Put Me Back Together(88)

“You did this,” I said, my eyes narrowing on that black form, almost melting away to nothing in the trees.

“Keep telling yourself that, Katie Kat,” a voice said, and I spun around, flattening myself against the wall so hard I smacked the back of my head. It began to bleat with pain, or maybe that was my internal alarm telling me to run, run, run.

There was nobody there. The studio was empty, and when I stepped out into the hall I saw the other students were still congregated far down at the other end, out of earshot. Nobody was close enough to tell me if they’d heard it, too. Pressing a hand to the back of my head, I backed away from the doorway to the studio, still unsure if I’d imagined it or if Brandon was going to leap out of a shadow. When I hit the opposite wall with my back I staggered. I was having trouble breathing. Air, I needed air.

Pushing through the door to the stairwell, I scrambled down the two flights of stairs and fell out into the night. The wind was blowing harder now, a gale beginning to build, and the air forced its way into my lungs, leaving me gasping. I looked up at the stars as my breathing returned to normal and thought that no matter how many times I painted it I could never really capture the immensity of that sky, or the horror of it. That sky had watched as Brandon had killed Tommy. It had been the only witness. That sky knew the truth.

Truth or lies—that was what it always came down to. My lies or Brandon’s truth—neither really covered what happened that day. Maybe no article or painting or piece of testimony ever could. Maybe trying to make right something that was so wrong to begin with was the real problem. No truth I told would ever bring Tommy back. No lie would fill the gaping hole in his mother’s heart. Maybe the trick to moving on with your life was saying goodbye.

I closed my eyes and painted myself into the clearing. The train tracks ran ahead of me and behind. The sky was blue and clear. And I was not running or bleeding or crying. I was still. The woods were peaceful, just like I hoped he was. Just like I hoped I would someday be.

“Goodbye, Tommy,” I whispered. As I opened my eyes again, a star winked brightly, exactly above my head. I knew it wasn’t Tommy, but it made me smile.

“Alone at last,” a voice said, and I knew it was him. I would have known that voice anywhere. I’d been hearing it in my dreams for six long years.

Brandon Tomko had found me.





22





My first thought was that he was shorter than he was in my nightmares. We’d been the same height once, and he was taller now, but not by much. I estimated about two inches. That random thought echoed in my brain—Two inches isn’t much—as he took a step toward me and I could see his face more clearly. Then all the air was sucked out of my lungs and I couldn’t breathe. It was as though the world went still—no movement, no sound. There was just Brandon and me and the moment I’d been dreading every day since Tommy Wesley died.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Katie Kat,” Brandon said. His voice was the same, but with a rough quality to it that I associated with worn-out old men. Men who tiredly stalked the woods at night looking for their next victim. Men you didn’t want to run into in the dark—oops, too late.

“Really? Seems to me you found me last week,” I replied, surprised to find that my voice wasn’t shaking, though my hands were. “At least that’s the impression I got from the knife you stabbed through my pillow. I’m not the one who’s been hiding, Brandon.”

He flinched when I said his name, almost as though I’d insulted him. “Well, aren’t you lucky,” he sneered. “You’re free to grab hot chocolate and kiss your boyfriend and take naps in the park and go to class. You don’t have to hide. What a great life your lies have bought you.”

Take naps in the park? Did he mean the day Lucas and I had visited the basketball court in Christie? Had he followed us there, too?

I tried to stem my panic by wrapping my arms around my stomach tightly, clamping down. It didn’t work.

“I lied because I had to,” I said.

He chuckled humourlessly. “You had to. How convenient. I guess the fact that your lies threw me to the wolves was just a happy coincidence, then. None of your doing, really. Since you had to.”

His words sounded so familiar, filled with blame, with reproach. It’s all your fault, Katie, they hissed. You’re a liar, a coward, a hypocrite, Katie. All these years I’d thought it was my own voice haunting my thoughts. Now I realized it was Brandon’s voice I’d been hearing all along.

“Now who’s lying?” I said. “I’m not the reason you were locked away, Brandon. I didn’t kill Tommy Wesley, you did.”

His eyes burned into me, fixed on my face. His entire demeanour changed, becoming somehow menacing simply by the shifting of his weight, the movement of his shoulders. In that moment, as he stared at me, I began to regret coming out the back door of the building. Though there were campus paths leading off in every direction, all the streets were out of sight. The halls inside the building might have been filled with people, but outside it was quiet, the campus nearly deserted. Nobody could see us right now. I was all alone with him.

“I killed that kid because you asked me to,” Brandon said, his voice dead calm.

That did it. Those words. It was the first time I’d heard him admit to it out loud and it woke something up in me.