by Emily Henry
“I’m in.”
SIX
BUT WE DIDN’T GO back to the field the next day.
For one thing, there was the violent storm that rolled into town not long after I turned up to work that morning, with angry purple clouds pushing in over the outdoor pool. Within minutes, lightning snapped across the sky toward the soccer fields beyond the water slide, and within half an hour, the YMCA’s director called to tell us the forecast wasn’t promising and we might as well close the outdoor facility for the day.
So I’d gotten bumped to the front desk, and the guy scheduled there went home sick. I hated working inside on the best of days, and today, there was nothing to do—nothing but a sticky romance novel in the lost and found, which I wasn’t brave enough to touch. And even if I’d wanted to continue the unsettling “research” Arthur was pestering us all about in the group texts (I didn’t), the storm seemed to be having some kind of adverse effect on both my phone, which kept freezing, and the computer, whose screen started pixelating and shuddering whenever I got too close.
Sofía was working too, but back in the fitness center, so I was left alone in the silent lobby, counting the minutes until Arthur’s shift at Walmart and Sofía’s and my shifts here ended, and we could finally go put all this behind us, lightning storm or not.
But then, after a segment about a dog who liked to ride the bus played on the muted TV fixed to the lobby ceiling, Cheryl Kelly appeared onscreen in front of the electric fence that guarded the substation on Jenkins Lane.
She was clad in a red windbreaker, and a disembodied hand floated on the left side of the frame, holding an umbrella over Cheryl’s billowing blond hair.
I wondered if someone had told her to swap out the blue she wore while reporting on the steel mill accident for the red she’d been wearing since, or if she’d made the decision herself.
While Remy had his denim and Levi had his loud hats and Nick had his trademark all-black outfit plus an endless supply of neon high-tops, I couldn’t imagine committing to one look.
Of course, I couldn’t imagine committing to anything. It was best to stay flexible when it came to decisions. You never got what you really wanted anyway. Someday Cheryl Kelly with News 11 would wake up and find a very particular burglar had robbed her of all her red clothing, and she’d have to settle for something teal.
Onscreen, her face was emoting so aggressively I couldn’t take the suspense. I left the desk and stood on one of the plastic chairs to turn up the TV’s volume.
The TV was old, and as soon as I was eye level with it, it went fuzzy, static pulling monochromatic streaks across the screen. I smacked the side of it, but (shockingly!) that didn’t help. I turned up the volume on the off chance I’d be able to hear her through the fuzz (I couldn’t!), then hopped off the chair hoping to give it a moment to resolve.
“The plot thickens!” Cheryl Kelly said as she snapped back into red existence. “For those of you just tuning in, I’m standing here outside the step-down transmission substation on Jenkins Lane, where yesterday, we reported about a strange—and intriguing—pattern that had appeared in a local farmer’s corn crop, as well as his grazing field. While early speculation from the Sheriff’s Department focused on the possibility that this was a calculated act of arson, yesterday’s investigation has turned up some puzzling—and startling—”
“And startling,” a voice parroted in breathy falsetto behind me. I spun to find Sofía leaned against the reception desk.
“—new information,” Cheryl Kelly finished.
Sofía shook her head. “Why does Cheryl Kelly always sound like she’s talking through the first half of an orgasm?”
“Because they cut her off before the second half?” I said.
The segment cut to a wide-angle view of the electrical facility. Yellow caution tape had been wrapped around the fence like a Christmas bow. Several police officers, as well as Crane Energy employees in rain ponchos, stood within the grounds, sharing a conversation we couldn’t hear, as Cheryl’s narration went on, the screen jumping once more to yesterday’s aerial footage of the charred field.
“With the help and cooperation of the property owner, local farmer Garrett St. James, the Sheriff’s Department determined that the burns were much deeper than initially thought. Preliminary reports that this was the careful work of pranksters faltered when a dig at the burn site turned up charred soil in the same careful path more than two feet below the surface.
