The man paused, his foot creaking on the drooping wooden step. His eyes flicked to her arm where it disappeared behind the door, and he stepped back, slow and easy. Neither spoke, and when the silence threatened to extend indefinitely, Mona slammed the door. She kept one hand on the bat as she slid the dead bolt home and snapped the chain in place. Then she stood sideways at the window, peering through the curtain slit. She didn’t let the fabric fall until a cloud of gravel kicked up, bouncing off our aluminum walls like hail.
Mona paced to the kitchen, snatching her cigarettes off the counter.
“What do the police want with you?” Her voice was eerily calm as she slapped the box hard against her open fist.
I sank slowly into the scratchy vinyl chair. I couldn’t explain. I wouldn’t know where to start.
“Does this have something to do with that boy?” Mona asked through a mouthful of smoke. “I knew it. I knew he was nothing but trouble.” She shook her head, letting her ashtray clatter to the table.
“It’s nothing like that, Mom—”
“Don’t lie to me, Nearly!” She smacked the table hard enough to rattle me.
I looked at her hand and saw my crinkled trig exam—the one I’d used to wrap her Mother’s Day gift—smashed flat under her palm. I’d scored 100%, but I’d missed the bonus question, an impossibly tricky equation that no one in the class had bothered to answer. The bonus question was filled in, complete, in the same messy scrawl my mother used to write our rent checks every month.
“Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot,” she said.
I pulled the test toward me, my mind working over the numerals and letters, the logic sinking in. My mother, who climbed a pole for a living and scraped her paychecks from a stage, had finished my trig test.
“What are we doing here?” I whispered.
My lips parted, clearing a path for all the angry words I’d been swallowing for years. But I couldn’t squeeze all that bitterness through the knot in my throat. I balled up the test in my fist and shouted, “What are we doing here?”
My mother’s eyes were glassy, her lips pressed into a thin line. The cigarette smoldered away between her fingers.
“All this time you could do this?” I shook the test in her face. “And you kept us here?” Years of questions and anger burned to the surface. That test was like a match in my hands. I wasn’t supposed to be like her. I was supposed to be like him. The one who’d found a way out. “Why?”
She was crying, her eye makeup dripping in long black streaks down her face. “I never graduated high school!” she shouted, as though that were somehow my fault. “What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to take care of you? Your father left me nothing!”
I gritted my teeth, holding back the worst of the things I wanted to say. I wanted to hurl everything I had at her, to throw everything I knew now back in her face, but each word was a boomerang. I couldn’t inflict pain without hurting myself.
“You don’t get to lecture me on boys, or grades, or school anymore. You don’t get to build my future out of your busted, burned-out life! That was your failure. Not mine.” I took a last look at the trig exam before tossing it into the trash. “It’s too late for extra credit.”
I locked myself in my room and collapsed into my bed.
In a matter of hours, I’d probably be arrested for four murders I didn’t commit. My mother had kept secrets from me for years. Neither of my parents were who I thought they were, and this trailer—this life that had always been the best she could do for us—was a lie.
I reached under the mattress and withdrew the train ticket from the bag.
Reece was the only one left I could trust. Leave town, he’d said. Run, before everything came crashing down around me. It didn’t matter if running made me look guilty. The police thought I was guilty anyway. Get someplace safe, he’d said. Save yourself.
But that wouldn’t save him.
And if I ran, that would leave Jeremy squarely under the investigators’ microscope.
Besides, I only had the ticket, no cash. The ticket was enough to get out of town, but the only cash in my future was the scholarship I was going to lose anyway.
I shut my eyes. Kylie’s bloody face stared back at me. Emily, Marcia, Posie, Teddy, and now Kylie . . . And yet, this whole mess was far from over. Whoever was framing me wasn’t finished.
Ne + Ar + Li + B + Os.
My name was still incomplete.
Obviously, whoever was doing this was in no hurry to have me arrested, only giving the police part of the picture. Just the bodies of my students. He was holding back, biding his time, withholding the one piece of evidence that would seal my fate—the clue he’d left for me under the bleachers—but he’d put me in an inescapable box. Made it impossible for me to go to the police without incriminating myself. He was forcing me to play this through, but I was damned either way. In the end, it would be my name spelled in blood. But why? Why me?
I lay there for hours, watching the light shift in my room. By late afternoon, my head was swimming and I was no closer to understanding any of it. I should’ve been studying for my chemistry final, but there hardly seemed any point in it now.
The front door slammed and I peeked out my window. It was just before dark and Sunny View Drive took small bites of my mother until she was a tiny red speck under the traffic light. I was alone.
I opened my door and headed to the kitchen, hungry, tired, and confused. Mona had fished the trig exam out of the trash and left it for me, smoothed out on the table. Stuck to it was a yellow Post-it note addressed to me.
N— This is for you. I was saving it for your graduation. Use it if you must. Save it if you can. Please stay out of trouble. And be safe. It’s yours to waste now. —M
Mona’s note lay on the table beside a fat brown envelope that said For Nearly. The handwriting on the envelope looked familiar. Not like Mona’s. More like my own.
I picked it up, the paper crackling loud in the silence. I opened it. Turned it upside down over the table. Tight rubberbanded rolls fell out with a series of thuds.
Money.
A lot of money.
But it was the yellowing letter that I reached for first. It
peeled open, brittle like the skin of an onion. My eyes burned as I read it.
M—I need to lay low and I can’t stay. Hide this. It’s all for Nearly. For college. I know how much that means to you. It’s not much, but I’ll send more through Butch as often as I can. He’ll watch out for you. I’m sorry I let you down. I love you both. —D
I tore off the rubber bands, fanning the cash in my shaking hands, a ripple of loose bills spilling to the floor as I counted. Five thousand dollars. Not as much as the scholarship, but enough.
I scooped the rolls of money into the envelope and clamped it tight over my chest, the names of a thousand distant cities rolling like a bus departure ticker through my mind. A lightness filled me, but it didn’t last.
If I weren’t so worried about what might happen to Jeremy, I could’ve run.
40
I slipped into chemistry class at the last possible second. Whispers and stares followed me. They’d grown louder and harder to ignore since Teddy and Posie died, and the connection between the victims became undeniably obvious. Anh acknowledged me with a nervous smile.