilight-like darkness. It was so quiet and still that it was as if no one actually lived there.

“Is it just you and your mom?” she asked. She had a vague memory of seeing Fletcher’s dad around the time they moved in. He was a slight man who shared Fletcher’s square jaw and dark curls. She thought she remembered an older girl too, but it was a long time ago and Avery was reminded of how little she really knew about Fletcher.

“Yeah. You want a drink or something?”

“Sure.” Avery followed Fletcher toward the kitchen, trying to pinpoint what irked her so much about the house.

Fletcher opened the refrigerator.

“You’ve got nothing in there!” The appliance light was glaring, making the shelves look very sparse.

Fletcher just shrugged.

Avery looked around the kitchen: no coffee cups in the sink, no cereal boxes on the counter, no ugly magnets from different states stuck to the fridge. The house was beyond pristine—it was nearly empty.

“Are you guys moving or something?”

Fletcher handed Avery a bottle of water and took one for himself. “No. My mom just doesn’t like to keep a lot of stuff, I guess.”

“I wish that were the case at our place. My dad is a pack rat. It’s really organized but still.” She grinned. “I think he wants to make sure we’re prepared for the zombie apocalypse.”

Fletcher smiled. “So…”

Avery unscrewed the cap on her bottle and took a long sip. “So…”

“Why are you here?”

She felt as if she had just sucked down lighter fluid.

Fletcher’s expression immediately changed to one of apology, and he held out his hands. “I didn’t mean it like that, I swear! It’s just no one—well, we’ve never really hung out together.”

“We used to. A little bit at least.”

“That was five years ago.”

Avery wanted to say something meaningful, but all she could come up with was that she didn’t have other friends either. As weird as it had been for Fletcher to want to talk to her after the incident, she found herself wanting to talk with him. He was nice. He understood her. He knew what it was like to have awful, haunting memories that never really left you.

She shrugged.

“There’s nothing to do down here. Wanna go upstairs?”

Avery had never really been in a boy’s room before.
But
it’s Fletch
, she told herself.
No
big
deal.
“Cool.”

“I’m glad you stopped by. My brain is kind of crazy.” He drew a circle around his temple with his finger.

“Believe me, I know the feeling.”

Fletcher opened the door to his bedroom. Avery didn’t know what she was expecting, but it was pretty normal: bed with navy-blue sheets. Desk with nothing on it. Alarm clock in the corner. It didn’t look quite as sparse as the rest of the house, but it still had that uncomfortable feeling that someone might have stayed there but no one really lived there.

Avery took a seat at the desk while Fletcher sank onto his bed, balancing his water bottle in his lap. His gaze connected with hers, and Avery realized she had never noticed how unusual his eyes were. They were a brown so golden and pale it bordered on amber.

“Is it just about what happened to your mom?” Fletcher asked.

“That makes me feel crazy?” Avery shook her head. “It’s a combination of things. My mom’s death, my preoccupied dad, being the daughter of the chief of police.” She stopped, licked her lips, and smiled. “Am I boring you yet?”

“No,” he said, wrapping his arms around his shins. “Not at all. I feel the same way. Sometimes my mind is all jumbled up but lately… I mean, after”—he rolled his eyes—“all this, it feels worse.”

“Yeah.”

• • •

Fletcher felt his pulse start to speed up. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to tell her everything.

Everything
that
I
think
happened.

Fletcher was trying to stay calm. Avery’s expression was hard to read, somewhere between blank neutrality and stark judgment.

“Do you remember everything about what happened?” he asked. “Are there gaps in your memory?”

“Gaps? Yeah, Fletch, we talked about this. The blackouts and—”

“No…”—he swung his head—“not just blackouts. Even now. There are…blank spaces. Missing pieces. Like, you remember the walkway that leads to the door and you remember being in the house, but you can’t remember how you got in.”

Avery looked confused and Fletcher barreled on. “Like, was the door unlocked? Did you just walk in, or did you have a key? Did someone let you in?”

“I guess, but I don’t think I forget anything really important…”

Fletcher grabbed Avery’s hand. “But what if what was missing was the
most
important thing?”

There was a flash of panic in Avery’s eyes.

