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We locked eyes. “Oh,” she said, a dark smile curdling her lips. “Youdo.”
“Shut up.”
“Ooooh,” she said, looping her arm through mine. “Youdoooolike him. Well, well, Madeline Martin.”
“Stop.”
She lifted her palms as I turned off into history class. “Hands off, I promise. Girl rules.”
Badger stood behind Steph. He still hadn’t said a word, his expression unreadable. He whispered something to Steph and she laughed, still looking at me, then they walked off as my history teacher shut the door.
After I put my dad to bed, I come back to the porch and sit on the swing, turning the little mechanism on the music box, thinking. Those days feel like a thousand years ago, but I can still see the vibrant red of Steph’s sweater, smell the lilac scent of her shampoo. And all those new feelings I had for Evan; I can still feel them.
I’ve gotten the timing right on the music box and recognize the tune.
I’ll Be Home for Christmas.
I’m sitting with the eeriness of it, the odd promise that seems like a threat.
Evan Handy will not be home for Christmas, this much I know. He is serving life without the possibility for parole at the state penitentiary. Unless Harley Granger finds new evidence. And even then, a new trial could take years.
But who else is out there?
I’m pondering this as a pair of headlights wind their way up the drive. It’s Badger; somehow, I can tell before I even see the sleek lines of his electric blue GTO, the first car he ever restored with his dad and our ride for pretty much everything after that.
He climbs out and lopes over to the porch, walks up the shallow steps and sits heavily beside me on the porch swing. I put the music box in my pocket.
“I thought you weren’t going to talk to him?” he says after a moment of silence.
“I—”
“Don’t bother telling me you didn’t. Three people saw the Scout parked in front of his house.”
This town. I swear. I don’t bother denying it, or even making any of the excuses I made to myself as I drove over there—I just wanted to find out what he knows, wanted to tell him to back off, convince him that justice was served.
Instead, “Do you still think about them?”
He doesn’t ask me who. “Of course,” he says, voice just a breath. “Every day.”
“And that night?”
“Same.”
“Do you do that thing where you go over and over every detail and wonder how it could have gone differently?”
He nods, looks down at his feet.
“We never talk about it. Like never,” I say into silence. This thing that changed us both irrevocably is never discussed, as if words will breathe new life into the horror show of our memories.
He shrugs. “I had to try to—move past it. Life goes on, right?”
That’s what they say. But it isn’t true for all of us, is it?
“I’m still back there, I think. Maybe part of me died there on the riverbank.”
He looks at me sharply. “Don’t say that.”
“I think it’s true,” I say, wrapping my arms around my middle. “It’s my fault they were all there. I didn’t deserve to be the only one who came home.”
