30. Daisy
Chapter 30
Daisy
I didn’t know why I was speaking so softly, like I expected someone to overhear us when the vacuum cleaner made it clear Dylan was still cleaning in another part of the building.
“Seriously?” Wolf leaned in to look.
“There,” I said, pointing to the picture of Jace’s dad.
He wore a leather jacket over a T-shirt, his jaw sharp under a stylized haircut, long in front, shaved on the sides. There was a challenge in his eyes, the same challenge I saw in Jace’s eyes.
Fuck with me. I dare you.
Try to get close to me. I dare you.
“He looks like Jace,” Otis said.
I looked over at him. “You’ve never seen a picture of him?”
“Jace doesn’t have any up in his room,” Wolf said. “It wasn’t something he liked talking about.”
If it had been anyone else, it might have seemed strange not to talk about a dead parent, but I knew Jace now, understood the way he tried not to think about the things that were hard to think about.
I used my finger to save my place in the yearbook, then looked at the cover to check the year. “He was a junior in this one.”
“Now we know he was here during this four-year period,” Wolf said, returning to the yearbooks he’d been going through. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
I wanted to start at the beginning of the yearbook in my hands, see if I could find other pictures of Jace’s dad, but first I flipped the page to the M's, looking for my mom. I didn’t find her in the juniors or the sophomores, but when I turned to the freshmen, there she was, a younger version of my mom staring back at me from a black-and-white picture with the name Eleanor Mercer under it.
Her dark hair was stick straight, a contrast to the way I remembered her, with soft curls from an expert blowout. Her face was a little softer too, and I thought of Ruth, the way her face had morphed from soft and babyish to more angular, more refined, just in the last year.
I saw both of us in my mom. Ruth had gotten her nose, but it was obvious I’d gotten her eyes even though you couldn’t see their unusual color in the black-and-white photo.
Long earrings dangled from her ears and she wore a top that looked like it was made of crushed velvet. Even from the pictures it was obvious she was a counterpoint to Arlo Kane: good girl meets bad boy.
I touched her picture. She’d been so young, just a kid.
I took a deep breath and flipped to the front of the yearbook, but I only got a couple pages in before Wolf spoke next to me.
“Got something,” he said.
I leaned over to look. “What is it?”
He pointed to a color photo: a group of kids standing in formation, tallest in back, a few kneeling and sitting in the front next to two guys with whistles around their necks. Run, Forrest, Run was spelled out at the top of the page, and under it, Blackwell Track Team.
I saw Jace’s dad immediately, standing in the back, arms folded over his chest, chin tipped, all-too-evident chip on his shoulder.
There were other photos of the team under and around the team picture, the team celebrating wins and goofing off during practices, and that was where I saw another picture of Arlo, one that was more revealing.
“Who are these people?” I asked, pointing to the two guys standing on either side of him. They were clearly teammates, arms around each other like they’d just won a gold medal at the Olympics.
Wolf lifted the yearbook closer to his face to read the fine print under the picture. “‘Arlo Kane with Hunter McAllister and Michael White, Carlton Finals.’” He hesitated as the names hit him. “It’s Mac. They were friends in high school.”
It hadn’t been obvious at first. This version of Mac was clean-cut, minus the scraggly hair, facial hair, and the creases around his eyes. But now that Wolf had said the name, I could see it.
“They were friends,” Otis said. “Good friends.”
I sucked in a breath. I didn’t know why it mattered. Mac and Arlo Kane had been close in the MC — that was obvious from the fact that Arlo had left Jace in Mac’s care — but this felt different.
Bigger.
Now I could see history coming into focus, and I couldn’t help wondering if that history was connected to all the questions we had about, well, everything.
“Who’s the other guy?” I asked. “Michael White.”
He was a chubby, his expression serious under shaggy brown hair.
“Maybe just a teammate,” Wolf said.
“No,” Otis said, “they’re tight. All of them.”
I looked at the picture, at the way they stood close together, the way the Beasts stood close together.
Like they were closing ranks around the world.
I watched as Wolf turned the pages of the yearbook. It only took about a minute to find another picture of the trio, this time sitting under a tree in the courtyard, the paper bags around them indicating it had been taken during lunch.
This time there was a fourth person, a guy with dark skin and an easy smile.
I leaned in to read the name: Derrick Mayer.
We found other pictures of Arlo and Mac, almost always with Michael White. Sometimes they were with Derrick Mayer, sometimes not.
After we worked our way through the yearbook Wolf had found, we did the math to figure out which of the remaining yearbooks would have pictures of Arlo and Mac, then started on those. It was more of the same, track team photos (except for senior year, when they didn’t appear with the team), candid shots at school events and on field trips.
And then, in their senior year, there were several pictures of Mac with my mom.
At lunch, her head in his lap, Arlo, Michael, and Derrick sprawled out around them.
In the bleachers during a football game, Mac’s arm draped possessively over my mom’s shoulders.
And then, prom: Mac and my mom in formal wear, beaming at the camera, clearly in love.
But this one was different because in this one, Arlo Kane looked on, part of the picture but separate from Mac and my mom.
A third wheel.
And this time the photographer had caught something on his face during an unguarded moment, an expression I recognized because I’d seen it on Jace’s face more than once.
Rage.