The Long Game

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  I wasn’t going to feel bad about pushing back.

  I wasn’t going to wonder what kind of person that made me.

  Eventually, my face went numb from the wind. I walked back toward the main building, sure of one thing. If John Thomas said a word about Vivvie, if he so much as breathed in her direction, if I had to follow through on my threat—

  I would.

  I headed back to the cafeteria but took the long way. Past the computer labs, past the library—I paused. There was a sound, a high-pitched gurgling, like muddy water through a whistling pipe.

  The hallway was empty except for me, the door to the library slightly ajar.

  What is that sound?

  That was when I saw the liquid oozing out from underneath the door. At first I thought it was water, but then I realized. It’s red. My heart thudded in my chest. I took a step toward the door. Red—it’s red—thick—

  The door creaked, and something spilled into the hallway. It took me a moment to recognize the shape as human and another to recognize it as John Thomas Wilcox. Hands. Feet. Eyes. Mouth. All the parts were there, but the whole . . .

  Red. Red on his chest. Red on his hands.

  The horrible gurgling sound was coming from him.

  I leapt forward, jarred out of my horror by the realization that if he was gurgling, if he was wheezing—he was still alive. My brain flipped into hyper gear. His white shirt was soaked in blood beneath his Hardwicke blue blazer. I ripped the blazer open, looking for a wound.

  “Help!” The word ripped its way out of my throat, savage and raw. “Somebody, help!”

  John Thomas’s mouth opened and closed as he gasped for air, that horrible gurgling sound punctuating each gasp.

  I tore off my own blazer and pressed it to his chest. Stop the bleeding. Have to stop the bleeding. I yelled for help again. I screamed for it.

  “Shot.” John Thomas choked out the word.

  He’s been shot.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, lying through my teeth. “You’re going to be okay.”

  I could feel his blood on my hands. I could smell it.

  “Tell.” He managed another word. The gasping increased.

  I kept applying pressure with one hand and grabbed my phone out of my pocket with the other. My hand shaking, I dialed 911.

  “Didn’t.” John Thomas gargled the word. He surged upward. He grabbed hold of my shirt. His eyes met mine. “Tell.”

  A second later, he was sprawled back on the ground, his head lilting to one side, the floor below him soaked in blood.

  “What is your emergency?”

  On some level, I was aware that the 911 operator was talking on the other end of the phone line. On some level, I remembered making the call. But on another, baser level, all I could think about was the body.

  The body that used to be John Thomas Wilcox but wasn’t anymore.

  No more gasping. No more gurgling. His eyes were vacant.

  “What is your emergency?”

  “He’s dead.”

  I didn’t even realize I’d spoken until the operator responded. “Who’s dead?”

  “A boy at my school.” The words burned my throat. Tears burned my eyes. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. “Someone shot him. I . . . I tried to help . . . I yelled for help, but no one—”

  “Miss, I need you to stay calm. I’ve got police en route. Do you see any indication that the shooter is still in the area?”

  The hall was empty except for me and the body that wasn’t John Thomas anymore.

  “Has anyone else at your school been shot?” the operator asked. “Is this a spree?”

  I don’t know.

  I wasn’t sure whether I just thought the words, or if I actually managed to say them, too. My hand dropped to my side, the phone with it.

  Why hadn’t anyone come when I’d screamed?

  What if John Thomas isn’t the only one? I thought. That was enough to spur me into motion. One second I was standing there, my limbs dead weight, and the next, my phone was on the floor, and I was running for the cafeteria.

  For Henry and Vivvie.

  I broke through the door into a room filled with unnatural stillness. People were huddled in groups. I could hear someone crying.

  Multiple someones.

  “Tess.”

  I turned toward Henry’s voice. He was here. He was whole. I took a step toward him.

  Henry’s fine. My brain struggled to process. They all are. No one was hurt. No one was screaming.

  Henry made it to my side, his stride long and the expression on his face as intense as I’d ever seen it. Something gave inside me.

  “Shot.” The first word I managed to form was the same one John Thomas had said to me. “Someone shot him.”

  Henry reached for my shoulder. He squeezed it. “I know.”

  Someone shot John Thomas Wilcox.

  Henry knows.

  “You know?” The words came out in a whisper.

  “Everyone knows,” Henry told me, his voice taut. “I am so sorry. I know your families are close.”

  Close? My brain struggled to parse what he was saying. Sorry?

  Sorry that I had been the one to discover the body? Sorry that I yelled and yelled and no one came?

  “Dead.” I meant to ask questions, but that was all that came out. “He’s dead, and—”

  “You don’t know that,” Henry cut in.

  Yes. I do.

  “Tess.” An added layer of strain entered Henry’s voice. I followed his gaze down to my hands.

  Blood. John Thomas’s blood on my hands. Dead. He’s dead—

  “Tess,” Henry repeated, his voice soft, “what happened? Are you hurt?”

  “No,” I said, and somehow, staring down at my bloody hands, Henry’s touch warm through my clothes, the dam broke, and words came rushing out at warp speed. “Someone shot him. I found the body. I yelled for help. I tried—”

  Henry ducked to capture my gaze. His mint-green eyes held mine. “Someone shot who?” he asked.

