People Like Us(32)
And then the world started spinning on its axis again. I did become team captain. Mom and Dad latched on. It all became real. Everything started to matter. I don’t want to fall back into that wild spinning nothingness again. Because once you’re in it, there are no footholds. It takes something extraordinary, a cosmic alignment of divine proportions, to pull you out. Meeting someone like Brie. Finding I do have a place in a school like Bates. A place where I can be sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that what is ahead of me is better than what I left behind. But the balance is so fragile.
I pretend to sneeze so I have an excuse to place my fingers over my face and I leave them there, peering out through the cracks. I do not want to see a rotting cat corpse. Nola removes another stone and I fidget in place. “What are we going to do with the body? We didn’t even talk about that.”
She doesn’t look up. She removes another stone and discards it carelessly. “Rebury it.”
“Where? How? We don’t have shovels and the ground is frozen.” I take a step backward into the darkness, so that the grave and the thin beam of flashlight illuminating it are almost blocked by her bent figure. But I can still see a sliver of her pale face curving over the ever-shrinking pile, her expression of concentration, the dirt accumulating under her fingernails.
“Not in the ground. That would be too obvious. It would just turn up again.”
I take another uneasy step backward and scream as something touches my shoulder. A tree branch. I’ve backed into a tree.
Nola turns and glares at me. “You’re going to get us caught.”
“Sorry,” I say meekly.
“You could help, you know.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll stand lookout.”
She removes one more stone and peers down. “Toss me the bag.”
I throw it to her, unable to force myself to move closer or to back up farther, unable to look away or to make any effort to peer around her. What I see is this: hard-packed earth, tufts of fur, and bones. It’s almost more shocking than everything worse my brain was conjuring because it’s so simple and staged looking, like a museum exhibit. Fossils. The creepiest thought occurs to me. Nola had said Hunter wasn’t dead when she found him. I edge closer and we stare down at the bones wordlessly, and I wonder. I almost ask. But then she carefully scrapes the bones and fur off the ground and into the backpack and wipes her filthy hands in the dirt.
She looks at me with unmasked disdain. “You’re gutless, Donovan.”
I’m beginning to agree. But it’s not going to sway me into touching Hunter’s remains. A sudden, paralyzing fear seizes through me that I will answer for his death, one way or another. That by witnessing his bones, I am somehow responsible. And then the fear explodes, and it’s not just Hunter, it’s Megan and Todd and Jessica. Death is a chain reaction, a butterfly effect. I shiver and begin to scatter the stones back around the clearing with my sneakers. “So what’s the plan? We’ve got the bones.”
She slings the backpack over her shoulder and heads down the path toward the main road. “We lay them to rest.”
“You said they couldn’t go back in the ground.”
“Exactly. They’re going where they’ll never resurface.”
The realization makes me shudder. “Don’t you think the lake is under enough scrutiny right now?”
She picks up her pace and I try to match it. “Not near where Jessica was found. Near the main road.”
I fall into step next to her. “Nola, think this through. If anyone ever finds this, it’s way more incriminating than the grave. They can trace the backpack to you.”
“How? Have you ever heard of running a DNA test because of a dead animal?”
I fall silent for a while, but I’m uneasy. A lot could go wrong. I pull my cashmere hood over my head as we near the main road and peer down into the darkness in both directions before sprinting across. All is quiet. At the edge of the lake, Nola kneels and unzips the backpack, and I gather stones to weigh it down. Accomplice, a voice in my head screams. Accessory to murder.
I lift a heavy rock, slippery with moss and algae, and slip it into the bag. It crunches the bones and other stones beneath it. “So, I guess after this, we’re done.”
She pushes her sleeves up and wipes the sweat off her forehead. “Not half. These are pebbles. Give me something to work with.”
“With the revenge blog.” I pause and begin working on another large stone. “Obviously I can’t continue to work on it without the software, but just show me how to use it, and we’re cool.”
“I didn’t say I was done.” Her face is a mask of stillness, but her arms are wrapped tightly around her waist, almost protectively.
“Well, I’m saying it.”
She lets out a sharp laugh. “You are not firing me.”
“I’m not putting you in any more danger. We’ve destroyed your evidence but your name is still on the list. Just do me one more favor and take your name off the class roster like you did with Tricia. And teach me how to use that stupid password software. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Like you have any control over this shit storm?” She smiles up at me in the moonlight. There’s always an air of cynicism in her smiles, but for just one moment, with the breeze softly blowing strands of velvety hair around her pale face, her eyes luminous, she looks hopeful.