Chapter 40
HILL COUNTRY
He bolts upright.
I barely have time to think. I’m on my feet, his phone clutched in my hand. Sometime in the night I took my shoes off and I’m barefoot, but I run toward the trail, burrs and stones biting into my skin.
His hand grazes my back, but he doesn’t manage to grab me.
But it doesn’t stop him either. He is still coming.
I can hear his voice but can’t make out what he’s saying over the sound of my own breath, my own sobs.
Images flicker inside my mind. Lynette and Max.
Lynette and Rocky. They all twist and tangle together, the boys turning into one boy and then back into two.
Lynette smirking, or weeping, or begging, or laughing. And all through it I am running.
And then, just as quickly, I am not.
My ankle twists. It jerks my leg out from under me, and then I’m falling in the darkness, my shoulder and arm taking the brunt of the impact. Blood fills my mouth as I bite down on my lip. I can feel burrs and thorns scratch every available inch of my flesh as I tumble down a shallow incline.
For a second, all I can hear is my own breathing. I look around the deep green shadows of the field.
Then his dark form appears, blotting out the stars behind him.
“Iris?” he whispers. “Are you okay?”
I make my breath as shallow as I can, body motionless.
He stands there for a moment, then fumbles in his pocket. A moment later, bright light fills my eyes.
“Wait, sorry.” He moves the beam so it’s not in my eyes. “Shit. You’re scratched to hell.”
“Get the fuck away from me,” I say, moaning.
“I’m not about to leave you out here. You need a doctor.” I watch as he kneels down. He’s next to me, though it’s still too dark to see his face. The moonlight catches on the lenses of his glasses.
“You’re a liar,” I spit. “You’re disgusting. You’re just…”
He holds very still. My voice gives way. I dissolve into sobs. Violent, racking sobs, so heavy I think I might just shake apart.
“Did you murder them?” I finally ask. “Lynette and Rocky?”
“No.” He shakes his head violently. “No, I promise. I know you don’t have any reason to believe me, but I swear.”
“You’re right, I don’t believe you.” I try to get up, but my ankle won’t hold my weight. “You’re a fucking monster.”
He doesn’t speak for a moment. He just sits there next to me, watching as I keep trying and failing to stand.
“Listen, you have to let me help you get back to the car. If you do…” He breathes in heavily. “If you do, I swear, I’ll tell you everything.”
He wants to piggyback me up the hill, but I refuse to let him touch me. We finally settle on a makeshift crutch from a tree branch he finds. The going is slow and my ankle screams in pain, but we make it.
The sight of the little clearing makes me want to start crying again. There’s the soft old blanket where we kissed. Where, just a little while ago, I felt like my heart might finally have something to hold onto besides grief and fear.
All a lie.
“Here,” he says, pulling out a little bottle of pills from his backpack. I shake my head. He sighs. “It’s just ibuprofen!” But he puts it away.
“Talk,” I say. I refuse to sit down. I lean on the tree branch and stand a few feet away from him. “Now.”
He sticks his hands in his pockets. His breath is still heavy from the chase.
“Okay. Well. Yeah. I was … I was the Sekrit poster. Rockytruther. Both times, the time after the game and the time at the dance.”
“But I was dancing with you. How…”
“I had it prescheduled. Sekrit lets you do that.” His voice is quiet and even. “I wanted it to go off at the dance, and I made sure I was dancing with you when it did, so you wouldn’t suspect me.”
“All this time, you’ve been pretending to help me,” I say. “You pretended to be Jonah. You pretended to like me.”
“Actually, no. No on a few counts. That’s the weird thing. I wasn’t the catfisher.”
For a second I don’t quite get what he’s saying. I frown.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I understand. But truly, Iris, I wasn’t the catfisher. The Not-Jonah, or whatever. I swear to God. The two Sekrit posts were all I did.”
“That doesn’t make sense. He was the one who mined me for all that information…”
“I didn’t need to mine you for anything.
I live right next door to you. I’ve overheard stuff.
Through the fence, through your open window.
Plus Lynette told me stuff about all of you.
” He shifts his weight, and in the dark I can make out his shrug, his open hands.
