by Lexa Hillyer
When she’d awakened after midnight to find Mel gone, and the bedroom window cracked open, she’d had to assume the obvious: Mel had snuck out. To meet up with Dusty, presumably. She’d been texting someone all night; even when Lilly had tried to ignore it, she’d noticed.
But it wasn’t Dusty’s car she spotted when she’d snuck outside in search of Mel. It was a red truck, pulled over at the side of the road, edging the woods. Boyd’s red truck. A hulking metal animal heaving its breath into the cold.
Now: a male voice drifting out over the wind. The sound of a car door slamming. She was almost there, and the heat of discovery drove her on.
But it was so cold. So cold and so dark. The sparse streetlights did little to help, spinning patches of air into gold-hued snow blurs. She had to hurry.
Lilly scrunched her winter hat down lower. Still squinting, she made out a figure—no, two figures—floating from the shoulder of the road, toward the looming darkness of the woods that backed up to Devil’s Lake from Route 28.
Mel and Dusty?
Mel and Boyd?
Voices took clearer shape in the air as she got closer, though the words themselves wove and dodged and blew away. Holding her breath, hidden by the hounding snowfall and the heavy dark, she came all the way up to the driver’s side—the side facing the road—without the figures noticing. She peered through the window. The keys were still in the ignition, a faint silver clump dangling in shadow.
Shivering, she rounded the back of the truck, careful to stay hidden from view behind the glow of the taillights.
A guy and a girl, arguing.
Lilly took a step back.
Secrets. Secrets.
She watched from behind the truck as Boyd put his hand on Kit’s arm, and she shook, possibly crying.
Was he grabbing her now? Had she let him?
Slowly, he pulled open her coat.
Lilly shuddered hard. Kit said something, but Lilly only caught snatches of her words: please and you’re making a mistake and I don’t believe you.
The racing of Lilly’s heart became a loud ringing through her ears and head. What was happening? Kit’s voice, dancing on the wind, seemed to ebb and peak and break.
She stood on the verge of calling to them when Kit got quiet, moving closer to Boyd. Then she was touching his face. And he was leaning down, and they were kissing—mist rising from where their faces met.
Hot breath in the cold night.
Oh.
So they weren’t fighting.
A flash of mortification.
Everyone was coupling off, hooking up, lying to Lilly about it.
Secrets, secrets.
She backed up toward the road, the thrill of voyeurism bursting suddenly into hot shame. A car rushed past her and honked.
She gasped, swiveled—was that Dusty’s car? Or someone else’s?
She felt all turned around now, cold and miserable, and she needed to get inside.
She raced down the road the way she had come, back toward Mel’s.
When she got there, she found Mel in the side yard, her father’s rifle in her hands, crying.
“What happened?” she asked over and over again. Her head throbbed, her thoughts raced, her chest felt as hot as her fingers and toes were cold. She had to remind herself—she hadn’t heard a single shot. The gun hadn’t been fired. Nothing had happened. Nothing bad had happened.
Had it?
“Mel, you can tell me anything.”
But all Mel told her was that she thought she’d heard an intruder, and she’d gone to get her dad’s gun to scare off whoever it was. She said it was normal—claimed she often brought the gun with her to the door if it was after dark, though Lilly hadn’t seen her do it before. Said her mother always told her that’s what they were for, really. Hunting, yes, but also protection. “No one messes with the Knoxes,” Mel quoted with a shaken half smile. Anyway, she said with all the anxiety she’d been having, she no longer slept well. She heard noises. She got scared in the dark, felt hands touching her skin, sometimes, or eyes watching her through curtains. She just wanted to make sure that Lilly was safe. That they were all safe.
But if there’d been an intruder, why hadn’t Lilly heard anything?
“Did you see anything? Anyone?”
“I just meant to scare them off. But . . . no one was there, Lilly. Trust me, it was no one.”
