Playlist for the Dead(57)

“Besides, it was better if you didn’t know,” she said. “You couldn’t get in trouble if you didn’t know the details. And I really liked hanging out with you, getting to know you—I thought you’d get it, but I wanted to be sure. I dropped enough hints; I thought you’d figured it out.”

I thought back on our conversations about karma. Had it just been her code for telling me all along? Her way of telling me not to worry, that I hadn’t done it? That she had me covered? It couldn’t be.

“Was it just you? Was it Eric, too?”

“Not exactly,” she said. She sounded calm; apparently if she’d had the urge to cry, it had passed. “He drove the night I got Trevor. But he was kind of pissed at how it all went down. I don’t think he realized just how mad I was. It’s a good thing I didn’t need his help—it’s not as hard as you think to knock someone out when they don’t see you coming.”

The baseball bat probably contributed to that, I thought. “What about Jason?” I asked. “Eric said he hadn’t seen him since they broke up. Was he lying?”

She shook her head. “Damian helped out with that one. We were so angry at what Jason and those guys did to Eric that we had to do something.”

“So none of this is about Hayden at all?” It was bad enough that Astrid was behind all of this, but somehow the idea that it was unconnected to Hayden made it worse.

“Of course it’s about Hayden,” she said. “That means Ryan’s the most important, for his sake and mine. But this part won’t work without Eric. I’ve been trying to make him see that, but he’s obsessed with taking Ryan down on his own.”

I took a step back, almost involuntarily. I felt the need to be farther away from her.

“Oh, come on, Sam,” she pleaded. “Don’t be like that. You know they’re monsters. They ruined Eric’s life, and Hayden’s, and Jess’s, and mine. And yours. They were destroying everything they touched and no one was doing a damn thing about it. I’m so sick of them being able to get away with it. Someone had to do something. You have to understand that.” She reached out toward me, as if to take my hand.

But I pulled back farther. “You hurt people,” I said. “Badly.” My voice was getting louder.

“They deserved to be hurt. A lot worse than anything I did. Jason mostly just got humiliated, and Trevor’s going to be fine.”

“What about what you were planning with Ryan? What did you think would happen, if it worked?” Now I was yelling. People were starting to look.

She shrugged.

“Did you even care?” My voice cracked. I couldn’t remember ever being this angry. Not at someone I could confront.

I’d been so worried that I was responsible, and then that Eric was, that it hadn’t even occurred to me to consider the possibility of Astrid being involved. To think about how I might feel. But now I knew.

It was awful.

It was so awful that it overshadowed my relief at the knowledge, finally, that it hadn’t been me.

Astrid must have seen something in my face. “I did it for Hayden,” she said softly.

As if that made it better. But it wasn’t even true, not really. “You did it for yourself,” I said, just as quietly.

She looked at me, as if trying to think of the words that would fix things. But there weren’t any. I felt like everything I knew about her had turned out to be a lie. I’d thought we were the same, that we’d been lucky to find each other, especially now, but maybe it wasn’t good luck. Maybe this was just another horrible way of reminding me that I really had lost the only true friend I’d ever had.

There wasn’t really anything I wanted to say to her, except one thing. “Please don’t do this,” I said. “Let Eric handle this his own way.”

She nodded, then knelt back down and started picking up the potatoes and putting them back in her bag. “I thought you’d understand,” she said, not looking at me now.

In some ways I did, but not in the ways that mattered. She wasn’t who I thought she was, who I’d wanted her to be. And now I had to face being alone again.

I walked away.

I hadn’t asked Astrid a lot of the questions I’d meant to; I wanted to know how much Eric knew, if her other friends did too, why she’d decided it was her job to take the bullies down in the first place. But did it matter? I’d lost her—or she’d lost me, really—and with that, I’d lost the prospect of a new group of friends. Maybe the problem was the whole idea of groups; as soon as more than two people got involved in anything, so many things could go wrong. There was the bully trifecta, three idiots all but sharing one brain; Astrid’s old cheerleader friends, who’d dumped her when Ryan did; her new friends, helping her plot revenge against the bullies without even seeming to realize that they were condoning violence themselves. I was almost inclined to think that what they were doing was worse—there was no question what the bullies were, because they did most of their harm in the open, but Astrid’s crew did everything in stealth, leaving someone like me to take the blame.

Who needed a group? What was so bad about having one best friend, anyway?

I missed Hayden as much as I had since he died. I missed him so much I finally didn’t even feel bad thinking about it; I just sank into it, let it roll over me in waves. It was the closest I’d come to crying, and if I hadn’t been like two feet away from a field full of people I mostly didn’t know or couldn’t stand, I might have just said fuck it and started bawling.