“What if what I can’t remember is—” He looked down at his own hands and let Avery go as if she’d burned him. “Never mind.”

“No, Fletch, I get it. I do. You think that if you could fill in those gaps, you could help find the killer.”

Fletcher stared at Avery for a long, hard moment. With her chin slightly hitched, her hair curling at her shoulders, she looked so innocent, almost angelic, like one of those marble statues in the cemetery. He could trust her. He could tell her.

“Fletch? Fletcher, honey, are you home?” His mother’s voice trailed from downstairs. He wondered if Avery could also feel the change in the air between them.

“I’m here, Mom. Avery’s with me.”

“Come on down, please. Both of you,” she replied.

Avery cleared her throat, her voice a hoarse whisper. “Are we in trouble?”

Fletcher gave a noncommittal shrug and stood. “You should probably go.”

She nodded and followed Fletcher down the stairs, smiling at Mrs. Carroll on the landing. “Hello, Mrs. Carroll. I was just—” Avery looked from Mrs. Carroll to Fletcher and back again. “I was just dropping off some homework for Fletcher.” She snatched up her backpack. “I should go.”

Mrs. Carroll’s eyes didn’t leave her son’s face. “That’s probably a good idea. Do you need a ride?”

“No, thank you.” Avery stuck her thumb over her shoulder. “I live super close.”

• • •

“Thanks a lot, Mom.” Fletcher snorted. “Kick out the one person who doesn’t think I’m a complete socio.” He’d adopted the moniker they had used at school when he passed by.

“You are not a sociopath.”

“Whatever. I don’t care what they think. I care what Avery thinks.” The reality of what he had said hit him squarely in the chest. Did he really care what Avery thought about him?

“Fletcher, you know it’s not a good time for you to get too wrapped up in your friends. Especially a girl like Avery Templeton.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I’ve known Avery since we moved here. She’s the only kid who’s ever been nice to me except for Adam. What do you have against her?”

His mother wouldn’t meet his eyes. “It’s just not a great idea right now. You need to distance yourself from everything that happened in the woods. And frankly, Avery is a big part of that. I’m just thinking about you, honey.” She brushed the side of his face tenderly. “I want you to be okay. Dr. Palmer is going to see you tomorrow afternoon, and he and I think—”

Again, Fletcher shrugged off his mother and her concern. “I’m fine, Mom. You have no idea what I need.”

• • •

Avery peeled the crusts off her sandwich, piling them at the side of her plate.

Chief Templeton gestured at the discards. “Dinner not to your liking, Princess Avy?”

She overlooked his barb. “Do you like Mrs. Carroll, Dad?”

“Mrs. Carroll? Sure, why not?” He paused and narrowed his eyes. “Wait, this isn’t a fix-up, right? You’re not trying to—”

Avery shrugged and picked up her sandwich. “She’s super-protective of Fletch. A million more times than normal.”

“Her son was beaten to within an inch of his life, Avy. I think a little overprotection is warranted.”

“I don’t know. It’s more than that. I was over there today, and we were up in Fletch’s room when she came home—”

Chief Templeton held up a silencing hand, his eyebrow arching. “You were in a boy’s room without any parents in the house?”

Avery rolled her eyes. “It’s Fletch, Dad. Get a grip.”

The chief gave her a stern look. “‘Get a grip’? Did you really just tell me to ‘get a grip’?”

Normally, Avery would have flushed red to the scalp and waited for her father to read her the riot act, but this was bigger than a conversation about boys.

“I really think there’s something wrong with her. I think maybe she could have had something to do with what happened.”

The chief closed his mouth, then pointed a finger at his daughter before starting in. “First of all, you’re not out of the hole for shooting off your mouth. Second of all, are you really accusing a mother of killing her son’s friend and beating her own child to cover it up?”

“Fletcher can’t remember the face of his attacker. What if it’s because his brain can’t handle it? What if his brain is trying to protect him from knowing that his mother is a murderer?”

“Motive?”

Avery bit her lip. “None, but—”

“This conversation is over, Avery. Go to your room.”

Avery gaped, feeling betrayed. “I was just thinking out loud.”

