the envelope.
“Okay,” I say. And then a moment of awkward silence.
“Whose sweatshirt is that?” she asks, accusatorily, pointing to my chair across the room.
I turn and see Levi’s sweatshirt, the baseball cap jutting out of the pocket.
“Nobody’s.”
“Is that a guy’s sweatshirt?”
“It’s mine.”
She looks around my room for a second, all the pictures of us, all her old drawings. She crumples her nose, goes back out into the hall, and closes her door.
“If your parents are coming home, I should go,” says Pres thickly.
“I promise I’ll think about what to do,” I whisper.
He takes the photos from under his thigh, shoves them back into the envelope so quickly I barely see him do it.
“You okay?” I ask.
“No.”
“Preston—”
“I’m going to go now.”
“Wait,” I say, but he’s already halfway across my room, climbing out into the night.
I spend the night awake, facing the window, a knife under my pillow, remembering every night I slept in Grace’s room so she wouldn’t be afraid of the dark.
“The tree branch outside my window is rotten,” I tell Mom in the car to school the next morning. “The big branch. The one on the tree that Grace fell off when she was a kid and sprained her ankle. It’s dead. Can Dad saw it off?”
“I don’t know what all this is about trees, Joy.”
I leave the car without saying good-bye.
The photos are in my bag. I’m not—I can’t—do this. I’ll take them to the police station after school. Or talk to Savannah myself.
Those are the good-person things to do.
I’m early again. Preston’s always early, too, since he comes in with his mom. But I can’t find him. The last place I look is the art room. Eastman hangs the decent still lifes and the landscapes upstairs, to show them off on Parent Night. Down here, it’s bloated self-portraits, angry scribbles, a painting of someone in a bath full of knives. Art that makes adults uncomfortable.
Something catches my eye by the sinks. There’s a painting of the quarry. But it’s nothing romantic. It’s a wound in the earth, blood splashing the trees. I squint. The name in the corner: Cassius Somerset. His art’s always been upstairs. Pastels, clouds, not the kind of thing a murderer would paint. I used to sneak extra minutes in the hallway after school to look at them.
This bloody quarry, it’s the kind of thing a murderer would paint.
I’ve dreamed about that night with him twice, muscle memory, his skin setting fires on mine. My cheeks ache with how hard I was smiling and then I have to curl up, digging my thumbnail into my palm, half-moon marks, because it should be a nightmare, not a dream.
Kissing someone doesn’t mean you know them.
I wander out of the room. The buses’ll be here in a few minutes. Pres vanishes when other people are around.
I turn the corner, nearly bang into Levi.
“Joy.” His expression’s weird. “I was looking for you.”
“I forgot your sweatshirt at home,” I say, tired. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
“It’s not that. I looked in my locker.”
“For your sweatshirt?”
He holds up a grainy printer-paper black-and-white copy of—
No. No, how?
“You were so messed up yesterday, and I didn’t even know for sure what I saw . . .” He kind of hugs himself. “But this photo I found in my locker—it was in your bag yesterday, wasn’t it?”
I wrench open my backpack, find the envelope, grope for the edges of the photos and count. One’s missing.
Preston. He took one last night, he made copies. He was so afraid I wouldn’t do it.
How long would it take to slip one through the slats of every locker in the school?
“This is the principal. Is this real?” Levi holds the copy away like it’s poisonous. “Did you put this in my locker?”
I can’t speak, can’t move.
Upstairs: the echo of the bus arrival stampede, everyone piling inside, shedding jackets. I start to walk, run. Have to find Savannah, have to get her out of the school—
“Joy?” he asks, but I’m down the hall, fighting through the masses.
And then a hundred locker doors open at once.
FIVE
June 30
Grace
“ONE STRAWBERRY SOFT SERVE, ONE VANILLA with rainbow sprinkles.” Joy glances at me eagerly.
One childhood, two children: extra large ice-cream cones. Strawberry for her. Vanilla for me. “I don’t want one.”
“Grace, seriously. Stop it. You’re not fat.”
Which is something people always say to confirm that, yes, being fat is as bad as you think it is.
“One small,” I tell the girl behind the counter.
We sit in our old corner booth. The red pleather is