Chapter 6
HENLEY HOUSE
After my friends drop me off, I stand at the curb and wait until the sound of Hayden’s engine fades to nothing.
The air has finally cooled a little, but I’m sweaty and aching and my nerves feel ragged.
The development we live in is boring during the day—the houses are all in the same earth tones, the lawns the same too-bright green—but at night it’s borderline spooky, a hall of mirrors, the patterns repeating up and down the street.
A rustling sound; I stop, my head whipping right and left to see where it’s coming from. Someone’s out here. A moment later I hear a soft laugh, a man’s murmur. My heart climbs into my throat. I will my feet to move, to carry me to the house, but I’m frozen in place
Then I see shadows next door. It’s Max Fisher, walking his girlfriend Katy down the driveway to her car.
If I’d realized they were there, I’d have sprinted to the front door of my house. Max and I are friends. Katy and I … not so much.
But it’s too late now. He sees me and waves and starts across the dark expanse of lawn toward me. Katy trails reluctantly after him.
“Hey.” Max shoves his hands in his hoodie pockets, stretching them out away from his hips. He’s only a few inches taller than me, but wiry, with a kind of spring-loaded energy in his movements. He stops just short of my mom’s agave.
“Hey, Max, Katy.” I try to get a read on them, whether they’ve been on Sekrit. Max is usually super plugged in to online stuff—but I also know that’s one of the things he and Katy fight about, so if he’s been out with her, he may not have seen it yet. “Did you guys go to the game?”
Katy presses her lips together. “No, we missed the gladiator battle.”
Generally I wouldn’t bother paying attention to someone like Katy Phillips.
She’s supersmart and actually pretty cute, but she’s also prissy and judgmental and boring.
She’s one of those people that think anything popular is automatically a waste of time.
And for some reason she’s never really liked me.
Even back in middle school, before I started cheer, she always seemed to be gunning for me in class, trying to take me down a peg.
These days we keep it civil for Max’s sake, but I can’t help but bristle at half the words that come out of her mouth.
“How was it?” Max asks me. “Did we go … fight … win?” He says it deadpan but does little pom-pom motions with his arms. From him it’s not mean-spirited. He’s always teased me about cheer, but it’s more like brotherly ribbing.
“We did not,” I say. I’m pretty sure by now they haven’t seen Sekrit, or Katy would be throwing it in my face. I consider telling them about the Koenigs, but it feels too risky to gossip right now, like I’m inviting my own judgment. “It wasn’t a great game. What were you guys doing tonight?”
“Working on college essays,” Katy says. “I finished mine back in July,” she says, “but I’ve been helping Max with his. How are yours looking, Iris?”
Mine? Unwritten, unconsidered, and shoved to the back of my mind. But I can’t say that to Katy.
“Um, I’ve got a decent draft,” I lie.
“Nice!” she says, pasting a smile on her face. “Congratulations!”
“Thanks,” I say, but she’s not done.
“You know, I was honestly almost jealous of you when I was working on my essays this summer. Like, here I am trying to write about overcoming adversity, when the only thing I’ve been through was the time I missed mock UN because I had strep throat.
” She cocks her head to one side, her hair falling pin-straight over her shoulder.
“But you! You’ve been through so much. It must have been easy to whip through those applications. ”
I have no intention of writing anything about Rocky and Lynette. But I just smile at her.
“So easy,” I say.
“Anyway,” she says, slinging her backpack across one shoulder. “I’ve got to get home. Tomorrow’s my last shot at the SATs and I’m aiming for a perfect score.”
“Bye,” I say vaguely, but she’s not even listening.
She turns with sudden determination to face Max and pulls his hips square against hers.
She plants a wet, awkward kiss on his lips and lingers a few beats too long.
His eyes go wide and stay that way when she turns away to where her little white BMW is parked at the curb.
We both watch as she drives down the street, the same direction Hayden went a few minutes earlier. Max shakes his head a little and smiles.
“Thanks,” he says.
“For what?” I cut my eyes toward him, frowning.
“That’s the most action I’ve gotten in weeks, and it was just because she was trying to make you jealous,” he says.
I snort. “Jealous of what? She thinks I’ve got a crush on you or something?”
“Well, yeah,” he says. He gestures toward his own body. “Who wouldn’t want a piece of this?”
I grin at him. Max is cute, in his shaggy-haired, gangly-limbed way, but he’s more like a brother to me than anything else.
We’ve lived next door to each other since elementary school—we used to run around blasting each other with Super Soakers all summer, building forts and zipping around the neighborhood on our bikes.
We’ve grown apart as we’ve gotten older—not because anything happened to drive us apart, but just because we stopped being able to bond by swapping Pokémon cards and eating too much candy—but we’re still friends.
Still, I’ve never thought of him romantically.
“Can you blame her?” I say. “I get to live right next door to you. Every day you hit me with that charisma…”
“Shut up,” he says, but he’s grinning too.
