The Telling (21 page)

Adults reach a certain age and they forget tasting the salt of make-believe oceans.

Josh continues, “An anonymous tip came in last night about the cave under the spring. They think it was a fisherman or hiker who's familiar with Gant's inlets. They decided not to issue arrest warrants for us after that. Their divers were waiting until it was light enough today to search for evidence. Cops were calling our parents to let them know as I walked in with the backpack.”

“So we got hypothermia for nothing?” Carolynn asks, hunched forward, still blue.

“No.” Josh squeezes her shoulder. “Even though my mom's cop buddy made it clear that what we did was evidence tampering, they hope they might be able to collect physical evidence from the backpack. Even though Ford is still missing, the cops don't think there's anything
serial
going on.”

“Serial?” Becca asks as she bands her ponytail tighter.

“Yeah, they don't think Maggie's killer is responsible for Ford. His parents checked their bank statement, and he made a withdrawal yesterday in Seattle, and Ford's dad said they had a blowup fight right before my party. The cops think he's just trying to freak out his folks before he comes home.”

Duncan and Rusty make jokes about not being bitches in prison. Becca and Carolynn talk about the start of school in less than a week. Josh is springy over Ford just pulling a stunt. “I was kind of screwed up over it,” he admits. “It was my birthday he disappeared after. I would have been to blame if something happened to Holland.” He laughs nervously at the close call. Me: I don't care that Ford is okay. There was a stirring in my chest when I thought Maggie's killer had gotten his hands on Ford too. It was giddy and fluttery gratitude, like finally someone was doling out revenge.

“Now that all this crap is over, we have to figure out our end-of-summer prank,” Becca says, and then, aside to me, adds, “Every year before school starts we do something fantastical. Like last year we set off fireworks from the football field, and the year before we spent a night gift wrapping the school office, so when admin showed up they couldn't see where the office doors were. This year we have to top it.”

“And no”—Carolynn levels a finger at Duncan—“we're not organizing a clothing-optional kegger or going streaking on the beach or doing anything nudity related.”

Duncan snorts. “Did I suggest that?”

They keep batting around possible stunts. I lean back into the velvet chair and close my eyes. I let their mingling voices wash over me. This, the push and pull of the core, is what swept me along, made me feel less stuck a month ago. Every time the sadness has crept nearer, threatened to suffocate me, there's been a silly thrill to focus on. School is about to start, though. All these summery adventures will be over, and I'll be left with a small life again.

Back-to-school things shuffle through my head: girls with brand-new highlights and fish-tail braids like tiaras; a sea of tan-and-boysenberry-purple to-go coffee cups from Marmalade's; strawberry-lip-gloss-stained pouts; cake-frosting, vanilla, and berry body mists all mingling into one unidentifiable, sickening smell in the school corridors; stiff backpacks sitting too high on freshman shoulders, inviting the milk-carton bombs upperclassmen will launch at them; loner girls like me, eyes on concrete, just praying a seagull doesn't crap on their hair as they dart across the quad; and summer beefs over drunken beach hookups and the resulting fistfights and sobbing.

The first day of school is a pageant that sets the stage for the rest of the year.

“We shouldn't just do a prank to screw with people. Not this summer; not after so much has happened,” Josh is saying. “It should
mean
something. When my grandpa died, my moms and I drove out to the point and we threw his ashes in the sound, and then we had a clambake right there and they drank his favorite beer and we sang his favorite campfire songs.”

“I am so not doing a prank in honor of Maggie,” Becca groans, fussing with her hair band again.

Josh looks expectantly at me. “What do you think about doing a prank in honor of Ben?”

I smile. I always wanted to do something for Ben—a grand gesture that he would have thought was brave and worthy.

“Oh, that's the best idea,” Becca squeals, winding her finger in the end of her gathered ombré hair and then letting it feather as it unwinds.

“I like it,” I say, the rightness spreading through me. “Thanks.”

“Yeah?” Josh says brightly. “It's okay?”

I nod. It is. Ben deserved a better send-off than he got. He would have hated his funeral, because it wasn't for us. It was for
them
. It was for Gant. It was big and spectacular and morose with its black stretch limos and its five-course banquet hall dinner at the club.

