The Truth Lies Here

by Lindsey Klingele

  But that was a long time ago.

  I stared in Reese’s direction. “There’s no need to talk to her like that,” I said.

  For a moment, Reese was completely motionless. Then, slowly, she turned her head to look at me. “I’m sorry, who even invited you here?”

  Before I could respond, Micah stepped in, swinging one arm loosely around my shoulders. “You made it!”

  Reese’s eyes went wide and her jaw clamped shut, but only for a moment. By the time Micah looked over at her, she’d forced her features into a more relaxed expression.

  “Micah, I didn’t know you were still tight with Penny,” Reese said, her voice carefully casual.

  Emily, who looked completely confused by Reese’s sudden personality shift, just lifted her cup up to her mouth and took a huge swallow.

  “I ran into her today while I was hanging flyers. I know Penny only comes to town for the summers, so I figured I’d invite her out.”

  “And I figured I’d come,” I said.

  Reese’s eyes flicked over to me briefly before she aimed another smile at Micah.

  “That was really nice of you.”

  Micah shrugged and grinned that giant grin at me. Despite being the soberest person in the circle, I felt just a little wobbly.

  “You know what they say,” Micah continued. “Mi keg party es su keg party.”

  “Huh?” Emily asked. She pulled her empty cup down from her mouth.

  “Here,” Micah said, moving his arm from my shoulder and taking Emily’s empty cup. “How about I get us all another round?”

  “I’ll help,” I said quickly, eager to get away from Reese.

  I walked with Micah to the pickup truck, and could feel Reese’s eyes boring into my back the whole way. It occurred to me that things between us might get even more unpleasant now that she’d started speaking to me again.

  So that was something to look forward to.

  “What’ll it be?” Micah asked, climbing into the truck bed and then reaching back to help me up. He pointed to the keg and to a couple of half-empty fifths. “Cheap beer or cheap liquor?”

  “Beer, please.”

  He filled up a cup and handed it to me, and I nervously brought it up to my lips. I’d never been to a bonfire party before, but when I was younger I’d heard about the kinds of things that happened at them. These parties had been going on for years, for longer than I could guess. In fact, the very truck I was standing in was likely passed down from someone’s father; it had probably seen more partying than any of the kids standing around the fire.

  Like a lot of small towns in northern Michigan, Bone Lake didn’t have a ton of places for high school students to hang out. A couple of gas stations, a couple of fast-food restaurants, a movie theater thirty miles away. It was completely different from what I had grown used to in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, with my overstuffed academic schedule and extracurricular activities. When my friends and I wanted to hang out on the weekends, we could go to concerts or comedy shows in the city. But our trips downtown were closely monitored. Our parents weren’t just afraid of us doing drugs; they were afraid of us getting mugged, kidnapped, run over by the El train. My mom drove me most places and strictly enforced my curfew. It wasn’t that my friends and I had never tried sneaking drinks before, but it was riskier, less tempting, and easier to get caught.

  In Bone Lake, the rules were different. As kids, we weren’t afraid of being kidnapped by strangers because, well, Bone Lake had no strangers. We’d traipse through the woods unattended, run around all day in roving packs, come home at sundown or even later. We grew up knowing that no matter where we went, we were safe, and never that far from home.

  Of course, we also grew up bored. Hence, the parties in the woods, in someone’s backyard, at the beach, near an abandoned barn. The location changed, but it was always the same party. Not that I’d ever had the chance to go to one. Back when we all still lived together as a family in Bone Lake, my mom would warn me about the parties and tell me I’d better not ever be caught at one when I got to high school. But it wasn’t the drinking or the drugs that offended her. “I expect you to have a little more imagination than that, Penny,” she used to say.

  Her voice was in my head as I raised the red cup to my mouth. But it was soon replaced by Micah’s.

  “So it must kind of suck for you to have to come back here every summer,” he said.

  “What? No, it just, um . . .”

  “Sucks.”

  I laughed awkwardly.

