What had happened to Adam?
Fletcher glanced at the empty visitor’s chair at the side of his bed, glad that his mother had finally gone home. Otherwise, she sat there, wringing her hands and staring at him. He was tired of being stared at.
He looked around the room for a clock, but there wasn’t one. He guessed marking time somehow went against the healing process. He wondered when Avery would arrive. He didn’t know what he’d say to her, why he’d even asked for her, but when the doctors and officers, even the chief of police, peppered him with questions, his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth. That didn’t stop them from trying to coax him to talk, saying things that shouldn’t come out of adults’ mouths like, “It’s cool, Fletcher. You can talk to us. We’re here to listen.”
They didn’t get it. They couldn’t, because even he didn’t get it.
Branches breaking underfoot, slipping in the mud as he ran, cringing, flinching, everything hurting. The smack of skin against skin, knuckles against bone, his palms scraping against rock, the moisture of—What was it? Blood? Damp?—seeping through his jeans as he fell. Adam, Adam, Adam…
Six
Avery’s mouth was dry. What was she supposed to say to him?
“Just listen,” Chief Templeton said as though he were reading his daughter’s mind. “Just listen to whatever he has to say and be there for him. Like a friend.” He offered her a formal smile that must have been reassuring for victims or witnesses or whoever her father normally dealt with, but it only made her feel more uncomfortable.
She nodded. “I guess.”
Fletcher and his mother had moved into the neighborhood about five years ago. Avery was ten, just about to turn eleven, a tomboy teetering on the edge between liking boys and wanting to strike them out with her wicked three-fingered fastball.
The first time she had seen Fletcher, he had wandered out into the park, a half-abandoned stretch of grass and weeds with bases and a pitcher’s mound scuffed out by the kids who played there. Avery was winding up a pitch, while Adam eyed her, his bat at the ready. A handful of kids were milling on bases or kicking rocks in their makeshift dugout. Fletcher had walked right through the game as if he had no idea anyone was even there.
She thought about that kid now—unaffected, indifferent—and tried to reconcile him with the one she had found in the woods. She thought of Fletcher’s eyes, the desperate way they’d looked at her, begging her to notice him on the forest floor.
Now Avery stood outside Fletcher’s hospital room, her heart thudding in her ears.
Would he be waiting for her? Would he even be awake?
Chief Templeton pushed the door open.
Fletcher was sitting up in his bed, looking out at the sunrise.
Chief Templeton cleared his throat. “Avery’s here to talk. I’ll be in the hallway if you need me.”
Fletcher turned slowly, hunched as though he were an old man.
Avery sucked in a breath. His face was clean now, but the bruises remained. A gash above his eye cut across his forehead and shot toward his scalp, where a quarter-sized chunk of his hair had been shaved away. He was covered in scratches.
Fletcher’s smile was lopsided. He gently touched the side of his head. “I probably look really stupid. They wouldn’t even let me see a mirror.”
“No,” Avery said, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment at being caught staring. “You look fine. Good, I mean.”
They both knew it wasn’t true and stared at each other in uncomfortable silence.
“Do you want to sit down?” Fletcher asked
Avery nodded and slid into the visitor’s chair.
They sat in silence for a moment, Avery listening to her careening heartbeat, certain that Fletcher could hear it too. She tried not to stare, but even cleaned up, the wounds on Fletcher’s face were bad. She thought about the possibility that Adam could have been the one to do this to Fletcher. It was impossible, she decided finally, absurd. The person who did this to Fletcher—the person who attacked him and Adam—had to be a monster. There was nothing else to it.
• • •
Fletcher watched Avery. Her actions were stiff and self-conscious. So was he. He had never been this close to a girl before. It felt so intimate, him being so vulnerable.
He didn’t even know why he had asked for her. It just came out of his mouth while everyone was throwing questions at him. His doctor kept holding his hand out to the officers, warning them that Fletcher’s condition could be “touch and go”—that was the phrase he used. But even when the officers backed off, the doctor started in: “Can you move this? Does that hurt? Do you remember if you were hit here…?” It was all a painful, weird blur, memories sharp and faded at the same time.
“I want to talk to Avery,” Fletcher had said before the fog had set in. “I want to talk to Avery, please.”
Maybe it was because she was kind of a loner like him, or because she had been through something traumatic too. Maybe it was because she had been the one to find him.
A thought played on his periphery but Fletcher didn’t want to pay attention to it: had he asked for Avery because she found him or because she saved him?
• • •
“My dad said you wanted to talk to me.”
Fletcher’s cheeks went red.
“It’s okay, you know,” Avery continued, nerves humming. She wanted to comfort Fletcher. She wanted to be as good as her dad. But seeing Fletcher in front of her—part friend, part victim—shook her. “You don’t have to talk to me. I mean, you don’t have to tell me anything. Unless you want to. I won’t… It can be between us.” She was stammering, her hands flopping in front of her as she talked.
Fletcher opened his mouth, and then he shrugged. His shoulders looked small and bony beneath the oversized hospital gown. He looked fragile beyond the cuts and bruises, and Avery wondered how Fletcher was able to defend himself at all.
