Neverworld Wake(75)

The next minute was a dream. The realization of what had just happened got bulldozed dumbly around my disintegrating mind.

Jim’s dead. Jim’s dead. This isn’t happening.

Madly I ran around the Foreman’s Lookout, shivering, crying, blowing out candles, stuffing the comforter into my bag. I yanked on my clothes. I scrambled down the ladder four rungs at a time, barely making it around the gaping hole, threw myself into the grass.

I rolled to my feet, staring down at Jim.

Blood was oozing across the side of his face. His eyes were closed. He was dead. I was certain. I had to call the police. Yet, groping around in my backpack for my phone, I couldn’t find it. Had I left it in the Lookout? Looking up, I realized I’d accidentally left the oil lamp burning. It was then that I saw headlights igniting the grass like wildfire. A car. It appeared, bouncing along the rutted road, a loose hubcap, radio blaring.

It was Mr. Joshua’s beat-up red Nissan, the For Sale sign taped to the back window.

Vida Joshua. That was who I thought it was. What was she doing here? Had Jim meant to text her to meet him here, not me?

The question sent me retreating into the dark, sprinting back through the grass. I needed to go home. I needed my mom. I found the opening in the fence and struggled through.

Vida was going to find Jim and call an ambulance.

He would be fine. Everything was fine.

I don’t remember sprinting back through the woods and across campus. The next thing I knew I was barreling up the steps to the fourth floor of my dorm, racing down the hall. That must have been when Martha saw me. She lived on my floor, studied in the corner common room. I hurried to my room and locked the door, stripping naked. Everyone says I’m the good one, the kind one, so that means I am, doesn’t it? It means I always do the right thing.

I folded the La Perla underwear back into the tissue paper at the back of my drawer, returned Whitley’s top to my closet. I found my phone where I’d left it on the bathroom sink. It was 1:02 a.m. No messages. My hands trembling, I managed to wipe the lipstick off, splash my face with cold water, yank the grass and leaves out of my hair.

The realization of what I was doing hit me like a slap in the face. What was I doing, not calling the police? I had to go to Jim. My love. I began to dial 911, but the conversation I was about to have with the dispatcher made me stop.

My boyfriend is lying dead in Vulcan Quarry. He fell. Please send an ambulance.

Are you there? Where are you?

I ran away. I was jealous of another girl. I was angry. I loved him. We’d had a fight.

Cannon. I needed Cannon, the problem solver. I ran across the courtyard and climbed the oak tree to his room on the third floor of Marlborough. I knocked on his window. No answer. I pulled it open. There was no one there.

Kipling. Kipling would help me. He had a tower room in Eldred. I climbed back down the tree, raced across campus, slipped in through the fire exit, up the back stairs. His room was empty too. When I ran along the gable to Whitley’s dorm room and knocked on her window, she too was missing.

What was going on? Where was everyone?

Martha. Racing back to Creston, I could see her light on in the window on the fourth floor, but imagining her flat response as I confessed to her, weeping, frightened, sent me running straight back to my room, my heart scuttling around like a rodent in my chest.

I crawled into bed, staring at the ceiling. I kept telling myself to call my mom, but I couldn’t move. Questions exploded in my head like grenades: If I’d never decided to surprise Jim, would he still be alive? Had he wanted to see Vida, not me? Had I loosened the rungs from climbing up and down and then up again? Where were my friends? Had Jim managed to call them for help, and were they with him right now, hearing all about what I’d done, that I’d let him fall and left him there? Had I killed Jim?

I had to go back to the quarry. From there I’d call the police. I climbed out of bed, yanked on jeans, a T-shirt, boots. I ran all the way out there again, petrified, certain Moses was going to catch me. When I arrived it was after four. My entire body shaking, I stepped to the spot under the Foreman’s Lookout where the ladder was, and stopped.

Jim was gone.

There was no sign he’d ever been there.

No blood. A few blades of bent grass. Otherwise, there was nothing.

Vida had found him and taken him to the hospital. Or, by some miracle, he’d gotten up and walked away unscathed, which meant he loathed me now. They all did.

I returned to my room, staggered. All I wanted to do was die.

I wandered through the next day like a zombie. When I thought of the night before, the memories were distorted, as if I’d made them up. Had it actually happened? There was no sign of Jim. No one had seen him. Whitley, Kip, and Cannon all acted friendly but stiff. They said they’d been in their rooms all night. Martha claimed she’d slept in the library.

A day later, the news arrived: Jim had been found dead in the quarry lake.

It was impossible. I didn’t understand. What had happened after I’d run away? What had Vida done to Jim? Why were my friends all lying? What were they afraid of?

To find answers, I’d gone to Wincroft.

And all along, Martha had known my secret. Martha had been cleaning up my every move, all the while protecting me.

How had I never seen it? How could I have been so blind?



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