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“Is that so bad?” I asked.
“Here in Hart Hollow it can be,” she said, staring at the words on the pages. “And I wish I still did.”
“Believe in God?” I flipped through pages of the book, pausing briefly at each sketch.
“Yeah, I guess I don’t anymore. Not really,” she said. “It’s hard, after what happened.”
“Did you know Amber?” I asked.
“Yeah, she was my lab partner in biology last year.”
And there it was, hidden away. The strongest tie to the most recent runaway girl. My body hummed with the knowledge, something Nicole had failed to mention during our meeting of ragtag sleuths.
I leaned in close. “How come you didn’t say that at your house the other night?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and I saw the lie on her lips, heard it in her tone. I didn’t know it yet, but I could sniff out a lie and smell it in the air.
“Nicole …” I said, leaning closer, ready to pry, but she didn’t let me continue.
“We were friends,” Nicole said, her voice low. “We shouldn’t have been, she was … she was who she is, and I’m … well, you know.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, though everyone keeps telling me I should know. I didn’t grow up knowing all these rules and things you guys have. Living where we live makes us bad, and being who she is, someone like Kyrie, makes her good? Aren’t we all a little bit good and bad? Like Athena,” I mused, referencing the chapter we had read recently. I couldn’t get over Medusa’s fate.
“Yes. But her boyfriend—”
“Eric Childress?” The captain of the basketball team, his name meant something in that small town. His father was the Sheriff, and his mother was the vice principal of the elementary school, which could be found on the other side of the cafeteria. The entire school shared the same cafeteria; that’s how small it was. But I knew nothing different. It was vast, crowded, a labyrinth I was happy to traverse. It beat the alternative.
Nicole leaned closer, hiding behind her hair. “If we were talking about an assignment or anything in the hall, and Eric walked up, she would turn her back to me, act like we hadn’t just been talking to each other. I was nothing when he was near, and she acted like …” She stopped there, a blush taking over her face. I didn’t press further, but I would later.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she asked.
“That she treated you that way. And that you miss her.”
Nicole’s green eyes held a glimmer, looking at me like she had been seen for the first time in a long time. I didn’t know what it was like to have a sibling, let alone a twin who was more enigmatic than you, overshadowing you every time she was in the room. But I knew what it felt like to be invisible or think that you were. Strangely, moving to Hart Hollow, starting school there, and making friends had been the first time I’d felt anything remotely like a family—like I mattered.
“I miss her,” Nicole whispered. “And, I could never tell anyone because they’d never believe that we were friends or anything,” she admitted. “She was a prep, I’m—”
“I believe you,” I said, meaning it. Nicole didn’t strike me as someone who would lie. She had secrets, that much was certain. But she kept them to protect herself, to protect someone else.
She laughed then, almost in a way that sounded like relief, then wiped her eyes. “What was your old school like?” she asked.
“Ah, it was okay,” I replied, wanting to avoid lying to her. Maybe I needed to tell my new friends about my past, where I came from. Valerie had warned me to stick to the script, never divulge our pasts. I didn’t know where I came from yet, but I’d adopted the last name whispered in the dark the night the fire came. Hemming. The woman with the wild hair and the blood called me Hemming before Valerie and I fled.
So when Valerie asked me what name I wanted to go by, I chose my middle name and the name she’d uttered.Nicholas Hemming.My first name never felt like my own, and I smiled at the words when we obtained the falsified birth certificates. Nicholas Hemming. No middle name. A fresh start. Valerie had kept her first name and had given herself a generic last name.
A fresh start for us both.
A clean slate to be wiped with blood.
* * *
After school, Nicole came over to study. I figured getting her alone was the only way to get more information out of her. I knew there was something she was hiding, and I needed to know what it was.
We sat at the picnic table in my backyard, bundled up in our hoodies, below my bedroom window. Nicole remarked on the placement. “So, how often do you sneak out?” she asked.
I laughed, glancing at the tree line where the cemetery was. “From time to time.”
