She stepped back, removing her foot from the grass clearing. The moonlight shimmered down like a spotlight, and she’d rather stay in the shadows of trees. With a fluid motion, she threw the equipment bag off her shoulder. Out rolled twenty-three baseballs. They spread around her feet, prevented from rolling by strange dips in the dirt.
Chloe leaned over and delicately lifted one of them. She adjusted her form, ready to throw. She yearned for for someone to snatch her hand and tell her not to do it. She yearned to scoop the baseballs back into the bag and return them to their rightful home in the equipment closet. For Stricket to come home from shopping before she could take action.
But there was nothing to stop her.
It was not a surge of inspiration that made her throw. Not a brilliant decision crafted in her mind. What made her throw weren’t her thoughts, but her lack of them. Her mind empty, all that filled her was a raging emptiness in her muscles. The baseball whirled through the inky air, crashing through a window by the door.
As the glass shattered, Chloe grabbed another baseball. She gave it a quick bounce in her hand before sending it flying through a different window. It rung as it hit something inside. Double points.
“I’m doing this for Benji,” Chloe reminded herself. Her eyes watered, but her head was too warm for tears.
She wasn’t tracking how many she’d thrown, but eventually, she ran fingers along the dirt and found nothing but an empty bag. Her fury settled, and as she saw the broken house, she bit her lip and turned away. She was afraid of the damage. Afraid of what she’d done.
She kicked a tree, and her toes throbbed from the impact.
* * *
It was at the same time Chloe had climbed back through her bedroom window when Benji slipped out of his. His backpack was filled with a few more items than his last attempt. One to-go bowl from Chowdies, two crinkled bills, and a change of clothes. He trekked through the outskirts of town, making sure no one could spot him.
Yet even if an old friend were to see him, what would be the harm? They were no longer in his way. Benji knew that this time, there would be no one to stop him. No Chloe to chase him. No Sam to laugh in his face. No James to block his path. It would only be him, alone at the edge of Wishville.
Nearly two days until the 23rd. Two days to live outside of town. To Benji, that was enough.
He reached Candy Road faster than he thought he would. Everything moved rapidly, and before he could bat an eye, he stood facing the LEAVING WISHVILLE sign for the second time this month.
There was no staring at the lights of town and waving goodbye. No watching of the seagulls and listening to the waves for the last time. Instead, he powered toward the exit. He was ready to leave everything behind. School, his mom, all of his old friends, classmates, Oliver. He was ready to let go of it all, and spend his last two days discovering the one mystery he had left.
He brought his foot forward to step off the bridge, but it came plummeting back. Don’t do it. His mind spoke to him with a voice louder than his urge to leave.
“I’m getting out of here.” Benji tried to move, but his feet remained bolted to the ground. He relaxed his arms, restraining himself from battling the energy that kept him still. The end was so close, yet miles away.
“Why?” Benji stepped further from the border, retreating from the bridge. “Why can’t I leave?”
The sign didn’t answer him, so he searched his brain for a reason. A single message wiggled its way from his mind to his lips, sliding off his tongue.
“Not today.”
His eyes widened, two moons resting on his nose.
It was a warning. Nina had told him not to leave town. His own conscience stopped him from taking the last steps away from everything he knew. Benji understood that tonight wasn’t the right time to leave, even with only two days left on the clock. The only question was why? He had done everything he needed to, hadn’t he?
Part III–home
CHAPTER 24
jett
It was Monday, May 22nd, and Benji stood in the hall of Wishville Junior High. As kids gave him high-fives or stared from a distance with narrowed eyes, he couldn’t help but wonder why he was still here. Tomorrow was his death day. He should have been miles from Wishville by now, but here he was, living this new life he created as if he planned to stick with it from the beginning.
“What’s up, Benji?” Ray bumped into his arm and walked next to him. “Why weren’t you here this morning?”