  “Don’t worry,” Micah continued. He leaned in and faux-whispered, “I don’t think it’s a secret that there’s not a lot going on around here.”

  I could feel his breath on my face when he leaned in, but it was brief. He sat up against one edge of the pickup truck bed, and I took the other side.

  “So what do you do for fun in Chicago?”

  I shrugged. “I write for the school paper.”

  “And that’s fun?”

  “I think so.”

  Micah smiled, and I felt myself smiling back. I knew my main objective should be getting him to open up to me about his dad and what had happened at the plant, but I couldn’t really think of a way to steer the conversation in that direction. Or maybe I didn’t want to, not yet.

  “Chicago’s just a place, really,” I said, sticking to an easier topic instead. “Just like any other place. It has more people, I guess.”

  “But it’s Chicago,” he said. “It’s got the Bulls, the nightlife, the food—”

  “It does have great pizza.”

  Micah grinned. Then he looked down at his drink, and his face fell a couple of inches. “Man, I’d love to live somewhere like that.”

  “You can in, what, a year?” I said. “When you graduate, you can go wherever you want.”

  Micah kept his eyes down. “Yeah,” he said, but his voice was low. “A year seems like a long time, though.”

  “I get that. I’m ready to be at Northwestern, like, yesterday.”

  Micah looked up again, all traces of sadness gone. He smiled. “Northwestern, huh? I got a recruitment letter from them.”

  “Really?”

  “Hey, don’t act so surprised,” he said. “I’m not a total idiot.”

  “I know that! I didn’t mean . . .” I sputtered.

  “Relax,” Micah said, grinning. “Just giving you a hard time.”

  And I did relax as I looked at the firelight reflecting off Micah’s face. I took another small sip from my cup. It was nice how calming it felt to be around Micah. My stomach butterflies still gave the occasional flutters, but overall, being with him was . . . pretty easy.

  Still smiling, Micah stretched his leg out so his foot was right next to mine, and then he tapped the toe of his shoe against my sneaker. Tap, tap. Pause. Tap, tap. This felt different, somehow, from the way he’d hugged me outside of Hector’s or the way he’d thrown an arm over my shoulder when I got to the party. Micah always had that effortless familiarity with everyone. But this, this tap, tap against my foot, it was something else. Something deliberate.

  I felt my whole body get warmer. For a moment I wondered if the bonfire had grown bigger, large enough for its flames to heat me up way over here at the far edge of the circle. But when I looked at it, it was the same size as when I’d arrived. I took another sip from my cup.

  I forced myself not to look at Micah’s foot, still resting against my own. I cleared my throat. “Do you think you might go? To Northwestern?”

  Micah shrugged. “It’s a Big Ten, but I don’t know. . . . Even if I get a partial scholarship, my mom can’t really help that much.”

  I nodded. Tale as old as time.

  “Been thinking about MSU, maybe. Bryan and I were talking about both going there. . . .”

  Micah trailed off, his smile slipping from his face again.

  “I’m sure he’s okay,” I said, hugging my arms to my chest. “Probably just took a road trip, right?”

  “
Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” Micah said, running a hand through his hair. “Apparently, the cops searched Bryan’s and Cassidy’s places, and nothing from their rooms was missing.”

  I lowered my cup, sitting up straighter. “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I mean they didn’t take any clothes with them. No suitcases, nothing. Isn’t that weird? If they were just going on a trip without telling anyone?”

  Yes. It was weird. If it was true, it was very weird.

  “It still doesn’t necessarily mean something bad happened,” I said, though in my mind I was picturing a truck mangled at the bottom of a ravine, a boat tipped over in Lake Michigan, Bryan and Cassidy wandering lost through the woods in the Upper Peninsula. Another image popped into my head—the strange picture on my dad’s phone, the flash of light and the armlike branches—but I quickly pushed it away.

  “Maybe it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and they bought clothes wherever they were going,” I said, trying to sound convincing.

