Life After Theft

by Aprilynne Pike

  “You stalked him?”

  “It was not stalking!”

  I waved my hands in an attempt to placate her. “Continue.”

  “It wasn’t stalking. Years of stealing have just made me very good at not being seen.”

  “I bet.” Everything had just taken a nosedive into surreal.

  “And I . . . found out that his best friend . . . was more than a friend.”

  “And he knew you found out?”

  “Duh,” she said, looking at me like I was particularly remedial. “What’s the point of finding out a deep, dark secret if you don’t gloat about it? And a couple weeks later Preston got sent away.”

  “Convenient,” I drawled.

  “I didn’t do it!” she yelled. “I didn’t tell anyone what I knew. Well, except Khail.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “I don’t know!” she protested. “No one believes me! Khail cornered me after school one day and tried to get me to admit I’d squealed, but I didn’t have anything to do with it!”

  “And that’s why he still hates you a year after you died?”

  She paused.

  Oh no.

  “Well . . . maybe that’s not the only reason.”

  Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse. “What?” I said, more to my book than her.

  “Preston’s parents sent him off before he could say good-bye to anyone, so all Khail had to remember him by were the two things he’d left at Khail’s house.”

  “Lemme guess,” I said, not even bothering to put any inflection in my voice. “A Yankees hat and red boxers.”

  Kimberlee had the decency to look chagrined.

  My first run-in with Khail made a whole lot more sense now. “How does Sera fit into all this?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

  She shrugged.

  “Oh, come on. Let’s not play this game again.”

  “What do you want me to say? Preston was gone and Khail acted like he didn’t even care, and so I started picking on Sera instead because I knew it would bug the hell out of him. And maybe I got carried away. It was more fun to pick on Sera; she got all mad and flustery,” Kimberlee said, as if we were talking about the weather instead of how she’d bullied my girlfriend. “Bullying Khail is like beating on a brick wall, but turn on Sera and they both go off the deep end. It’s surprisingly satisfying.”

  “You really are crazy.” I meant it. I was seriously horrified.

  Kimberlee rolled her eyes and turned back to the television. “Whatever. I wasn’t Miss Nice to Everyone. That’s hardly news. But I never told anyone except you about Khail or Preston.”

  “Oh yes, you’re completely innocent.” My head spun. Tell her I hate her. Khail had meant every word.

  And now I knew why.

  “Why’d you tell me anyway? Are you hoping I’ll go plead your case to Khail?” I asked, already dreading that conversation.

  “No!” Kimberlee said, turning around to face me again, her eyes deadly serious. “You cannot tell him! You have to promise. I don’t know if even Sera knows about him. So he’ll figure out exactly who told you and then he’ll never believe I didn’t out him and Preston.”

  “Why do you care what he thinks? I mean this in the nicest way possible; you are dead.”

  Her expression immediately snapped to a practiced neutral. “I just do, okay?” she said, turning back to the infomercial.

  Someone’s crush didn’t die with her. In her own warped way, Kimberlee really did care for Khail. Still. Talk about doomed love. He’s gay, she’s dead, stay tuned.

  I turned back to my calculus homework, but was having trouble focusing. I felt like I was keeping secrets from everyone. Sera, my parents—now Khail, the one person who knew everything about Kimberlee. Weirder, it was his own secret I was keeping from him.

  One more drop, I told myself. Then I could go back to my life, and Khail could go back to his, and he’d never have to find out that I knew the one thing he apparently didn’t want anyone to know.

  Three days. And this would all be over.

  Twenty-Five

  FRIDAY MORNING THE PLAN WENT into action. Step one was ridiculously simple. Khail leaned over to a girl in his first-hour class and said, “I heard the Red Rose Returner is going to pull something big on Monday.”

  It took off from there. By lunchtime the whole student body was buzzing about it.

  I expected Sera to be pissy as usual about anything having to do with the Red Returner, but she didn’t seem mad. She seemed scared. I tried to bring up the possibility of a date, but she brushed me off for the first time since we’d gotten together.

  “I have tons of homework,” she said vaguely. “I can’t do anything this weekend.”

  “But you just finished your big project for history and you haven’t mentioned anything else.”

  “Yeah, well, my homework is hardly the most exciting thing to talk about,” she insisted.

  “You have to eat sometime,” I pressed. “Can’t I take you out for a quick lunch on Saturday or Sunday?”

  “I just don’t have time,” she said, pushing past me toward her next class.

  I grabbed her hand and pulled her to a stop. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked quietly.

  Her eyes softened. “No, not at all.” She pulled my face down to hers and kissed me. “You’re wonderful. I just . . . I have a special project I’m working on this weekend and I have to do it alone. Okay? Next weekend we’ll get back to normal, I promise.”

  “Okay,” I said, defeated for the moment. “I’ll see you on Monday, then.” I watched her hips sway as she walked, blinking only when the door closed behind her.

  “I don’t like it,” Kimberlee said over my left shoulder.

  I jumped and knocked into some freshmen, who looked at me funny but didn’t say anything. I had to be getting a rep for being totally spastic. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I hissed as quietly as possible. I headed toward calculus and Kimberlee caught up with me.

