Page 33 of Leave No Trace
‘Yes.’ I nodded at the rock. ‘I do know what that’s like.’
‘That’s the problem,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about you, do I? I tell you everything and you tell me nothing.’
Turning to face him, I looked him straight in the eye, giving him my complete attention. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’
‘Why were you a patient at Congdon?’
My mouth fell open in sheer surprise. Lucas watched me, waiting, until I exhaled, long and heavy.
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘It tells me what kind of person I’m trusting with my father’s life.’ Then his head dropped and his jaw tightened, struggling with the qualification. ‘If he’s alive.’
I tried to put myself in his place, tried to remember how it felt before I’d really gotten to know Dr Mehta – the one-sided revelation called counseling. It had been uncomfortable, exposing, like I was stripping naked and prancing around in front of fully clothed, expressionless people. As Lucas’s speech therapist, I wasn’t supposed to tell him my life story. But as a friend...
‘There’s not much to tell. My mom...’
‘Didn’t stick around,’ he supplied, startling me with his uncanny recall.
‘Yeah.’ I plowed ahead, trying to do it quick, like a Band-Aid. ‘I didn’t handle it well. Neither did my dad. He disappeared out there’ – I waved to the lake – ‘as much as he could and left me with a woman who didn’t care what I did so long as my dad’s checks cashed. She lived over there.’
I pointed to an area even further south of our house, where violence, drugs, and drunkenness saturated the neighborhood with a reek even the lake winds couldn’t blow away.
‘I started hanging out with random kids on the street. Getting into trouble.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘The usual. Stealing, destruction of property, breaking and entering. I discovered I had a knack for picking locks, which endeared me to a certain group of people.’
‘And that’s why you got sent to Congdon?’
‘No.’ Bryce stubbed out his second cigarette and headed across the outcrop toward us. I turned back to Lucas, my face carefully blank, and told him what I’d never shared with anyone outside of Congdon’s walls.
‘I got committed because I killed a man and painted my face with his blood.’
Lucas gaped as Bryce reached us. I stood up and stretched.
‘Are you done yet?’ Bryce asked.
I patted Jasper on the head. ‘Yeah, let’s go.’
15
Something happensto you after you kill a person.
I’m not talking about the guilt or the doubt or the nightmares that make you do it over and over, each time a little different, each time like you have a chance to change it but you never can. What happens, in the daylight hours, is a bubble forms between you and everyone else, invisible and impenetrable. Everyone on the outside is all the same. They work and they hustle and they complain about what they don’t have and then they go home and crawl into their beds and drift away. And you can never be part of them, because something is awake in you that doesn’t know how to sleep.
I still remember the crunch of his skull, how it didn’t feel broken as I smashed the rock into it – there was no sudden give, no tremor of anything reverberating through my fingers – but I heard the pop of fracturing bone. It was a dull sound, the kind of noise that would have been forgotten in the next breath if it meant anything else and it wasn’t even the sound itself that haunted me; it was the feeling that washed through me the instant I heard that crack and saw his body go limp. Not horror. Not regret. Not even relief. It was happiness, a raw, savage joy that flooded my veins as I stood over him.
I was fifteen, I had just ended someone’s life, and I was happy.
The week started out on a crap note to begin with. Some cheerleader named Hope – why not call her Glass Half Full, you unsubtle helicopter parents? – picked a fight with me before class and of course I was the one who got suspended, not pom-pom girl. Dad was somewhere on Lake Ontario and wouldn’t be back until Saturday, so I spent the week roaming Lincoln Park with all the badassery of an unsupervised spring ninth grader. I walked the train tracks, stole Twinkies from the gas station, and finally decided to break into an abandoned warehouse, where I ran into two guys smoking weed.
Their names were Derek and Rex and they called themselves D-Rex, or rather Rex did and Derek put up with it. I’d seen them around before. They’d just gotten into town and had hung around the fringes of our group for the last month or so. One was short, the other fat. I didn’t think I had anything to worry about from some short, fat rookies, even if they were a lot older than me, so we spent the afternoon wandering the neighborhood together. Rex, the fat one, kept wanting to find things to eat. Derek, the short one, played music on his iPhone and scrolled through the crappy pictures on my old flip phone. One of them was a picture of a picture – a shot of me and my mother standing in front of the cabin. When he asked, I shrugged off a few details, touching the agate necklace I wore beneath my shirt. Yes, that was me. My mom used to take me up north every summer, before she left us.
‘I swear to God I saw her the other day. Rex and I came from up north.’
‘From Ely?’ I spun around.
