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ALLIE
Everything happened so quickly. One moment, I cheered on Redwood’s defense, and the next, I was pushing through a herd of terrified high school students with Imani in tow, trying desperately to find Jace.
Amid the craziness, I couldn’t find him or any of the football players, which should’ve been easy because they were all so much taller than the typical Redwood student. Deep down, I knew Imani and I weren’t in any big trouble. But … still.
Imani suddenly stopped in the middle of the crowd as people pushed past us, shoving us out of the way to get to the exit of the field. Cops stood around, trying to calm people down and make sure they were safe, trying to be nice. Cops in Redwood were never nice; they were always corrupt. Now, they were scared that they’d be next.
“Come on, Imani. We need to go.”
When I tugged on her hand, she didn’t budge. I turned back around to see tears streaming down her cheeks. The bright red face paint in the shape of a R on her left cheek dripped down the side of her face from her tears. She went to wipe them away, but she couldn’t even pull her arms up enough to reach her cheeks with her trembling hands. She mouthed my name, but no words came out.
Despite the adrenaline and nerves rushing through me, I wrapped my arms around her, like she had done to me countless times, and stroked her back. “Imani, we have to go. We don’t know what else they have planned.”
She shook her head, still unmoving. “They-they killed someone!”
I swallowed hard, not knowing how to react. My gut reaction was to tell her that I’d told her to stay away from Poison because they were no good and did shit that nobody else would do, but that would be rude—absolutely, terribly rude.
So, I pushed her forward with the crowd, so we wouldn’t be trampled.
“That’s what they do,” I said, careful not to speak their name out loud and in public.
While everyone must have known that this was their doing, I didn’t want to incriminate them. I needed to thank them.
She wrapped her arms around me as we kept up with the students. “I knew they were bad news, but … I-I-I didn’t think that they’d do anything like this. They took a life and put it on display like it was … nothing.” When we made it out onto the sidewalks, where everyone was dispersing onto the streets and speeding out of the parking lots, she continued, “How many times do you think they’ve done that before? Once? Twice? Hundreds of times?”
After scanning the crowd again for any sign of Poison or Jace, I turned back to her. “I don’t know, Imani,” I answered honestly.
I wanted to tell her that they probably hadn’t done it before, but that’d most likely be a lie. From the outside, they looked like they had done that many times before, to the point of perfection.
Past the point of shock, Imani shook her head and turned back to the stadium. “I’m going to scream at them for this! How do you just kill someone and throw their fucking head onto the field during a football game?! You have to be fucking insane.”
Never before having seen this side of her, I grabbed her by the wrist and dug my heels into the ground to try to stop her. “If you go back in there, the cops will question you and pressure you to give up any information you have on them. You don’t want to get them sent to jail, do you?” I asked her. But honestly, the way she was reacting right now made it seem like she didn’t care what happened to them, though I knew she did.
“They killed someone, Allie. Doesn’t that scare you?!” she asked, continuing back to the cops at the gated entrance to the football field.
A couple looked over at her, giving us that look all cops gave when they thought that they had something stuffed in the bag, thought that they could coerce an innocent person into lying or spilling more than the truth just to prove their own beliefs.
She looked back at me with furrowed brows and a disgusted expression. Truth was, Jace and I were living with a murderer. We had been living with one for the past two years. And now, I would always be a bundle of nerves when I was with Harlan.
Murder shouldn’t be positive by any means, but, sometimes and for some people—like Harlan and Principal Vaughn—it was needed.
“They won’t even be inside,” I argued. “They’re probably watching from a distance.”
After my last few words, she stopped abruptly. “Watching from a distance …”
When she turned back around, a red car drove by, almost as if on cue. Though the windows were tinted, I didn’t miss the small smirk I saw from the driver’s window from João when they drove under a streetlight.
As the car drove down the street, Imani went to chase after it like a madwoman. I captured her wrist again and dragged her down the street toward the bad side of Redwood.
“There is no point in chasing them. They’re already gone.” And they were our damn ride.
I scanned the field for any sign of Jace and frowned when I still couldn’t find him. After Poison’s big reveal, the crowd had been pushing people down the bleachers so fast and so abruptly that I dropped my stupid phone and couldn’t find it.
Imani hurried down the sidewalk and inched closer to me. It had to be below freezing out here at the moment. The frames on my nose felt like they were ice sitting on my face.
A car pulled up to the sidewalk a few feet ahead, and whoever was driving rolled down the passenger window. For a moment, I thought it was one of the Poison boys picking us up, but it was Nicole. Fucking Nicole, out of all the damn people it could be.
“Get in,” she said to us. “You’ll freeze out there.”
