Page 32 of Together We Rot

Ronnie gulps. I can hear the rustle of sheets again as she sits upright. “Okay, Wil, we’ll be there in five.”

“What do you mean ‘we’—?”

Lucas hangs up before I get an answer.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ELWOOD

Lucas and Wil decide the perfect time and place for World War III is right here in the car. “What part of ‘subtle’ did you not understand?” she gripes, her finger launching in Kevin’s direction as soon as she opens the door. He sits like contraband in the back seat and his smile slips clean off his face. “Are we stopping along the way to pick up Brian Schmidt too, or is he already hiding out in your trunk? Might as well schedule a town parade while we’re at it.”

Kevin coughs out an “Uh, I can leave,” but Lucas is having none of it.

“Ignore her, Kevin. Sit down and shut up, Greene. You said you wanted to go to the library.” Lucas hurls her attitude right back at her. “Ergo, I brought Kevin. The guy who literally works at the library and has keys. What? Did you expect us to break in?”

She huffs, and when it’s clear she’s got no intention of buckling up, I snake a shy hand across from her and pull the belt into place. She throws me a withering look before returning to Lucas. “It would’ve been easy.”

“Yeah, no. Some of us have futures to think about. Speaking of...” Lucas finds my reflection in the rearview mirror. I could be on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and he still wouldn’t stare any harder than he does now. “What the hell is going on with you, dude?”

The sight of him has my teeth chattering. His blond curls are smashed beneath a red knit cap and the rest of him is zipped up in a thick Patagonia jacket. Red plaid manages to peek out from the zipper, and I’m sure even that is thermal.

“Um,” I start. I don’t finish. The wind punches at the glass, hungry and clawing for what it can’t have.

“I’m going to need a little more than an ‘um’ here. Your dad and Sheriff Vrees barged into my house looking for you. You’ve got ‘Missing’ posters, for Christ’s sake. I’m surprised they don’t have helicopters out yet.” He glances at the sky like they might swoop down any second. “What happened after we dropped you off? And why are you with her—? Don’t tell me the two of you are a thing again.”

“Jesus,” Wil says, and I try not to think too hard about how disgusted she sounds. “Once again to you and the rest of the universe: we were never a thing. Also, that’s real bold coming out of your mouth.”

“We were going to tell you,” Veronica insists. Her foundation is a shade too dark for her skin, applied in a way that suggests she threw it on in a hurry. She’s wearing one of those bubble vests over a long zebra-striped shirt. Lucas talks about Vee almost daily. When he isn’t talking to her, he’s blatantly staring at her down the hall. “I swear.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Wil grumbles to herself at the same moment Kevin places a hand over my shoulder.

“Seriously, Elwood, are you okay?” he tries. “We’ve been worried about you.”

Saying the words aloud to Wil was hard enough. Repeating them for the rest of the car proves almost impossible. I clear my throat. “I ran away.”

Lucas blinks from the steering wheel and his frustration seeps back in. “When I told you to stand up for yourself, I meant apply to college, not run away from home. No wonder your dad was so pissed at me. He practically accused me of kidnapping you.”

My father’s face flashes in my mind. I see him with his finger wedged tight in Lucas’s chest, shorter yet still finding a way to loom over him.

“There’s more to it than that,” Wil says on my behalf. She grinds her teeth as if just being in the same car as Lucas is enough to set her off. The two of them have always been oil and water—identical ends of a magnet, repellent in their similarity. Kevin joked once that Lucas was the only one who could properly fill the hole Wil left, but I don’t think even he could fill her shoes.

When she opens her mouth again, the whole story comes pouring out of her lips. It sounds exceedingly worse hearing it from someone else.

Lucas is quiet for one shell-shocked minute. He shares a look with Veronica and Kevin, pleading with one of them to speak first. When no one does, his eyes settle hard on me. “And you believe all that?”

If I close my eyes, I’m still running, branches whipping across my skin and fear sloshing in my gut. The forest has never left, and I see it on the back of my eyelids. Trees splitting the clouds, trunks wider than homes, roots ripping like fingers. The deeper you go, the less light there is. At its heart, not even the moon can penetrate through the leaves.

It had been real in the moment, but here in the car doubt gnaws away at my memory. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Wil interjects.

“Not talking to you, Wil. I know what you believe.”

“Oh, you think I put him up to this?”

His fingers tense on the wheel. “Quite frankly, yes. You ran off with him at the party, said God knows what to him there, he comes out looking thoroughly off his shit for the rest of the night, and now suddenly everything has gone off the deep end.” His eyes find mine in the rearview. “No offense, dude. You were drunk and Wil put this wild idea in your head. It was my bad. I should’ve eased you into drinking, so you left with a clear head. But you’re all trying to tell me that after a year of Wil auditioning for Dateline, now we all believe her tales? We’re talking about your parents, man. They’re all holier than thou and overbearing, but murder? Cults? This isn’t a TV show. This is real life.”

“Last I checked, a small group of secretive people with strange rituals is the textbook definition of a cult,” Wil scoffs. “Ronnie, Elwood, tell me why you’ve never told me anything about the church services before. I was under the impression that religious people loved talking about their faith.”

Veronica and I share a glance. “It’s this whole ‘keep it to ourselves’ thing Elwood’s dad preaches,” she says. “Everything runs on a need-to-know basis in the GOA”—she abbreviates Garden of Adam like it’s text slang—“where only adults have access to certain things. Basically up until you’re eighteen, you’re just sitting there twiddling your thumbs and listening. Then, suddenly, once you’re an adult, you’re magically super devoted like Mom. I never questioned it before. I thought it was just getting older and suddenly wanting to pal it up with Jesus. It’s weird, for sure.”

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