If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  “I’m always your friend.”

  “Would you keep it a secret?”

  Noah said nothing for several seconds, his face pale, the bruise on his cheek more pronounced because of it. “Dude,” he said. And it was as though that same wave was now pressing against Noah’s throat, that same war raging inside of him. Torn, that was how it felt. Like actually being torn in two. “I would try to keep it a secret,” he said. “But I don’t know whether I could.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Yeah, Connor. A really nice kid has been murdered, and if you told me that you knew who killed him, I don’t know if I could just keep that to myself. I mean, could you?”

  “This is my brother.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

  “Is this like . . . some kind of weird hypothetical test of loyalty? Or are you just messing with me?”

  Connor wanted to say yes and change the subject, to dance away from this tearing guilt the way he had last night, when Wade had cornered him in the hall between their two rooms and asked him what was wrong, why was he so quiet, why wouldn’t he look him in the eye. “Just school stuff,” he’d said. “No big deal.” But this was Noah, simple, easy-to-read Noah, whom he knew better than Wade, better probably than himself. The one person in the world he actually could look in the eye.

  “We’d better go to class,” Noah said.

  And Connor stopped him right there, by the bank of lockers in the empty hallway. He put a hand on each of Noah’s shoulders and made him promise on his mother’s life not to freak out. And then he told him everything.

  “WOW,” SAID NOAH after Connor finished.

  Connor had hoped for a little more than that, but nothing came. For a good half minute, Noah stood there, gaping at Connor, the word wow hanging in the air above them.

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Wow” and “Well.” Great. Why had he bothered telling Noah Weston anything? “We’d better get going . . .” he started to say.

  But Noah grabbed hold of his arm, stopping him. “You didn’t ever open the bag, right?”

  “Right. Wade told me not to.”

  “So you don’t even technically know it was a phone.”

  Connor frowned. “I’m pretty sure it was a phone, Noah.”

  “You don’t know,” he said. “Could have been anything. Weed. A pack of cigarettes. I’ve seen Wade smoking cigs before. Outside school. In the park too.”

  “Why would he want me to throw out a pack of cigarettes?”

  “It could have been anything.” There was a tinge of desperation in his voice, and when he smiled, it wasn’t his usual goofy one and there was a strange look in his eyes too, like the first hint of fever. “Wade would never kill anybody,” he said. “He’d never run over someone and drive away. You’d never help cover it up. You’re my best friend, and best friends know each other and I know you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Noah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That almost sounds like a threat.”

  Noah cast a quick glance down the hallway, which was empty now, class having started. “Saturday was the worst day of my life.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “I’m not talking about the fight,” Noah said. “I’m talking about when my mom told me I couldn’t hang out with you anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  “And if what you’re saying about Wade is true . . .” He took a breath. “If it was what’s-her-name’s phone in that bag, and if he had it because he stole her car and killed Liam with it. If that’s really the truth . . .”

  “You won’t be allowed to hang out with me?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s worse than that. I’ll have to tell the cops.”

  “You will?”

  “And if you aren’t with me on that, we probably won’t ever talk to each other again. Right?”

  Connor swallowed hard.

  “I want things to stay normal.”

  “Me too, Noah.”

  “Good. So let’s just agree that it probably wasn’t what’s-her-name’s phone.”

  Connor exhaled. “Okay,” he said. “Agreed.”

  “We’d better go to class. We are so late, man. She’s gonna kill us.”

  Noah was right. It could have been weed or cigarettes in the bag, or it could have been some other random phone Wade wanted to get rid of. Wade could have had entirely innocent reasons for coming into Connor’s room after three in the morning, drenched from the storm outside, dripping rain on Connor’s floor, and making him promise not to tell anyone, ever.

  But none of those excuses made Connor feel normal. They made him feel as though something unstoppable had already started—an avalanche, with boulders and ice and fifty-foot waves of snow, capable of destroying Connor’s family, the school, the entire town. And the only reason why they weren’t all buried yet, the only reason why Noah was able to feel normal about things, was that the two of them were standing at the foot of the mountain, with their backs turned.

  TYPICAL HOW THEY scattered at the sight of a uniform—the group of kids clustered at the edge of the parking lot, watching Wade Reed and his mother bowed over his vandalized car and snickering. Some had their phones raised. Pearl and Udel had been on their way to the parking lot anyway when the pointless call had come in from Romero back at the station, alerting them to a 10–21 B that was literally thirty feet away and telling them Wade’s mother, also thirty feet away, had called it in.

  And so the first thing Pearl had done was to head straight toward the kids—a group of skinny little white boys in Nike warm-up jackets and joggers, obviously from the middle school next door. “Can anybody here tell me if they saw . . .” she started, but they dispersed before she could finish the sentence, a frightened flock of pigeons.

  She took off after the kids and caught up with three of them on the sidewalk that ran between the high school and the middle school, barely breaking a sweat. They stared up at her, these three idiots, breathing hard, clearly terrified. “Never run from a police officer,” Pearl said.

  “We’re sorry,” said the tallest of them, who was a couple of inches shorter than Pearl, his voice higher than hers. Adolescence had not so much as grazed these boys. “We just got scared. It was dumb of us.”

