The Swallows

by Lisa Lutz

  “Only parents or guardians right now,” the officer said.

  “I see. Well, I’m Gemma Russo’s father,” he said.

  “Ten minutes,” the officer said, retreating behind the metal door.

  Greg finally noticed me. He walked over and took a seat on the bench next to me. When he closed his eyes, I saw a single tear slide down his cheek.

  “Is Jonah all right?” I said.

  “He’s in surgery. Something happened with an ax and his leg. I’ve been assured that he’ll be okay,” Greg said. “Eventually.”

  A middle-aged man in a rumpled suit entered. He was the first of four lawyers to arrive that night.

  “Adam didn’t make it,” Greg said.

  I wasn’t prepared for that. It never occurred to me that anyone would have died that night. I tried to summon sympathy. I’m sure that many factors led to the disturbed young man he became. But at that moment, I couldn’t feel much of anything. Then I felt guilty for my lack of feeling.

  “The others?” I said.

  “Gabriel, Mick, and Jack will be fine. Smoke inhalation, a few cuts and abrasions, and I think Gabe’s leg was broken. Although it might have already been broken.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Some time passed. Couldn’t say how long.

  “And you know about Claude?” Greg said.

  “I heard.”

  “Do you know how I found out?” Greg said. “Finn sent me a text. A text. I don’t recognize this world anymore.”

  Gemma Russo

  I know we started the fire, but no one had to die.

  When the boys realized that the door wasn’t going to budge, Jack used a chair to smash the only window that wasn’t blocked by flames. Gabe hurled himself outside, landing on his already broken leg. Mick and Jack crawled out after him. They told the police that they thought Adam had already escaped—that they couldn’t see anything through all of the smoke. I don’t know if Mick or Jack contributed to Adam’s death or just didn’t save him. Either way, the cops bought their story.

  Jonah didn’t know there was a fire until it was already raging. When the alarm sounded, and Jonah realized that the editors were locked inside the burning lounge, he couldn’t find Carl or the key to his bike lock. Jonah tried to pick the lock but didn’t know what he was doing. Then he went at it with a baseball bat. Eventually he got hold of the fire safety ax and attacked the door itself, throwing his whole body into the job. But those axes aren’t like ours. The hallway was hot. Jonah’s hands got sweaty. He said the ax slipped and sliced deep into his shin, hitting the bone. The paramedics found him as they were doing a sweep of the floor. That’s when they broke the lock and found Adam.

  Jack, Mick, Gabriel, and Jonah were taken to the hospital. Mick and Jack were released the next day. Gabriel was kept another twenty-four hours for observation. Jonah had lost five pints of blood and had nerve damage to his leg. Everyone kept talking about how he was going to make a full recovery. They meant that he’d be able to walk without a cane after six months and maybe jog again in a year. The soccer scholarship that had once been a sure thing wasn’t even a longshot.

  All of this I learned later.

  We were at the Lowland precinct after the fire. They had us handcuffed to one another, sitting on a bench in a hallway. The one holding cell was taken up by a drunk.

  Later, there was an investigation. We didn’t talk. We weren’t going to destroy our futures because of one mistake, and we’d learned long ago to keep our mouths shut. Chalk it up to inept police work, or the horde of lawyers retained by Stonebridge parents, or the prevailing code of silence, but no one was ever charged with attempted murder or arson or manslaughter.

  But somebody had to take the fall, and it was easiest to fault the dead.

  I don’t know how the investigators reverse-engineered the evidence to reach this conclusion, but Adam was blamed for just about everything that happened that night. His unhinged mental state was ascribed to his relationship with Ms. Shepherd. Even the fire was somehow pinned on him.

  Greg resigned, because there had to be an administrative casualty for the sake of “optics.” I know I ruined his career. I hope I didn’t ruin his life.

  Greg feels guilty about Adam’s death. I know that because he’s asked me more than once if I do. Usually I ignore his question or change the subject. When I think about Adam, I think about the kind of man he would have become.

  Greg is still trying to figure out how it all went wrong and what he missed. Sometimes he’ll remember a detail from the past year and realize he’d misread the situation at the time. Then he’ll ask me about it.

  “Your hair. It wasn’t lice, was it?” he said just the other day.

  I tried to explain it to him. I’m not sure whether he understood, but he really does try.

  We moved off campus into some rich person’s vacation home. Once I decide on a college, we’ll move again. I’m being homeschooled for the rest of the term, which is interesting.

  Greg’s plan is for us to live together my freshman year. I’m not sure if the purpose of that is to save money or to keep an eye on me.

  It won’t be the college life I was imagining for myself, but it’s better than jail. And it’s better than the life I once thought was inevitable.

  Time and space have separated me from my former allies. For some of us, the distance feels permanent. Emelia refuses to talk about the past, and without that, we have nothing in common. It took all of five minutes on the phone to figure that out. Tegan and I didn’t even bother with the phone call. She also wants to forget. And I don’t want to stand between anyone and their amnesia.

  As for Jonah, the problem is that he can’t forget. Every step he takes, every jab of pain, reminds him of that night. He knows I’m not a murderer. But I am, technically, an arsonist. Well, I was one once. I won’t let that define me. Jonah wants to be with the kind of girl who was never an arsonist. I respect that. Really, I do.

  With Mel and Kate, it’s different. We’re bound by spit, blood, and now ink. Mel and I copied Kate’s tattoo of our preferred weapon. It was a gesture of solidarity at a time when we feared our bond would be broken. Mel and Kate wear their ink proudly. So far, I’ve kept mine hidden from Greg. He worries enough as it is. He even worries about the stupid red sweatband I wear around my wrist to cover it up.

