The Masked Truth(26)

The brain is composed of three primary sections. First, the forebrain, which contains the hypothalamus, thalamus and cerebrum. Next, the midbrain, which is the tectum and tegmentum. Finally, the hindbrain: the pons cerebellum and medulla.

Which parts are these? What am I seeing on the wall?

A person’s life. A person’s self. That’s what I’m seeing. We can talk about the heart and the soul and “what’s inside,” but it comes down to this: our brains. Everything we are is in there, everything we’ve been and want to be, and now it’s splattered on a wall like someone spit out a mouthful of oatmeal. A life reduced to this.

He shot her between the eyes. He walked over to her as she looked up and said, “Why?” and he shot her. Let her see the gun coming. Pulled the trigger and splattered her life and her self on the wall behind her. While he looked her in the eyes and watched her die.

“Riley?” Max is beside me, leaning down, temporarily blocking my view of that horrible wall. He’s checking to see if I’m still there, if I’ve teetered over into a flashback.

I blink. He nods and moves away, and I see the wall again and say, “How can someone do that?”

“Hmm?”

“How can—?” I cut myself short and shake my head. “We need to go.”

“No, we can …” He looks around. “There’s a room over there. If you want to talk.”

I’d laugh at that if I could, and if it wouldn’t be horribly cruel. We’re running for our lives, but if you’re feeling traumatized right now, Riley, we can talk.

It’s sweet, if inappropriate, and maybe it’s a little bit of shock too, Max not thinking clearly, and when I look at him, he’s staring at Aimee’s body and there’s a horror in his eyes that makes me realize just because I’m the one with PTSD doesn’t mean he isn’t suffering some current traumatic stress right now.

“Lorenzo,” I say, and his head jerks up, gaze wrenching away from Aimee.

“Right,” he says. “Lorenzo.” The reminder that the clock is ticking for Lorenzo, and we need to get that phone for him, and neither of us can afford to freak out until we do. Save the therapy for later. It’s time to move.





CHAPTER 12


The therapy room door is wide open. There’s been no sign of Gray or Predator. We’re constantly listening for them. Even without asking Max if he is, I know the answer, because whenever we hear footsteps, he glances that way, tracking them even as we move.

A moment ago I heard footsteps on distant stairs. Heading up to the second floor.

How many sets of stairs are there? We passed near one, and I recall Aimee saying something about another when she showed me around.

I wish I’d listened more when she showed me around.

I wish I’d listened to her more in general, not just the therapy but when she tried to talk about herself, her life. The other therapist never did that. He’d drawn a clear line there. I am your therapist, and this is all about you. Aimee had taken a different tack. When I withdrew, she’d tease me out with talk about herself, trying to distract me from my inner monologues. It had never worked because …

Because I wasn’t interested. Because part of me had resented her showing that personal side of herself.

I don’t want to be your friend, Aimee. I have friends. Well, I did, before the shooting.

Some had wandered off. They didn’t know what to say. And I gained a few more, the popular girls, until I realized they were only coming by hoping some of my so-called celebrity would rub off while they were being nice to the poor traumatized Riley Vasquez—double-duty pity visits for the win!

But I do still have friends, good friends, even if I’m not the best one in return these days. Lucia and the others, my real friends, they’ve stuck by.

Then there’s Shannon. She came by every day that first week and I wouldn’t see her, so she stopped coming, but she kept sending me care packages. Even after I was back in school, where’d we pass in the hall, she sent me comic books and novels and candy, exactly the sort she knew I liked, because we’d been best friends for so long. There’d be little notes like “Thinking of you.” Except she wasn’t really thinking of me. She was thinking of how she’d narrowly escaped being me that day at the Porters’, how it was supposed to be her.

Blood money, that’s what those packages are, and I want to scream at her in school, just stop in the hall and call her a two-faced bitch, and let everyone know what she did and that it should have been her, goddamn it, it should have been her. Except I don’t wish it was, I don’t dare, because I wouldn’t have trusted her to keep Darla safe, and let’s be honest here, I wouldn’t have trusted her to keep herself safe, and I still care about her enough to think of that, even after what she’s done.

I’d tuned out most of what Aimee had said about herself, and now I regret that. She hadn’t been trying to be my friend. She’d just been trying to help. To connect. I refused that connection, like I refused a full tour of the building.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty. That’s what Dad always said.

What Dad always said.

Max and I have a plan for the therapy room. We need to, because Aimee said Cantina was still alive when she left. Step one, then, is to see if that has changed. If he has “succumbed to his injuries,” as they say in polite society and English mystery novels. The English guy with me does not say that. Nor is his response at all polite when we realize Cantina has not succumbed.