Chapter 28
VARDA ELEMENTARY PLAYGROUND
I can’t make myself go home. Mom and Dad will still be up, and they will want to hear about the dance. And people might think to look for me at my house. I don’t know if anyone’s mad enough to come for me, but if so, I don’t want them to find me.
So I walk for a long time. My thoughts fly like windblown paper, none of them holding still long enough for me to understand what has happened. My body takes over. I run for as long as I can and then I walk.
It’s like time vanishes into a black hole, and when I come back to myself I am on the swings at the elementary school.
I’m barefoot, though I don’t remember when or where I lost my shoes.
My left foot feels scraped and raw. My body roils with spent adrenaline.
The hem of my gown is almost black with dirt, and my body is clammy with sweat.
There’s only one person who knows my friends’ ugly secrets.
I pull the phone out of my pocket—there are already messages pouring in, but I ignore them for the moment. Jonah still hasn’t messaged me. But I know with a leaden certainty that this was the plan all along. Message me, manipulate me, milk me for information. Use that information to destroy me.
But why?
Is he just another psychopath? Is his charm part of the fun? Making people think he’s decent and then tearing their lives apart?
Did he have some connection to Rocky? Or … Lynette? I knew he’d met her at camp. In fact, she was the one who had bullied me into talking to him that first year.
I never could figure out how she knew I was crushing on the cute tennis player with curly hair, but maybe it was obvious.
I was shy around boys back then, and it didn’t occur to me to talk to him, even though there were plenty of opportunities.
But I made up a lot of excuses to walk past the tennis courts.
If I was lucky I’d get a glimpse of his muscular legs, his easy smile.
But one morning, Lynette grabbed me by the back of my sports bra and steered me straight for his breakfast table. I didn’t even have a chance to protest. He looked up at me and smiled before I even knew what was happening.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re Iris, right?”
He made room next to him. Lynette, looking very pleased with herself, sat across from us and plopped down her own bowl of Special K.
I was still too stunned to realize that he knew my name at a camp of almost two thousand kids.
Later, Lynette told me she’d been chatting him up on my behalf.
She’d been staying up until one or two in the morning to corner him in the TV room while he watched Adult Swim with some other guys, trying to find out if he was “single and suitable,” as she put it.
She was like that, before things got so hard for her. The kind of friend that would be your wingman without you even knowing it.
They’d been friendly, then, but they hadn’t ever gotten close. Not that I knew, anyway. Unless something happened between them after Lynette and I stopped being friends.
The thought is strangely unsettling. It would’ve had to have developed sometime between when she was kicked off the team and the murder itself. Six months. And that was during the school year—how would they have reconnected? To my knowledge she only ever saw him at summer camp.
But then again, maybe they’d been texting the way we had.
My eyes fall to the flowers around my wrist. They’re in tatters now, the perfume sharp off the crushed petals. A sudden burst of rage cuts through me and I yank them off my wrist, crush them in my hand.
Overhead, ragged clouds streak over the moon.
When I dial Jonah’s number the phone rings and rings. There’s no voicemail set up. I let it ring for a while, and then I try one more time. When he still doesn’t pick up, I text him.
ME
What the fuck???
I sway back and forth on the swing that’s almost too small for my butt—the swings we used to leap off of, back when we were kids, me and Lynette flying through the air with our hair whipping around our heads. I sit, and I wait for a call that doesn’t come.