Stranger in the Lake(83)

“I can’t live this way anymore.” Jax’s voice cracks, weary with emotion, with what sounds like tears. When he steps out from behind the clump of grass, his rifle is pointed at the ground. “This guilt...it’s too big for me to keep carrying around. It’s too heavy. Every time I close my eyes, Bobby is right there. That...that look in his eyes when he couldn’t break free of the seat belt, the sound of his underwater scream when I went for Paul and not him. He grabbed my ankle, and you know what I did? I kicked him in the goddamn face and then I dragged Paul to shore.”

I can see it. I can see what a burden it’s been for him. We all knew Jax was suffering; we just didn’t know from what.

Micah laughs, a bitter snarl of a sound. “You stupid motherfucker. Even now, even all these years later, you still think this is all about you. My mom died. My father doesn’t love me enough. Paul’s my best friend, not yours.” Micah’s face goes ugly and mean, contorting with his awful words. “That’s always been your problem, but I’m here to tell you this time it’s not. This thing with Bobby, it’s not about you.”

“What are you talking about? Of course it’s about me. I was the reckless one, the idiot who insisted on driving even though I couldn’t see straight. I was the one who leaned into that curve, took it way too fast.”

Micah fills up his lungs and roars, “It wasn’t you, asshole.” Three quick puffs of air, sharp in the dark quiet, and I struggle to focus on his words, slipping through the hills like smoke. It wasn’t him, what? “Bobby’s car was a stick.”

For the longest time, no one speaks. There’s just sirens and black night and Jax, breathing hard.

He shakes his head. “No, it was—”

“You wanted to drive,” Micah says. “Hell, you tried to, but you couldn’t. You killed the engine, about launched us all through the windshield. I wouldn’t stop laughing, so you dragged me out of the car and tried to fight me, but your punches never landed because you were too plastered.”

The memories flicker, spinning and blurring before they fall into place. How Jax dropped behind the wheel. How the car lurched forward only to stop. The laughter, the fighting. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I understand it now. Jax didn’t push down on the clutch when he started the engine. I know, because the same thing happened to me once in Chet’s Jeep, right before he taught me how to operate a stick.

Jax grunts. “No. That’s not right. I remember getting into the driver’s seat. I remember holding the wheel. It wasn’t a stick.”

“Yes, it was,” Chet says, and all heads swing in his direction. The sirens are deafening now, screeching around the curves at the top of the hill, and he shouts to be heard above them. “Bobby’s car was a Camaro Z28 1LE. Chevy’s lightweight race car package. Built for the track, but most people buy ’em to drive on the roads. Especially roads like the ones around here.”

Chet again, with his car facts, stuff nobody else knows or cares to retain.

“So?” Jax’s voice is impatient.

“So all LEs are manual transmissions. Chevy doesn’t make them any other way.”

I stare at Micah, and oh my God. For twenty years, he’s kept this sickening secret that he’s responsible for the crash.

No, it’s more than that.

For twenty years, Micah has fed them this lie like a bowl of ice cream, scooping it up and shoving it down their throats often enough, and with enough passion that they believed it. He fooled his so-called best friends with this stitched-together story and held Jax’s sanity hostage. He let Jax believe that it was his fault, his crime, when all this time, it was Micah’s.

My gaze flits to Jax—to poor, batty Jax, and it’s hard to see his face in the dark, but I see his stance. The way his arms swing up once again, the way he aims the rifle at Micah’s chest. I don’t need to see his expression to know what happens next.

“Charlie, move,” Chet hollers, but he doesn’t have to tell me. I’m already scuttling farther up the dock, putting some space between Jax and his target, moving all the way to the edge. I don’t know how accurate a shot Jax is. Don’t want to be in range when he pulls that trigger.

Micah puffs up his chest, spreading his arms wide. “Do it. Go on—shoot me.”

Cars screech around a curve in Micah’s driveway, and I shudder at what Sam will think when he comes around the side of the house. Jax will look like the aggressor. Paul must be thinking the same thing, because he yells at Jax to put down the gun.

Micah sputters, pounding a fist on his chest. “Right here. Somebody shoot me, damn it. Do it.”

There’s commotion high on the hill, bodies spilling down it like an army of ants, voices shouting to get down, to put the guns down. Jax freezes, everything but his expression. He’s close enough I see it now. Not the anger I expected to see but a smile—a real, actual smile. Slowly, smoothly, he lays the rifle on the grass.

Revenge comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes the best revenge, the worst kind, is to do nothing at all.

I see it too late, the way it creeps over Micah’s features—the hardness, that look of determined exhilaration. Daring death. Doing something crazy.

His body shifts, and three things happen all at once.

Jax lunges.