And, because she wanted to believe in the things that had kept her life together until now—sisterhood, friendship, the snow globe of Devil’s Lake that had held them their whole lives and kept them safe—she didn’t question Mel, only held her close and dragged her quietly back into the warmth of the house.
Even though she’d seen the blood on the butt of the gun, just before Mel had wiped it off with her hand, wet with snow.
Even though she knew something was terribly, terribly wrong.
Maybe she just hadn’t been ready yet, for her whole world to shatter.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Now
FEBRUARY 13
TESSA TRIED TO TAKE LILLY’S advice—her own advice, too—and to let it all go. To move on. But she couldn’t. Still, something snagged.
Nabokov’s tall tale in the tall grass.
The boy who cried wolf.
The wolf tattoo. The ring. Who loses a beautiful engagement ring in the woods? What was she missing?
Now, in the middle of the night, she stood in the empty, ill-lit school hallway with its flickering fluorescent bulb, searching for Mr. Green’s office. In her head, she told herself that she had ridden her bike to school in the middle of the night and slipped in through a half-open classroom window because she needed to read Kit’s poems, the ones that had caused her to win the award. That she’d only wanted to understand, to get closure. That was all. Just some closure.
Love poems.
The answer.
She fumbled with the English Department door handle, but it was locked. She let out a breath, starting to realize how deeply insane this would look if she were caught.
She backed away, her shoes crying out softly in little gasps against linoleum. She was about to turn around and leave when she heard something.
The doorknob wiggled a tiny bit.
And then the door opened, from the inside.
“Kit? Is that you?” a man whispered.
A gasp slipped through Tessa’s throat.
Mr. Green stood there in the dark doorway, staring at her as though looking at a ghost.
And she stared back, feeling somewhat the same. She thought of Kit, exclaiming how excited she was to take Advanced English this year. She thought of seeing Mr. Green outside the homecoming dance, one of the chaperones. How Kit had disappeared from the dance for a while, only to return flushed and secretive. How from then on, Kit had withdrawn more and more into herself this past fall.
The wolf tattoo.
The poem about the boy and the wolf.
The secret someone she’d been meeting up with—the reason for her lies.
Tessa’s stomach was clenched so hard she didn’t think she was breathing, wondered if she’d ever breathed. She felt suffocated and at the same time, detached from her body, as if floating there, observing what was happening without really being a part of it.
How long had she suspected this?
“You’re him, aren’t you?” she said.
Mr. Green backed up. “It’s very late. What are you doing here?” His voice was hoarse.
A laugh forced its way out of Tessa’s mouth, dry and bitter and brittle. Quickly, the laugh died, replaced by a flood of anger so burning and so bright she could hardly see. “I get it now. I get it. It was you.”
“Stop that. Stop it.”
“I’m right, aren’t I?” She stepped closer. “You’re him.”
“This isn’t real.” He said it with an urgency she’d hardly heard an adult use before, except that time when the toaster caught fire late one night and her mother sternly told her to get out
of bed in case the house burned down.
And she followed him, like he was the light at the bottom of the well or the end of the tunnel—the sick, twisted, obvious answer to a long, sick, twisted riddle.
The ring. The tattoo. The secrets.
The kiss.
The poems.
She rounded the doorway—floated into the office, moved with no control of her limbs. Mr. Green was already sitting at his desk, his face in his hands. The overhead was off; there was only the light of his desk lamp.
He was muttering into his hands. “Threestrikesyoureout. Threestrikesyoureout.”
“What?”
He shook his head, and when he looked up again, she could see he was full-on crying. Also something she’d never seen a grown man do before. Tear up maybe, but nothing like this. It made her want to throw up. She felt sick. Sick and furious and very, very afraid.
“What the fuck is your deal?” she burst out.
His face was a complete mess—blotchy, twitchy, red. “It’s finally happening, isn’t it?” He shook his head again. “Fuck, it’s finally happening.”