“I’ve got no clue who was catfishing you. ”
I let that statement settle around me without answering. Wispy clouds, stained violet by Austin’s far-off lights, have drifted over the moon. My ankle throbs urgently, but I try to ignore it.
“You and Lynette,” I say softly.
He doesn’t answer for a minute. When he does, his voice is rougher than usual.
“We were in English together last year. It started out as a … like, as a debt I owed her. She was the only one who was nice to me back when no one would talk to me. So I asked if she wanted to hang out. I didn’t even expect her to say yes.
She was … well, she was pretty self-destructive for a while.
I figured I was too tame for someone who was bent on fucking themselves up.
But we started to hang out. And things just kind of happened from there.
” He goes quiet for a moment. “I was crazy about her.”
“Must have been a blow when you found out she was hooking up with Rocky, then,” I say. It feels good to get a hit in.
He doesn’t answer.
“So then you hear they’re set to meet at the ranch, and you decide to drive out there and confront him,” I say.
“Confront them both, actually, because she needs to learn her lesson too. And when you get there, you see Rocky’s truck, and you know there’s a gun in there, because it’s fucking Texas. So you grab the gun…”
“Wrong, Iris. I already told you. I didn’t kill them,” he says. “I didn’t even know about the cabin. I didn’t know they were hooking up until after they were … were dead.”
“Sure,” I say. “Sure, you’ve been so trustworthy so far.”
“My mom’s got a Ring camera,” he says. “I’ve had the footage saved for months. Just in case, you know.”
That surprises me. “You guys have a camera? Does it get any of our street?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it shows that you didn’t leave the house either.”
I want to scream. All this time, he’s being sitting on proof that I didn’t go the cabin. But then again, all this time he’s been spreading lies. Ruining my life. Pretending to help me. Pretending to be my friend. Pretending to …
I brush the memory of his lips off of mine with the back of my hand.
“Okay. You didn’t kill them. You just tortured me. Why? Why did you do it?”
“At first it was just because I … I was pissed, Iris. She lost everything. And then she died. She knew you were the one who told Gloria about the drugs. She told me not to tell anyone. But she was so sad, and so alone, and then she was dead. And I kept seeing you at the top of that fucking pyramid…”
“It felt unfair.”
“Yeah,” he says. “It felt really unfair. I guess I wanted you to get a taste of what she’d been through. I was going to stop there but your friends, they all stood behind you.”
“So that’s why you smeared them? Just to fuck with me.” I make a face. “That’s psycho shit, Max.”
“Yeah, I guess.” I can’t read his face in the dark, but his voice is strange and flat.
“Anyway, when I found out some guy in Houston was fucking with you too, I wanted to figure out what was going on. But that was a bust.”
“And then you got to play like you were the romantic hero. Was that part of the plan, or just a perk?”
He’s quiet for a moment before answering. “I didn’t mean for that to happen,” he says. “I didn’t mean to fall for you.”
“Really? Man, I guess I’m just lucky then.”
All I’ve wanted for the past two weeks is to know the truth. But it turns out that the truth is worse. The truth is that someone I trusted has been trying to hurt me all along. The truth is that I am infinitely alone.
“What about all the other stuff? The dead squirrel? And my locker and mailbox and…”
He shakes his head. “I didn’t do that stuff either. That’s just our lovely classmates taking shit too far.”
“I don’t think you get to express judgment on what constitutes taking things too far,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
“Okay,” I say. “What now?”
“What … do you want to happen now?” he says.
A question I’m not really prepared to answer.
My wish list is impossible. An “undo” button on life; a chance to travel back, back, back, to before the murder, before Lynette was even kicked off the team.
Maybe before the summer that her addiction took hold, to a time when I could’ve found a way to help her.
Barring that, though, I just want this all to be over.
“Are you going to confess?” I ask.
“Yeah. I’ll do it tonight, if you want.” He pulls out his phone, but I shake my head.
“No, tonight I want you to get me out of here. Take me home. You need to go to the sheriff and confess to your part in this. And you need to confess on Sekrit too.”
He nods. “I will. I promise.”
“And just so you know?” I stand up again, testing my ankle gingerly. “That doesn’t mean I forgive you.”