I didn't used to understand why Ben just didn't tell all those kids to eff off if he hated them so much. I wondered why he ate lunch in the quad and not with the fringes of the school social order on the field. Why go to parties and make out with the girls and fist-bump jocks? Granted, Ben dating Maggie, the opposite of Gant, senior year
was as close as he got to saying screw you all. He'd never gone out with a girl for more than a few weeks until her, and it wasn't for lack of trying on the parts of all those perky populars.

Now I get it. It's how I feel about the core. I shouldn't care what they think about me. I know better. But it's as if wanting to be accepted is in my teenage DNA. I can't resist it. I look at Carolynn and think,
I want to be friends with that girl. She's not a kitten. She's a lion.
I want to bask in her laser-beam gaze and Becca's sunshiny grin. Josh's smiling eyes are straying toward me every few seconds as the others go on about how Ben loved giving authority the finger; how Ben would have approved of a prank in his honor. With Josh's attention aimed at me, my stomach almost doesn't knot at them acting like they knew Ben.

I want to prove the five of them wrong for ignoring me—or worse—up until this summer. I want to make it really hard for them to ice me out come classes starting. I want to show them that I am brave, alive, dazzling, and full of nerve and mischief.

Ben's send-off is as clear to me as the Seattle skyline isn't on a gray, stormy day. We spend the next hour masterminding what Becca calls a giant
peace out
for Ben. Rusty and Duncan are all eager grins and fist bumps as they insist on staking out the location. It's agreed that barring disaster, we'll spring into action tomorrow night. Even Carolynn props her elbows on the coffee table, stirring her caramel-spiked coffee with a spoon, and adds to the plan.

As I walk to my car, I stare clear down the street to where it dives into the harbor. The
Mira
is docked farther down, where most of Gant's residents keep their vessels year-round. I wish I was on her now, sailing with the cold air splashing my skin. The breathless way
I smiled into it always cleared my head. I'm floating, feeling lighter than I have since we surfaced with Maggie. June hasn't crawled through July and into August to get me. The core is going to help me memorialize Ben. But Ben's killer is out there; Maggie's too. And I feel detached, like a helium balloon that's broken free from its string and is sailing away, when instead I should be grounded and disturbed that my great-great-grandmother's rosary found its way into my secret place and that a girl has died.

This is not what I experience, although at this point, I'm used to not feeling what I'm supposed to. Instead it's as if the universe has gift-wrapped a dazzling, perfect present of revenge and left it at my feet.

This is why, when I get home, I don't march to the lower terrace to destroy the rosary like I should. It's either the rosary used to kill Maggie, or else it's not and I'm losing my mind and can't remember storing it there eons ago. Either way, it looks suspicious that I'm hiding it. I won't throw it away, though, because it's a reminder that sometimes evil deeds do get punished and that villains end up dead.

It allows me to believe that the world is the way Ben imagined it.

B
ullies don't get to win, Lana.” The fire was a rosy glow on Ben's face; his nose cast a dark triangle on his left cheek.

Fitzgerald Moore had been found that morning by a woman driving her two kids to school. He was beaten bloody and unconscious on the shoulder of the road. She'd pulled over, kept the car doors locked, and called the police.

“Ethan and Max were laughing in second period, in the same way they snicker over cutting class or paying that freshman in honor society to write their term papers. This is a guy's life they screwed with, and it was funny to them, like little boys picking off the legs of a cricket.”

I gave him a disapproving glare.

“Sorry. That's messed up too,” he said. Ben buried his face in his hands. My fingers and their chipped purple nails had been crawling over the bag of marshmallows in my lap, bunching the plastic around the white pillows, pinching the fluff to make indents. I wasn't sure what to say or do until I thought Ben was crying. I slipped my flip-flops on and shuffled over to perch on his
chair arm. My bare leg knocked into his much bigger knee, and I hugged his shoulders from the side.

“I'm sorry, Ben,” I said. “Can we tell my dad to do something? Is Fitzgerald in a hospital? Does he need a doctor?”

