head black like a mussel’s glistening shell.
Under his body.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, shaking my head quickly, my words coming faster and faster. “Maybe it was lying there from before, kicked there.”
“Hanlon,” she says, bending down, a waft of coconut and sweet vanilla, her girliest perfume, worn only on days of biggest trouble and mayhem. “You should be careful here. After all, you may have given it to her, but it is your bracelet.”
“Everyone knows I gave it to her,” I blurt. Which is true, but I realize I’ve given Beth a new gift. Shown her a crack in the armor.
I’m ashamed of myself.
Smiling down at me, she extends her hand, but I don’t take it.
“I know what she means to you, Addy,” she says, hand dropping. “But this is bigger than your virgin crush. You best watch your back.”
My head jerks up, smacking the wall tile.
“This is epic,” she continues. “This is too big to girl out on me. Sack up.”
She starts telling me about a show she saw on truTV about a man whose wife killed herself, or so it seemed. It turned out he’d murdered her.
“You know how they knew? Her teeth. They were all fucked up, like the gun had been forced in there.”
The blade through the center of me is sharp and exacting.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” I whisper.
“PFC and his captain ID’d the body. They said Sarge’s top front teeth were shattered. Caps, by the way. In case you want to know.”
I don’t say anything. I’m picturing Will confiding in us at Lanvers Peak, showing us his counterfeit smile, like taking off a beautiful mask and revealing a more beautiful one underneath.
“So someone jammed a gun in Will’s mouth,” she says, tapping her own front teeth, I can hear the clack, “against those ivory tusks of his and went…POW.”
Sliding back against the wall, I am too weary for her.
“That’s not right, Beth,” I say. “He jammed it there himself.”
“How do you know?” she says, laughing with a kind of giddiness rare and unnerving in Beth. “Were you there?”
In class, in the hallways, trying to shake off Beth’s sly hustle, the way she can whip me up into it with her, the way it can sweep through my body, like a fever.
What does she know? I think. She’s just guessing. Wanting.
But the bracelet, the bracelet. Under his body.
There are a million explanations, I tell myself. And Coach will tell me, she will.
This isn’t like before, when the boom of Beth’s voice in my head could drown everything else out.
Once it was, and I did what she said. Even last summer, at cheer camp, when she told me about Casey Jaye and how Casey was lying about me behind my back. Finally I believed her. I surrendered to it.
But not this time. There’s things I’ve seen that she hasn’t. Lanvers Peak, the three of us there, Coach, Will, and me. The way the two of them nestled around me, knowing I’d take care of them. The smell of burning leaves, the way we shared it, that sense of a lost world of beauty and wonder.
The three of us, what we shared. It was a fleeting thing, but it has a radiant power. It is something just mine, and I won’t have her take it from me.
And the boom of Beth’s voice isn’t enough to make me give it up.
Because Coach would never let anything happen to me.
You can, she told us, fall eleven feet and still land safely on a spring floor.
Except later that day, in English class, Beth’s text popping up in my phone. The link to the second article, Hunt for Answers at The Towers.
It will not stop now.
It talks about police going door-to-door, interviewing every resident in the apartment building.
And about how lab technicians are going through everything found in the apartment, pulling up carpet samples.
My flip-flops, did they leave a print?
But I remember Coach, with what I now recognize as a stunning presence of mind, had us both remove our shoes. Staggering presence of mind, really.
But then the article says, in a throwaway line, the last in the piece:
“Detectives will be reviewing security camera footage of the lobby.”
Security camera footage of the lobby.
Coach and I padding out, her sneakers in hand, at two thirty a.m.
I feel a curtain fall over me.
A second text from Beth, just three words this time:
Truth will out!
In Coach’s office, blinds pulled tight.
She’s behind her desk, my phone lying on the blotter in front of her.
I