“Ohmygod,” Natalie gasped.
Hallucinations. The thought flashed in my brain just as the binoculars fell out of Natalie’s hand. Her face was pale, eyes wide and glistening with tears. My stomach fluttered with a hundred dread-filled butterflies.
“Jesus,” Trip said, looking from her to me. “What’s going on here?”
Natalie was rocking gently back and forth, hands covering her mouth like she was stifling a scream. I went over, squatted in front of her. “What, Nat?” I said, hearing a quaver in my own voice. “What was it?”
Her eyes found mine, and I saw she was scared. “God, Riley . . .” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I saw my dad,” she said shakily. “In our house. There was blood everywhere.” Natalie breathed quickly, like she could barely suck in the air. “I think he was dead.”
My body felt cold, every hair on end. Go, my brain whispered. Walk away. Pretend this never happened. But I was frozen.
And in that moment, Tannis leaned forward and picked up the binoculars. I’m not sure if I thought she wouldn’t look or if I hoped she wouldn’t see anything. Maybe I was just too stunned to act. It wouldn’t have mattered; Tannis would have looked anyway. That was how she was. Or at least I tell myself that now.
The dark lenses reflected the fire, with Tannis’s thick blond hair spilling loose around them. When we were kids, she wore it in ponytails, dirty and messy by the end of the day from climbing trees and riding BMX bikes with the boys. Tannis was tough. I knew no matter what, she wasn’t going to freak out or cry. I wasn’t even sure she knew how to do those things.
I held my breath, staticky nonsense in my brain, until finally she lowered them.
“Well, that was really f**king weird,” she said softly. She looked at Nat, who was rubbing her temples. “It was me, on the mountain,” Tannis said. “I was walking Wraparound in summer. You know, like, hiking?” I nodded. “There were a couple kids with me. The way I felt about them . . . I think”—she hesitated—“they might have been mine.” She laughed nervously, looked at me. Waited.
She wanted me to tell what I’d seen.
Not a chance.
Natalie stood suddenly and lurched away from the circle.
Trip jumped up. “Nat?” He followed her to the edge of the woods. She stumbled, and he grabbed her arm. Then she threw up.
“We should go,” I said, the voice—Get out!—now screaming in my head. I started to gather our things, robotically stuffing my backpack with beer cans, matches, sweatshirt. This wasn’t okay. Something was wrong here. Very wrong.
Tannis nodded, dumping her beer onto the fire, scraping up handfuls of dirt to put out the flames. She gestured toward the woods. “I’m going to help Trip. You guys pick up the rest?”
“’Kay,” said Sarah, already folding the blankets.
I collected the last of the trash and scanned the circle. The fire was out. There was nothing left.
Except the binoculars.
Sarah saw them too. “You want these?”
I shook my head. It seemed stupid not to take them, but no, I didn’t want them. No way.
“You think we should just leave them?” she asked doubtfully. “Here?” Sarah looked around the clearing. “They might get wrecked.”
“We could put them back in the cave.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “I’ll take them.”
“Are you sure?” I forced myself to say, “I can do it.”
“I won’t go far.” She was already reaching for the box, flipping it open.
“Riley?” Tannis called.
“Yeah?” I could barely make out her silhouette against the trees.
“We’re going to start down. You guys okay to follow?”
I checked the flashlight. “Uh-huh,” I told her. “We’ll meet you at the car.”
I heard the crunch and snap of their receding footsteps as I zipped up my bag. I looked over, expecting Sarah to have tossed the binoculars into the cave and be heading back my way, but she’d stopped just inside the dim opening.
She was frozen, and for a second I thought she’d seen an animal or something. Then I noticed a glint of metal in her hands, near her face.
She was looking into the binoculars.
CHAPTER 3
TRIP PICKED ME UP FOR school just before eight on Monday like he did most mornings. I slid into his passenger seat and wrinkled my nose. “Dude. It reeks in here.”
“Says the guy who spent yesterday cleaning toilets,” Trip answered.
“Actually, it was rotting mice.” It had been my week to clean and reset the traps at Oknepa Hotel and Restaurant, the only place to stay in town, and my employer for the last three years. “And toilets,” I added.
“How’d you score such a sweet job?”
“Must be my good looks.” I swiveled around, looking for rancid food. Trip’s gym bag was on the floor, surrounded by McDonald’s wrappers. Bingo. I hadn’t seen him since he’d dropped me off Saturday night after the cave. I’d spent half of Sunday at work and an even longer half at the hospital ER with my mom. I guess I knew how Trip had spent his. “You ever clean this thing?”
“My car or my bod?”
“Either.”
“Rarely,” Trip admitted.
“I bet that impresses the ladies.”
“Seems to be working out okay,” he said pointedly.
I let that go. I didn’t want to talk about Sarah, or worse—him and Sarah.
“Don’t you think it defeats the purpose of a workout to have fast food afterward?” I asked instead.
“You’re in a shitty mood,” Trip observed, glancing over.
I took a deep breath, then exhaled hard. “Sorry.”
He studied me for an extra second, then zeroed in on it. “Your mom all right?” Trip had a way of reading people like that, especially me.
I shrugged, my chest tight, thinking of her in the hospital wheelchair last night. I wanted to blow it off, tell him it was nothing, she was fine, but I was having a hard time unclenching my throat.
Trip noticed and pulled over, turned on the bench seat to face me. “What happened?”
And just like that, it felt like the end of eighth grade, Trip and me standing by our lockers—side by side that year—after the first time she’d been sick. I’d tried to hold it together back then, telling him the stuff the doctor had said.
Normally you wouldn’t take your fourteen-year-old son to your medical appointment, but I’d found my mom in bed that morning, barely able to sit up. I’d been so worried, I’d insisted, and I guess she hadn’t had the energy to fight it. But when we’d sat together in the doctor’s office after she’d come out of the exam, I wished I hadn’t gone with her. The things he’d said scared the crap out of me.