I wait outside the door, watching the screen. But the message goes unread.
Tentatively, I reach for the doorknob, just to peek. But I hear a deep voice and wrench my hand back. “Hey there.”
I turn to find Bram behind me, leaning against the archway to the opposite wing. He takes a step forward, lifting his arms like hemight embrace me. Instinctively, I back up.
He stops in his tracks, face falling.
“Sorry,” I say, my breath shallow, “you startled me.”
When he looks up again, his eyes are cold. “It’s all bullshit, Hayden, what these idiots are saying. I didn’t do anything to Kennedy. You know that.”
I quickly nod, like I do know that. Only I don’t, not really. Because I didn’t see Bram during the drill, or even afterward.
“A girl is dead,” he says. “Naturally, they’re all going to blameme. The guy whose girlfriend died last year.”
He has a point there. “That’s exactly what I tried to tell the cops,” I say.
Bram reaches up to rub the back of his neck. “Doubt it will do any good, but thanks. For vouching for me.”
At the gratitude in his voice, I feel a stab of guilt that I didn’t do more. That I didn’t force those detectives to listen to what I had to say.
“That’s what friends do.” I say it like that’s what we are, like it’s all we’ve ever been. Like there isn’t always this tension between us, ever since the day I made that horrible mistake with him. “But Bram, they have a video of one of you with Kennedy.” I don’t want to ask it aloud, but he’s gone silent. “You’re not the person in the video?”
“No,” he says sharply. “I’m not the person in the video.”
I put up my hands in a gesture of surrender, reminding him I’m not the bad guy here. We need to change the conversation.
“You want to watch a movie?” I ask, because when it’s only Bram and me hanging out, that’s what we do.
When I’m with Henry, we go for walks, maybe stopping by the library or hitting the diner, where whoever can finish an entire cup of stale coffee first wins a slice of pie, paid for by the loser. If Henry and I watch a movie together, we’re talking over it the whole time, debating its merits, cracking jokes. It’s not quiet like it is with Bram, where it’s enough to just be in each other’s presence.
As for Adam, I doubt he’s ever sat through an entire movie in his life. Up until last year, he could never keep still. When we hung out, it always consisted of passing a ball of some sort on the mansion’s lawn. He’d talk about which girl he liked at the moment; I’d stealthily avoid having to reciprocate and talk about my crush. Sometimes we’d pull pranks together, like when we tapedLooking for a Prom Dateads with Jimmy Ciccone’s photo on them around school after he’d trashed Adam’s football performance in the school’s sports column. I was there to tone down Adam’s more extreme ideas of retribution and keep him out of jail. It’s heartbreaking seeing Adam as a quiet recluse now, because he’d always been loud andout there, whether for good or bad.
Bram is Adam’s opposite in many ways: He’d rather keep to the shadows than be in the spotlight and speaks only when he really has something to say. Now he simply nods, gesturing for me to lead the way to the home theater.
I do, with guilt creeping up again. The truth is, I’m not here to relax on the leather reclining seats with Bram and sit in contentedsilence. I’m here to find out why he was the one who found Kennedy in those woods yesterday. “Bram,” I say, taking a seat front and center, “you said you took a while getting back after the fire drill.”
“Yeah,” he says, picking up the remote.
“Except the cops say that you weren’t on the attendance sheet for the drill.”
His spine stiffens, but he continues navigating the screen browser. “That’s because I lied.”
I flinch, shock hitting me like a fist. Somehow, I hoped the teachers were wrong, that Bram would be able to prove they simply missed him and his brothers. It sounds stupid, now that I really think through it. “You lied to me?” I hate how my voice cracks, how hurt I sound.
“I’m sorry,” he says, dropping the remote on the seat nearest him and turning to me. “I wish I hadn’t. But it doesn’t mean I lied about everything else.”
It doesn’t? He must see the dilemma he’s handed me. I’m expected to trust him, to believe the words that come out of his mouth. But yesterday he lied about the fire drill.
What’s to say he didn’t lie about not being the person on the video surveillance footage? “Where were you, then?” I ask. The question sounds sharp, almost like righteous indignation. Maybe it’ll force the truth out of him. This is his chance to rectify things between us.
Bram rubs at his face, deep in thought. He rests his chin on his palm, the other arm crossed over his stomach. “You remember thatHenry and I were together in the cafeteria when you left.”
I nod.
“Well, we went to find Adam. And when we did, he was in bad shape.”
“You mean the bumps on his head?”