“… and I just can’t help myself. It’s just nonstop sex appeal,” I say.
“Something Katy seems sadly immune to,” he says.
“Aw, poor Max. Cockblocked by the college admissions process.”
I don’t say it, but Katy and Max have always felt like a mismatch to me. They’re both smart and driven—Max is aiming for MIT himself—but he’s quiet and cuttingly funny, and she’s so straitlaced it hurts. But who am I to judge? My love life ended up with two dead last spring.
I suddenly realize he’s watching me.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing. You just looked upset when you got out of Hayden’s car.” He puts his hands in his hoodie pockets and shrugs. “Everything okay?”
“Oh. Well, since you ask … no. Everything is not okay.” I drag the toe of my sneaker over the mulch and look down. “Have you been on Sekrit?”
“Not tonight. Why?” He’s already getting his phone out, though, so I don’t answer.
I catch a glimpse of his wallpaper—a picture of his cat, Starla, with her tongue sticking out of her mouth—before he opens up the app.
The Sekrit logo fills the screen, sea green with an icon of a woman putting her finger to her lips.
Including tonight’s hot topic.
I can pinpoint the moment he sees the post, his pupils flaring wide. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah.” I shift my weight a little, studying his expression as he scrolls through comments.
“God. People are really … just the stupidest,” he says. Then he grimaces. “Also, apparently half our class doesn’t know how to spell the word ‘whore.’”
“What?” I grab for the phone, but he holds it out of my reach.
“No, look, you have to ignore this.” He turns off the phone and shoves it down in his pocket. “They’re trolling you.”
“That’s what Hayden and Sophie said, but…”
“For once, Hayden and Sophie are right.” He puts an arm around my shoulder and squeezes. “Honestly, Henley, it’s just a lot of noise. If you freak out about it, it’ll just make things worse.”
“So I’m just supposed to pretend it’s not happening?
” I lean against his side. His body heat is familiar and comforting.
Last summer, while I was still working through what happened, he was one of the few people I could stand to see.
Maybe that was just because he was one of the few people who acted like it was normal to be sad.
He’d come over and sit with me and listen to music.
He didn’t try to ask me questions or fix problems. If I cried, he hugged me and let me cry.
Everyone else—even Hayden and Sophie, sometimes—seemed to want me to hurry up and get over it all.
“Well, what other option do you have?” he asks.
Fair point. It’s either “ignore it” or “react to it,” and the latter is definitely giving people fuel for the fire. But something about the post sticks in my throat like a splintering bone.
Maybe it’s just that Rockytruther, whoever they are, sounds so very confident.
“Hey, do you … do you remember that … night?” I ask, looking up at him.
“The night Rocky killed Lynette?” he says. The words are both shocking and relieving; almost no one else would say it that bluntly, even six months on, but hearing him say it without a hint of doubt in his voice makes me more certain than ever that Max isn’t buying into the Sekrit post.
“Yeah,” Max says. “I remember. I was in here playing video games all night. I certainly wasn’t watching a bunch of hot girls in pajama shorts tumble around in your backyard. And if I were watching something like that, it would be respectfully. With respect.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, nudging him in the ribs. “But since you were watching so respectfully … did you notice anything over there? Like, did … did anyone leave early, or…”
“Not that I saw,” he says with a shrug. “You guys were outside until around one. Then my mom put her head out and yelled that she was going to call the cops, so you all went inside. That was about when I put my headphones back on and got back to Elden Ring. I wasn’t really paying attention after that, so I don’t know what might have happened. ”
“Yeah, okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
He gives me a knowing look. “I mean, I can’t one hundred percent vouch for you, but I did not see you leave and come back covered in blood or whatever. If that’s what you’re worrying about. From what I could hear, you weren’t going anywhere that night.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, forcing a smile. He always seems to know what I’m thinking. Usually it’s nice, being known like that. But hearing him joke about this makes my heart start to go too fast.
“Anyway.” He gives me one more squeeze and then lets me go. “There’s nothing you can do about any of this tonight. Go upstairs, try to rest, see what things look like tomorrow, yeah?”
“Yeah.” I take a deep breath, and then let it out. “Yeah, okay, you’re right. I’ll try. Thanks, Max.”
“Yeah. Night, Henley.” He looks at me for a second, then smiles and tugs on the end of my ponytail. Then he vanishes back into his house.
I stand for another moment on the little strip of garden between our houses, looking up at the pattern of the oak trees against the starry sky.
It’s still surreal, hearing details from that night that I don’t remember.
Max’s mom is known for her itchy cop-calling finger, and usually I do my best to respect that.
But I don’t remember her threatening us that night.
I don’t remember deciding to go inside; I just remember being out on the lawn and then back in the living room, house lights blazing against the dark windows.
If I don’t remember that, though, what else have I forgotten?