AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I just have to know the truth,” Kami said. “The worst thing that’s happened in my life is my grandmother dying while I was at cricket camp. You know that. I told you that. You haven’t told me about this. I know you hated your father, and I know that the summer before last was bad, that you weren’t with your parents. I know your father’s dead. Tell me how he died.”
Jared looked at her for another moment, then passed a hand through his hair and looked away. The edge of his jaw was hard, scar pulled tight over his cheek.
“My dad hated us,” he said. “Me and Mom. He hated us all the time. He wasn’t drunk all the time, but he was drunk often enough. The summer before last, he gave me this scar, and I ran away.”
There was no emotion in his voice, stripped clean like flesh from dry bone, but Kami knew how he had felt.
“I slept on the streets for a few months, and then I got sick in the fall, and after I was well I thought about Mom and how she always got sick. I thought about how I’d left her alone.”
“You went back for her,” Kami said.
Jared’s mouth twisted. “I went back,” he said. “It was late, and he was drunk. He didn’t let me in the door. We were fighting out in the hall, he was shouting and she was screaming, and he—he fell down the stairs. Broke his neck.”
“Someone pushed him, Ash said.” Kami did not add, Just like someone pushed me.
“When the police came, Mom said I pushed him. She made sure they took me away in handcuffs.” Jared looked at Kami again. His gaze was defiant, almost desperate, as if he was daring her not to believe him. As if he expected her not to. “There was a security camera in our building, and it showed I wasn’t close enough to have pushed him. I hated him enough to kill him, but I didn’t.”
Kami suddenly knew how hate like that felt, the cold absoluteness of it. “I believe you,” she said.
His mother had betrayed him. He’d come back for her, and she’d sent him to a cell. Kami had talked to him when he reached out for her, lonely and desperate, even though she hadn’t known what she was talking him through. He had talked to her the same way when her grandmother died. Even though that had been different, had been an ordinary tragedy, an old woman with a bad heart, and this was a nightmare, she’d meant it when she said she was on his side.
“Ash isn’t going to turn me against you,” Kami told him. “You can trust me.”
There was a flicker of warmth between them, like a match lit.
“Come on, Glass,” said Jared. “I’ll take you home.”
Kami had told him nothing but the truth. She did believe him. She believed he’d hated his father enough to kill him. And she knew, could feel the wall in his mind, that there was something else he was hiding.
Chapter Eleven
The Haunted River
They had to swing by Jared’s locker so he could grab his jacket. “A leather jacket,” Kami said as he shrugged into it. “Aren’t you trying a little too hard to play into certain bad boy clichés?”
“Nah,” said Jared. “You’re thinking of black leather. Black leather’s for bad boys. It’s all in the color. You wouldn’t think I was a bad boy if I was wearing a pink leather jacket.”
“That’s true,” Kami said. “What I would think of you, I do not know. So what does brown leather mean, then?”
“I’m going for manly,” Jared said. “Maybe a little rugged.”
“It’s bits of dead cow; don’t ask it to perform miracles.”
Jared laughed. “Come on, I brought a spare helmet for you,” he said, reaching into his locker again.
As he spoke, she reached for him in her mind, and felt the pleasure he felt in his motorbike. She could taste some of the thrill, the speed and the danger.
“Ahahaha!” said Kami. “No, you didn’t. You brought it for someone else, someone who doesn’t know that you have crashed that bike fifty-eight times!”
“Technically speaking, only fifty-one of those times were my fault.”
“Technically speaking, you drive like a rabid chicken who has hijacked a tractor.”
“Like a bat out of hell,” Jared said. “Nice simile. Sounds sort of dangerous and cool. Consider it.”
“Not a chance. I like my brains the way they are, not lightly scrambled and scattered across a road. And speaking of bad boy clichés, really, a motorcycle?”
“Again, I say: rugged,” Jared told her. “Manly.”
