“That’s not true,” I said quickly. It turned out I would do just about anything to prove Paisley Wheelwright wrong.
Cassidy grinned. “See?” She stuck her tongue out at Paisley, who dismissed her with a wave. “I knew she’d like it.” Cassidy threaded the pin through the fabric of my previously plain-Jane tee.
“Go Oilers?” I said lamely. My outward show of school spirit was no doubt a surefire sign of the coming apocalypse.
As though in response to this cosmic shift in the balance of the universe, there was a ripple through the hallway. One of those invisible movements you felt like a magnetic force field. It started somewhere at the far end from which the commotion was beginning to carry. There, the crowd of people was beginning to churn like sharks spotting chum in the water.
Cassidy and Paisley turned.
“What the hell’s going on?” Paisley asked.
The current of bodies was reaching us now. Girls leaned in with cupped hands and sidelong whispers. Paisley marched up to one and tapped her on the shoulder, demanding to be let in on whatever had the attention of the entire student body. I could tell she wasn’t used to not being the first to know. I wasn’t used to caring.
Paisley’s eyebrows shot up. Her blond bob swept her shoulders as she shook her head. Cassidy and I shared a look.
The first bell rang, but instead of hurrying off to class, students were leaving the building. “Come on.” Paisley grabbed Cassidy by the arm. “That freshman told me there’s something on the building and the administration hasn’t been able to cover it up yet.” While not exactly an invitation, it was enough of one for me. “I hope it’s about Principal Wiggins.”
I ignored the first bell sounding through the intercom and followed them past the administration office and out onto the front lawn. Students snaked like a trail of ants toward the stadium, stopping short and curling around the side of the building.
A clump formed at the end of the line where they all stood staring in the same direction. There seemed to be an invisible line across which no one would step.
Finally, we joined them. Across the exit to the boys’ locker room red dripped in stringy rivulets down the side of the school building. Jagged letters scrawled across the tin door, spilling onto the brick on either side. The writing had the metallic taste of violence, as if the brush had been wielded like a weapon, and positioned below it, like an abandoned puppet, was a third body.
Someone shrieked. “Is that real?”
An arrow stuck out from the boy’s throat. Silvery netting wound around his legs and up his torso like a fly stuck in a spider’s web. The boy was small. He couldn’t have been more than a freshman, with skinny arms that poked out of baggy sleeves. His chin drooped onto a frail chest. A ring of burned flesh was carved into the scalp. His feet splayed out from the school, shoes that were too big for his body like he might have shot up next summer if he’d been given the chance. There were more screams now. Girls shielded their eyes. I couldn’t take mine away. At his sides, the boy’s wrists pointed up like a sacrifice. And he might have been sleeping or passed out.
If he hadn’t been dead.
If it hadn’t been for the missing eyes.
I stared into the hollows where the whites had been carved from the sockets and blood left tearstained streaks down his cheeks. The vacant expression leftover haunted the daylight and drained the warmth from my skin. Bloodied eyelids hung limply, half covering the empty holes.
Kids covered their mouths, and I flinched at every muffled gag that sounded from nearby. I gulped down my last memory from that locker room last night. Adam lying on the floor. Damp, water dripping. Crickets and nighttime and no one around. The thought sent a shudder through me. The spaces between my fingers grew slippery.
“Back inside!” Coach Carlson had arrived on the scene and was yelling into a megaphone. “One week’s detention for anyone that’s not in their seats in five minutes.”
The wail of sirens grew closer. A teacher shuffled in front of the students, herding them away, shooing them. She kept glancing over her shoulder at the dead body, too, and the empty sockets. Glancing and shooing, glancing and shooing, as if we were all passing by one giant car accident.
I didn’t know if it was the threat of detention or the approaching sirens or if everyone wanted to get away from a spot that felt all of a sudden unconsecrated, but the herd began to slowly turn back in the direction of the front entrance.
I took a final glance back at the glistening words, penned in dripping blood.