“St. James is now reportedly in talks with a private excavation team. He hopes their assistance will help determine whether this is indeed arson, or if something beneath the Earth’s surface may have caused the burns through some kind of natural—though uncommon—”
“Though uncommon,” Sofía breathily gasped.
“—phenomenon!” Cheryl Kelly finished.
The camera cut to a prerecorded interview with Garrett St. James, a mostly bald man with a thin gray swipe of hair back-combed across his shiny forehead, and a gun cradled in his arms like it was a very long baby.
Sofía snorted. “Only in Splendor, Ohio, would someone be like, Hey, mind if I bring my gun to this interview? And then have the news station be like, Sure, you can make vague threats on our program! No big!”
“We’re gonna get to the bottom of this one way or another and bring him to justice!” St. James was saying, rattling his gun a bit for effect.
I thought about the bullet I’d found, the damp footprints along the Jenkins House. “Do you think he saw anything that night?” I asked.
Sofía shrugged. “Why would he go to all this effort if he’d seen what happened? If he was around, he obviously doesn’t remember what went down either.”
And if he’d seen us lurking around near his property beforehand, he would’ve turned us in by now. Sofía was right: There was no shortage of hunting guns in Splendor. That bullet could’ve belonged to my pediatrician as easily as it could have belonged to Garrett St. James.
Sofía turned to me and jutted her chin toward the marks on my hand. “How are you feeling, by the way? Do yours itch or anything?”
I shook my head. “Yours?”
She ran her teeth over her bottom lip. “It’s like they’re already healed, isn’t it?”
“You tell me,” I said. “You’re the smart one.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m the one who tries.”
I had tried once, right after the accident. Getting perfect grades that fall was just one more way I could prove I was okay, take the burden off Mom and Dad. I especially threw myself into my science class, thinking my wannabe-astronaut mother would find some hope in watching me take an interest in the things she’d shared only with Mark.
All I really wanted was to be outside, like I had all summer, running through woods, soaked in sweat, smelling honeysuckle and oleander on the sticky breeze. Instead I’d toiled at the kitchen table for hours on my unnecessarily elaborate model of the solar system, then left it sitting out for upwards of a week, waiting for the moment Mom would notice it.
When she finally did, she didn’t say anything, but I watched hurt creep into her eyes. Like it was a trap I’d laid for her. I guess it sort of was.
I pushed too hard.
Three weeks later, she left.
On TV, Cheryl Kelly was standing cozy-close to Sheriff Nakamura again, the disembodied hand splitting the umbrella over both of them.
“Until we can be certain of the cause of this, we are still treating this as a criminal investigation,” he confirmed.
“Great,” Sofía said over Cheryl’s breathy wrap-up. The channel cut to a commercial break, and Sofía eyed me once more. “I guess that pretty much puts the kibosh on today’s plans.”
I felt simultaneously relieved to have an excuse not to go back to the field and anxious about the necklace, imagining it sitting out there where so many rain boots were stomping around and shovels w
ere stabbing the dirt.
“I guess I’ll tell my mom I can go shoe-shopping with her after all,” Sofía said, with the enthusiasm most people would muster when talking about a dentist appointment or a Pap smear. “Wanna come?”
When I’d first befriended Sofía, I’d treated visits to her house like field trips to an art museum. Her home was beautiful; her parents were beautiful and warm and funny and loving. They were both ob-gyns, which struck me as very sophisticated and meaningful. Her mother, Dr. Gloria Perez, lived in elegantly casual linen and wool and focused all her use of color and pizzazz on her shoe closet, which I’d regularly begged Sofía to give me tours of.
Sofía didn’t care much about shoes, or shopping. She spent half her life in athletic wear and the other half in dark jeans and cheap white T-shirts she bought in multipacks (and looked like a Gap model in), but every few weeks, she and her mom went shoe-shopping.