  “John Thomas Wilcox.” I stared at him, my brain processing the fact that Henry hadn’t known about John Thomas, that he’d been talking about something else.

  Someone else.

  I heard the sound of sirens in the distance. I stared past Henry to a flat-screen television on a nearby wall.

  A reporter was talking into a camera. I couldn’t hear her—couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t feel anything, not my arms or legs, not my tongue in my mouth. But as shock set in and darkness bit at the corners of my vision, I could make out the words on the ticker tape going across the bottom of the screen.

  Someone shot him, I’d told Henry.

  His reply had been hoarse. I know.

  I stumbled backward, my hands looking for purchase against the wall as I absorbed the message on the ticker tape. When I’d said Someone shot him, I’d been talking about John Thomas Wilcox.

  Henry had been talking about President Nolan.

  CHAPTER 26

  President Nolan has been shot. Someone shot the president. The words played on a loop in my head. They didn’t make any more sense sitting on the floor with my back to the wall than they had in the cafeteria.

  We were in lockdown. Less than a minute after I’d heard the first siren, all of us were shuffled into classrooms. The lights were turned out. The doors were barred. Guards were posted in the halls.

  The Secret Service had removed Anna Hayden from the premises.

  I’d ended up in a science classroom. Henry was there. Vivvie, too. Two dozen of our classmates were crammed in with us. Some were crying. Some were frantically texting their families.

  Some were looking at me.

  The blood was dry on my hands now, but my clothes were still soaked with it. My pant legs. The cuffs of my shirt. The lapels, where John Thomas had grabbed me.

  John Thomas had been shot, and someone had tried to assassinate the president, and there was blood on my hands.

&n
bsp; “What did you see, Tess?”

  The whispered question broke through the whir of my thoughts. In the dark, hushed room, I wasn’t even sure who’d asked it.

  “What happened?”

  “Whose blood is that?”

  More voices, more questions. I didn’t realize I was shaking until Henry laid a hand on the back of my neck.

  The questions were just going to keep coming. They would come and come and come, and the answers would always be the same.

  Someone shot John Thomas. Someone shot him, and I found him, and—

  The guard at the door received a call. “We’re clear,” he said a moment later. “There’s no evidence of a gunman on campus.”

  The lights came on. The room exploded into conversation, a dull roar that pressed in against my ears. If there wasn’t a gunman, if this wasn’t the start of some kind of shooting spree—then John Thomas had been the only target.

  Someone had wanted him dead.

  I will bury you. I remembered saying those words to John Thomas. I remembered meaning them. John Thomas had been making threats—and my gut said that my friends hadn’t been the only targets.

  Nauseous, I began scrubbing at the dried blood on my hands. The door to the room opened. On some level, I was aware of a police officer stepping into the room. I heard him say my name, but I barely recognized the sound of it. All I could think about was getting rid of the blood.

  “Hey,” Vivvie said softly, reaching out to grab my wrists. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  I jerked back from her grasp. She turned to look at Henry, and he stepped forward.

  “Tess, these gentlemen need to speak with you,” the teacher called from the front of the room.

  I would talk to the police. I would tell them everything, just as soon as I got the blood off my hands.

  Henry caught one of my wrists in each of his hands. His touch was gentle, but when I tried to break his hold, I couldn’t.

  “Water,” Henry told me. He had an uncanny knack for sounding calm and reasonable no matter the circumstances. “You need water.” He guided me over to the emergency shower. He pulled the cord. Water rained down. Slowly, Henry guided my arms into the spray. He ran his hands over mine, gently scrubbing at the blood crusted to my palms, my fingernails.

  For a moment, I watched as if from a great distance, his fingers working their way between mine, his skin brown and smooth, mine paler than usual beneath John Thomas’s blood.

  “I’m okay.” If I said the words, I could believe them. I came back to myself, felt Henry’s touch on my skin, felt his body next to mine. He seemed to realize, the same second I did, that this was the closest the two of us had ever been.

  We both froze. Henry stepped back. I stared down at the pools of red washing into the drain.

  “Miss,” I heard someone say behind me. “If you’ll just come with me, we need to ask you some questions.”

  Vivvie handed me a stack of paper towels. As I dried my hands—mostly, though not entirely, clean now—Henry eyed the police officer.

  “Perhaps you could give her a moment?” he said. That wasn’t really a suggestion. Staring down the police officer, Henry slipped off his Hardwicke blazer and began unbuttoning the white collared shirt underneath. It wasn’t until he stripped the shirt off that I realized his intent.

  “You don’t have to,” I started to say.

  “Kendrick,” Henry replied firmly. “Do shut up.” He was down to his undershirt now, but he spoke with the polish of someone wearing black tie. Moving efficiently, he handed me his shirt. All too aware that every set of eyes in the class was on the two of us, I turned to the police officers.

  “Can I change?” Like Henry, I aimed for a tone that invalidated the question mark at the end of that sentence. The officer gave a curt nod.

  “We’ll need to bag your shirt.”