The Father Said Drink In The Blood & Share Ye The Resurrection.
I then flitted my eyes away, worried that the act of reading itself marked me as one of the damned.
TWENTY-SIX
The subject has lost five pounds in the last two days. His eyes are dilated. It’s becoming increasingly clear that a new energy source, with a longer half-life, is needed to sustain him or we’ll risk losing the progress shown to date in the data.
* * *
Instead of class, the school staff corralled the entire student body into the gymnasium and told us to sit on the bleachers and when those were full to sit on the floor. We caught sight of Owen and Adam, and while I knew she’d never admit it, I got the feeling Cassidy found the emergence of a crisis on school grounds to be très romantique. An excuse to leech onto Adam, who, to her credit, was tailor-made to play the strong, silent type.
We climbed up a set of bleachers after the other upperclassmen, with Adam and Cassidy trailing. Owen rolled his eyes. “Someone get the fair lady her smelling salts before she faints,” he said.
I looked back. “Don’t be a jerk. We’re making progress. I think he actually likes her. Look at how he watches her.”
“I think it seems as if he likes everyone.”
We scooted past a row of students to a few empty spots near the top of the bleachers. “What do you mean by ‘it seems’?”
“Nothing.” He sat down and slid over to make room. I didn’t peel my eyes away from him. His shoulders scrunched up to his ears. “Nothing,” he repeated. “God, you don’t need to go all mama bear on me.”
The roar of a thousand voices filled the gymnasium.
Adam tapped me on the shoulder, his face calm and serene and innocent as ever. “Victoria, what are we doing here?”
The corner of my eye caught the red scabs on his knuckles, and I quickly glanced back up. “Damage control.”
On cue, Mrs. Van Lullen waddled out in a tight black pencil skirt and orange cardigan. She dragged a screeching podium to center court. She tottered away on clunky heels, and Principal Wiggins, who was built like a bullfrog, appeared, tugging at the tie around the spot where his head and shoulders met. The man had no neck. He tapped the podium microphone, and the thumping reverberated around the room. He leaned over. “Hello?” Mrs. Van Lullen reemerged and whispered something in his ear. “Oh.” He cleared his throat. “Okay then.” A hushed silence blanketed the room save for the choked heaving of a single person’s sobs. “Most of you know why we’re here,” Principal Wiggins began. He spoke close to the microphone with his head bowed, probably trying to strike the right balance between authoritative and grim. “We’re not releasing the name of the victim at this time, but a student’s body was found this morning outside of the boys’ locker room.” This sparked a round of tittering, and Principal Wiggins had to hold up one hand to make it stop. “This marks the third murder in Hollow Pines in the span of weeks. Precautions must be taken to protect our students. If you spot anything or anyone that looks suspicious, report it to an adult immediately. Students are to go home directly after all extracurriculars, and the Hollow Pines police have asked me to convey that all persons under the age of eighteen will be subject to a ten o’clock curfew as an added safety measure.”
This time the crowd elicited a collective groan. “But it’s Homecoming,” called a voice in the crowd.
“Which will now be over at nine,” said Principal Wiggins. “In order to ensu
re that everyone has time to get home for curfew.”
“This blows,” yelled another voice to shouts of agreement.
“His body’s not even cold yet,” I said to Owen. “And already his death is an inconvenience.”
“Surprised you’re not going to try to bring him back, too,” he whispered. “You could have an entire army of—” I elbowed him. He croaked and shut up.
Principal Wiggins raised his voice over the crowd. “The police will be pulling certain students to question them.”
Cassidy bent forward to talk to us. “I wonder if they’ll question us since we were there. You think?” She said this like it was a good thing.
“Why? We don’t know anything,” I said too quickly.
My heartbeat picked up. Adam plus police plus alibis. Under scrutiny, it all seemed to add up to a mudslide of worst-case scenarios, and I was standing at the bottom waiting to get buried.
