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He sounded like Ellis. The deeper I dug, the more reluctant they both grew. Max had pried into her past and she’d pried into Ryan’s. Now both of them wanted to drop it with no explanation, no resolution. Just vague warnings about each other.
As if they were rivals.
Max stepped away from me.
Instinctively I lunged after him, caught his arm. Ran my hands down to his palm and turned it toward the light.
The back of his hand was a rich gold tan, but the inside was pale. I expected roughness from boat work yet the skin looked smooth. He jerked free before I could memorize it, compare it to the photo I’d saved. The hand that held those wooden carvings.
“Leave now. Please.”
“Max—”
“I want to be alone.”
Goddammit.
In a final act of defiance I drank the rest of my cognac, slowly. He stood with his back to me, shoulders hunched as if expecting a blow.
He didn’t turn or move. Barely seemed to breathe. My eyes played over his body, and I wished with a gutting desperation that I could draw because drawing was how I remembered things, and I wanted to remember this. I wanted to hold those images side by side.
At last I left him and stalked out into the night.
The constellation of Christmas lights in the rafters filled the attic with a soft radiance. Ellis sat in the dormer window with her laptop as I paced, nursing a beer.
“Got another bite,” she said.
I flopped onto the bed beside her.
We’d made fake social media accounts using the names and pics of kids from Ryan’s graduating class. Then we messaged his old classmates. This is Meg. I forgot my password so I made a new profile. Can you friend me again, please?
Amazingly, it worked. If you even remotely impersonated someone, people often filled in the blanks themselves. You’re always forgetting shit, Meg. I told Steph & Kat to re-friend you too. Each act of trust gave us more names, pics, info.
“This is phishing,” Ellis said. “If we’re caught, we could go to jail.”
“We’re not stealing their credit cards. We’re just socially engineering them to tell us stuff so we can solve a hate crime.”
She pushed her glasses up, frowning. “We don’t know that there was a hate crime.”
“Trust me, Watson. I have a nose for these things.”
“ ‘There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.’ ”
“What’s that from?”
“Really?” She sighed. “You’re more Katie Holmes than Sherlock.”
I pinched her bare thigh, and she kicked me away.
Once we breached the outer circles of Ryan’s senior class, we sca
Ryan is so fine.
Too bad he likes D in his A.
Just like you, ho.
Suspicion confirmed: Ryan was closeted, acting straight. At his winter formal, three days before he died, something big happened.
I CAN’T BELIEVE MY FUCKING EYES
[image removed]
Is this a prank? Is it for real?
omfg #eyebleach #ca
LOLOLOL EPIC TROLL
OMG is that RYAN???
But we still had no idea what.
Something shocking. Disturbing. Epic.
What could he have done in front of everyone? Kissed a boy?
Rumors flew that kids who talked about the incident got suspended, their college plans threatened. Discussion was driven underground, into private messages and invite-only groups.
Now we were trying to breach those i
I rolled onto my back, musing at the ceiling. “What if she was Ryan’s beard, and got sick of playing his fake girlfriend? Maybe she outed him at the dance.”
Ellis twirled a lock of hair, agitated.
“What?” I said.
“This feels cruel. They’re so easy to manipulate.”
“Because they’re dumb.” I snorted at our new “friend’s” profile. “I could send her a pic of Beyoncé and she’d believe I’m her. If she goes through life this gullible, something way worse will happen someday. Better to learn this lesson early.”
“She wouldn’t believe you’re a celebrity. She believes you’re her friend because she trusts her friend.”
“Maybe she trusts her friends too much.”
Our eyes locked, and something electric crackled between us. I was so close to asking about her name again.
“How much trust is too much?” Elle said.
“When they can hurt you with it.” I didn’t break eye contact. “Good thing we’re not hurting anyone, right?”
“Right.”
It’s going to tear you up, like it did to me.
What the hell had Max meant? Maybe I already knew this story: gay son, homophobe dad. It would explain why Ellis was loath to dig deeper, scared of reliving her own past. And why Max wanted to believe she was at fault in the crash. Blame the deviant.
Except he knew I wasn’t exactly straight, either. He’d assumed Elle was my girlfriend from the start, and never called our relationship unhealthy, like Mamá. But maybe I’d made my case for being more-straight-than-not too well. Constantly dissociating myself. Reflexively denying it.
Like the coward I was.
I got up and cracked open another beer.
“Guess I’ll go,” Ellis said. “So you can talk to Blue.”
No bitterness in her tone, only resignation. Blue was my nightly routine now. A thousand bucks, a soul-searching dialogue that made me laugh and think. Then we got off. Every night the tension built, our flirting intensifying, growing luminous, incandescent, imploding. I put the tie around my neck. He came all over his fist. Sometimes we kept talking after. In my head I ran my fingers through his hair, his legs twining with mine. The thought of his hard slender body, his deft hands, his self-deprecating humor and intoxicatingly gentle maleness got me wet again. Sometimes we’d go for round two.
He was the perfect guy. Almost ridiculously so.
Night after night I lay awake, staring up at these fake glass stars.
What’s wrong with me? I thought. Why am I obsessing over him when Elle is right here, flesh and blood, real? What do I really know about him beyond what he wants me to believe? Her, at least, I know. Why couldn’t I love her the way she loved me?
It was the same love. I knew that.
Ellis packed up her laptop and headed for the door and then stopped, came back, and pulled something from her bag. “These are for you.”
Gourmet gummy bears.
Way to make this impossible, Elle.
“Well,” I said, “now you have to stay the night.”
“Why?”
“To help me eat them.”
I was rewarded with the deepest blush ever.
Ellis wouldn’t touch beer, so we raided the kitchen and found horchata in the back of the fridge, which I mixed with rum. Half an hour later we were lying on my bed with a pile of gummy bears spread on the quilt between us. Elle half-assedly played World of Warcraft on her laptop.
“What exactly are we looking for?” she said, shooting arrows at a lumbering ogre.
“Her.” I sorted bears into a color wheel, red to blue. “You heard Max. ‘He’d never hurt a soul. That was Skylar.’ ”
“We don’t know if Skylar did anything.”
“Maybe she put the gun in Ryan’s car.”
Ellis frowned. “You’re making a lot of assumptions about this person.”
“You have to make some assumptions about people, Elle. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere.”
“You won’t get anywhere by assuming too much.”
Fucking Occam.
“So you think Skylar has nothing to do with it?” I said. “They just beat Ryan up for being gay? Is that still a huge deal here, in Maine?”
“It’s still a huge deal everywhere. My own parents didn’t see me as human. I was an aberration. Sinful. Defective.”
I touched her arm, silently.
If we’d known each other as kids, it would’ve been different. I never would’ve let them hurt her. Sometimes I fantasized about it: packing our bags and ru