Twisted by Hannah Jayne(19)

Beth Anne slipped on the bracelet and promptly forgot about it until that night at dinner. The three of them were eating pizza straight from the box when Isabel grabbed Beth Anne’s arm with her clawlike fingernails.

“Where’d you get that bracelet?”

Beth Anne glanced at her wrist, feeling the heat burning on her cheeks.

“That’s mine, isn’t it? You took it from my purse!”

“Now, now,” Beth Anne’s father said, trying to calm Isabel.

“No, Jackson, that was in my purse. It’s mine. She stole it from my purse!”

Through lowered lashes, Beth Anne watched her father’s gaze rake over her. “Did you take that bracelet, Bethy?”

Beth Anne wagged her head from side to side, still studying her pizza slice.

“She’s lying! She’s lying! She’s out-and-out lying, Jackson. You’ve got to punish her!”

Isabel snatched the bracelet from Beth Anne’s wrist and pinched her cheeks with one hand, making Beth Anne’s lips pucker. “Your daddy’s gonna teach you that it’s not right to steal.” She slapped the bracelet on her own bony wrist, and Beth Anne thought the richness of the stone made Isabel’s yellow-hued skin look that much more sallow.

“Go to your room, Bethy.” Her daddy’s voice was even, relaxed.

Isabel didn’t spend the night that time. When Beth Anne woke up the following morning, Isabel was still gone, but the bracelet was sitting in the center of the kitchen table.

It took fourteen days for the police to find Isabel Doctoro’s body.

“Bex!” Trevor was moving toward her at a dizzying speed. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He squeezed her arm, then pulled her into a hug.

Bex stiffened. The feeling of Trevor’s warm, muscled body pressed up against hers was both intimate and weird.

“Hey”—he didn’t let her go, his mouth a hairbreadth from her ear—“it’s okay. I’m here.” He squeezed her a little tighter and Bex felt herself melt into him, exhaustion crashing over her in white waves. She wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, if it was a minute or hours, but however long it was, it felt too short.

“I’m so sorry. Jeez…” He looked away and raked a hand through his hair. “I feel like I’m kind of responsible.”

Heat ricocheted through Bex, exploding like gunfire in her ears. “W-what?”

“I don’t know. I feel like…” Trevor looked down at his feet, the tops of his ears flushing a fierce red. “I feel like I should protect you. Like, I don’t want you to have to experience anything bad.”

Bex was frozen, rooted to her spot in the hall.

“I know that’s stupid, but”—Trevor looked up at her, his eyes finding hers and pinning her there—“I really like you, Bex.”

She blinked at the small smile that played on his lips, every synapse in her brain firing simultaneously, random triggers flailing: He likes me! Run! It’s a trick. It’s a joke. I like him. Someone actually likes me! A boy, a boy likes me! He’s lying. Everyone’s lying.

Something overrode the wild clatter in her brain and Bex’s lips were moving, sound coming out. “I like you too, Trevor.” Heat grazed the back of her neck, and her palms started to sweat in that millisecond between her answer and his response. Her stomach started to lurch, then flutter.

“So, we like each other then,” Trevor said, a wide smile pushing up his red-apple cheeks.

The bell cut through Bex’s response while Trevor’s hand found hers, his fingers intertwining with hers.

There were grief counselors in all the afternoon classes. Bex saw Renee slip into the class across the hall from hers and shrunk back in her seat, hoping that the doctor wouldn’t turn around and see her, wouldn’t announce that she had talked to Bex about the heredity of mental illness.

At half past the hour, all the classes filed into the cafeteria ten minutes early for lunch. A long line of adults stood behind a podium, all with somber faces and wearing every shade of navy-blue pantsuit imaginable. Bex figured that black must have given off too dark a vibe so the official color of teen grief must be navy blue. She wasn’t certain why skirts were off-limits and let her mind wander while the principal tapped a microphone and waited for the clattering of dishes and lunch bags and Starbucks cups to die down.

“If we can all just take a moment of silence,” Principal Morse started.

Chelsea and Laney looked at each other and then at Bex, pulling her into a crushing embrace while they bowed their heads. Bex chanced a glance up and met Trevor’s eyes. He was sitting across from her, staring. They both bowed their heads for one enveloping moment of pulsing silence, Bex staring at her kneecaps under the table and listening to the thud-thud-thud of her heart. She remembered a story that her only Raleigh friend, Mel, had told her about, something that Mel was reading in class. It was about a man who killed another man and was driven to admit it because he could still hear the dead man’s heart beating—“The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Bex hoped the heart she heard was her own.

When she looked up, she was met with Darla’s pale-blue eyes staring down at her from a huge photograph projected on the cafeteria wall. The girl was smiling, head cocked, blond hair in corn-silk waves over one shoulder, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.