  It’s important that people understand that we have a conscience. We know what we did. We won’t forget that someone died as a result of our actions. Mel keeps trying to replay events, restructure the various points in our trajectory to find a way to destroy the status quo without taking a life. Kate, on the other hand, is confident that each variable was a necessary element in the equation that led to the final outcome.

  “I’ve done the math,” Kate likes to say. “It was the only way.”

  I’m not so sure about Kate’s math, but I can live with what we did. It had to be done.

  If I have one regret, it’s for Linny. I should have let her fight by my side. Then she would have gotten it out of her system. I don’t know that it will ever be over for Linny.

  She never did get those pictures back.

  Ms. Witt

  It’s been a year since I left Lowland. The memories haven’t faded as much as I’d like, and my life isn’t as different, but I’m okay. I am still inside the machinery of my parents’ universe. I’m not just a cog, in fact, but a wheel. Dad can’t keep up with the book-a-year pace, so I’m pinch-hitting. As a ghostwriter, I don’t feel quite like the god of the page, but I am perhaps a benevolent dictator. After everything that happened at Stonebridge, it’s deeply satisfying to have one thing I can control.

  When I drove out of Lowland, I thought I might never see Keith again. I would never go back there and I assumed he’d never leave. The first day he returned to campus after the fire, he dec
ided he didn’t belong there anymore. He sent his résumé to every prep school within twenty miles of Boston. He got a job coaching soccer and basketball at an all-boys boarding school with a competitive intramural program. The school has only half the acreage of Stonebridge, he reminds me often. I think he’s happy. I think I’m happy.

  Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Stonebridge and whether I might have done something else, something that could have prevented the tragedy. I’ve never come up with a good answer. What I do know is that without the fire, Stonebridge would still be standing and so would the rot at its core, contaminating every student who entered those halls.

  The headmaster at Keith’s school offered me a part-time job as a fencing instructor. I declined. A few days later, I found myself in the offices of the sister school just a mile away, offering the same services for free.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes when I watch my students practicing their parries and ripostes, I see them hesitate. They’re afraid of receiving pain, of course, but even more afraid of administering it. Above all, they’re afraid of themselves—of the primal, euphoric thing that surfaces when they fight. They’ve been tamping it down so long that it’s become alien, unrecognizable. I’ve come to see my job as reacquainting them with it. Sometimes it only takes one win to remind them how good it feels, how right. Once that happens, I know they’ll be okay.

  In a perfect world, they wouldn’t need to fight. That’s not the world I live in.

  You can keep telling girls to be polite, to keep a level head and it’ll all work out in the end. But don’t be surprised when they figure out that you’ve been feeding them lies. Don’t be alarmed when they grow tired of using their voices and playing by your rules. And don’t be shocked when they decide that if they can’t win a fair fight, they’ll just have to fight dirty.

  For Anastasia Fuller

  Acknowledgments

  The Swallows is my tenth novel and it’s safe to say it’s the one that might have induced the most insanity. I am truly grateful to everyone mentioned below, and others, for somehow playing a part in getting it to this point. Many of these thank-yous should be accompanied by at least a small apology.

  I’ll begin with my agent, Stephanie Kip Rostan. Thank you for having faith in this book from the first draft to the last and all the versions in between. I hope I never put you through that again. And thank you to everyone else who makes Levine Greenberg Rostan so awesome, especially Sarah Bedingfield, who went way above and beyond, Melissa Rowland, Elizabeth Fisher, Miek (no, I did not misspell that) Coccia, Tim Wojcik, Matthew Huff, and the rest of the team that always finds time to eat cake with me.

  Thank you to my editor, Kara Cesare, for all of your hard work, sage advice, and patience. Also at BBD: Kara Welsh, Jennifer Hershey, and Kim Hovey, I’m in your debt. Jesse Shuman, Loren Noveck, Karen Fink, Debbie Aroff, Colleen Nuccio, Kathy Lord, and Diane Hobbing, you are all awesome. Emily Osbourne, that bird is better than I could have ever imagined.

  Jaime Temairik, thanks for the map and blowchart and the stuff we left out. Thanks, Kate Golden, for the tree illustration and the proto-blowchart.

  Ellen Clair Lamb and David Hayward had to read an obscene number of drafts—consider this both a thank-you and an apology. I still owe many drinks (now it’s in writing) to Katrina Holm for her notes on a very early draft. And thanks, Julie Shiroishi, for your excellent edits during one of those revisions. It’s all a blur now. Sarah Weinman, thanks for all kinds of things. I’m glad you’ll have the opportunity to read this book in its finished form.

  Thank you, Morgan Dox for, yet again, reading a very early draft. And Steve Kim and Rae, Julie Ulmer, and Peter and Carol, just because…

  Thanks to my cousin Jay (Fienberg) for all the hacker/technical help and for being really cool. And thanks to the rest of my family: Bev and Mark Fienberg, Jeff and Eve Golden, Dan and Lori Fienberg.

  Last but not least: a huge thanks to my friend and comrade Megan Abbott.

  By Lisa Lutz

  The Passenger

  How to Start a Fire

  How to Negotiate Everything (with David Spellman)

  Heads You Lose (with David Hayward)

  The Spellman Files Series

  The Spellman Files

  Curse of the Spellmans

  Revenge of the Spellmans

  The Spellmans Strike Again

  Trail of the Spellmans

  Spellman Six: The Next Generation

  About the Author

  LISA LUTZ is the New York Times bestselling, Alex Award–winning author of the Spellman Files series, as well as the novels Heads You Lose (with David Hayward), How to Start a Fire, and The Passenger. She has also written for film and TV, including HBO’s The Deuce. She lives part-time in the Hudson Valley, New York.

  lisalutz.com

  Facebook.com/​lisalutz.author

  Twitter: @lisalutz

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