Girl in Snow(40)

“Remember me?” she said. “Jade. Like the rock.”

“Yeah.” Cameron squinted. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re ditching this morning.”

“Why?”

Cameron had never ditched school.

“A sign from the dead,” she said. “Come on. We only have a half day anyway.”

Jefferson High was bussing the ninth-grade class to Maplewood Memorial as soon as the eleven forty-five lunch period began. Mom had looked concerned when Cameron left the house—Are you sure you want to go to school today? You could stay home. We could go to the service together, she’d said. I’m fine, Cameron had told her, I want to go to school, and he’d zipped up his jacket.

Now, Jade was standing in Cameron’s driveway. It took effort not to stare at her chest, which bulged from the seams of her white dress and merged with the acne sprinkled across her collar. She’d painted the skin above her eyes a powdery blue, and it smudged across her temples, down her cheeks. A small chin faded into her neck. Chapped lips. A bruise snaked from her thigh to her knee in an unnatural purple triangle, like a watercolor mountain done by someone who had never seen a mountain.

“I should go to school,” Cameron said.

“You don’t want to do that. Let’s just say, you should probably listen to me.”

Cameron tried to understand what she meant.

“I know, Cameron.”

“You know what?”

“I know,” she said, and with an ominous raise of her eyebrows—a threat—she turned in the direction of Willow Square and marched ahead. Cameron could not let her go, not without even a sliver of answer. It occurred to him that this had been Jade’s intention, but still, he followed.



Cameron stumbled along behind Jade, passing all the closed boutiques and the pub where Mom bought craft beer. The Willow Square fountain was turned off for the winter, a drained sink. No one had been assigned the job of taking down the Christmas lights strung across the square, and as February progressed they burned out one by one.

He followed until Jade finally stopped—Cameron’s mouth was dry from walking, and he was trying hard not to panic about the facts of the situation. Lucinda was dead, and Cameron was not in school, and soon he would have to go to her memorial service. He would have to sit and watch everyone grieve, alone with his own missing.

They had stopped at a building next to an ice-cream shop. The place was derelict, a giant fluorescent cross resurrected where a drugstore logo should have been.

“Is this a church?” Cameron asked.

Cameron’s family used to go to church. He would sit between Mom and Dad and wonder how long he could hold his breath without dying. The world record for breath-holding was twenty-two minutes, but Cameron never came close. And anyway, they stopped going to church after everything with Dad because Mom couldn’t sit there and hear about sin.

“Well, it used to be a Rite Aid,” Jade said. “But now it’s the Church of the Pure Heart. It’s not open until August, and they don’t work in here on Fridays. Come on.”

Cameron stood like an idiot, anxious, wishing he had gone to school or at least stayed home with Mom, while Jade wedged her fingers between the automatic glass doors. In a matter of seconds, she had tugged open a space big enough for both of them to squeeze inside and disappeared into the dust.

The church smelled like sawdust and peeled-up floors. They were in the entrance to an industrial-sized chapel—the ground was bare and the pews were scattered in awkward, temporary arrangements. The place had no windows, just frames where glass would someday be. Wind howled through.

“I’m going home,” Cameron said.

“You can’t. I still haven’t told you what I know.”

Cameron realized, as Jade skipped down the aisle, that he wanted to run. When she sat on the altar’s steps, a pair of panties flashed, black lace hugging the pale block of Jade’s upper thigh. Cameron would not run, partly due to Jade’s knowledge of something mysterious—the things she could know were all terrifying—and partly for the simple reason that she, unlike anyone else, had looked directly at him. She had looked right at Cameron and still, she wanted him to stay.

So he walked to where Jade sat, beneath a gigantic wooden cross propped lazily against the far wall. Cameron could still picture the drugstore that had existed here before: rows of shampoo and body wash, a clearance sale on razors and peanuts. A few empty shelves had been broken into dusty piles of wood and stacked against the wall, and the gaping room echoed, bulbless fluorescent lights a taunt from above. A price tag was stuck to his shoe: $14.99.

“This place is so great, isn’t it?” Jade said. “It’s one of those perfectly abandoned places where you can go to think or wallow or whatever. Everyone has a place like that, right? A place where they feel like they can be anyone, say anything?”

“Yeah,” Cameron said, brushing plaster off a small ledge to sit next to her.

“Where is it for you?”

“Nowhere.”

“Come on. If you tell me that, I’ll tell you why I brought you here.”

“Okay,” Cameron said. A pause. “It’s this cliff in the mountains. Over the reservoir. It’s very calm.”

“All right,” Jade said. “Fine. I saw you the other night. The night Lucinda died. I can see you from my bedroom window, standing out there. Watching her. I don’t care and I’m not going to tell. But I have to ask. Why her? Of all the girls in the world, why Lucinda Hayes?”