Kristen had kept this from me. I knew about her childhood pet （Green Bean the guinea pig）， the time she broke her wrist showing off on a swing set, and the ridiculous Easter-themed play she’d written in fourth grade, which her classmates had dutifully performed. I should’ve heard about the loss of a close friend, and whatever bad thing led to those angry black scribbles, now hidden in a basement’s silty dark.
A thought I’d almost but not quite had when the birthday treasure hunt had reached its dramatic conclusion: Is it really a good idea to be alone in a cabin in the woods with Kristen?
A floorboard creaked above me and I flinched. Why did everyone who got close to Kristen wind up dead? The sudden house fire, a horror-movie cliché…a chill radiated across my shoulders as I started to type in any details I could remember, anything that might lead to news articles about the blaze that killed her parents. But before I could hit Enter, the Internet sputtered out—I’d burned through all five gigabytes. I closed my laptop and sat in the dark while night sounds pressed in around me.
* * *
—
We rocked in our seats as the road swerved through the trees. Kristen was taking it too fast, accelerating as we snaked around hairpin turns.
“Why is it so twisty?” I asked, clutching the handle on the door.
“They had to carve the road out around all the lakes and swamps and ridges up here,” she replied. “It’s actually hillier than you’d think. Like here, it’s a crazy drop-off if you go off the road.” She gestured my way.
“So how about slowing down?”
“I’ve driven here a million times.” She careened around another corner and the seatbelt tugged at my neck.
I took a deep breath. “Hey, so I wanted to ask you about your friend Jamie.”
She squinted through a patch of sun. “Didn’t I say I don’t want to talk about her?”
“Well, I googled her. I was curious to see if she looked like me.” A ham-fisted lie, but the best I could do. “And I saw that she…died by suicide.”
“That’s right.” Camo-like shadows rippled across her face from the sun peeking through the trees.
“I thought you said it was an accident.”
She shot me a raw, strangled look. “Because it’s painful for me. Okay?”
“I’m sorry. I really am. I know she was like a sister.”
“Yeah.” She shook her hair out of her eyes. “You know, if someone said to me, ‘Do you think a twelve-year-old could stand it if both her parents died, and then her best friend since birth killed herself a few weeks later?’ I’d be like, ‘Obviously not.’ But here I am. Here we are.” She turned to me. “It was really hard. Losing her. I don’t ever want to go through that again.”
She stayed that way for a beat, watching me. Unease billowed in my torso.
“I can’t even imagine. What…what happened?”
She shrugged. “No one knew how much she was hurting. Not even me.”
“Was she depressed?”
“Guess so, yeah.”
“God, she was just so…young. For someone that age to…”
“It’s more common than you’d think.” She swallowed. “Remember how we both used to love The Virgin Suicides? ‘Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.’？”
We burst out of the woods and onto a country road, with a bar on one side and a dingy gas station on the other. At the last second, Kristen took a sharp turn and pulled up to a pump. “It’ll be cheaper up here,” she said, before snatching up her purse and slamming the door.
My brain was like minnows in a pail: Thoughts crisscrossed and swarmed and bumped into one another. Was Kristen being weird about Jamie, or was I the one seeing menace in the wholly explicable, as Kristen kept insisting? Was Jamie’s death really a suicide, or had Kristen had, well, something to do with it…and was I an awful friend for thinking that? Then there was the next stepping-stone in logic, something I’d never allowed myself to face head-on: Could all this death mean that…that the night with Paolo—？
Kristen opened the car door before I could finish the thought. She jabbed a button on the dash and the radio bellowed on. As we pushed back into the forest, I replayed our conversation in my head. All Kristen’s talk of losing Jamie, how she couldn’t go through that again…what was that?
Presents rattled in the back seat: the stone elephant for Priya, nifty beer glasses made from old bottles for Aaron. A nice Merlot blend and a card thanking Nana and Bill for letting me celebrate my birthday at their cabin. I’d sent Nana a polite reply to her email, thanking her for her well wishes and asking what she meant by the line about Kristen acting “a bit strange lately.” She hadn’t replied. It was odd—in her email, she came across as more concerned about me than her own granddaughter.
We soared past open fields with machines creeping across them like giant metal insects. Anxiety mounted as we approached the freeway and then thundered down I-43. Closer to Milwaukee, to civilization, to real life. Here the mystery surrounding Paolo’s death felt even truer—here it was a news point, not just a distant, passing item that blipped over the transom and meandered away like a satellite traversing the northern sky. I pictured Los Angeles cops waiting at my front door, the neighbors watching like dull-eyed cows.
That night, back in my own bed, I dreamed of beestings and bat bites, tiny pricks in my smooth, tender bark, setting off a cascade of pain. I woke up sweating and began unwrapping the elastic encircling my leg. I pictured it as the bandage uncoiled: a bloated white ankle, the skin of a corpse, plus a slash of squid-ink black streaking down one side of my Achilles tendon. But when I peeled off the final inches, the ankle looked the same as always.
CHAPTER 26
“I feel…scared.” My fingers were moving of their own accord again, the thumbnail scraping the skin below each tip. “Like, this intense fear that flares up when I least expect it.”
Adrienne nodded gravely. “What does that fear feel like?”
I raked at a notch in my pinkie nail. She hadn’t asked the question I dreaded most, because I’d need to lie: Scared of what? Of the L.A. police uncovering something we’d left behind. Blood on the hotel floor, a nugget in the pile of ashes we’d abandoned in the fireplace. Fingerprints on shovels. DNA in the trunk.
Or, take your pick—I had plenty of options, plenty of bad memories like bogeymen to keep me awake at night. Like that awful night in Phnom Penh. Kristen’s eyes flashing as she swung the lamp and took Sebastian down. Stop. Stop. Stop.
“I feel it in my chest,” I said, “like the beginning of an asthma attack.”
The clutch in my ribs had plagued me throughout dinner the night before. Aaron and I had had our belated birthday meal; he’d wanted to cook everything for me, but I’d insisted on making it a co-celebration, since he’d just picked up a coveted design project. I told him about the cabin, about roasting marshmallows and watching satellites skate across the sky. I turned the tale of how I’d twisted my ankle and yelled to a silent, unlistening night into a slapstick comedy, dorky and cute.