The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett(80)

He hesitated and glanced at my open bedroom door. “Maybe I should get Mom.”

“I want you to tell me.”

“She was in a ravine,” he said, sighing. “I guess the woods are pretty thick around there.”

“How far from the campsite?”

“A few hours.”

I sat up. “A few hours? How did the search parties miss her?”

“They couldn’t check every inch of the forest, Hawthorn.”

But they should have. They should have uprooted trees if they had to.

“Will they catch him?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The person who killed her.”

Rush got a weird look on his face. “I thought you knew.”

Did I know? Did I know something I was forgetting? “Tell me.”

“There’s no one to catch,” he said carefully.

“So she got lost.”

“Hawthorn, Lizzie killed herself.”

Time stopped. The air in my room went still. For a fleeting moment, I thought my brother was joking. “What? No. That has to be a mistake.”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“How do they know?”

“I don’t think we should talk about this right now.” He reached out to hold my hand.

I pulled back.

“How, Rush?”

He sighed. “They found her hanging from a tree.”

My mind raced. “But…no. Someone could have made it look like—”

“They have ways to tell, Hawthorn. I didn’t want to believe it either, but they’re sure.”

I lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling. Lizzie Lovett went into the woods to commit suicide. She was not a werewolf. She was dead, and she was never coming back, and it was because that’s the way she’d wanted it.

I kept returning to that night with Lizzie and Enzo in their tent. They whisper and laugh and talk about the future as if it’s still going to happen. He falls asleep. But she’s awake. She watches him. She knows she won’t see him again. Had she known from the start, when they planned their camping trip? Or was it a spur of the moment decision? How could she do it? How could she get up and walk out of the tent and leave everything behind?

“You’ll never know the answers, Hawthorn,” Sundog said later that night. He’d pulled my desk chair next to my bed and was sitting there as if he was keeping vigil over me, as if I were in a hospital, as if I were the one dying.

“She had everything, Sundog. How could she walk away?”

“You only know the part of the story people want you to see.”

But it still didn’t make sense. Nothing did. This was Lizzie Lovett. People loved her. She was a cheerleader. Cheerleaders didn’t kill themselves. At least they didn’t in the world I used to live in. Now, all the rules were reversed. Nothing was off limits.

On the day of the funeral, my mom tried to get me out of bed.

“You could wear your navy-blue dress with the gold buttons,” she suggested. “What do you think?”

“Will they have the coffin open?” I asked.

My mom hesitated on her way to my closet. “She was in the woods a long time, honey.”

“Was she just a skeleton then?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

“How tall was the tree that she hanged herself from? Could the animals on the ground get her?”

“I don’t think you should think about that, Hawthorn.”

“Why?” I asked, getting annoyed. It wasn’t my mom’s job to police my thoughts.

“It’s not respectful.”

“I’m pretty sure Lizzie’s past the point of being offended.”

My mom crossed the room and sat on the chair next to my bed. “I am being patient with you. I know this is a shock. I’m allowing you to stay in bed and miss a few days of school. But I won’t put up with that attitude. Understood?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Now, are you wearing the navy dress or something else?”

“I’m not going to the funeral.”

“You’re not? Don’t you think you should?”

“No.” I rolled onto my side, away from her. I stared at the wall.

“Funerals help people get closure. Going could help you move on.”

I didn’t want closure though. Moving on was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to close my eyes and pretend I lived in a world where Lizzie Lovett still existed.

? ? ?

Except, you know, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life in bed. I had to get up eventually. The day after the funeral, before anyone else was awake, I went to the end of the driveway and got the newspaper.

Lizzie’s funeral was on the front page. With pictures. The coffin was closed, but a huge photo of Lizzie sat on top of it. Flowers were everywhere. Enzo was pictured in a suit, the same suit he was supposed to wear to take me to the homecoming dance. He was standing next to Lizzie’s mom, part of the family. Not the killer some people had suspected.

I read the article a few times. It talked about the night Lizzie went missing. It talked about how she was found by two hikers, which was nothing more than luck. Like Rush had told me, her body wasn’t far from where the search parties had trampled through the woods. Lizzie’s mom had been interviewed. She said Lizzie was a happy girl, and there was no reason to suspect she’d been contemplating suicide. The end of the article shared a list of suicidal warning signs, even though Lizzie apparently hadn’t had any. It gave a number to call if you or anyone you knew was having suicidal thoughts.