“First you were ‘just in a fight,’ then you were just shooting off your mouth. Now you’re ‘just thinking.’ You’re like a different kid lately, Avy, and frankly, one I don’t like very much. Your mother and I raised you to behave better than this.”

Her father’s soft, gray-blue eyes had turned cold and hard. His jaw was set and Avery could see the pulse of his muscle along his jawbone. Avery’s eyes started to burn, her lower lip trembling.

“I just want to help my friend.”

“And I want you to be the kid you were two weeks ago. We can’t always get what we want. Now go to your room.”

Avery stomped up the stairs, unsure whether she was hurt or angry or both. Her father had always been on her side and would always listen to her theories on cases, no matter how far-fetched.

You’re like a different kid…

She slammed her bedroom door.

And frankly, one I don’t think I like very much.

The next day, Fletcher waited for Avery at her locker. There were the usual after-school sounds: people talking, papers shuffling, lockers slamming. But every few seconds he heard it—“socio” coughed into someone’s hand, followed by tittering laughter.

Socio
,
murderer
,
killer
—Dr. Palmer said that Fletcher couldn’t control other people’s perceptions of him so he should let those remarks roll off his back. What Fletcher
could
control, according to his shrink, was how he let others make him feel. And he wasn’t supposed to let their nasty comments bother him. But he couldn’t shake off the stares.

He was going to tell Avery how one of the memories had clicked into place last night, like one of those games where the squares drop down to plug up the empty holes.

He remembered Adam beckoning him over, and the two of them standing at the edge of a wide gully. Adam was pointing to a crisscross of bleached, white bones.

The memory made all the hairs on the back of Fletcher’s neck stand up.

“Whose bones do you suppose…?”

The voice was indistinct—either Adam’s or Fletcher’s and foggy, just like the rest of what he remembered from that afternoon.

But what happened next? Who else was there?

“Hey, Fletch.”

Avery looked cute in her enormous sweatshirt. Her light-brown hair spilling out of the hood, which hung down her back. She smiled.

Fletcher smiled back. “Hey. Got a second?”

• • •

They slid to sit across from each other at a picnic table at the back of the school. Fletcher seemed distracted when they sat down, and Avery really wanted to tell him to get on with it. The wooden bench was only semi-dry, and the moisture was seeping into her jeans and making her shiver.

Fletcher gnawed his lower lip, then swatted at his ear like there was a gnat.

“You okay?” she asked.

He blinked at her, as though just realizing she was there.

• • •

He started to sweat. His stomach started to roil.

Tell
her
about
the
dream.

Tell
her
about
the
whispers.

Tell
her…

Fletcher pressed his lips together in a thin line. “Have you ever…have you ever felt like your brain was full?”

Avery rolled her eyes. “Every time I’m in calculus. I swear if Mrs. Stevens gives us one more set of equations, my head is going to explode.” She puffed up her cheeks and pantomimed her head exploding, then grinned at him—one of those wide, carefree grins of hers that he loved.

“Not like that. Not exactly. Do you ever feel like, maybe, something’s taking over your mind?”

The look on Avery’s face cut him like a knife. Her eyes clouded and the smile dropped from her lips. She paled, and he knew she was thinking about her mother.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly.

“No, no.” Avery shook her head, pushing a clump of hair behind her ear. “That’s all right.” She smiled, but this time it didn’t look authentic. “Have I ever had my thoughts hijacked? Yeah. Haven’t you?”

Shock waves, like tiny pinpricks, burned all over him. She understood.

Then she continued, “Like when I’m supposed to be studying and all I can think about is a cheeseburger? Or when I’m super tired, but my mind is wide-awake thinking about stuff?”

Fletcher’s twinge of joy faded. He swallowed. “Have they ever been hijacked by something darker?”

Avery blinked. “By a bad memory?”

He nodded.

“Yeah. Sometimes I want to think of my mom in a good way, but I keep picturing her in the accident instead. But that’s normal, right?”

Fletcher realized she was waiting for his approval, so he pumped his head. “Sure. Yeah.”

“Do you think about Adam that way sometimes?”

He looked away, worrying his bottom lip. The errant thoughts of Adam weren’t what scared him. It was more than that. The whispers started small—a
psst
, a huff—and swelled to a chorus of voices that he couldn’t ignore.