He looked bad. He looked . . . in trouble. Bad, bad trouble. She grabbed the wall, her whole body feeling wobbly like she might at any second keel over.
This was it. The answer.
Mr. Green was shaking, hard, wiping his face fiercely with the back of his arm, which wasn’t helping his state.
“What did you do to her?” Tessa whispered. “What. Happened.”
He shook his head, unable to answer. So she began to speak, and the words, too, floated out of her, a kind of chant. A kind of truth, at last.
“She was dating you. In secret.” The story—the tall story in the tall grass came to her as she said it, even though the idea of it was so upsetting it sent a wave of nausea through her whole body, threatening to knock her over. “You made her keep it a secret. It was going on all winter. No, a lot of the fall, too, wasn’t it?”
He continued to shake his head, but he didn’t stop her.
“Around homecoming. Sometime around then is when it started.” The facts started to slot into place. “She liked you,” she said slowly, piecing it together one detail at a time. “Liked you a lot. She even got a tattoo for you!” Tessa gulped, practically choking on the dark truth pushing its way out. In the dim lamplight of his office, she could see the outline of his jaw, could understand that in some unthinkable way, he was good-looking. Appealing, even. He was as distraught as she felt, as if he too was just now learning the full story of what had happened. A strange part of her wanted to pat him and tell him it would be all right, even as a bigger part of her wanted him to suffer, to regret, to pay.
“She was out late,” she spat. “So often. She said she was going to parties, or working more volunteer hours. She wasn’t, was she? That’s why she never went to Jay’s party like I originally thought. We knew something was up. We thought something was wrong. Our friend Boyd—he knew. Or had an idea, anyway. They fought because he wanted her to stop, but she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t stop. And that night. She borrowed his truck. She was arguing with someone. Lilly saw,” Tessa said, remembering the story Lilly had repeated so many times now, the story of what she thought she’d seen. The falling snow. The hunting hat. “She was arguing with you.”
Mr. Green was staring at her in amazement now, but she went on.
“It was cold out. So you grabbed the plaid hat, the one Boyd always kept on the dashboard or in the glove compartment. You wore it. You’re tall like him. You were kissing Kit. And then she died. She was out there in the cold and she hit her head and she died.”
She came forward and banged on his desk. “What the fuck did you do to my sister?”
“I did nothing!” Mr. Green screamed, finally snapping out of his shocked, frozen state. Then he dropped his voice. “I did absolutely nothing to Kit other than respect her and read her sonnets and, and, and . . .”
“Did you or did you not kiss her?”
Green looked down again at his hands.
“Was there more? How far did you go? You know what, forget it, it’s so sick I don’t even want to know.”
Still looking down, and so quietly she had to lean in to hear him, Mr. Green said, “I told her it was over. That night. It had to be over. She was so . . . so young. It wasn’t going to work. I tried to tell her to go live her life. It was her. She was the one who wanted it, who pushed for it, who pushed me for more. So full of all these ideals, all these feelings, and I—it just got out of hand so fast. I never meant to hurt her, or make her think I could love her. Not like that. She was just a kid. Just a girl. A brilliant, beautiful girl, but just a girl. I couldn’t carry on—I couldn’t—and besides, and I had to tell her, I—”
“Had to tell her what?”
Mr. Green looked up, his eyes blazing. “She knew about Claire, knew we were back together. But she wouldn’t let it die. Wouldn’t believe me. I made my choice. I love Claire. I wanted to do right by her. I am doing right by her. I didn’t want to hurt her.”
At the word hurt, Tessa’s pulse spiked again. “WHAT did you DO?”
“I tried to show her the ring.”
The engagement ring—sitting now on Tessa’s finger.