When Cassidy returned her attention to the gym floor, I tilted toward Adam. “You didn’t see anybody here last night?” I asked, voice low, half wanting him to say that he had, that he hadn’t been the only one on campus. “No other cars in the parking lot?”
Principal Wiggins continued to drone on about the closure of the boys’ locker room and where counseling would be available for students that needed somewhere to cope with this most recent tragedy. Adam shook his head. “Is this my fault?”
“No.” I closed my eyes and willed myself to be patient with him. “And don’t say that, either. To anyone. Don’t mention that you were there.”
“I should lie.” He said it as a statement, one that I wished he’d have said more quietly.
“Think of it as leaving out part of the truth. It’s more of a secret. A secret between us. You like when we have our secrets, right?”
“Just us?”
I squeezed his hand, then felt Cassidy watching us, monitoring. I pulled it away. “Just us,” I said.
“Um, Tor?” Owen nudged me. “You might want to take a look at this.” He tilted the screen of his phone toward me. I recognized the basic blue-and-white background of the Lie Detector message boards.
I snatched the phone and scrolled the page. I couldn’t reach the bottom. It was as if the comments on the Hunter of Hollow Pines thread went on forever.
“The number of posts has more than quadrupled in the last hour,” he said.
“Are they about…?” I clicked the screen off and shoved it back into Owen’s lap like it was contaminated. Adam, I thought, but didn’t say it.
“Some of them.” His mouth formed a hard line. “But if the rate continues, more than five hundred people will have viewed the comments by tomorrow. It’s out there, Tor, and I’m not sure you can stop it.”
I refused to let myself contemplate how much time Adam had had unsupervised this morning once we’d arrived at school. Had it been fifteen minutes? Thirty? Would that have been enough? And if so, enough for what?
My throat was parched. I folded my hands in my lap and stared at the podium and Principal Wiggins behind it. “Then no more mistakes,” I said. “We have to make sure there’s nothing else to get out there, okay? It’s simple. We just have to be perfect.”
We can be perfect.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Stage 3 of the experiment will revolve around a new energy source for the subject.
* * *
The administration locked the doors. Off-campus lunch privileges were revoked. All PE classes were held indoors until further notice. For the rest of the day, we’d been trapped inside a cinder block cage with what felt like a shrinking oxygen supply. At the final bell, students rushed for open air. I was one of them. I grabbed my things and headed straight for the stadium to wait out football practice. At this point, there was no way I was leaving Adam alone. Not in Hollow Pines. Not with the Hunter on the loose. And … for other reasons, too, reasons that lodged painfully in my throat like a pill that refused to go down. Reasons that couldn’t be true. They just couldn’t be.
I scaled the stadium steps to a spot a few rows from the top bleachers. It looked like every sport except for the football team had canceled practice today. But this was Hollow Pines and this was Homecoming we were talking about. The show must go on, I thought drily. I popped off the orange-and-black pin fastened to my shirt and tossed it into my bag. My books made a loud clang when I plopped them down on the metal bleacher beside me. The seat was hard and cool. Up high, a strong wind swelled, peeling back the covers of one of my textbooks. I pinned it in place, then wrapped my arms around my knees, shuddering in the unexpectedly brisk air. The weather was changing. Above me, stray leaves fluttered before falling onto the sidewalk below.
I searched the field for Adam’s face as Coach Carlson took the team through warm-up drills. A familiar rush of panic crowded my lungs when I couldn’t immediately find him underneath the matching helmets and hulking football pads. The panic settled without fully disappearing once I spotted his uniform, number 88, and could just make out the swatches of dark hair and deep-set eyes hidden behind the bars that covered his mouth, chin, and nose.
In the background, a wide border of yellow crime scene tape marked off the outside of the boys’ locker room. A lone news van lingered a few feet off, and the occasional black-coated official ducked under the tape and jotted things down in a notebook.
The body was gone. But the image of the missing eyes still haunted me, so much so that I startled at the sound of another pair of feet clomping down the bleacher aisle toward me.