He looked down at his lap, his chin on his chest.
“Maybe you could tell me when you guys decided to go hiking. I mean, I didn’t know you and Adam really hung out.”
Fletcher’s head snapped up. “Me and Adam are friends. We hang out.” The edge in his voice frightened Avery. Then his face softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get mad. It’s just…you know, people think I’m a geek. And why would someone who is popular like Adam hang out with the geek?”
Except people didn’t call Fletcher a geek. They coughed freak or loser into their hands when he passed or asked a question in school. They called Avery a geek.
Fletcher traced the pattern on his pajamas with his fingernail. “The hike wasn’t really anyone’s idea. We’d been talking about hiking, checking out the woods, and just got in the car. It’s not something we did all the time. We aren’t mountain men or anything.”
Avery nodded. “Yeah, it’s usually a good idea to bring water and a map with you.”
“A map?” He laughed. “Care to join us in the digital age, Avery? It’s called GPS.”
She laughed despite feeling stung. “It’s called no cell towers in the forest.”
Fletcher reached out, his fingers featherlight on the back of her hand. “And then you found me.”
Avery matched Fletcher’s small smile, but something felt off.
• • •
We were just going to go for a hike. Nothing big, just a walk in the woods.
“Hey, Fletch. You’ve got to see this!”
Adam’s voice was a subtle call in the back of Fletcher’s head, and he squeezed his eyes shut. He could see his own sneakered feet and the tamped-down ground around him. He could feel the wind on his cheeks and see where Adam had stopped up ahead.
And then what happened?
An explosion of white-hot pain shot behind Fletcher’s right eye, and his vision went black.
“Hey, Fletch. Hey, are you okay?”
Hey, Fletch…
It was Avery this time and Fletcher wanted to grab her, wanted to hang on to
her for dear life. If she wrapped her arms around him, could she keep him here, could she keep him from slipping into the blackness? He tried to speak, but all that came out was a shallow groan.
Fletcher could feel the shift of Avery’s weight on the mattress as she moved toward him.
“Should I call the nurse? Are you okay?”
“No, don’t,” Fletcher panted, the pain shooting waves of nausea into his stomach. “I’m okay.” The pain started to subside.
He remembered the doctor’s fingers on his scalp, gently feeling along his forehead until he yelped at the same explosion of pain. The doctor had rattled off notes to the nurse: cranial damage, frontal lobe injury.
Avery stared at him, her eyes intense. “Fletch?”
“I’m sorry. I… Sometimes there are these…pains.”
She cocked her head, her eyebrows diving into a concerned V. “You look like you took a pretty big hit.”
Fletcher watched Avery’s fingers—delicate and slim—brush a lock of hair from his face. The light pressure from her fingers over his forehead sent a shiver through him.
“Does it hurt much?”
“Yeah. But the pain, the headaches, I mean… I’ve had those before.”
Avery’s hands dipped back into her lap and Fletcher went on.
“I guess I hit my head pretty badly.” He gingerly touched the zigzag of stitches that crossed his hairline. “Or whatever hit me.”
“Do you know? Do you have any—”
Fletcher shook his head. “I start to remember and then…there’s nothing.”
Avery looked toward the door. “After…after I lost my mom, it was that way for me too.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what she looked like. All I could see was…” She shuddered.
Fletcher vaulted back to the Founder’s Day celebration that summer. That night he had felt a part of something, a part of them. The whole school—the whole town—was there, and everyone seemed happy, accepting.
They were walking from the celebration. He remembered the sound of Adam’s voice reverberating through the trees as he and some other kid hollered and laughed about something. How Avery looked walking along, her hands in the pockets of her shorts. A bunch of other kids was there too, and Fletcher was right in the thick of them as they walked the shoulder of the forest road. Then he remembered the moment when everything changed.
They came around the curve in the road, and it was like stepping into a new scene in a movie: the stinking smell of gasoline and burnt rubber and something else that hung in the night air—something he couldn’t place. Then Avery’s face was illuminated by the flashing red-and-blue lights of the police cars stopped on the side of the road. He saw the careless smile fall from her lips. Recognition flit through her eyes and then anguish so deep that he could practically feel her pain.
Avery took off running toward the hissing chunk of twisted metal balanced on the edge of the road, one single tire raised to the sky.
It was a car.
Fletcher recognized it as the car that Avery’s mother had been driving.
He could still hear Avery’s cry. He could still see her fingers grabbing at the air as one of the officers tried to hold her back. But Avery got past him and scudded to her knees on the asphalt, digging at the car. Someone else grabbed her and she screamed. At some point Chief Templeton arrived, and Fletcher remembered the silent exchange between Avery and her father as he pulled her toward his police cruiser. Avery looked at Fletcher then, their eyes locking for one aching minute, her world crashing down, his standing still.
Fletcher ran his tongue over the front of his teeth, anxiety burning in the pit of his stomach. “Did you ever have blackouts? You know, about that night?”
He watched Avery’s hands clasped in her lap. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick. He had never noticed that before. She cleared her throat. “Sometimes. I don’t know if they were really blackouts though. Just…”
“Dark spots?”