  Bag it. For evidence. That sent another wave of whispered conjectures through the room. With one last glance at Henry and Vivvie, I made my exit. In the bathroom, I took off my own shirt and looked at the unblemished skin underneath. Clean. My body was clean. My hands were mostly clean, but I could still feel the blood.

  I could still smell it.

  I slipped on Henry’s shirt. It was too big for me. As my fingers struggled with the first button, I breathed in. This time, instead of blood, I smelled the barest hint of Henry.

  My fingers made quick work of the rest of the buttons. I didn’t even stop at the sink on my way out of the bathroom. I handed my shirt to the police officer.

  And then came the questions.

  CHAPTER 27

  “I was coming back from the playing fields. I entered through the south entrance. I was walking past the library when I heard something. I turned around and saw blood coming out from under the library door. Then the—”

  The body. It’s just a body now.

  “Then John Thomas fell out into the hallway.”

  I’d been through this a half-dozen times. The detectives kept saying that any information, even the tiniest detail, might help, so we kept walking through it again and again. The officers and I were sequestered in the headmaster’s office. Headmaster Raleigh stood in the doorway, presiding over the interview.

  “Mr. Wilcox was still alive at this point?” the detective prompted.

  I nodded. “He was bleeding. I didn’t know at first that he’d been shot, but there was so much blood.” I swallowed. I’d been in shock. I wasn’t going back down that road. “I knelt next to him and tried to stop the bleeding. He—John Thomas—he said he’d been shot.”

  “He actually said the words I’ve been shot?”

  “No,” I said through gritted teeth. “He just said shot.”

  And then he’d said tell and then didn’t and then tell again. We’d been over this. And over it. And over it.

  “I yelled for help, but no one came.”

  “As I’ve mentioned,” the headmaster interjected, “news of the assassination attempt on the president had commanded the staff’s attention, not to mention that of the other students. There was quite a bit of chaos. Under normal circumstances, I assure you our campus security would have been alerted within seconds.”

  The police had already sent someone to talk to campus security. There were closed-circuit cameras everywhere at this school. The hope was that the cameras might be able to tell the police what I couldn’t—who had shot John Thomas Wilcox.

  How did someone even get a gun into the school? That was one of a half-dozen questions echoing through my mind each time I walked through what had happened.

  “What were you doing out at the playing fields?” This was the first time one of the detectives had steered the questioning toward what I’d been doing before I’d discovered the body.

  “Thinking.” One word was all I needed to answer the question, so one word was all I used.

  The two detectives exchanged a look.

  “You said you headed back at about ten to,” the one on the left said, looking through his notes. “You discovered John Thomas’s body. The 911 call came in at three after the hour.”

  Thirteen minutes from the time I’d started walking toward the building until I’d dialed 911. Ten minutes of walking, three of yelling for help—and yelling and yelling, and no response.

  “Tess, dear.” Mrs. Perkins stuck her head into the office. “I talked to Ivy. She’s on her way.”

  The headmaster paled slightly and stepped forward. “Gentlemen, I believe this interview has gone on long enough. The girl has told you what she remembers. I can attest to the fact that the playing fields are a good jaunt from the main building, and Hardwicke has no policy against students walking the campus to think during lunch.”

  The headmaster came to stand behind me, placing a hand on the back of my chair. “If you have any additional questions,” he told my interrogators, “I’m afraid they will have to be asked in the presence of a parent and whatever legal counsel they may choose to employ.”

  I
was a minor. The police hadn’t had any qualms about taking my statement about finding John Thomas—but the headmaster’s words served as a reminder that they couldn’t really question me without Ivy present.

  Not about my own whereabouts prior to the murder.

  Not about my relationship with John Thomas Wilcox.

  Ivy arrived fifteen minutes later. “Are you all right?” she asked, her voice quiet.

  I nodded. She recognized that nod as a lie.

  I wasn’t okay. Standing there, in Henry’s oversized shirt, the bottoms of my pants still stained with John Thomas’s blood, I wanted nothing more than to hand the reins over to Ivy, to let her fix this.

  Fix me.

  “Ms. Kendrick.” One of the officers stood and introduced himself to Ivy. “If you and Tess could bear with us for just a bit longer, we have a few more questions we’d like to ask.”

  “Tomorrow.” Ivy also had a fondness for one-word answers.

  That wasn’t what the officers wanted to hear.

  “With all due respect, Ms. Kendrick, we really need to—”

  “You really need to think about the fact that, according to my sources, you’ve had my minor daughter in questioning for almost an hour—without my permission or a child advocate present. Whatever questions you haven’t asked in that time can wait.” Ivy looked from one officer to the other, her expression deadly. “She’s a child. She’s traumatized, she’s exhausted, and she’s still wearing a dead boy’s blood.”

  Ivy’s words had their intended impact: the officers looked distinctly wary and they remembered that there was blood on my clothing.

  “We’ll need those pants,” one of the officers said. From the expression on his face, he half expected Ivy to bite his head off for even asking. Instead, Ivy turned to me and nodded. “Bodie’s in the hallway. He’ll have a change of clothes.”

  I didn’t spend even a second wondering how Bodie had known to bring a change of clothes, or how it was that Ivy’s read on the situation was so precise. She’d gotten me out of the room.