“Boo,” Owen said with a smirk, catching my jolt to attention.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.” I let go of my knees and crossed my legs underneath me.
“That would hardly qualify as sneaking. I literally walked right in front of you.” He swung his backpack onto his hip and unzipped it. “Anyway, I wanted to show you something.”
I glanced back to where Adam had just flattened a teammate on the field. I felt the curve of a small smile on my lips. He was really good. “What?” I asked.
Owen flipped open a spiral notebook and took a seat beside me. “This,” he said, pointing.
I held back strands of my hair and leaned over to see. “It looks like a map.”
“Exactly. This”—he turned the notebook horizontally and moved his finger to the upper left-hand corner of the page, where he’d drawn a squiggly blob—“is Lake Crook. And these two lines over here…” He traced what looked like a river with a winding turn that crossed the page. “This is State Highway Twenty-Four. I figured right around here is where you … well, where you found Adam.” My back tensed. “It’s about a fifteen-minute drive. A longer walk but doable.”
I looked up from the page, stared hard at Owen, who I knew better than anyone else on the whole planet, who understood me better than anyone else except for maybe my dad, and he was gone. “Stop, Owen,” I said.
But Owen didn’t stop. The twitch was already in his fingers, the way it was when he was working on a tricky bit of machinery. He was fiddling, testing, probing, the cogs were turning. “Here’s the field. I’ve marked the time the body was found approximately based on what you’ve told me. Adam was there, too.”
“Owen…” The wind picked up again, fluttering the page. He ignored that, too, and I felt my throat get all tight and narrow like I’d been stung by a thousand bees. Suddenly I felt too exposed out here in the stadium, in the open air where any bird could simply fly over.
“Finally, we know we found Adam at the locker room,” he continued, “the night before a boy winds up dead at our school, outside of that same locker room.” To Owen’s credit, his tone was grim. There wasn’t an I told you so in sight. Just the bare-bones facts, exactly how I liked them.
My joints were stiff. “Let me see that.” I leaned over, then, as Owen was handing it to me, I snatched the notebook, tore out the page, and crumpled it into a ball.
“Hey, that took effort!” I hated it when he whined.
On the f
ield, Coach Carlson blew the whistle, and the team huddled together. I kept switching my attention back to Adam after short intervals.
“Yeah? Well, then it was a waste,” I said, tossing the crumpled paper out of Owen’s reach and shoving the rest of the notebook back into his hands. “These are coincidences, Owen. I thought you’d know the difference. I was on Highway Twenty-Four that night, too, remember? I was at the field where the body was found, and I was also with Adam and you at the boys’ locker room last night. Does that make me a killer?”
Owen looked down at his untied laces propped up on the bleacher below. “No.”
“And who are you looking out for, anyway? We’re supposed to be looking out for Adam, not piecing together his prosecution.” I was on my feet without realizing it. “I suppose he’s just storing his spare eyeballs and legs in, what, his locker?”
“I don’t know, Tor. He’s dead. I think we should at least think through the possibility. Before somebody else does. And FYI, the person I’m looking out for is you. You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong.” I pulled the strap of my bag over my shoulder and collected my things. “I’ll see you later, Owen,” I said, despising the niggling worm of doubt that squirmed inside me. “Find me when you remember who your friends are.” After that, I didn’t look back.
The bleachers shook underneath my clomping feet as I stormed down the stadium rows and out into the parking lot. The cool breeze wrapped itself around my neck and throat again, making me walk faster. Adam was mine. Owen would never have had the guts to create him. He would have never even tried. Owen’s fear of Adam was that he was different. He had questioned Adam’s existence since before he’d taken his first breath. Now he was looking for an excuse to be right.
I fished my keys from a front pocket of my bag, unlocked Bert, and slumped onto the fake leather seat. The cabin smelled moldy from where the moisture had seeped in through the crack in the windshield.
Teen Frankenstein Page 20