She nodded carefully. “Yeah, some details fade in and out. Or I start to wonder if something I know happened actually did. I heard that the brain can block out things that it can’t deal with.”
They were both silent for a moment. Then Fletcher spoke. “Do you ever wonder what it feels like to die?”
• • •
Avery’s eyes widened. “No.”
But she was only telling half the truth. After her mother died, Avery thought about those last few minutes of her mother’s life, wondering what her mom was thinking, what she must have felt. Did she know she was dying? Did she wish for more time? Did she think of Avery?
Even now, it made Avery tear up. She tried not to think about her mother or death.
“I can’t help but wonder what happens during…and after.” Fletcher looked at her as if he expected her to have the answers. “Do you?” he asked. “Wonder?”
Avery opened her mouth to answer, but there was a knock on the door. Chief Templeton poked his head in. “Avery? Can I see you for a minute?”
• • •
Fletcher didn’t want Avery to leave, but he had no reason to ask her to stay. He couldn’t remember anything important from the woods, details he knew she was hoping he’d share. And even when he wasn’t banged and stitched up, Fletcher had never been a great conversationalist. He offered her a small smile and feigned a yawn. “I should probably get some rest,” he said.
Avery stood from the chair and nodded. “Okay. That’s probably a good idea.” She turned and paused, scrawling something on a piece of paper before handing it to Fletcher. “This is my cell number. Call me if you ever want to talk. Not just about”—she waved her arm indicating the hospital room—“but whatever.”
Fletcher took the paper. No girl had ever given him her number before, and although he was certain it had more to do with his injuries than her interest in him, he was okay with it.
He waved as Avery closed the door behind herself, and he sunk back in his pillows. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he smiled. His eyes were heavy, but he didn’t want to fall asleep. He didn’t want to have another fragmented dream, but even more, he didn’t want to forget the sweet smile on Avery’s face.
• • •
Avery and her father walked down the hospital corridor in silence. When they got into the elevator, Avery turned to him, arms crossed in front of her chest. She suddenly felt protective of Fletcher after seeing him dwarfed in that hospital bed, his face and body ravaged. She was annoyed that her father would make her a go-between.
“So you want the breakdown?” she snapped. “Because he didn’t say much.”
“Avery,” her father said quietly, “we found Adam.” He pushed the button for the parking level, and the car started moving.
Fear fluttered in Avery’s chest. “Is he okay? Does he remember anything? Are you going to tell Fletcher?” She paused. “The last two nights were freezing. How long was he out there? He must have hypothermia. Why are we leaving if he’s here? I want to see him. You know, to say hey.”
A long silence followed. Avery could tell her father was taking his time, letting her get out all of her questions. But the silence stretched too long.
“Dad?”
Her father reached out and squeezed her hand. “Avy, honey,” he said quietly. “One of the search teams found Adam in the woods. He’s dead. They found his body.”
Seven
“What?”
The elevator doors slid open to the parking garage, and her father guided her toward his black SUV. He must have helped her into the car and buckled her seat belt, because Avery couldn’t remember doing it herself. All she could think about was the empty ache that pulsed through her body.
“Adam’s dead?” Images flashed in her mind: Adam in his letterman’s jacket. Adam walking through the library, a grin like sunshine, and Avery’s heart melting into her shoes. Adam was a boy she had a crush on. Adam was a boy she wanted to kiss. Now Adam was dead.
“What—what happened?”
“We’re not sure yet. The ME’s report isn’t ready, and of course the—”
She pressed her fingers on her dad’s arm. “In civilian, Dad. Did you see him? What happened?”
His voice was gentle. “I didn’t see him personally, Avy. And we’re still waiting on a positive ID from his mother.”
“But they know it’s him.”
“They’re pretty sure it’s him. The sex and height are right.”
“Dad, Adam’s and Fletcher’s faces have been posted all over the news. You know what he looks like. I know you can’t make an official statement, but I’m your daughter, not CNN.”
The chief ran his hands through his graying crew cut. “Honey, the body was in pretty bad shape.”
Avery’s stomach rolled and she felt tears prick at the backs of her eyes. Déjà vu pelted her. She and her father had been sitting in this same car two years earlier when her father had said the same words: The body was in pretty bad shape. At the time, “the body” was her mother. She had hated him for calling her mother “the body.” She had hated him for making her mother generic. She wasn’t a body, Avery had wanted to scream. She was my mother!
“W-what happened to him?”
Adam had been missing for almost two days, and Avery braced herself for the worst. Her father always grunted through crime shows when TV cops stumbled on a so-called corpse that still looked pristine four or five days after death. From his place on the couch, he would explain in clinical—and often gross—detail that “decomp begins four minutes after death.”
Avery knew that rigor mortis set in after just a few hours and that Adam’s skin would have paled as blood pooled in the lowest points of his body. She knew that if the body had been left unattended in the woods, there would be blowflies and maggots and any other manner of scavenging insects or animals. She tried to shake the images out of her head, but she still needed to know.
The Escape Page 3