“Sometimes I hear things.”

Avery didn’t laugh or call him crazy. “Things like what?”

Voices. “I don’t know. Just…”

“Well, I know when my dad got whacked in the head this one time, he complained of ringing in his ears for months.” She licked her lips, started to smile again. “He kept telling me to ‘Turn down whatever is making that stupid noise!’” She started to laugh. “I had no idea what he was talking about, and he wouldn’t admit that he was hearing things.” Fletcher forced himself to join her laughter.

“Yeah,” he lied. “That’s it. I guess it’s normal.”

“Normal is a setting on a dryer,” Avery said, suddenly more serious. “I saw it on a magnet once. But I like what it means—there is no normal. We are all a little off, and that’s okay.” She looked so sure that Fletcher wanted to believe her. Maybe he
was
just a different kind of normal.

Though the voices in his head didn’t quite agree.

• • •

That night, Fletcher tried to stay awake. Every time he nodded off, he fell into the same weird dream. In it, he was in the bathroom at his old house. There was nothing quirky or dreamlike about the setting—it was the same old bathroom with the same old white subway tiles and Susan’s same collection of shampoo bottles and hair-care products taking up every inch of space.

In Fletcher’s dream, he watched himself push the door closed so that he was alone. His reflection appeared in the mirror on the medicine cabinet. It was him, his face a little more filled out and his hair longer and curlier.

It was not just one reflection though. Like a fun-house mirror, it was him and him again, a collection of Fletchers.

The first Fletcher turned on the tap, leaned forward, and splashed water on his face. When he straightened to look at his reflections, none of the other Fletchers moved. They all just looked curiously at the original Fletcher. They were staring because the water from the tap wasn’t water at all. It was blood. And it was smeared across his cheeks, little droplets hanging from his eyelashes and dripping toward his chin.

This was the point at which Fletcher always woke with a start, the smell of blood clogging his nostrils.

He was in the middle of the dream yet again when, this time, the mirror crashed. It sounded like a sonic boom, so loud that it rattled his teeth and made him sit bolt upright in his bed.

“Did you hear that?” his mother asked. She was in his doorway, in her bathrobe, one hand pulling the collar tight against her throat. When she clicked on his bedside lamp, Fletcher could see the hollows in her cheeks and the bags underneath her eyes. She wasn’t sleeping well either.

Fletcher raked a hand through his damp hair. “I thought I was dreaming.”

“No, I heard something crash.”

He kicked off the covers and pressed his bare feet onto the floor. “I’ll go check it out.”

“Fletcher, no.” It was a halfhearted attempt to stop him. Fletcher could barely feel his mother’s fingertips brush against the fabric of his T-shirt. “It sounded like it came from downstairs.”

There was another unmistakable crash and then the squeal of tires.

A dog barked.

A light flicked on at the neighbor’s house.

Fletcher ran down the stairs and yanked open the front door, peering down the walk. His mother turned on the porch light.

The driveway and grass looked like a battlefield of oozing yolks and little broken shells. But it wasn’t the egging that had woken Fletcher and his mother.

Fletcher walked down the driveway, careful not to slip on the egg slime, and stopped beside his car. He gently fingered what remained of the splintered back window of his Toyota Celica.

“Oh, son, I’m so sorry. I heard all the commotion.” It was Mr. Henderson from across the street. The old man was in his slippers and robe. “Kids can be such jackasses. I can help you call the insurance company in the morning. We should file a police report too.”

Fletcher nodded. On the edge of his vision, he watched his mother gingerly step down the walk, take one look at the debris on the ground and the damage to Fletcher’s car, and turn back to the house—probably hoping that Fletcher wouldn’t see her shoulders shaking as she cried.

Fletcher glanced into the car. He put his hand through the open space on the back window and fished through the glittering glass. A rock, about the size of a tennis ball but slightly more compact. He picked it up, feeling the heft of it in his palm and swallowing hard at the words scrawled across it: ADAM DIDN’T DESERVE 2DIE. U DO.

He looked out to the street and launched the rock as far as he could.

• • •

By the time Avery got to homeroom, everyone was already seated. The murmur in the halls was better than any announcement, so the whole school already knew that someone had vandalized Fletcher’s house the night before.

