Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jules: Age Seventeen
Connecticut
On Sunday, in the early afternoon, around ten minutes after his mom’s required twenty-four hours of post-hospital-visit rest had ended, Jules stood in his bedroom and gazed at all of the purple checks—the color Hobbit had assigned to him—on the evidence board.
The questions from the assembled peanut gallery were flying fast and furious.
And after the obvious What the hell went wrong—which Jules had pretty much already figured out, to his ongoing great embarrassment—the most burning question on his list was: How did Suspect X come to learn that Jules was searching for him?
“I can’t help but think that my being targeted and drugged was a warning,” Jules mused as he looked at Hobbit’s work on the board.
“Or maybe even a fuck you.” Sadie was standing beside him. “Like, You really think you can stop me?”
He nodded, looking from her to his bed where Hobbit sat with Belle and Tom and then over to Shelly, who’d stopped needing to be horizontal and was sitting in his desk chair, swiveling back and forth and back and forth as she gazed steadily up at him with her giant brown eyes.
“So... who knows that we know?” he asked. He could tell from the silence that his question needed clarifying. “We do, obviously. Everyone in this room. Right? But who else knows that we’re searching for Suspect X? Who have we told about this?”
Sadie shrugged. “I haven’t told anyone,” she said. She looked over at Shelly, at the gang on the bed, and then at Jules. “Have you? I mean, I thought it was... private.”
“Well, obviously we told Caroline,” he reminded her. “And Krista.”
“Rachel and Diana,” Belle added to the list. Hobbit leapt off the bed, grabbed his black marker and wrote Who Knows? on the board and was now adding those four girls’ names.
“My mother now knows,” Jules said. “Not any of the details, nothing about the survivors,” he quickly reassured Shelly, “but the basics. That we’re looking for this guy and that he appeared to have targeted me last night. I couldn’t let her think it was a hate-crime.”
“Except, wasn’t it?” Shelly murmured. “I mean, I feel like... mine was a hate-crime.”
“But Suspect X doesn’t hate me because I’m gay,” Jules attempted to explain. “I mean, sure, maybe he does, too, but... I really think I was targeted because we’re coming for him not because—”
“I get it,” Shel said. “It just occurred to me that whoever Suspect X is, he had to hate me—and Krista and Caroline—to do what he did to us. He’s probably a giant, seething ball of hate.”
“That’s a good point,” Jules told her.
“Who else have we told?” Belle asked, looking around the room, but it seemed as if they really all had kept the secret secret.
“Did we ask Caroline and Krista not to tell anyone?” Sadie wondered, frowning at Jules in concentration.
“I honestly don’t remember,” he said. “It’s possible we just assumed...”
“Fuck. I’ll go talk to them again,” she volunteered. “See if they might’ve let it leak—and to whom.” Sadie was the only person he knew who’d use correct grammar in a statement starting with the f-bomb, and he loved that about her.
“I think,” Jules said, “that our profile on Suspect X needs reviewing.” He turned back to Shelly. “What Shel said about him being a seething ball of hate seems accurate.”
Hobbit added that description to the bottom of the list that included attended every party, has a penis and strong enough to carry a girl out of the party and into the woods.
“We now know that this drug doesn’t entirely knock out his victims—the survivors,” Jules continued. “So thinking that Suspect X has to be some hulking behemoth is wrong.”
“I was thinking that, too,” Belle said. “Thinking it maybe could even be a girl doing this but—”
“Krista got pregnant,” Jules said the words with her. “Yeah.”
Hobbit put a little star on the board, next to has a penis.
“I still think X has to be someone who’s ready to carry his victim,” Tom chimed in from where he was stretched out on the bed.
“Yeah, you were walking and talking,” he told Jules, “but there were times we had to pick you up off the floor. If Shel or Sadie or even Hobbit were alone with you, they would’ve struggled. ”
“Me large like , have tiny friends,” Belle said in caveman-speak even as Hobbit protested, “That’s not true. I absolutely would’ve figured out a way—”
“I’m talking about things like getting him into and out of the car,” Tom interrupted. “Hob, you and I did that together—it took four hands.”
“Yeah, but I’m betting Suspect X didn’t care if I hit my head on the door frame,” Shelly pointed out. “Or if I fell and scraped my elbow.” She held up her arm where bits of a lingering scab were a constant and sobering reminder of her assault.
“That is true,” Tom conceded in the sudden silence that fell as they all remembered that this wasn’t just a logic problem or a puzzle to be argued over.
