Last Girl Ghosted(75)

“I don’t like people who ask questions thinking that they already have the answers.”

Bailey raises his eyebrows and blows out a breath. “You’re a librarian, right? Aren’t you supposed to live for people who have questions?”

“When they’re honest, when the agenda is clear.”

I’d wonder what Joy has against Bailey Kirk but I already know. Joy is the keeper of history, of the story of this town and how it is told. Bailey Kirk is an outsider and an interloper. He doesn’t speak the language of this place. As someone with a foot in both worlds, I can see why the two would never be compatible. You can’t be a part of the world out there, and understand people like my father who wanted to leave it behind.

Joy comes to sit beside me.

“This is about you right now,” she says, taking my hands. “You’ve been through a lot. What have you come home to find?”

What have I come home to find? I thought I was looking for you. But maybe I am really looking for myself.

“Can you tell me what you remember? About the property, about my father, about the raid? Not just what’s here in the records. But what you know to be true about all of it?”

She regards me over her glasses for a moment with stormy gray eyes. She nods to Bailey, indicating that he can take a seat, which he does with a sigh.

Opening the first of the binders, she tells me what she knows, and she starts at the beginning.



PART THREE


i am the storm


You are the future,
The red sky before sunrise
Over the fields of time.


Rainer Maria Rilke



thirty-six


bonnie


Even though we can’t always have affection for every person we meet, we can always treat every person with kindness.

How many times had Bonnie’s mother said that? A hundred. A thousand. And that was the reason why Bonnie never made fun of Doug. The other kids in their class, when they weren’t actively teasing him—an enterprise usually reserved for lunch or PE when supervision was light—kept their distance.

The truth was that poor Doug wasn’t always clean; often he smelled, and his hair hung greasy and stringy over his eyes. He wasn’t always nice; he had a bad temper and when he got frustrated, he turned an awful shade of red. Even though he was smart, no one wanted to be his lab partner in science class.

But Bonnie kind of liked him, in a strange way. She always made a point to choose him, when it was left up to the chemistry class to pick their groups. And even though Jessica and Evie, her two best friends, were in the class, too, and they were a ready-made group, and they groaned and rolled their eyes when she picked him, Bonnie hated how sad he looked when he thought no one was watching. And he was a good lab partner, even Jessie and Evie admitted that. They were nice to him, too. Bonnie and her friends were the opposite of the “mean” girls—which always seemed like kind of a silly thing. She didn’t really know anyone who was mean all the time.

Anyway, Doug was gentle and quiet when he was part of their group. He took good notes. And he understood things. When Bonnie was struggling with something, and she often was, she went to find him in the library where he spent most of his study halls, and recess, and after school because his older brother always picked him up late in a beat-up old pickup that looked and sounded like it was going to shake apart. He always helped her.

On Valentine’s Day, she made sure that he was one of the people who got the little bags of candy she handed out. And at the end of each grade, she’d signed his nearly blank yearbook. Have a great summer, Doug! You’re such a good friend!

She’d known Doug since kindergarten. She would say he was a school friend, not an outside-of-school friend like Jessie and Evie. He didn’t go to the movies, or the games, or the fair with her group. Sometimes she saw him at those things, but he was usually alone or with his brother, who everyone knew smoked and sold pot.

One afternoon when Doug was helping her with algebra, he said out of nowhere, “My brother has a gun.”

Something about the way he said it made her uncomfortable. She shifted away from him a little; they’d been sitting kind of close together so she could see his notebook.

“Oh, yeah? Wow.”

“He took me to the range and taught me how to shoot.”

She knew that boys did that sometimes. Lied or exaggerated to make themselves seem cool. Her brother did it all the time—saying he made a goal in soccer when he’d really only assisted, or pretending a girl liked him when she obviously didn’t know he was alive. She figured that’s what Doug was doing.

She changed the subject, back to algebra, and he didn’t bring it up again. Probably if she had seemed impressed, he would have talked about it nonstop, since boys also seemed to do that.

She was in English class when it happened. Jessie sat beside her and Evie was out sick with her period. The sound, like a loud crack, made everyone freeze. Her teacher, Mr. Brennan, stopped writing midsentence on the board.

Another sound, louder, more like a bang.

When she looked back on that moment, she knew. Even though it was so far from anything she’d ever imagined. She knew what was happening. She knew it was Doug.

“Okay, guys,” said Mr. Brennan, his voice tight with a false brightness. “Don’t panic. Just get under your desks, okay?”