Benji hadn’t bothered showing up early. Soccer was the last thing on his mind, and even school wasn’t one of his highest priorities. If Rebecca hadn’t knocked on his door this morning, he probably could have slept through the entire day.
“You doing okay?”
Benji ignored him. The school was gray.
He left Ray behind him in the hall, entered Mr. Trenton’s class, and dumped himself into his familiar seat. Although Benji radiated a fresh dullness, the students were too stuck in their own world to notice. James rolled his pencil across his desk, a sign of boredom, but he refused to read for stimulation. He willed himself to stay present, to make sitting in Mr. Trenton’s class and being in Mr. Trenton’s class the same activity. Sam, on the other hand, did everything in her power to mentally escape. She hummed, pinching her arm whenever she found herself listening to the room’s ambiance. She forced a song out of her, a song she wished to live in.
“Are you okay?”
Benji jumped at Mr. Trenton’s voice, raising his chin to the board. However, his teacher’s focus was not on him, but Chloe.
“Sorry.” She crossed her arms, pressing them against her stomach. “I’m not feeling well.”
“Something must be going around.” His eyes trailed over Benji as he pointed to the door. “Why don’t you see the nurse?”
“I’m fine.” Chloe unraveled her arms, opened her binder, and lifted a pen.
The class erupted with whispers. As Mr. Trenton scribbled notes on the blackboard for them to copy down, Peyton sat sideways in her chair, facing Noah. “Think she feels bad for him?” She held her palm against her cheek in attempt to shield her voice from the rest of the room.
Noah laughed through his nose with unsteady breaths, keeping himself quiet. “Baseball or not, he’s a jerk.”
Their efforts to remain quiet failed. “You don’t have to be mean about it.” Audrey peeked at the board, ensuring Mr. Trenton had his back to her before turning her head in their direction. “But I agree it wasn’t right.”
The chattering of classmates filled Benji’s mind until he couldn’t decipher words from each other. It mushed together, like listening to a poem from underwater. His neck jolted in crazy directions, but it was pointless. Even Jett couldn’t handle it. He held his hands over his ears until he burst, spinning around to face Sam’s desk.
“You hearing this, Perkins?”
The chattering stopped. Everyone faced Jett, waiting. For the first time in six days, Benji was too confused to care about leaving town.
Sam frowned, her humming interrupted. “That wasn’t cool of you.”
“Me? It could’ve easily been Noah, and no one would’ve suspected it.” Jett didn’t bother lowering his voice anymore, and apparently, neither did Noah.
“You think I’d do something like that?” Noah’s eyes simmered behind smoking glasses. “It doesn’t even have to be someone on the baseball team. It could be—”
“Who else would know how to access the supply closet?”
“Obviously you know.” Noah scoffed. “Asking that question is the same as accusing yourself.”
“Not more than it’s accusing you.”
Mr. Trenton slammed a piece of chalk onto his desk. “I know you’re upset about the incident, but there’s no proof any of you did it. If you have any real evidence on who it could’ve been, I suggest you let me know in
private.” He grabbed his chalk, adding onto the growing list of notes. “Whoever it was, they had no right vandalizing Oliver’s property, no matter what rumors might be spreading through town.”
Benji stood. “Oliver?”
Mr. Trenton’s hand paused over the blackboard.
Benji abandoned his things, racing for the door.
“Benji, don’t—”
He burst into the hall and ran to the front door. With all the strength left in his body, he ran to Eudora Hill. He had visited Oliver so many times now that the journey was innate to him, and in what felt like seconds, he approached the clearing.
A clicking filled the air, mesmerizing the trees of Eudora into a dreary sleep. Each step made Benji shiver, as though walking through the path of a ghost. The higher he traveled, the more prominent the clicking noise attacked him. He reached the clearing. He could see the noise now. Hammering.