  Micah nodded his head slightly, like he was considering. “That could be.” He took a sip of his drink, and then he nodded harder, his face brightening a little. “Yeah, it could definitely be. Bryan was always talking about how sometimes he felt like he just had to get out of this place. Maybe he just . . .”

  “Took off.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, maybe.”

  Micah smiled again. I could sense an opportunity to ask for an interview rising up; Bryan and Cassidy wanting to get out of town was right in line with the heart of my article—how Bone Lake was an economic black hole sucking even its most promising residents down into the muck. I could ask Micah more about his own limited prospects, about his mom’s finances, about his dad. . . .

  But again, I didn’t want to. The moment just didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to see Micah sad right now, or hear that bleak tone in his voice. Instead, I just wanted to see that smile on his face, the smile that made the air feel ten degrees warmer. I wanted to be the one who kept it there.

  This time, I lightly tapped the toe of my shoe against his.

  Micah’s smile stretched farther.

  “It’s really not so bad here,” I said, taking another sip of my drink. “I can think of a few nice things, anyway.”

  Micah’s grin returned fully, and my stomach flipped. He tapped my foot back.

  “Yeah? Like what, city girl?”

  “Like . . .”

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “Yo, Micah!”

  Micah pulled his foot back abruptly and looked over at a kid in a letterman jacket who was calling him. I recognized the red hair and freckles of Kevin Abnair.

  “Stop flirting and come play flip cup,” Kevin called. His face twisted up into a half grin that looked like a leer in the firelight.

  I felt my face heat up as I pulled my own abandoned foot back to my side of the truck. Micah flashed me a sheepish smile and hopped off the truck bed.

  “Looks like I’m needed. Talk later?”

  I nodded, hoping that he couldn’t see my flushed cheeks in the darkness.

  I wandered around the outskirts of the party for a few more minutes, wondering if there was anyone else here Reese hadn’t forbidden to talk to me. Two girls I remembered, Jen B and Jen H, both averted their eyes when they saw me coming. I looked around for Emily and saw Dylan Rosen, another football player, hook his arm around her waist and whisper in her ear. She giggled and followed him back to the edge of the party and into the tree line.

  I sat on a vacant log, nursed my same red cup of beer, and pretended to text on my phone. After a few minutes, I felt someone sit down on the other end of the log. I looked over, and Reese was staring me down, her jaw clenched. Her Ring Pop–stained lips looked comically red in the firelight.

  “Okay, seriously? Are you just going to glare at me every time I see you for the rest of our lives?” I asked, turning to face her.

  “I’m trying to make a point. That you’re not welcome here. Was that not clear?”

  I breathed through my nose, trying to push down the rising anger. I motioned to Micah, who was standing near the barn. “Some people seem to think differently.”

  Reese snorted. “Please. Micah’s overly nice to everyone. He can’t help it—it’s like a nervous tic or something. But he wouldn’t give you the time of day if he knew what you are.”

  “And what is that?”

  Reese’s eyes became tiny slits. “A lying attention whore.”

  I breathed out, wishing I was anywhere else in the world other than on that log. Reese stared at me until I forced my eyes away.

  “Admit it,” she said, sliding closer.

  I shook my head.

  “Just admit out loud that you’re a liar, that you love attention, and I’ll leave you alone. All summer.”

  I considered it; I honestly did. I’d forgotten how potent Reese’s anger could be when she turned it on full blast. One time in sixth grade, Stacey Fenick told everyone in the girls’ locker room that her brother had seen “Reese’s pieces,” and that he’d been “unimpressed.” It only took two weeks for Reese to turn almost every girl in the sixth grade class against Stacey. We were all instructed to ice her out, to ignore her when she talked to us, to chew our gum and stick it in the handle of her locker every morning. And we all did it, too. Everyone knew not to cross Reese.

  So I did consider it, just saying the words I’m a liar out loud. Maybe Reese would stop glaring at me whenever we passed by each other; maybe she would go back to leaving me alone. . . .