  “Yep. Extremely dumb.”

  “We’ll never do anything like that again.”

  “How about ditching school? You plan on doing that again?”

  “No, ma’am,” the boy said solemnly. His hair was pale and soft as a baby’s and his ears stuck straight out from his head. Not much of a spokesperson. But he was talking, at least, which was more than could be said for his companions. “Today’s just weird,” he said. “You know.”

  Pearl nodded. “You came to the high school to pay your respects?”

  “Um.”

  She knew what that “um” meant. This dork had been holding up his phone. “Did you guys see who did that to Wade Reed’s car?”

  “No. It had already happened when we got there.”

  Pearl said, “Let’s see what you got on tape.”

  “Huh?”

  “I saw you. Give it.”

  He handed over the phone. As Pearl opened the kid’s videos, one of his friends made a whimpering noise, like a kicked puppy. She looked over at him and saw him shaking his head dramatically at his baby-haired filmmaker buddy and she knew why. Funny how easy it was to read the minds of tween boys. “His footage is online, isn’t it?” She turned back to the videographer. “You stream it?”

  He nodded.

  “Facebook Live?”

  “It’s just a couple of seconds.”

  She made him open his Facebook page for her. She played the footage he’d streamed live and then posted . . . about twenty seconds of the hobbled car, the lipstick scrawl on the windshield, then fifteen more of Wade a
nd his mother running across the parking lot, making the discovery. Nothing surprising in any of it, save maybe for the callousness of the voice-over. “Check it out. He runs like a girl.” What made Pearl’s throat catch, though, was the comments—the sheer number of them. It had been streamed and posted just a little more than five minutes earlier, and already there were dozens. Why were these kids allowed to keep their phones on in school? She read around ten of the comments and her heart sank. She couldn’t look at the page anymore.

  “He posted something really mean on Liam’s girlfriend’s Instagram,” the video kid said.

  Pearl looked at him. “So you think he deserves this? All of this?”

  He shrugged.

  Her jaw tightened. “Give me your student IDs.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Hand them over. I’m taking down your names, and I want the names of your friends who ran away. You’re all potential suspects.”

  “I swear we didn’t do anything.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Is there?”

  After she took down all the kids’ names, Pearl handed back the tall one’s phone, a sickening feeling welling up inside her, a type of dread. The boy, whose name was Cody, muttered an apology. But she waved him off. “Delete the post,” she said. Heading back to the parking lot, Pearl ran too fast. Her boots slammed at the pavement. A stitch worked its way into her side.

  BY THE TIME she made it over to the car, Bobby was taking pictures of the slashed tires with his phone. He glanced up at her as she approached. “You get anything out of those kids?”

  Pearl shrugged, avoiding Mrs. Reed’s sad gaze. “Not much.”

  Bobby took a picture of the back end of the car and straightened up. “You can come by the station anytime and fill out a report,” Bobby said to Mrs. Reed, in a voice that sounded assuring and professional—a relief to Pearl, who’d been afraid he might take out his raw feelings on Wade. He’d almost lost it a few times during the assembly, and on their way to Mr. Penny’s office she’d felt as though she needed to watch him very carefully—not so much because of anything he’d said, but because of the way he looked at Wade Reed, as though he were a bug that needed to be squashed.

  Those middle school kids might not have had any real reason to hate Wade. But Bobby Udel—so shaken over the death of his cousin’s best friend—now seemed to believe he did. “I know him,” Udel had said to her before the assembly, right after he’d gotten off the phone with Sergeant Black. “I know Wade Reed.”

  “We won’t be coming into the station anytime soon,” Mrs. Reed said. “We have no desire to go to the police station.”

  Bobby started to say something, but Pearl cut in. “That’s fine,” she said. “We’ve already got pictures and all the information we need, don’t we, Officer Udel? If you think of anything else, you can call it in.”

  Bobby shot her a look.

  Pearl ignored him. “We can call you a cab if you like.”

  “That’s all right,” said Mrs. Reed. “I have my car.”

  Wade said nothing. Pearl ventured a look at him, swallowed up in his dark clothes, staring at the pavement. She tried to imagine him grabbing Amy Nathanson’s purse and pushing her to the ground, but he seemed too frail for that. Not to Bobby though. In Bobby’s mind, Wade was a known car thief.

  “Sergeant reminded me,” Udel had told her, his face full of hate. “Two years ago, a kid stole his own mother’s vehicle, took it to Red Hook. That kid was Wade Reed.”

  “All right then, ma’am,” Pearl said. “If you need anything else, please call.”

  Mrs. Reed didn’t respond. She just looked into Pearl’s eyes and then turned away.

  As Pearl headed back to the cruiser with Udel, she thought of those eyes, how very dark they were, like two endless black caves, shielded by black lashes, shades darker than her carefully combed hair. Mrs. Reed and Wade had the same eyes. It was hard to tell what was behind them, but it felt to Pearl like a world of pain.

  Once she was at the wheel, Pearl turned to Udel. “She didn’t press charges, did she?”

  “Huh?”

  “When Wade stole her car and took it to Red Hook,” Pearl said. “Mrs. Reed didn’t press charges.”

