19 #2
Bram flushes. “Because it was humiliating.” He runs his finger over the now-faint white line that used to be a scratch on the back of his hand.
“Mariana asked me point-blank if I had feelings for you,” he says, voice rough, “and…I didn’t know how to answer that.
I just knew I couldn’t lie to her. So we broke up. ”
My heartbeat accelerates. It’s pumping furiously in my chest, my head, my hands. Everywhere.
“I let myself hope you felt the same way, and then that day in my room with the painting and afterward in the woods…well, you made it pretty clear that it wasn’t ever going to happen.
So I told Mariana that, no, I didn’t have feelings for you, and she took me back.
Only that time”—he twists his lips—“I did lie to her.”
“Bram,” I say, heat fanning up my neck, “you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do.” He’s looking at me like I’m the one who’s confused. He shifts closer to me on the couch until our legs touch. “I was so sure you wanted me to kiss you that day.” He pauses, as if replaying the moment in his mind, and my face heats. “Why didn’t you kiss me back?”
I avert my eyes to the coffee table. “I told you. I thought you were with Mariana.”
“You know what I mean. In the woods, when I told you that was over.”
My chest is tight, my thoughts all scrambled. “Because you’re my best friend.”
“That’s what you say about Henry too.”
“Yes, but—”
“But with Henry, it’s the truth,” Bram cuts in.
“You two are friends, always have been, always will be. For you and me, it’s not true, Hayden.
” He reaches out slowly to cup my chin, gently tilting my head until I look him in the eyes.
I can’t help but notice that for the first time in ages, he used my real name.
It sounds strange and intimate all at once, like he’s broken me open.
“You and I are not just friends. And I think you know that.”
I swallow, the sound like a blast. “You’re trying to mess with me,” I breathe, my face only inches from his. “You love messing with me.”
“Yes,” he says unabashedly. “It’s one of my favorite things. And I would like to continue doing it forever.”
I glare at him, but I don’t pull away. “Adam says that Henry loves me. You would do this to him? The way you did to Adam with Mariana?”
Bram’s jaw clenches. “I didn’t do anything to Adam,” he grits out.
“I told you, I didn’t know about his feelings for Mariana.
” He lets out a breath through his teeth.
“It explains a lot, though, about his state of mind this past year. His depression. He was dealing with a lot more than physical injuries.”
He’s right about that. The photo album in Adam’s room was there because he missed Mariana. Whether their connection was all in his head or not, Adam has been torn up about losing the love of his life.
“As for Henry,” Bram continues, “look, naturally he thinks he’s in love with you. Who wouldn’t be? Maybe he won’t see it at first, but he’s not the guy for you. And you are not the girl for him.”
“Because I’m the girl for you,” I say, only it fails to carry my intended sarcasm.
His gaze slips from my eyes to my lips, then down to my throat.
“You didn’t do anything wrong Friday night, if that’s what you’re worried about.
” He lets his hand fall from my face, and I hate myself, because I immediately want it back.
“If Adam tries to make something out of this, I’ll back you up. ”
“I’m not sure how much your word counts in a situation like this, but thanks.”
“I only want you and Henry happy. You did nothing wrong in the garden, but I do think…” he starts but stops himself.
“What?” I press. “Tell me.”
He bites his lower lip. “I think it’s—nothing. It’s nothing.” Only the way he looks at me is the complete opposite of nothing.
“Tell me about the fire alarm,” I whisper, my full voice trapped inside me.
“Like I said—”
“I can’t trust you if you don’t tell me,” I interrupt.
His smirk is joyless. “That’s not exactly how trust works.”
“You want me to give you so much, Bram. But you won’t give me a thing.”
He hesitates, as if this thought might have resonated with him. “You don’t actually want to know the answer to your own question. That’s the truth.”
“Tell me anyway.”
He inhales, long and slow as he deliberates. “You might want to talk to the love of your life,” he says, the words doused in irony, “since he’s the one who asked me to pull that alarm.”
“Henry?” My thoughts spin, everything colliding to a halt. “No—why would he do that?”
“I’m not sure. After the cafeteria, he wanted to talk. He said he needed me to do something for him. He said he’d taken care of the security cameras, figured out how to disable them remotely. I just had to pull the fire alarm and ask Adam to play lookout.”
“What? But the camera—”
“He must’ve only managed to disable the indoor cameras.
He either forgot about the ones at the back and the front of the school, or he didn’t realize they were on a separate circuit.
All he would tell me was that he was going to do something that would change all of our lives for the better.
And I was too worried about Adam to ask questions.
So before following Henry’s orders, I went and found him, which was lucky because he was about to do something stupid, like vandalize Todd and Neil’s lockers.
He was really upset, but I managed to calm him down.
Then I told him to play lookout while I pulled the alarm, just like Henry asked. ”
I can only stare. “And you just…did it?”
“It was Henry,” Bram says, shrugging. “Sweet, smart, innocent Henry begged me to do this. I never thought any actual harm could come of it. I didn’t think about cameras or consequences. It was my brother—the most sensible of the three of us. So yeah, I just did it.”
Why the hell would Henry ask Bram to pull the fire alarm? “You didn’t see Henry afterward?”
Bram shakes his head. “I started toward the back doors, so I could blend in with everyone else during the drill. But I noticed Adam wasn’t coming, so I went looking for him on campus.
With his state of mind and everything, panic took over.
I had no idea what he was capable of. I finally found him in the car and sat with him the whole period. ”
Something isn’t clicking yet. “How did you end up in the woods with Kennedy’s body?”
Bram rubs at the back of his neck. “When everything happened with Mariana and the town turned against us, Kennedy stopped harassing me. I didn’t see her or hear from her for a whole year.
But the second she saw me back at school, it all started up again.
Her texting me, sneaking onto our property, vandalizing shit to get my attention.
She even showed up here in the house once.
In the house. She was so aggressive, I had trouble getting her off me without hurting her.
I was so upset, I said some of what I’d wanted to say.
But not all of it. She’d caught me off guard, so I didn’t have a chance to really sort out everything on my mind.
About Mariana.” His eyes go from angry to sad and distant, his mind seemingly just as trapped as his physical body, in this house, since Mariana died.
“Because in a way,” he continues, “I blamed Kennedy for what happened. If she hadn’t lied to Mariana, maybe Mariana wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time—I don’t know.
Anyway, the morning Kennedy…you know, she texted asking me to meet her in the woods behind the fields after school.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to meet her. There was no way.
But then, the whole time I sat with Adam in the parking lot, I thought about what else I wanted to say to her.
I’d planned to tell her it was never going to happen and to double down on reporting her stalking to the cops.
And then, when the bell rang ending school, I left Adam in the car and went to the woods to finally confront her.
Only instead of having that conversation, I found Kennedy dead. ”
A chill runs up my spine. “So then, Kennedy’s phone—the one with her text messages to you—the cops must have it, right? They know that she texted you to meet her in the woods?” The very place she was killed.
“They haven’t mentioned it,” Bram says. “But yeah, I assume so. They’ll toss it into their growing pile of evidence against me.”
Only he wasn’t even there when Kennedy was murdered. He was with Adam in the car, each one the other’s alibis—alibis they couldn’t share because of the parts they played in pulling the fire alarm.
A third person—a person wearing the exact hoodie I gifted the Abbott brothers—took Kennedy out to the woods where her body was discovered, only minutes later.
There’s only one other person who could be in that video.
“The companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
—Frankenstein by Mary Shelley