  But I couldn’t do it. I thought of my dad, of all his lies. I never wanted to live my life that way. The truth was always better than a lie—no matter what that lie might be, no matter how good it might sound, or how many problems it might fix. Reese could do whatever she wanted to me, but she wasn’t going to force me to say something that wasn’t true.

  I turned around and looked her straight in the eye.

  “I’m not a liar.”

  Reese’s eyes widened with disbelief. She opened her mouth to respond, but her words were drowned out by a loud, piercing scream.

  We both turned our heads toward the direction of the scream—the woods behind the barn. I jumped off the log and followed a few of the others who were moving toward the noise. The screams continued—it was definitely a girl, and she sounded terrified.

  I moved quickly to the woods, briefly catching Micah’s eye as he headed there, too. His face was tight with worry.

  We moved past the first line of trees, following the sounds of the screams. After a few feet, the concerned murmurs of the kids back at the party were swallowed up by the woods. We were in pure darkness, a place where the glow of the fire didn’t reach.

  A bright, whitish light bounced against the ground and trees in front of us. Over the sounds of the girl screaming, I could hear someone trying to calm her down.

  Then the light shifted and I recognized what it was—the focused beam of a flashlight app from a cell phone. It moved up from the ground and into the terrified, openmouthed face of Emily Jennings.

  Dylan Rosen had hold of her arm, and he was trying to get her to stop screaming. His method of shaking her and saying, “Stop, stop,” over and over didn’t seem to be working.

  “Dylan, what . . . ?” Micah said.

  As I moved closer, I could smell something horrible, but couldn’t exactly place it. It smelled like something burned, but also like . . . meat?

  I went over and put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. She immediately crumpled into me and started to hiccup as she gulped for air. “I thought . . . it was . . . a person.”

  Dylan swung his arm around, maneuvering the phone so that its light hit the ground a few feet away from us. I gasped.

  There, lying in the dirt and leaves, was a body. It was completely blackened, as if it’d been thoroughly burned. At first glance, it almost did look like a human torso that was missing its arms and legs. Only when I stared closely at its head did I see the elongated nose, the tiny nubs
of horns. It was a deer, completely charred. Under its cracked, blackened hide and skin were a reddish interior and glints of bone. It smelled as though it’d been lying there for some time.

  “It’s okay,” I managed to say to Emily, who was still struggling to catch her breath.

  Dylan turned to Micah, his features grim. “What the hell happened to it?”

  Micah’s eyes were glued to the dead deer. He slowly shook his head.

  The deer’s face had been completely burned, but somehow its eyes remained, big and round as black marbles. It seemed to be looking over our shoulders, as though it were staring transfixed at something in the woods beyond, something it was still scared of, even in death.

  Eight

  I SHOT STRAIGHT up in bed, my heart beating fast. For a moment I thought I was hearing Emily’s screams again. But it was just the phone, ringing in the next room.

  I stumbled out of bed, grabbing the now-warm glass of water on my nightstand and taking a gulp. There was a putrid taste in my mouth, probably a remnant of the cheap beer I’d drunk the night before. I trudged into the kitchen and picked up my dad’s old landline.

  “Hello?” My voice came out both groggy and cracked.

  “Yeah, is Ike there?”

  “Oh, uh . . . no,” I said, leaning back against the wall. A faint pounding noise was drumming at the base of my skull—drinking that water so quickly might have been a bad idea.

  “Who is this?” the gruff, impatient voice on the other end of the phone asked.

  “This is his daughter. Who is this?”

  “His editor,” the voice barked.

  I closed my eyes against the light streaming in through the kitchen window.

  “Do you know where he is?” the voice continued. I heard the light clicking sound of typing on the other end of the line.

  “He’s been gone a couple of days. I think he’s out working on a story.”

  “He’d better not still be working on it. His column was due three days ago.”

  “Oh, well . . .” I struggled to think around the pounding in my head. “He’s not here, so . . .”

  The gruff editor exhaled loudly into the phone. “Tell him Mac called, and that he better get his ass in gear. No more excuses. Got it?”