It was just their thing, she explained. I’d gone along a couple of times. The last time, I remembered watching them both dissolve into laugh-tears in the size 9 aisle of Nordstrom Rack when Sofía called a feathery pink heel something that belongs in Muppets porn. Later, Dr. Gloria had told us about her childhood in Mexico City and her first boyfriend. She’d told us the way Sofía and I interacted reminded her of her sister, and though a certain melancholy passed over her face, thinking of the sister she’d lost in the accident seemed to make her more happy than sad. She also asked us a zillion questions about the mockumentary and clapped her hands and laughed when we described our plans for upcoming episodes.
I had a great time.
When I got home, I went straight to my room and cried. I hadn’t been shopping with them since. In fact, I hadn’t even been to Sofía’s house again, and once, about a year ago, we’d come close to fighting about it, despite all my greatest efforts to avoid confrontation.
I couldn’t explain it: how being around her family—knowing I could never belong—hurt worse than being alone. Instead I’d just blurted out, “We’ve been spending too much time together.” After that, things between us were never the same.
“Fran? Shoes? Yes? No?”
Before I could stumble through an excuse, the desk phone rang. I held up a finger and went to answer. Static filled the line, followed by an ear-piercing squeal. I yanked it away from my ear, wincing, then drew it back as the screech ended. “Splendor Community YMC—”
“Fran!” someone hissed on the other end.
“Remy?” I glanced toward my cell phone on the desk. “Why are you calling me at work?”
“I don’t have your number memorized, and this one’s online,” he said. “Look, I’m on my dad’s phone, and I only have a second before he realizes he forgot it and circles back. He’s coming to ask you and Arthur questions. You can’t tell him anything, okay?”
“About the field?” I said, startled. I thought about St. James, about his gun. “He can’t honestly think we had anything—”
“He doesn’t,” Remy cut me off. “But he can’t know you were there. I mean it, Franny. He cannot know. I’ll explain tonight. Can you meet me at the tracks, midnight?”
It took me several seconds to understand. Despite his Rebel Without a Cause aesthetic, Remy mostly honored his dad’s rules, at least when he was already in trouble.
“I have to go,” Remy hissed. “Midnight, Fran. Don’t tell anyone, okay? I’m serious. Not even Arthur. Not until we talk. And no matter what: You weren’t in that field. You were at Levi’s, watching The Shining, and then we fell asleep.”
The line clicked dead, and I stared at the phone, trying to make sense of it all.
“What did Remy want?” Sofía said behind me.
I put the phone down. “Sheriff Nakamura is coming to ask us some questions.” I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Remy wants us to lie.”
“Like under oath?” Sofía said.
“If it comes to it,” I said, “I think so.”
Her eyebrow arched, and she studied me with something like suspicion. Or maybe I was imagining it. “And that’s all he said?”
There were all kinds of things my friends and I never talked about, dozens of unspoken secrets, not to mention Nick’s storytelling. This felt different.
“Pretty much,” I said.
Sofía’s lips pursed. “Okay,” she said finally, and walked away.
Lightning flashed outside the window, and something feathery and black smashed into the door. I flinched and swallowed a scream as I jumped up from behind the desk.
The bird slid down the glass door and dropped lifelessly to the concrete, a thin trail of blood connecting the point where it hit to where it lay dead.
I jumped again as two more hit in quick succession, behind it. I clamped my hand over my chest like my heart was a skittish Chihuahua I could soothe by petting, but it didn’t slow and my stomach didn’t unknot.
I kept thinking about the mind-bending CRACK! and the burst of light that had followed, the way I’d felt like the universe had split down the middle and everything was falling toward the rift, upending the laws of physics and swallowing them whole. In the last second I remembered, I’d lost all concept of up and down, of balance, of my body and its place in space.
I felt fine now, I told myself. Completely, totally normal.
But if the birds had been affected this way, what were the odds that we’d been unscathed?
In my head, Cheryl Kelly’s breathy voice sang, The plot thickens!