As he dragged himself across the clearing, he watched Oliver pound rusty nails into the wood of his home. He stood on a stool, a hammer in one hand, pressing a piece of wood with the other. Benji almost couldn’t recognize the place. The shattered windows and splintery boards intruded the magic of the hill. The grass beneath him turned brown, the trees a dark gray, and the sky a menacing white—bright enough to blind.
Benji waited for his hands to go stiff, but nothing came. A fear passed through him—a fear that for the rest of the day, nothing had the power to faze him.
He stepped closer. His head jotted left and right, unsure of which bruise to focus on. They were equally painful.
“Your windows,” Benji said.
Oliver gave nothing more than a slight flinch at Benji’s voice. He hammered at the wood louder than before, but this time, he missed every nail.
“Oliver?”
He pounded louder.
Benji’s focus caught to the shimmering shards of glass on the dirt. Among them was the occasional baseball. He leaned over to grab one and tossed it into the air. The fabric was rough, nearly bursting at the seams. He caught the ball and rolled it between his fingers. Looking closely, he saw three words printed in green.
Wishville Junior High.
Benji walked along the deck, observing every ball he could find. Each one had the same writing. He tossed the ball to the ground in rage and turned the corner, approaching Oliver with a raspy voice. “Why would they do this?”
The man stopped pounding, but he froze fazing the wall of his house.
“Oliver, I—”
“Why the hell are you here?”
Benji shook his head. “You know I—”
“Don’t play dumb with me.” He gave the wood one last knock before hopping off his stool and tossing his hammer onto the dirt. “You’re all a bunch of filthy liars. All of you.”
Oliver walked away, leaving his work unfinished. Benji tried chasing him, but Oliver cut him off with a rigid turn, towering over Benji from the highest step of his deck. “You were supposed to leave last night.” His nose twitched. “I believed in you.”
Benji gulped. “You know I’d never do this.”
“I don’t give one damn who did it!” He huffed. “I’m not mad about my windows, Benji.”
As Benji watched Oliver enter his tattered home, a twinge of hope leapt away from him. He jumped to grab it, clinging to it like he was mad. With a deep breath, he spoke to the man’s back. “You still believe me, don’t you?”
It couldn’t be true. After all they’d been through? After how much they’d shared?
The man stopped at the doorway, glancing at Benji through the corner of his eye. There was a spark between them, a familiar glow, but as Oliver set his hand on the knob, it faded.
Benji stood blankly at the base of Oliver’s deck. His worry shifted into rage. Someone had come here to hurt Stricket, and in doing so, they took away the one person who understood him. The one person he could trust with anything. Who could possibly do this?
But when he remembered the scattered baseballs and broken glass, the culprit couldn’t be more clear.
* * *
Chloe couldn’t keep her foot from tapping. Benji ran out of class. He must have been angry. Infuriated. Although Mr. Trenton continued the lesson, his students couldn’t forget about Benji’s explosion. In less than a week, the average boy in class morphed into someone they admired, someone they were concerned for. Chloe caught Audrey peeking at the door, and Jett asked Mr. Trenton if he planned to alert the office. Everyone agreed it was wrong not to acknowledge that he left class, and probably school campus, but Mr. Trenton responded with a simple, “Let him be,” and that was the end of it.
No matter how much Chloe tried to support her actions, she knew it wasn’t right. The conspiracies rushing through class were enough to crush her soul. It was only a matter of time before they’d narrow the list of suspects to her. They would find out. They all would.
What do I do? Her foot tapped faster, and she bit her pencil eraser.
The bell rang for lunch. Jett and Noah argued on their way out, blaming each other for the incident. Audrey followed James, blabbering about her little sister’s piano recital. Sam’s hair fizzed in the air as she dashed from the room, her theory notebook tucked in an iron grip. And as Chloe watched her classmates walk away—the classmates she’d gone to school with for nearly nine years—she felt like she didn’t know these people.
By the time she left class, a herd of students had gathered on the right side of the hall, opposite the cafeteria. Peyton rushed past her, slamming into her shoulder without an apology. The golden locks she called natural loosened as she ran. It was the first time Chloe had seen Peyton run outside of PE, so she followed after her, curious.
