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Then, when I’m sure no one is looking, I cross the hall to Devon’s locker and put in the combination. I take out a notebook and flip through it, comforted just seeing his handwriting inside. That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? To love someone so much you find comfort in their handwriting?
A jacket hangs on a hook inside, and I bring it to my nose and breathe it in. I consider taking it with me, but I’ve taken enough from him. Instead, I wordlessly say goodbye to Devon, too, and about a million ‘I’m sorrys’ before closing the locker and taking the bus home for the last time.
The hallways are busy again by the time I leave Ally in the bathroom. I hate that she got to me—with her sad eyes and her fake fucking bullshit and I almost started to feel bad for her.Almost.
And what did she mean when she said I wouldn’t have to worry about her for long? Was that a threat? Was she trying to say that…
No.
She wouldn’t do something like that. But trying to make me think that she would? That’s something the manipulative bitch would do.
I walk in late to calculus and take my seat in the back. The teacher doesn’t mouth off to me like he would have last year, demanding retribution for this kind of blatant disrespect, desperate for any excuse to flex his imagined power and stroke his ego. When I look up at him, it looks like resisting the urge is causing him physicalpain, and I smirk.
He hands out a test I didn’t know about, but even after missing months of class, I’m not worried. I put my phone in my pocket and take out my scientific calculator as instructed, then write my name and the date at the top of the page.
October 22nd.
Oh, fuck no.
Ally wasn’t trying to trick me into thinking she was suicidal; she was referring to her birthday on Monday. Does she actually think that she can just fucking take that money and leave after everything that happened?
She thinks she gets to get out?
I snap the pencil in my fist in half. I look up at the clock—it’s almost two. Ally has volleyball practice after school, but Grace will be home pretty soon. I could just tell her. I could go to her house and knock on the door, and maybe she would see me and wouldn’t answer it, but I could tell her about the hiding place under Ally’s bed. I could tell her about the money, and she’d look, and then she’d take it. Ally would be stuck here, and she’d be pissed.
But that would be so much less satisfying than if she just found it all gone and knew it was me.
So I decide to wait.
I get there early on Sunday and watch the car back out of the driveway. I make sure Ally’s in the passenger seat and that her uncle’s BMW is still gone, and he’s still off campaigning somewhere.
Then, I strut across the street in broad daylight, climb onto the AC unit, and through the bathroom window.
I head through the pristine modern home—the one that still looks like no one lives there. I think about trashing it just for the hell of it. Well, not just for the hell of it, but because this whole fucking family played a part in this and because fuck them, and I barely manage not to. My more calculating side wins over impulse this time. I can’t tip them off that someone has been in the house.
Even though I’m almost certain she made up or, at best, exaggerated the abuse, there is something just not right about this house—an ominous feeling. The air is thicker somehow, and it makes it hard to swallow. I wonder how I missed it the first time I was here, but I guess I must not have been paying attention. I missed a lot of things back then.
I take the stairs two at a time up to the room at the end of the hall without a doorknob. I drop down to the ground and slide under the bed, feeling around for the loose board. I find it quickly, then remove the entire box and set it aside. I dig around in my bag for the present I’d gotten for Ally, remove it from the plastic container, and set it down unceremoniously into the hole beforereplacing the board. I get up, drop the box of cash inside my bag, and then throw it over my shoulder.
I leave the same way I came in, and I’m back home in under an hour. That was easy.
My dad’s new place is a three-bedroom townhouse close to downtown. It’s small, but that’s okay when you’re a twice-divorced guy and your only kid is either going to jail or college, so they won’t need much space. There’s no pool on the property, and I’m sure that was intentional. He has a cat, he doesn’t sleep, and he’s lonely. I can tell he misses Lydia. And Darci, too. He misses the life he had before Ally, and so do I.
It was hard enough trying to wrap his head around Darci’s death and my inevitable arrest. When the story about the knife came out, and police found that stupid fucking picture she took, Lydia made up her mind about me pretty fast. She moved out three days later. How could she stay with someone whose son murdered her daughter?
Still, he never really let go. When we’d talk, I’d ask if he was okay, and, of course, he always said he was, but he’d also talk about how everything was going to be better once “they” find out I didn’t do this, but I think the only “they” he ever worried about was her. I think he expected her to call once the video came out. Maybe he still does, but it hasn’t happened yet.
I close the door to my room on the second floor, dig the box from my bag, and open it. Two envelopes rest on top; I tear open the one stamped and addressed to the school and find herwithdrawal form fully filled out, signed, and dated. The other isn’t sealed, and there’s a bus ticket inside from Seattle to San Diego. It leaves tomorrow night.
Interesting choice. I wonder what happened to Florida. I wonder if that would have been her landing place or if it was just a spot to rest before she moved on because three days on a bus wasn’t so appealing when it actually came time to do it.
I also wonder what her plan was. Was she going to try and leave tonight, catch a bus or a ride down to Seattle, and stay the night there? Or was she going to wait until tomorrow after school, skip volleyball practice, then get on the bus and never come back?
Underneath that is the cash. It’s all there—morethan all there. I count out just over $6,300 dollars, which means Ally hasn’t completely retired from petty theft or selling drugs or whatever she was up to. There’s a handful of third through sixth place track ribbons she’s kept for some reason, and some pictures at the bottom of Ally and a woman I assume is her mother. In some of the photos, she can’t be much older than Ally is now. The coloring is different; the woman has light brown hair and blue or green eyes, but her face shape, her cheekbones, and her smile are all Ally.
In one of the pictures, she holds a toddler version of the girl who ruined my life in her lap, smiling down at her. In another, they’re at a beach together. This one must have been taken right before her mom was arrested because Ally doesn’t look much younger than she is now. She’s in a bikini, leaning against theshorter woman’s shoulder. There aren’t any marks on her hips or thighs, and it trips me up for a second.
“Doesn’t change anything,” I say aloud to myself.