  “Oh. No. She told the sergeant it was all a misunderstanding.”

  Pearl nodded. “So there’s no record. He was never fingerprinted.”

  “No.”

  She started up the car and pulled out of the parking lot. They drove several blocks without saying a word, the only sounds in the car the engine, the crackle of the police radio, and their breathing.

  “I think he did it,” Udel said as they neared the station. “I think it was Wade Reed who killed Liam.”

  “A few hours ago, you were convinced it was Amy Nathanson.”

  “That was before I knew anything.”

  “You still don’t know anything.”

  He turned to her, his face starting to flush. “He was at the club with the victim on the same night as the carjacking and he was repeatedly in the area where her car was parked. He posted hostile comments on Liam’s girlfriend’s Instagram the day Liam died. He has a history of auto theft. And he’s a psychotic fuck. I know all of that.”

  “Okay,” Pearl said. “But you know that it isn’t enough to arrest him, right? I mean . . . I think Wind and Wacksman are working hard. But so far everything you’ve said—including the psychotic fuck part—none of it amounts to much without witnesses, DNA evidence of some sort, or a confession.”

  He turned back to the window. They were at the station now. As Pearl pulled into the parking lot in back, she watched Udel out of the corner of her eye, breathing hard, his jaw working. “I want justice,” he said. “I want closure.”

  Closure. That word, which made her think of her brother on the phone, of her father, who apparently wanted closure now, after leaving her to grow up in the home of her mother’s older sister—a hoarder, driven crazy from grief. Closure. What an impossible thing to want in this messy, chaotic, unfair world. And what a selfish thing, to expect it. Pearl parked the car, staring bullets at Udel. “Take a chill pill, Bobby,” she said.

  THE TOW TRUCK arrived quickly, and once the driver had hitched up Wade’s Corolla and Jackie had filled out all the necessary paperwork and taken down the address of the mechanic, she and Wade headed back to her car. “You want to get breakfast?” she tried.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll just take you home, then.”

  He said nothing, which she took for a yes. She started up the car. Her radio was tuned to NPR, so they listened to that—the host of the local morning show interviewing the director of a production of King Lear up in Troy. The host’s voice grated at her—the way he seemed to chuckle out the words, as though everything was one great big laugh, including tragedy. When the host said, “On the plus side, Lear makes you appreciate your own children,” she couldn’t take it anymore and flicked off the radio.

  They drove in silence for a while until she saw it up ahead: the shrine to Liam, so big and colorful now that, from a distance, it looked like an upended parade float. Wade didn’t seem to notice it. He just sat there, long limbed and gangly with his hands clasped, his legs spread, both too big and too small for the seat at the same time—this overgrown thing she’d completely lost control of. “Why did you make that terrible comment on Tamara Hayes’s Instagram?”

  Wade replied to the floor of the car in a voice so quiet she could barely hear it over the engine. “I deleted it right away. Somebody screenshotted it, I guess.”

  “Okay. But why did you post it in the first place?”

  “I was angry.”

  “Why?”

  She pulled up to the red light and stared at him, that dyed hair flopping in his face, those pale, clasped hands. He smelled of cigarette smoke and weed and everything else he never told her about. “Why?” she said again.

  “I don’t know,” he yelled, loud and sudden as a bomb going off.
“I don’t know why I fucking feel anything so stop fucking asking me!” He put his head in his hands and she kept driving, her heart hammering into her ribs, hands shaking on the wheel, waiting for an apology that didn’t come. He scared her. Her own boy scared her. It was the most awful feeling she’d ever had.

  Jackie stayed quiet for the rest of the drive home. So did Wade. As he opened the door and got out of the car, Jackie thought, Lawyer. I have to find a lawyer. She picked up her phone and started to tap in Helen’s number, thinking about Helen’s husband, Garrett—calm and steady and a lawyer, a good one. But then she heard the slam of her front door and thought of everything that had happened in the past few days. All of it. She put the phone down and cried.

  Seventeen

  From the Facebook page of Cody Lerner, aged thirteen. Early comments posted under a video, streamed live from the parking lot at Havenkill High School at 9:00 AM on Monday, October 22.

  5 shares; 490 people like this

  Brittany Thomas Wait who is that freak?

  Ben Lee Murderer

  Jack Klein He killed Liam Miller. He was on meth.

  Ben Lee Bath salts

  Sarah Amanda He does run like a girl lol

  Mason Marx fag

  Ben Lee Somebody should run *him* over

  Dylan Rogers He worships the devil. My cousin goes to the high school and she told me she saw him sacrifice a dog.

  Brittany Thomas HE SACRIFICED A DOG?

  Dylan Rogers Yep

  Mason Marx I heard cat but maybe a dog too.

  Eric Jones He was creepin on Liam’s girlfriend. He sent her a dick pic.

  Brittany Thomas Why did he kill Liam? Was he jealous?

  Eric Jones He’s crazy. Nobody can figure out what goes on in the brain of a crazy person.

  Christa Parker My mom says we have to lock the doors now. We live a block from where Liam got hit. She doesn’t think our neighborhood is safe anymore. That’s *his* fault.