Ben dropped his hands to his lap. I saw his face. There were no tears. His gray eyes were bottomless and angry. His square jaw was set, his teeth grinding, the muscles ticcing under the pressure. He was furious. His face softened when I stood up. His fingers slid between mine. I waited, my back warmed by the flames, my front cold and goose-pimply through my T-shirt as the wind vaulted up from the harbor.

“Don't worry,” he said, his thumb covering mine. My shadow had fallen over him, and I couldn't see if his expression was as calm as his voice. “Fitzgerald's at a hospital. He'll get better. It's Max and Ethan who won't. They thought it was okay to jump a guy with their baseball bats because he's homeless and I humiliated them in front of student gov and their girlfriends. I'm sure they wanted to go after me with bats.” A soft snort like a laugh. He sounded as though he wished it had been him.

It was my imagination that Ben's hand went cold in mine. Everything was going cold; night just drops on you in late September. I went back to my seat, sat there cross-legged, wishing I had a hoodie from the house and waiting for Ben to speak.

“Max and Ethan aren't much better than all those girls in your class, are they?” he asked. I froze with my teeth sunk into a marshmallow. What did he mean? Did he suspect what Amanda Peters, Carolynn Winters, and all their friends said to me? Was the truth not as buried as I thought? The marshmallow turned chalky in my
mouth as I tried to swallow it. “You have no idea what I hear girls saying to each other,” he added with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders.

I forced a laugh that moved my lips like a grimace.

His eyes were careful on mine, slightly creased at their outer edges, the tiny freckle at his right hidden in the lines. “You'd tell me if anyone ever hurt you, right?” he pressed.

I fidgeted. The fire sent up a flare of spitting embers. The wind caught one and snatched it higher. It painted a wide arc in the sky. “No one's hurting me,” I said.

“Not even that little witch down the street?” he continued, jerking his head in the direction of Becca's house. Ben never liked Becca. He'd noticed her coming over to swing and sleep over, and then sixth grade and she never showed again. He wasn't stupid; he knew she'd ditched me.

“I haven't seen Becca at school this year,” I lied, pushing the knobs of my spine into the planks of the wood chair. Ben might have known I shared two periods with her.

“Okay,” he said, rolling his shoulders back, cracking his neck as it went side to side. “Good. You only need to say the word if you ever want me to kill anyone for you.” His grin was wide and sarcastic.

I cupped my chin in my hand and smiled. Amanda Peters and her minions had hissed at me the day before. Ben offing them was a satisfying thought. “How would you do it?” I thought the joke was obvious in my tone. It must not have been.

A shadow passed over his face—disappointment with me—and he sat back. He was in short sleeves like me, and goose bumps were spreading up his arms as he crossed them at his chest. “Jeez, McBrook. I was kidding.”

A minute later he was challenging me to a marshmallow-eating contest—loser would buy tacos if we weren't too stuffed. I figured he'd forgiven me. He knew I wasn't serious. I was, though, a little. As much as a fourteen-year-old girl can be about killing, which depending on who you ask, varies from not at all to serious as a heart attack.

What came in the days after didn't surprise me. Ben didn't let the bullies win.

Ethan Holland's girlfriend dumped him, loudly and in the quad, for Ben—a relationship that would last a whole two weeks until it became obvious to her that Ben was more interested in revenge on Ethan than in her. Kids gossiped, and I heard that Ethan was torn up that she never tried getting back with him.

A short time after, an anonymous note arrived in every school administrator's mailbox, detailing Ethan and Max's activities: buying papers from an honor society member and plagiarizing others from the Internet. Willa had said her mom wanted to expel the boys for Skitzy-Fitzy's attack; everyone knew it was them. The police were more concerned with protecting the boys than charging them, though, and P.O. couldn't hold Ethan and Max responsible for a crime the police wouldn't. Plagiarizing was another matter, one that P.O. could dole out swift punishment for.

When the vice principal arrived to clear out the boys' lockers—school policy for those who are suspended—he discovered joints. This isn't illegal in the state of Washington but is strictly forbidden by Gant High's athletics staff. Unlike their attack on an
actual human being
, having pot in their lockers was horrible enough to get them kicked off the baseball team. No one cared that they denied it was theirs.