“God,” Shelly said on a giant exhale, “I hate that I was talking or even... Jules, I think we could’ve talked you into doing anything—as long as we promised you that David would come back.
I mean, we got you to do things like go up the stairs by telling you that maybe David was up there, that, you know, David definitely wanted you to climb the stairs and.
.. I honestly think you would’ve had sex with Hobbit or Tom or, jeez, even me if I told you David wanted you to.
It was like...” Shelly looked to Sadie for help.
“Your inhibitions were trashed,” Sadie confirmed. “It was pretty easy to manipulate you.”
“It was pretty funny,” Tom said, but then, as Shelly incinerated him with a sharp look, his flying ashes added, “No, I’m sorry, actually it wasn’t funny at all. Sorry, Shel.”
“Well, so much for Fuck you, David,” Jules said weakly. “Apparently, I’m not over him yet.”
“We all knew that,” Hobbit said quietly.
“So finding out that maybe I had sex—willingly—with creepy Suspect X,” Shelly brought them back on topic, “has kind of freaked me out.”
“It wasn’t willingly,” Belle said fiercely. “You were drugged. You did not consent—”
“But what kind of drug does that?” Shelly asked. “Knocks you out, except not completely. I went to the library yesterday to try to find out, but... I couldn’t find anything and when I tried to ask the librarians for help I just... I couldn’t even ask.”
“I will,” Sadie said. “I’ll ask.”
“We’re gonna find out,” Jules said. “My mom’s got a friend who’s an ER nurse.
She’s already left a message for her to call.
” He’d wanted to do an additional blood test at the hospital, but insurance wouldn’t cover it and his mother had found out that the cost was outrageous.
Spending all that money on a test that would probably reveal nothing was a hard no.
Still, he wished now that he’d gone for it, taken the money out of his savings.
“And yeah,” he told Sadie, “I’ll go to the library with you. ” Librarians loved him.
They fell into silence again as he looked back at the evidence board.
“Can I ask,” Tom said from the bed where he’d apparently reassembled his Shelly-incinerated body parts. “Because I’m still not clear on exactly how you were drugged. When you followed Belle inside the house... Did you have something to eat or drink while you were in there?”
“Jules, I’m so sorry about that,” Belle apologized yet again for what had absolutely been a menstrual emergency, made worse by her very short shorts. “I really had to get to the bathroom, fast. There was literally blood running down my leg.”
“It’s really okay,” Jules told her yet again, “but thanks for that image that’s now burned into my brain.”
“It was dire,” she pointed out, but she was laughing a little, no doubt at his reaction.
“You,” he said, “have apologized and have been completely forgiven.” He looked at Tom. “And the answer to your question is no. I had absolutely nothing to eat or drink while I was in the kitchen.”
The counters had been filled with bags of chips and popcorn and cookies, but Jules had been too worried about Belle and too anxious about leaving Hobbit with Rodney Burke and his idiots to even think about grabbing a snack.
Which he wouldn’t have done anyway because he damn well knew that their suspect drugged people.
“The only thing I had all night was that one Dr. Pepper—that, yup—guess who’s at fault?
” He raised his hand. “I left the bottle behind when I went into the kitchen after Belle.” He looked at Hobbit.
“You asked me while we were at the hospital, and I was so certain that I took it inside with me but... I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t think I did.
We need to assume that I left it on the picnic table, just out there for anyone to tamper with. ”
Hobbit took a deep breath, and turned and made a new heading on the board. “People with access to J’s Dr. P.”
“Rodney,” Belle said, but Hobbit was already ahead of her, listing all of the soccer players who’d surrounded—and hassled—him at the party, starting with, yes, that seething ball of hate, Rodney Burke.
“Shit,” Jules said as he realized... “Topher. And Joey.”
Hobbit shot him an oof look, but wrote both of their names at the bottom of the list. “I don’t know the names of those three boys from out of town,” he reminded them. “But they were definitely there, with Rodney’s crew.”
“Charlie, Bobby, Trent,” Belle reported. “From Ottersfield. Charlie and Trent are on the soccer team. Bob’s a super-fan. I’m pretty sure they’re all stupid-rich. Trent was talking about seeing the World Cup somewhere, maybe... Mexico?”
Shelly spoke up from her seat over at Jules’s desk. “You guys...? Didn’t Rachel used to go out with Rodney Burke?”
Rachel, whom Jules and Sadie had approached, asking if she’d maybe been drugged and assaulted at a party in the recent past. Rachel, who with her friend Diane, had refused to talk to them...