  Kimberlee glanced back at the door Sera had disappeared through. “She’s acting weird. You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

  “It’s midterms. Everyone’s stressed.”

  “How long has she been acting this way?”

  “I don’t know,” I shot back. “Since midterms started?”

  “How about since she got called into Hennigan’s office?”

  I turned to look at Kimberlee, glad the halls were mostly empty—even if it was because I was late for class. “I admit, the timing is weird, and whatever Hennigan said obviously upset her a lot. But she seems to know that you were the person who stole all this stuff that’s making a sudden reappearance. Can you think of any reason why she might be so upset at the thought of you?”

  For a few seconds Kimberlee looked everywhere but at me. Finally she met my eyes. “She could be spying for Hennigan.”

  I snorted in disbelief, a second before the direness of the possibility hit me. “No way. She wouldn’t do that.”

  “You’d be surprised what people will do under the right kind of pressure.”

  “You’re biased, and—”

  “I know,” Kimberlee said with a sigh. “I’m just saying—I’m not even accusing. I want you to be careful. You’re almost done—everything will be over by Monday.” Her cocky demeanor clicked back on as quickly as it had vanished. “Just try not to get your ass caught in the meantime, okay?”

  Saturday morning I met Khail down at the cave to load everything up. As we worked, we went over our plan for Monday.

  True to his promise to be extra careful, he’d borrowed a truck from a friend in Santa Barbara to load all the bags into. He’d stow it in his parents’ guesthouse garage before they got home and retrieve it after they left for work Monday morning.

  “So at eight ten I’ll be all ready to go,” he said, dragging out the last box. As in, the last box in the whole godforsaken cave.

  I’d been trying to build up the courage to
say it for an hour, and this was my last chance. “Watch out for Sera,” I blurted.

  Khail paused and I could see the muscles in his arms flex. “Why?” he said with a forced nonchalance.

  “I think there might be . . . a possibility—a small possibility,” I revised, “that she’s trying to find out who we are.”

  Khail’s head lifted and he glared at me. “What are you talking about? Like spying?”

  “Forget it,” I said. “It was a stupid thing to say.”

  Khail jumped down from the truck and walked around to face me. “No, explain,” he said, crossing his massive forearms over his chest. “I want to know what makes you think she’d spy on us.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I repeated.

  “No, you wouldn’t bring it up if you didn’t have a good reason; I want to hear what it is.”

  I sighed. “She got called into Hennigan’s office right after the break-in and she’s been acting really weird ever since.”

  “So?”

  “She was looking in your pockets while you were in the shower when I came over—going through your cell phone.”

  Khail laughed openly now. “This is how I can tell you’re an only child, Jeff. That’s totally normal. I snoop on her all the time, too.” He grinned. “Oh man, the things I could tell you.”

  I hesitated for a few seconds before playing my final card. It was the only way I was going to find out for sure. “I bet you could. I’ve heard some things about Sera . . . um, freshman year . . . ?” I left the question open.

  Khail’s smile immediately melted away. “You can’t hold that against her, Jeff. She didn’t know what was happening. You of all people know she would never deliberately let someone die.”

  Holy shit! “What?”

  Khail’s jaw clamped shut. “Damn it,” he whispered, running his fingers through his hair. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I just assumed Kimberlee would have told you. She’s not exact a good secret-keeper,” he almost growled.

  Oh boy, this is awkward. I figured my best course of action was to just keep my mouth shut.

  Khail pursed his lips, then something changed in his eyes. “I’m only telling you this so you hear the truth, understand?” He glanced around like someone might be listening. “It was a rough time. My dad got fired; he said we might lose the house and everything. . . . He and my mom were talking divorce—yelling divorce, really. They fought constantly. Like the bad fighting you see on TV, except that it was real and it was our life. Sera was only fourteen, and she took it really hard. I . . . I got involved with someone, so I wasn’t around. I’ve always wondered if things would have turned out differently if I’d been there for her.” He shrugged. “But I wasn’t and I can’t change that now.

  “Sera stopped doing anything anyone wanted her to do. My parents have always pushed her hard in gymnastics, so she quit—refused to even do a cartwheel for her coach. Failed classes she didn’t used to have to even try in. Dropped her old friends and found new ones. Bad ones. Way older than her. She had money and they were happy to use her for it. They got her on weed, then coke, and one night they all got high and tried heroin.” He shrugged. “She was tripping hardcore when the only other girl her age OD’d.” Khail sighed and leaned back against the truck. “If anyone had been lucid enough to call 911, they probably could have saved her.”

  “Holy shit.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “My parents finally realized their stupid problems were having an effect on their kids. Sera went to court-mandated rehab for two months, Mom and Dad started seeing a counselor, worked some stuff out, didn’t get divorced after all, but it was a little late by then—we were already screwed up,” he said in a quiet voice that simmered with anger.

  I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t say anything. Sera had told me she’d been a mess, but I figured she meant something . . . I don’t know . . . tamer. She seemed too good and pure to be involved in anything even remotely like this.