“It was proof. That I’d moved on. I didn’t think she’d believe me any other way, so I agreed to meet up with her. I parked down the road. She was there, with that truck. I tried to get her to warm up. We argued and she got out, so I followed. Then she tried kissing me, tried, I don’t know what. It wasn’t going to work. It was a snowstorm and she’s beautiful—was beautiful—and lovely and I told her she’d make some boy her age very happy someday, but she begged me please to stay and when I said no, she pushed me away.”
“So you shoved her to the ground. You hit her in the head. You—”
He practically choked. “No. I wasn’t the one who threatened her. I wasn’t the one with a weapon, the one who screwed everything up.”
But Tessa was sick of the lies. Of the cover-ups. “You’ve been threatening me. That anonymous text. The creepy note warning me to back off.”
“No.”
“Are you going to tell the cops, or am I?” she replied, an eerie calm settling over her. It was over. The whole sick truth was here. It was over.
“I’m resigning. I’m done.” He reached into a drawer, and with trembling hands, pulled out a familiar-looking notebook. Kit’s poetry journal.
“Yes, you are done. And here’s your ring, by the way.”
Shaking, Tessa slowly slipped the sapphire ring off her finger. She dropped it onto his desk, then lifted the journal, backing away until she was at the doorway, until she was past the brink, until she was gone.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE TO LET GO
BY KATHERINE MALLOY
I’m driving past the littered, torn ravine—
that icy, white-laced waterfall. It bares
its teeth, but can’t cry out. The cold’s so clean;
it holds everything back.
The houses stare
from the side of the road; beyond that’s only road
and forest—stripped—laid down beside each other
for miles in the weak beginnings of sleet, the old
gray sky tucked down around them like a cover.
The umber grass bends east in surrender.
Sometimes we cannot know exactly what
things mean—for all the world’s a great pretender:
the sleet was just a false alarm, and what
I thought was fog was not—it’s hard and frozen.
But, Love: the trees still fling their arms wide open.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Now
FEBRUARY 13
TESSA WALKED ALL THE WAY home. She walked and walked and walked, trying to feel anything other than disgusted, gross dismay. Maybe Lilly had been right all this time. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to know the truth. Maybe the truth was just a set of broken pieces that didn’t all quite line up. Shard
s of semi-truth, sharp as fangs.
When she got to their block, she sat down on the driveway between her house and Boyd’s, numb. A statue.
She was still sitting there when the sun finally cracked over the horizon.
Still sitting there, shivering, sleepless, when Boyd stepped out of his house the next morning.
“Tessa? Jesus, Tess! What are you doing up this early? Out here?”
She looked up, her head heavy. Boyd was wearing boxers, flip-flops, and a T-shirt. His hair was all over the place. He must have gotten straight out of bed.
He’d been gone a little over a week, but it felt like much longer. Like he’d become a different person in the meantime. Standing on the porch for that frozen second, he wasn’t her Boyd. He wasn’t even Boyd at all. He was just a guy. A slightly too tall, slightly too gawky, but still oddly cute guy. A stranger. He’d aged in ten days, and she hadn’t. This whole time, she’d been on pause.
And then he was at her side, helping her off the gravelly concrete. Her legs felt weak beneath her. The dawn was blooming behind his head.
They both stood there, facing each other. He was still holding her hands.
He cleared his throat, staring at her, expressionless, waiting. There were tears in his eyes.
“So, you’re home now,” she said. “And I have the proof. I know it wasn’t you, I—”
“Tessa,” he said softly.
She had planned to tell him everything. All about Mr. Green and the affair. The final missing puzzle piece. And she would tell him.
But right now, what came out of her mouth had nothing to do with any of that. It had nothing to do with Kit at all.
“Do you, um, remember that afternoon when we were in my room, studying AP Bio?”
His eyebrows seemed to soften at the edges. His lips seemed to curl up—but only a tiny bit, like he was too afraid to show either sadness or happiness, so his face paused somewhere in between.
“You know. The time, we, um . . .”
He took in a breath, and even though it was a tiny breath, she could hear it. “Kissed,” he said.
