“I’m not in a position to.”
“What are you hiding, you smug fuck?”
He stared at her very hard. “Not what you think I am.”
She gritted her teeth, opened her mouth to scream at him, and then closed it.
He reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet. From a photo sleeve, he removed a cocktail napkin folded into quarters. She recognized the handwriting, even after all this time.
“Found it the last time I went home. B-list Harrington lyrics from when we ate mushrooms once. I also have one of Rick’s medals. His dad gave it to me. I was going to drive it to Washington and pin it to the face of whoever was running the Pentagon at the time, but…”
He took the napkin back, folded it tenderly, and returned it to his wallet. Maybe he just couldn’t stomach it, the possibility that yet more evil had befallen someone he cared about long ago. But the world had changed, and he had to adapt. There might have been a time in his life when his love for Lisa still endured, when he would have followed Stacey and her bizarre theory to the ends of the earth. That time had passed. He’d lost his picture of all of them at homecoming the night he’d returned to New Canaan. He woke in Rick’s old bedroom, his pockets empty except for the cash. Her face—all their faces—were gone.
“My one friend went to Iraq and took a sniper’s bullet to the head,” he said, already knowing this explanation would be inadequate. “Another died in an apartment fire junked out of his mind. And maybe someone I loved once really was murdered, but… I have these dreams—well—they’re more than dreams. I wake up from them and it literally takes me a few minutes to understand that they’re not real, they just linger that long. In them, I see the world that’s coming. The future we’re being banished to. I wake up from them and I’m soaked in sweat and shaking, and I never get back to sleep because I feel like I just went walking in another time and place.”
In the morning he’d leave his hotel room and trade a backpack with a Saran-wrapped brick of cash for a USB drive packed with the secrets of seemingly invincible institutions. Then he’d vanish down the highway and across the plains. Stacey would return to her new apartment in St. Louis on the Central West End and slide her notebook back into the deep recesses of her desk’s junk drawer where Maddy was unlikely to snoop. It would not linger there long.
“We lose people, Stacey,” he said carefully. “And it’s never fair, and it’s never right, and there’s always something missing about it. Something unexplained.”
Bill stopped speaking so abruptly his jaw clicked shut. Together, in that moment, they remembered Lisa, her raw mouth and giant laugh, and they glanced around because they both felt it. Like she’d been eavesdropping from another booth.
On a cloudless summer night at the edge of a creaking metal dock on Jericho Lake, Lisa Han tried to stare straight up at the glowing fringe of the Milky Way, at the dusting of jeweled stars drawing from one corner of the horizon to the other. She fixed her eyes there so she wouldn’t have to watch what Todd Beaufort was doing to her with the knife. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of screaming, of revealing fear. Kaylyn, pleading from a safe distance, had all but assured they were too far to be heard anyway. Lisa gritted her teeth in agony, in defiance, and tried telling herself how little this would matter—not to those distant worlds, not really.
Todd’s sweat dripped into her eye, and she remembered flirting with Bill Ashcraft in her freshman year math class. How his sweet-boy grin bloomed whenever she teased him. How overjoyed she was when he asked if she wanted to go to the movies that first time. This melted into her childhood when her mom moved them to New Canaan, and Lisa spent all her time at the public library scouring the children’s books while her mom used the computers to search for a job. It was where she met Kaylyn and Hailey, two impossibly cute, impossibly friendly girls whose class she’d join in the fall. To them Lisa was this crazy, fierce goddess dropped out of the sky who knew exactly how babies were made and could describe it in gory, gut-bustingly funny detail. And a few months later, she would befriend this kid Danny across the street, a cute, dorky ginger who looked like he’d been chosen for a trip to the moon when she let him have her copy of Where the Red Fern Grows. “You’re like my kid brother,” she explained to him once. “I’m older than you!” he objected. “You’re like my cute little baby brother who I’m going to stuff in a locker with a bag of dog food and not let you out until you eat the whole thing.” And then she sucked the entire length of her index finger and jammed it in his ear until he shrieked.
Todd drove the knife into her until it stopped hurting, until her whole body went numb and cold and indifferent, and then, instead of screaming, she laughed in his face. She was thinking of Stacey’s funny little church-chick manner, this air of rosy, Christian, good-golly-Miss-Molly-ain’t-that-swell!-ness about her, and what a total gutter whore she was once you got in her pants. Lisa laughed because she was thinking of how hilarious it had been to tease Stacey about this dichotomy, to turn around out of the blue in their senior year English class and whisper, “Stop thinking about these titties, you scag.” It was just too easy to crack her ass up. So while she was being stabbed to death, Lisa had to laugh because it was so funny how in love she was. How weird. Who the fuck would’ve seen that coming? Her defiant chortling carried a mist of spittle and blood straight up into Todd Beaufort’s panicked mouth.
Finally, she remembered being eight years old and waking to find her mom curled up in the bathtub. There was no water in it. Fully clothed, she hugged her knees, sobbing. So Lisa went to the kitchen and figured out how to make blueberry pancakes. A half hour and a couple of failed prototype pancakes later, she brought them on a tray to the tub. Bethany wiped her eyes and studied the breakfast like a foreign currency. “How did you make these?” she asked.
“Mom, I can, like, read directions.” She unrolled some toilet paper and set knife, fork, and this makeshift napkin on the tray. “Also, you know, most directions are at like a fifth-grade reading level? And I’m already at an eighth-grade level or at least sixth. Does it make you feel better?”
Bethany gasped, sucked back tears, nodded furiously. “Yeah, babe, it makes me feel better. So much better. You’re a tough little girl.”
“Uh duh, I know.” And Lisa sat on the closed toilet to stuff a syrupy, blueberry-packed forkful into her own mouth. “I’m a freaking samurai, Mom.”
How much she still had planned. How eager she was to get started. All the people she would have touched, all the hearts she would have broken. She’d wanted to get strange tattoos and pierce the tops of her ears, her tongue, her nipples; wear garish makeup and collect odd gypsy clothes; travel like a wind-borne petal, fight through the muddy crowds of psychedelic bacchanals; write a deranged novel where a woman’s periods come to life each month to follow her ghostlike, quipping about dating life and making Marxist critiques of assorted makeup products. She’d wanted to learn to play the guitar like Ben Harrington and take all her wholesome smut poetry and set it to music, to buy a camera and stalk the globe taking pictures of twisted scenes she found beautiful and then render the beautiful vistas with menace, danger, and gore. She wanted to steal unpredictable books from public libraries in Omaha and hostels in Florence and the shelves of her one-night stands, slipping her lovers’ most beloved, dog-eared copies into her bag and vanishing without leaving a phone number. She’d wanted to leap over vast chasms and coax others to follow, find herself and her companions all run out of food, matches, maps, water, and opinions so that they’d have to fashion fire from a glasses lens and arguments from half-remembered philosophies. She’d wanted to lead revolutions with barbaric compassion, face down all immutable phenomena, and charge over the shadowlands between the unknown and the unknowable.