The moment flashes through my mind again and suddenly, we’re back together, all four of us, the citrus sky giving everything an unnatural glow. It had felt like another dream, another bad trip, Lucy’s hand bleeding in such a steady, rhythmic drip that the sound of her blood hitting the floor reminded me of the second hand of a ticking clock, strangely soothing in the silence.
I see her lift her finger to her lips, eyes on mine as she sucked it dry.
“Did he hurt her?”
“No,” Sloane says, and I blink out of the memory. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Did he hurt any of you?”
We’re all quiet, hands wringing nervously in our laps.
“We know this boy’s background,” Frank says, eyes darting back over to me again. “You can tell us.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she repeats.
“The marks on his body … they weren’t natural. This wasn’t just some accident—”
“You heard her,” I interrupt, realizing too late that my fingers are digging into my palms so hard the thin skin is starting to sting. I release my grip and wipe the sweat from my hands, placing them on my lap to hide the little crescents left behind by my nails. “It wasn’t like that. And we don’t know where she is.”
The room falls into a heavy silence and Detective Frank just stands there, waiting for us to fill it, even though he knows, by now, that we’ll only refuse. Finally, he exhales, looking at the officers still standing behind him and jerking his head toward her bedroom door before turning his attention back at us.
“Well, all right,” he says, chubby fingers back in his belt loops. “If that’s the way it’s gonna be, I’m going to need you girls to wait outside while we search.”
CHAPTER 36
BEFORE
We’ve been in a state of comfortable quiet since Lucy told me about the cave, Levi, that secret thing they do when the four of us are fast asleep.
It feels strange now, thinking about it: all those nights I had been lying in bed, closing my eyes, not even knowing there was another body beneath me. Their hidden presence like a fifth roommate I never knew we had. But now that I’m in on it, now that I know, it’s hard to imagine I didn’t somehow feel the company of another person down there. That I didn’t pick up on the reason I always felt so cold, that underground pocket of concrete and dirt drafting into my bedroom, emitting through the floor.
That I didn’t feel their nervous energy, hear their shallow breaths. Pick up the panicked beating of their pulse beneath the floorboards, shrill and haunting. My very own telltale heart.
“That guy from the fire,” Lucy says to me now, breaking the silence. “His name is Danny DeMarcus. I do know him. He went to my high school.”
I roll over to my side, curled up in a ball like we’re lying in bed and not on rigid asphalt, shingles rough beneath the weight of us.
“Danny DeMarcus,” I repeat, remembering him from Halloween. The blond boy in the blue dress who had plopped down next to us, striking up that conversation Lucy desperately didn’t want to have. He had been so insistent, so sure he was right, and Lucy had just brushed him off the way she always does, asserting ignorance. But still. I had seen something different in her expression that night. I knew she was lying.
“I guess I just prefer for people around here not to know about my past,” she says, rolling over to face me, too. “I wanted a fresh start. I figured you’d understand.”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding, hand under my head like a pillow. “I understand.”
“There are things from back then I didn’t want to bring with me.”
I’m quiet, not knowing how to respond, Lucy’s eyes on mine like she’s waiting for me to say something next.
“It was such a shitty school,” she continues when the silence stretches on for a beat too long. “There were nine people in my graduating class. Nine. I would go years without meeting a new person.”
I think of Eliza and me, just like this, two years ago: the hard wood beneath us, the stars up above. Listening to the cicadas on the dock, reliable like a metronome, steady as a sound machine, their lullaby soothing me into a trancelike state. Nodding vaguely as she talked about all the places she wanted to go, people she wanted to meet, our little town and private school suffocating her like a boa constrictor: the harder she fought, the tighter they squeezed. It was hard not to take it personally.
“I honestly didn’t think any of them would go to college, let alone come here,” Lucy says. “This random little place.”