The herd formed a tornado of shouts and shoves. After fighting her way through the crowd a bit too forcefully, she emerged from the front in time to see Benji shove a fist into Jett’s jaw.
Jett skimmed the locker doors before regaining his balance and locking his eyes on Benji. Standing in the spotlight of a growing crowd, a grin swept over his lips. He rubbed the side of his face as though he’d only been flicked.
Peyton’s frown lifted with a dose of glowing excitement. There hadn’t been any school fights since Oliver was in high school, so the thrill of witnessing one overpowered concern of the consequences. A part of Chloe hated herself for wanting to see the fight. Jett stood nearly a foot taller than Benji and was blessed with a build that could easily crush him. The winner was obvious. Yet at the same time, Chloe clung to the doubt that maybe Benji was stronger than she thought.
But when Benji faced the crowd, Chloe stopped smiling. She backed away, stepping onto someone’s foot. “Sorry!” Her breathing sped, and her soul sunk in a punctured ship. Benji wasn’t normal. He wasn’t forcing a grin. From the look in his eyes, he wasn’t thirsty for answers. It was the first time she had spotted him with nothing but pure rage between his gritted teeth.
Jett’s hair shimmered in the hallway lights, flopping on his head as he leapt closer to Benji. “You wanna pick a fight with me?” He took his right arm and flung it behind his back. “If you want, I can even out the competition.” From the looks of it, the opportunity of crushing Benji in battle was something he’d always longed for. The punch had hardly shaken him, and he saw the event as more of a sparring joke than a real fight.
Benji sent his arm flying from his side. Jett stepped away smoothly, and the short boy’s fist slammed against the cold lockers. He pulled his throbbing hand away with a wince, glaring at Jett as he shook the numbness out of his fingers.
Jett looked down at Benji again, not in humor or anger, but in shock.
The room froze. Students finally understood that Benji wasn’t bluffing. He wasn’t playfully fooling around. This time, he had actually gone insane. The admiration the school had given him for all the change he’d created—it dissipated with a blink.
; “Jeez, what the hell’s your problem?” Jett held his hands in front of him. “I’m not trying to kill you. I mean, I definitely could. But I’m not trying to.”
Benji narrowed his eyes and took a step forward. The crowd filled with murmurs, many considering to interfere, but none taking action. What was the correct way to act as spectator of a fight? They had never studied such a scenario before.
“You’re insane!” Benji peeled back his arm once again, but when he reached out to punch, his back slammed into the lockers, and his arm flopped back to his side. Someone had given him a gentle shove from the side, but it was enough to throw his momentum off.
“Seriously?” Sam stood a few steps ahead of the crowd, her cheeks redder than her hair.
Benji forced himself away from the lockers, not bothering to look at her. The only person he could see in the room was Jett, who had now lowered both of his hands. His eyes glowed with a fiery mahogany hue. They were burning. “Never thought Marino had a violent side.” His voice was deeper than Chloe remembered it being. Benji’s aggression had transformed the careless jokester into a madman.
“Stop, both of you.” Sam took a step between them. “This is stupid.”
“Both of us?” Jett grabbed her by the shoulder and shoved her into the clump of students behind her. “It’s your boyfriend here who started this.”
Sam stumbled backwards, running into Noah, who helped stop her from falling. She rubbed her sore arm, and Noah fixed his crooked glasses. As Benji and Jett shot after each other, students trickled between them, shouting and blocking their path. Chloe watched the chaos unfold from the edge of the hall, the last to remain where the crowd had once stood.
Jett struggled wiggling through the wall that had formed in front of him. “Let me through!” He clawed through the students, but each layer he penetrated reformed instantly.
Benji leaned forward, but was pulled back by strong arms. “Calm down!” Noah said.
Leaving Wishville Page 14