SEVEN
AT LEAST THE SHERIFF had come alone.
I would only be lying to one cop, whom I knew, instead of multiple strangers.
The worst part was that Dad happened to be home between jobs, and there wasn’t anywhere for four people to comfortably sit in our house.
We had one couch and an off-brand La-Z-Boy in the living room, and the two tiny chairs in our tiny kitchen at the back of the house were covered in mail piles, discarded jackets and bags, leaning stacks of thrift-store National Geographics whose photos I’d pined over while standing at the kitchen sink eating breakfast. The surface of the table itself was worse: playing cards and mugs that never made it to the dishwasher, paper towels and junk mail and crumbs that never made it to the trash.
I could tell Dad was embarrassed. Possibly because we never had adults over and he’d just realized how badly we needed to clean. Possibly because he had to sit on the couch between me and Arthur while Sheriff Nakamura perched on the not-La-Z-Boy, looking stern and paternal despite the purple plastic cup of water Dad had offered him, with Droog sitting squarely on his feet.
“I am sorry to just drop in on you folks like this.” The sheriff eyed me guiltily. I was dripping wet from the ride home, leaving a full-body print on the couch. I pulled my hands inside my damp sweatshirt pockets to hide the scars.
“No trouble at all.” Dad cast an anxious glance between me and Arthur. “I’m just afraid I don’t understand what it’s all about. You said there was a fire on Jenkins Lane?” His grimace swiveled between Arthur and me, clearly readying himself for the worst.
The sheriff scooted to the edge of the formidable chair and gave an encouraging smile. “Something like that. You haven’t seen it on the news?”
Dad scratched his jaw. “I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of time to keep up with that sort of thing these days.”
A lie. Sure, Dad was busy, but he was also an insomniac. If you stood in the hallway at just about any given hour of the night, you could hear the soft din of prerecorded baseball games coming from the television in his bedroom. Never sitcoms or action movies or traffic and weather reports. Just baseball games that had already happened. His happy place.
He used to love baseball. Before the accident, he’d played in the church league and everything. Mom didn’t know anything about the game, of course. Once, when Mark, Arthur, and I were playing Mario Kart in the living room, I
’d overheard her pretending to give Dad advice on an upcoming game.
“You see, Rob, what you gotta do is . . .” she’d said from the next room.
“What, Eileen?”
I remembered glancing over my shoulder and seeing him through the kitchen doorway, leaning in close to her, his face dead serious. “Tell me, honey. How am I gonna win this game?”
“Well, listen. You’ve gotta take that ball, and throw it, right into the end zone.”
Dad fought a smile. “The end zone is a very important place in baseball.”
“Oh, the most important,” Mom had agreed, and their laughter had bounced around the yellow-lit wallpaper of the kitchen, a Carole King record softly playing under it all.
I’d hardly cared that they were happy. Back then, it had all seemed very normal, the five of us in that house.
The smell of onions and baking garlic that meant Dad’s potato-chip-topped green bean casserole was in the oven.
The spread of Arthur’s superhero comics across every surface in the living room.
Mark’s mix of art books and science journals stacked neatly on the bottom step so he’d remember to take them to bed with him.
The high-pitched yodel of Mom’s laughter filtering into the living room.
“No one’s accusing Arthur or Frances,” the sheriff said, yanking me out of the memory. “To be frank, Robert, at this point, we’re not quite sure what we’d even be accusing anyone of. There’s been significant damage to some crops, as well as the little electrical plant down there, not to mention the cows and the birds in the area are a bit agitated by whatever happened, and, well . . . confused.” He seemed resistant to saying that last part.
“With all due respect,” Arthur said, scooting to the edge of the couch to mirror the sheriff’s confident yet casual position. “They’re cows. Isn’t being confused part of their M.O.?”
The sheriff chuckled, but there was something uneasy underneath it. “Can’t argue against that. But the property owner is pretty upset. He’s concerned the cows might have been tormented.”
