Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake)(29)

But I also know our speeding roller coaster car could fly off the rails anytime, and part of my brain is nagging me as we head down to the road. We can see the bonfire clearly, and hear the shouts and laughter and pulsing music.

“Come on, let’s get there before the cops bust the party!” Vee calls, and breaks into a run. I catch and pass her easily. This, I’m good at. I don’t even break a sweat, and in fact I have to slow down to let her catch up. She’s laughing and wheezing a little by the time we get there.

The area under the cliff—Killing Rock—is mostly imported sand, a pretend beach in the middle of Tennessee. The night air’s crisp and cold, but that isn’t stopping anybody from swimming in the lake or cannonballing off the top of the cliff. It’s not that bad; it hasn’t even been below freezing. Fall in Tennessee can sometimes be summer with more leaf colors, and winter can be fall with more Christmas decorations. No sign of any change tonight. The skies are a little cloudy, but the wispy kind of clouds that look decorative instead of threatening.

There are maybe a hundred teens around Norton, Tennessee, and about eighty of them are here right now on this end of the lake. The rest are probably on their way.

“Well, this looks just perfect,” Vee says, and turns a wide smile on a boy who stumbles by. He’s already blind drunk, but she doesn’t seem to mind; she looks him over twice. I feel a little twinge of . . . something. I don’t want to think it’s jealousy. I tell myself that Vee’s not into me anyway, that I was just imagining things back in Wolfhunter when it seemed like she really liked me. Oh yeah, then why is she here, if she isn’t here for you?

Okay. Maybe I’m jealous, after all.

I pause just in time to see one of my kinda-girlcrushes Lottie come cannonballing off the top of the rock, knees hugged tight to her chest, and she hits the lake with a tremendous splash that’s greeted with cheers from camp chairs near the dock. Dozens of teens are gathered around the bonfire, which spills red and gold light onto rippling water. I see Vee walk away out of the corner of my eye, but I wait for Lottie to surface. She does, waving, and gets another round of cheers as she strokes for the shore. Lottie’s gorgeous. She’s a redhead with big green eyes and an upturned nose and a Tennessee accent so slow it drips like honey. Yeah, I might have kind of a thing for her. Lottie barely knows I’m alive, though. At least she hasn’t actively hated me. So I can still crush on her a little.

Killing Rock probably isn’t the real name of the big cliff that juts out over the lake; it has some boring-ass official title like Lookout Point or Sunset View or something. But it’s been called Killing Rock among the students in Norton for as far back as anyone can remember; even the teachers call it that. Nobody can ever say who exactly got killed here, though. There’s some vague legend of a Native American princess committing suicide by jumping off it onto rocks, the stupid bullshit that white people say to make themselves all romantic about the original residents they killed off in the first place. I don’t buy the myth. But the name has to come from somewhere.

When I look around for Vee, I don’t see her. She’s vanished into the crowd. I frown and search a little, but I finally figure she’ll come back when she’s ready. Yeah, maybe she found that drunk guy and is making out with him right now. I don’t like to think about that. I’m not sure if Vee is gay, or bi, or poly, or what; she hasn’t exactly said anything to lead me one way or another. But I do know one thing, deep down: she’s bad for me. I first met her when she was in jail, and yeah, maybe she didn’t kill her mom, but she’d done plenty of bad stuff by that point. She had a drug problem. Drinking too. And she was willing to do a lot of sketchy things to get what she wanted.

Doesn’t mean I don’t still want her.

“Hey, Lanny.” I turn. Someone—a shadow in the trees—holds out a beer to me, but I shake my head. Last thing I need is Mom smelling it on me when I get home. He passes me a water instead. I check to make sure the seal is intact before I open it and take a sip. Growing up paranoid has its good points; nobody is going to get me with the normal predator tactics. Oh yeah, dummy, coming out here in the dark was super cautious. I hate the mocking voice in my head, but I can’t turn it off either. At least it’s making sense right now. Usually it’s just a constant litany of how dumb my hair looks, how my eyes aren’t the same exact size, that I’m too thin or too fat or too short or not sexy enough or whatever. The only thing that makes it better is that I know everybody else has that same voice too.

Well. Not the assholes, I guess.

There is just enough firelight bleeding out to the fringes to see that the guy handing me water is Bon Casey, kicked back in a folding lounge chair. Like me, he goes by a nickname, but at least Atlanta is a decent first name. Bonaventure? Ugh, not so much. He’s older than me by a couple of years, a senior, and I’m struck by a little shiver of shyness.

“Bon,” I say, and toast him with the water. He kicks a bedraggled old camp chair my way, and I sink into it. “How’s it going?”

He shrugs. “You know.” Bon’s technically a senior, but he got held back a couple of grades. He’s really an adult, which makes it borderline weird for him to be out here. “Heard about your brother. He okay?”

“Yeah. He’s fine.”

“Yeah, well, Hank Charterhouse is not okay,” Bon says. “Got his jaw all wired up. You know the Charterhouses are hooked up, right?”