Avery was upset. She had called Fletcher three times that morning, but he hadn’t answered either his cell or the home phone, and he hadn’t called her back. She texted,
Are you okay?
just before she’d walked onto the school grounds that morning, but still nothing.

“I heard it was all over the house, all over everything—eggs, shaving cream, the works.” Kaylee looked almost pleased with her replay of the events at Fletcher’s house.

Avery shook her head. “That’s awful. Fletcher has gone through enough.”

“Fletcher?” Kaylee stood up, nearly nose to nose with Avery. “He seems pretty fine to me. I mean, he’s alive.”

“God, Kaylee! He’s totally traumatized. He watched his best friend die! And now people…”—Avery looked around, eyes narrowed and accusatory—“
you
people are accusing him of murder. He’s our friend! We’ve known him since he was kid!”

“No,” Tim said, standing up. “We’ve only known Fletch for a few years. We knew Adam since he was a kid. And Fletcher has never wanted to be anyone’s friend. He barely even talks to anyone.”

“You know an awful lot about Fletch, Avery. Maybe you’re so defensive of him because you like him.” Kaylee flicked her glossy hair. “Maybe you’re defending him because you know that Fletcher didn’t do this alone.”

Avery gasped. “What are you talking about?”

The kids around them exchanged looks, and a surprised murmur rippled through the room.

Tim shot Kaylee a look. “Come on, that’s not fair. Don’t drag Avery into this.”

Kaylee cocked a hip, clearly not ready to back down. “I didn’t drag Avery anywhere—she did this to herself. Think about it. She was the one who found Fletcher.”

“I was on a search team.”

Kaylee shrugged. “So was I, but I didn’t find him. You told us not to leave the group for any reason, Avery, but who left the group? You. And when you did, you went straight to Fletcher. Coincidence?” Her blond eyebrows rose.

Avery wanted to defend herself, but her voice was trapped in her chest. She looked around for someone to defend her, for a teacher to step in, but she was surrounded by suspicious stares. “That’s not true.”

“And then the only person Fletcher wanted to talk to in the hospital? Avery again.” Kaylee was gathering steam now, patrolling the classroom like a prosecutor in front of an adoring court. “Everyone knows Fletcher was jealous of Adam. Fletcher’s a freak. Adam was perfect. He practically had a full-ride college scholarship already, a brand-new car…he had everything. Fletcher had nothing, and he couldn’t take it anymore.”

“That’s not—”Avery tried to interrupt.

“Kaylee,” Tim said again.

“And everyone knows you had a major crush on Adam. You probably just got mad because you knew it would never happen for you and him. One of those scorned-lover things. ‘If I can’t have him, no one can.’”

Avery’s head started to spin. The only thing she could register was Kaylee’s sharp, snotty voice.

“He thought you were a freak too.” Kaylee pointed her index finger, jabbing at the air in front of Avery’s chest.

“He didn’t—” Avery heard herself say. “Adam and I were friends.”

“No you weren’t. When was the last time he even talked to you? When was the last time he said anything more than ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Can I borrow a pencil?’ He felt sorry for you because your mom died. Just like Fletcher: You. Are. A. Freak.” She punctuated each word so that they hit Avery like poisoned darts. “You probably wanted him dead.”

“What’s going on in here?” Ms. Holly broke through the door like a wave of fresh air, and Avery felt her legs nearly give way. She wanted to report Kaylee, to defend herself and Fletcher, but there was nothing left in her. Kaylee had shredded her, and Avery didn’t know how to begin to put herself back together.

The class answered Ms. Holly with silence. No one stepped in. No one pointed out that what Kaylee had said was mean and just plain wrong from beginning to end. No one asked about Avery.

“Take your seats, everyone. Come on, come on. Class is starting.”

Avery could hear Ms. Holly’s voice, but it felt like her ears were full of cotton.

“Avery? You can sit down now.”

Avery snapped to attention, gasping for breath as though she had been holding it the whole time. Tim wouldn’t meet her eyes. Kaylee looked unaffected, lazily flipping through pages in her textbook. Avery sank into her seat.
Did
that
really
just
happen?