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“She’s not going to fucking die,” Zig snaps. “We’ll take precautions. No fucking fairy lights, and we’ll postpone Christmas no matter how Salem protests,” he argues, but Ev laughs bitterly.
“You’re taking precautions against the things Astrid saw, but you still don’t believe her without proof?” He shakes his head. “You can’t have it both ways. But then this must be how it always is for—oh shit!”
“What? What is it?” I step forward as Ev types something else, and the large screen on the wall flares to life.
“Bingo, I’m in.”
I spot the national headlines that Ev showed us earlier about the school shooting that Astrid was implicated in before her name disappears completely from the following copies. I dismiss them for a minute, trying to find what it was that caused Ev’s reaction. And there it is, on page five of a local paper.
“Psychic Teenager Saw School Shooting Two Weeks Before It Happened”
Something heavy presses on my chest as I move closer, seeing more articles about the eerie claims of the then sixteen-year-old Astrid.
“It says she went to the police, and they sent her away with a warning about wasting police time,” Oz reads.
“Jesus, the officer who sent her away was the same guy who arrested her the day after the shooting.”
“How come that didn’t flag up before?” I choke out, vomit rushing up the back of my throat, but I swallow it down.
“Like I said, she changed her name, and her parents’ influence made all this disappear.”
“This doesn’t prove she wasn’t involved,” Oz says quietly.
“She had an airtight alibi.” Ev turns and points to the far corner of the screen. “That’s how they hid everything so easily. Because she was innocent. The police would have looked like fucking idiots if this came out. She was in a cell while the massacre happened after being arrested the night before for causing a disturbance. She was waiting for her parents to post bail, but they never turned up. Eventually, her guardian, who is also her lawyer, came and collected her.”
“So why all this if they knew she didn’t do it?” I wave my hand angrily over the original newspaper articles. Angry at them, angry at me, and angry at all of us for believing this bullshit.
“She knew too much. They didn’t believe she was psychic, so she had to be the killer or an accomplice who was in on the plan all along. That was the only way she could have known the details like she did. The police really had it in for her. So did the grieving residents of her hometown,” Ev says quietly as he flips to the next screen.
Photos of a black and blue Astrid lying in a hospital bed, her face so swollen it looks deformed. I wouldn’t know it was her if it wasn’t for the mass of white hair.
“She was attacked?” I snarl.
“Over and over again. The town was grieving, and she made the perfect scapegoat. She never went back to school. And as soon as the case was dropped against her, her parents moved her away. It might have been the one good thing they did for her because they seemed conveniently absent for everything else. Saving the world took precedence over saving their only daughter, I guess.” Ev turns to look at us, his face hard.
“You know what this means? That even though she might have been miles away, locked in a cell when it happened, she saw it all as if she was there. She saw her classmates gunned down—teachers who she knew most of her life lying dead in the hallways. She saw it all, but no one believed her. I bet she still sees it every time she closes her fucking eyes.” He turns back to the screen.
“One of the detectives, James Allen, filed a complaint about the handling of her case. He had been there when she made her initial report. He was also one of the detectives who took statements from the families of the victims.” Ev points to a report and enlarges it so we can read the messy writing more clearly.
“Claire Delaney taught AP Chemistry. She got dressed in a white dress that morning, but when she went to leave the house, she spilled coffee all over herself and changed into gray pants, and a pink shirt.” He flicks to a crime screen photo of the teacher lying in a pool of blood before highlighting a section of the officer’s report.
“Astrid described her outfit, gray pants and a pink shirt, two weeks before this went down. She talked about seeing a lone shoe at the bottom of the stairs, as if it fell off when someone was running away, too scared to come back for it.” He points to another photo, and sure enough, there is a black high-heeled shoe at the bottom of the stairs.
“I could read you a dozen more details that seem insignificant, but these are all things Astrid couldn’t have known about without seeing them. Sure, she could have planned everything down to the last detail. But she wouldn’t have known about the little things like spilled coffee, pink shirts, and lone shoes.”
I take a step back as the full impact of what he’s saying—what he’s been trying to say all along—hits me.
Looking me in the eye, Ev shakes his head before looking at Oz and Zig with the same disappointment. “We just did to her what they all did.”
“Wait, it’s not the same,” Zig says, but there isn’t much conviction in his voice.
“Might as well be. Because from where I’m sitting, yet again, there was nobody in her corner.”
I shake my head. “You’re wrong. This time she had you and Greg.” It should have been me and Jagger, but thank fuck for them.
“Doesn’t matter. I was the one who brought your attention to this shit before I had all the facts.”
“You were just doing your job, and you told us to wait until you could dig further. This isn’t on you,” Oz tells him as his eyes move to mine. “It’s on us. We fucked up. We need to go talk to her. Apologize.”