  “She’s worked really hard to get over this. And, trust me, it hasn’t been easy. Some things she’s never going to get back. Her clean conscience, for one. I know that night still haunts her. On top of that she lost her shot at competing nationally in gymnastics. She’ll brush it off if you ever mention it, but it’s a major sore spot for her. She has a lot of regrets, but she’s dealt with them and moved on.” He hopped up onto the tailgate and fixed me with a hard glare. “That’s why I started watching you so closely when Sera told me she liked you. Why do you think someone as pretty as her hasn’t had a boyfriend in almost two years? She doesn’t trust herself to choose someone good. Someone who’ll understand that she’s made mistakes and let her keep moving forward. And if you can’t, then you should—”

  I held up my hand defensively. “No, you don’t get it. I don’t hold it against her at all.” I hoped I was telling the truth, but I had a little ache in the pit of my stomach. Coke? Heroin? I had never even seen that kind of stuff, much less tried it. “But . . . what if Hennigan tried to use that against her? To put pressure on her?” I hedged.

  But Khail was already shaking his head. “She owns her past—owns her mistakes. And she would never let someone else suffer for what she did. Besides,” he added as he jumped back onto the tailgate and lifted another box, “most people at Whitestone either know or have heard rumors. Who would Hennigan threaten to tell? You?”

  He had a point. It really didn’t make a lot of sense. But . . .

  “She would hate that we were helping Kimberlee,” Khail said. “But I guarantee she’d never rat me out.” He let the box fall hard into the bed of the truck. “And I don’t think she’d rat you out either.”

  I nodded and tried to squelch the feeling that something still wasn’t right, but doubt haunted me . . . rather like a drowned girl’s ghost.

  Twenty-Six

  “DO YOU WANT TO DO something else?” Kimberlee asked peevishly after I failed yet another attempt to conceal a yawn.

  “No, I’m good,” I said, trying to sit up and look interested.

  “Right,” Kimberlee muttered.

  Since Sera was busy, I’d been watching TV with my only other nonsecret friend—loser much?—and she was on this nostalgia-for-childhood kick so we were on about our tenth episode of My Little Pony. I argued that she wasn’t even alive when My Little Pony originally aired, but she retorted that she wasn’t alive now, either, and there’s just no good comeback to that.

  After a few more minutes of pink sparkle ponies, she turned to me. “It’s all going to be gone on Monday, right?”

  I had to jerk to attention a bit. I may have been snoozing. And possibly drooling. “Wha—? The stuff? Like in the cave? Yeah. We’ll finish it all up on Monday.”

  “Then what?”

  “Huh?”

  Kimberlee turned her whole body to me now. “Then. What?” she repeated, as though the problem was with my ears.

  “I heard you,” I said, rolling my eyes, “but I don’t understand what you’re asking. We return the stuff, you go poof, I get my life back, the end.” I rolled over and closed my eyes again.

  She was silent for a few seconds, then asked, “Yeah, but what happens to me?”

  I figured that if she actually asked me a question three times maybe she was ready to hear a serious answer. But it wasn’t really an answer I knew myself. “Honestly?” I said hesitantly. “I think you’ll just fade out. Become at peace and then cease to be.”

  She sat straight up. “What the hell do you mean, ‘cease to be’?”

  Perhaps that was a bit too serious. “Okay,” I said, rolling over to face her, resting my chin on my crossed arms. “I always figured when someone died, they were probably just done. But now there’s you. I mean, are you an angel or a spirit or what?” None of those words sounded anything remotely like Kimberlee. “My theory is you’re kind of like an echo of a person. And you’re still here because you can’t find peace. So once you do, maybe you’ll slowly slip away, like drifting of
f to sleep.”

  “So you’re doing this all because you want me to just disappear!” She looked genuinely horrified.

  “No, it’s not like that. I like the idea of drifting away after I die. If you don’t, then believe something else.”

  “But you think I’m going to disappear?”

  Yeah, so maybe as an agnostic I’m not the most comforting spiritual advisor around. What did she want me to say? “I don’t think anything. I was just . . . presenting one possibility. You could also turn into the abominable snowman and terrorize skiers for all eternity.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Now you’re just being stupid.”

  I let out a frustrated breath. “Look. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you—I don’t actually care about the details. I don’t know; that’s what agnostic means.”

  “So you just live your life not knowing anything?”

  “I know a lot of things,” I countered, then shrugged. “Whether or not there’s a god just doesn’t happen to be one of them. It doesn’t seem that important to me.”

  Her jaw muscles flexed and she looked back at the television, although I doubt she realized the credits had started to roll. “Well, it seems awfully important to me right now.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “And even being confronted with a ghost doesn’t make you want to find out now?”

  “Not really. Nothing in this world is going to prove or disprove that there’s a god. At least, I don’t think so. Religion is really good for some people, but being agnostic works for me. Like Einstein.”

  “Einstein was agnostic?”

  “Very.”

  “Hmmm.” She was silent for a while. “What makes you want to be good?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to.”

  “That’s dumb. Why bother?”

  I had to stop and think on that one. Because I always have seemed a little trite. “I believe that there’s enough bad in the world and that you should do what you can to put some good in there, because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “You’re just a good person, I guess.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”