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“That’s okay with me.”
“Why? This is the alternative.”
“Okay. Enough.” Rhys stands behind Cary and pulls him to his feet. Cary pushes away from him and says, “I am not going back to the auditorium—”
“The nurse’s office, then,” Rhys says.
So we take him there. Cary needs an arm around each of us to stay upright. Taking on his weight slows us down. His legs are uncooperative, jelly, and as we pass a classroom, he detours inside and pukes in a garbage can and then he spits.
“Better,” he mumbles. After that, he is a little better. He just wants to pass out, he tells us. When we hit the nurse’s office, he flops back on the cot and Rhys unties his shoes.
“I’m a murderer,” Cary says. “I. Am. A. Murderer.”
“No, you’re drunk. Sleep it off.”
I don’t want Cary to stop talking. I want him to finish what he was going to say in the auditorium. I want to hear someone else say they’ve given up. I need to hear it.
“It should’ve been you, right?”
Rhys gives me a look. “Sloane.”
“What? No…” Cary blinks. “No. It should’ve been—Harrison.”
“That kid just can’t get a break,” Rhys says.
“We didn’t even know him—” Cary sits up with difficulty. “Rhys, remember we found him and we didn’t know him and it turns out he went to this fucking school? Just by looking at him, you could tell he’s nothing. Everyone else—everyone else, we knew—” He leans forward and puts his head between his knees. “It should have been Harrison.”
“You’d feel just as bad as you do now if it had been.”
“No one would have held it against me if it had been Harrison.”
Cary’s breathing gets so heavy and for a second I think he’s passed out sitting up, but then his shoulders start to shake. He’s crying.
I turn to Rhys, who stares at Cary, horrified. Rhys turns to me and his eyes are begging me to do something, like I’m the girl here and I should know what to do. I take a tentative step toward Cary but I don’t know what to do. I think I’d need to be drunker than I am to have any idea of what to do or say to help him. Cary raises his head and he looks so sad.
“The alley was swarmed,” he whispers. My heart hears this, processes it, understands it before my brain does. I take two steps back. “I knew it was swarmed…”
“Cary, shut up,” Rhys says.
“It was the only way to the school and none of us knew Harrison. Bait.”
“Cary.”
“But the Caspers insisted, you know? They insisted, didn’t they? They couldn’t wait and I—I couldn’t say I lied, right? But it wasn’t … it wasn’t supposed to be them. It was supposed to be Harrison. I set it up and it was supposed to be … Harrison—”
He starts to sob. He cries so hard I think he’ll be sick again. He curls up on his side, his eyes squeezed shut. The pain is so etched on his face that I can feel it. He knew that the alley was swarmed.
Harrison was bait.
And I remember—I remember Cary looking down that alley and turning back to us, telling us it was safe and the Caspers … the Caspers rushing ahead. They wanted to get to the school so badly, they were so eager for the walls, the shelter to keep them and their children safe. I close my eyes and I hear Mrs. Casper’s voice in my head, just before she went. Thank God one thing’s finally gone right. She sounded so hopeful, so relieved. And then—
“Cary,” Rhys says.
“Go. Just get the fuck away from me—”
Rhys doesn’t need more incentive than that. He grabs me by the hand and pulls me out of the nurse’s office. He shuts the door quietly and then stares through the window at Cary. My heart is jackhammering in my chest. Rhys turns to me.
“We can’t tell anyone about this.”
“I know.”
“I’m serious, Sloane. We can’t—”
“I know.”
He swallows, nods, and then we make our way down the hall together, back to the auditorium. I am terrified they’ll somehow see what I’ve heard on my face, so I stop. Rhys stops. He waits for me to walk again and I do and he walks with me. When we turn the corner, I realize how spent I am. I lean against a locker. I really don’t want to go back. Not yet.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Give me a minute.”
“Whiskey and head trauma don’t really go, huh.”
“I don’t want to be around you right now.”
The mea
My father never went after Lily after she left. Nineteen. She was legally an adult, but he was so angry I could never understand why he didn’t just go to the police and make them track her down. I don’t know why he didn’t make it hard for her. But then I think … as long as he had something to hurt it must’ve been okay that she was gone. Cary wanted to use Harrison as bait and the Caspers got in the way. The Caspers thought Cary should stand in front of them. They thought he was expendable. The man outside, he was expendable. He didn’t mean anything to me. Was I expendable? Was I Lily’s bait?
I go to the bathroom and splash water on my face. My head feels awful. When I finally get to the auditorium, I stretch out on my mat. Grace is on Trace’s mat and Trace and Harrison are across the room, eating a bag of chips. Harrison is talking and Trace is actually listening to him. Trace must feel bad about bringing the wrath of Cary down on Harrison or else he’s really drunk because I can’t think of any other reason why he’d care what Harrison has to say.
Harrison was supposed to die.
“How bad is he?”
Grace’s voice pulls me from my thoughts.
“Who?”
“Cary,” she says.
“Why do you care?”
“Just tell me how he is.”
I want to tell her he’s bad. I want to tell her Cary’s not the guy she thinks he is, that he’s simultaneously better and worse than anything she’s imagined, but I can’t.
“He was crying his eyes out.”
“Yeah right.”
“I’ve never seen a boy cry like that before. Not even Harrison.”
She considers this. “But he’s wasted, so it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Maybe it’s the only way it could come out.”
“Sure.”
I can’t deal with this. Her. The pounding in my head. Trace. Cary. Her. Harrison is supposed to be dead. I’m supposed to be dead.
“You and Trace make a game out of hating Cary. He feels it.”
“You think I should forgive him? You think that’s important now?”
“I think you still have something and he doesn’t have anything and he told you both he was sorry.” I close my eyes. There is no buzz anymore, if there ever was, just tiredness curdling my blood. “And I think he is.”
“He only said it once.”
“Is it going to make a difference if he says it a million times?”
“I never saw him cry.”
“Then go into the nurse’s office.”
“You’re not being fair.”
“He said—” I stop, and then I lie. Maybe it will help. “He said it should’ve been him.”
“He didn’t.”
“Fine, Grace.” I roll onto my side, putting my back to her. “He didn’t.”
Eventually, the sun goes down. We call it a night long before that.
I’m standing on the edge of a cliff and it feels like my heart is missing.
Sloane.
Post-whiskey, my head is thick and my eyes are weighted. I can barely open them, but still I hear his voice, calling for me. I should let him know I hear him calling for me.
“Dad—”
The moment the word is out of my mouth, I’m awake and I want to be sick. There’s a difference in saying it out loud on purpose and having it involuntarily twitch its way past my lips. Dad. I sit up slowly and check my watch. Five in the morning. Rhys shifts and rolls over. His face is smooth, untouched. Everyone around me is still, hours away from their eyes being open and I’m jealous because I just want to be asleep like them. In this moment, that is the only thing I want.