B00B9FX0F2 EBOK Page 16

  Despite that fact, Jason kept replaying the scene at her house, and her pleas to listen were tugging at him. He was struck with an inexplicable desire to turn his phone back on and call her. He wanted the truth — it was the only thing he wanted anymore — and she could give it to him. But she wouldn’t. She was a liar. Jenna and Troy and Luke, all of them knowing more than they were letting on, all of them hiding their secrets behind their love of Lacey.

  Lacey, who Jason had loved, too — or at least thought he could love — turned out to be the biggest lie of them all. And he had fallen for it. He felt disgusted with himself. How could he have been so stupid? He straightened out the song he’d been writing for Lacey and read it to himself silently one last time. The lyrics, once full of all the hope and happiness Jason possessed in the world, were hollow now. He ripped the paper again and again until it resembled nothing so much as confetti. Then he threw the tiny pieces by the side of the road and watched the wind whip them away.

  He drove back to Oakdale like a zombie, and by the time he arrived at his house, he was so numb that he barely even noticed the station wagon parked outside. Until he saw Troy Palmer, clad in his garish Brighton High varsity jacket, leaning against the hood, that is. Then his attention perked right up. Troy didn’t look like a murderer, but Jason knew that’s what everyone said about serial killers.

  Jason looked around the car for a weapon just in case. Rakesh had left food wrappers strewn about the passenger seat, and there were binders full of CDs everywhere. He’d never needed to defend himself against a six-foot-tall lacrosse-playing monster before yesterday, and not twenty-four hours later he was going to have to do it again. Lacking better options, he grabbed the plastic snow scraper he saw on the floor of the backseat. It hadn’t done much in January when his windshield was coated in ice, but who knew, maybe it was waiting to fulfill its true destiny as an instrument of pain. When he stepped out of the car, Troy was approaching.

  “What are you doing here?” Jason called out, looking around the street for neighbors. No one else was around.

  “We need to talk about the necklace.” Jason’s shoulders stiffened. Troy was almost upon him now.

  “How do you know about that?” Jason demanded. He gripped the snow scraper tightly in his right hand and tried to look as sure of himself as possible.

  “It’s Jason, right?” Troy stopped a few feet short of Jason, and put his hands up. “I’m not here to fight you, dude.” Troy gestured to the scraper and smiled; his face was kinder than Jason expected. “Besides, if I were, that thing wouldn’t do you much good. C’mon, let’s go inside.”

  It was a command more than anything else, but Jason flexed his knuckles around the scraper’s handle. “I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me how you know my name and where I live.”

  “Should I call you Keith McKeller, guitar teacher to the stars?”

  At the mocking reference to the pseudonym he’d used with Mr. Gray, Jason froze. Had he forgotten to block his number? How could he have been so careless?

  As if reading his mind, Troy added, “You know everyone has caller ID, right? After you called Luke’s house, it wasn’t hard to track you down. We found you at the bridge that night.”

  So it had been Luke and Troy in the woods, Luke and Troy speeding off into the night. Were they working with Jenna? It didn’t make sense, but nothing made sense anymore.

  “I’m sorry about texting you like that,” Troy said. Once again, Jason was surprised at the genuine note of apology in his voice. “It was Luke’s idea.”

  Jason’s brain was reeling. As he stood there speechless, Troy placed a hand on his shoulder. “So that’s how I know who you are and where you live. Now it’s my turn to ask a couple questions. How about you put this thing down, and we go inside.”

  More obediently than he would have liked, Jason lowered his arm and led Troy to a chair at his kitchen table. Perching on a stool at the counter, Jason’s eyes darted around for blunt objects that could do more damage than the plastic snow scraper in a pinch.

  “So …” Jason said awkwardly. By now, he was about 85 percent sure Troy hadn’t come to harm him, but it wasn’t much comfort. It was the type of thing you wanted 100 percent certainty on. While his visit to Jenna’s house had thrown everything he knew about Lacey into doubt, it still seemed entirely plausible that Troy had been as dangerous to Lacey before she died as “Lacey” had led him to believe. The thought of the text messages wasn’t helping.

  “How did you know about me and Lacey?” Troy blurted out. “Who told you?”

  “No one told me,” Jason said. It was the truth.

  “Then how did you know about the necklace? Luke told me you were digging up something at her grave. And I see he wasn’t lying about kicking your butt.” He nodded toward Jason’s bruise.

  “Why did you bury it?”

  “I don’t want to answer that until I know who you are. How were you connected to Lacey?”

  Troy was watching him carefully. Jason mentally calculated the distance to the drawer where his mom kept the knives. He was closer, but Troy was in better shape. He thought he could make it there first, but he didn’t want to test the theory. He’d stick to the truth in the hopes that it would help him avoid unnecessarily enraging the beast. “I wasn’t,” he said. “I mean, I thought I was. But I was wrong.”

  “Okay, but you must have known her. How?”

  It was still sinking in that he really hadn’t known her. Not even a little bit. It was Jenna the whole time. Jenna was the one he’d IM’d with so easily, the one who’d sent him the sweet and funny messages, the one convincing him he was the only one who could help “Lacey.” Jason had been so foolish for ever having believed otherwise. Troy looked at him expectantly, waiting for an answer.

  “It’s complicated.”

  Troy rolled his eyes. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

  Maybe Jason should tell him everything. After all, it would be a relief to get all of the secrets and the lies off his chest. If he couldn’t just walk away from the situation, at least he could unload. His whole relationship with Lacey had been a sham; he no longer owed her any sort of discretion. But the idea of spilling his guts to a complete stranger didn’t exactly appeal, especially since, Jason reminded himself, that stranger might be a violent psychopath.

  “I talked to Lacey online.”

  “On Facebook?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When did it start?”

  There was an urgency to the question, and at first Jason was shocked that Troy understood the strange nature of his relationship with Lacey, but then he realized the question rose from his insecurities about whether or not Lacey had been faithful to him. “It wasn’t while you were with her,” Jason said with a hollow laugh.

  “Did she tell you that we were together?”

  “Not exactly. Why did you insist on keeping it a secret?” It was one of many questions Jason couldn’t figure out, but it bothered him more than the others. If he’d been dating Lacey, he would have screamed it from the rooftops. Though, he supposed, he sort of had been dating Lacey, or believed he had, and he’d kept silent about it. At her request. Jenna’s request. The thoughts were swirling in his head, making it difficult for him to focus on what Troy was saying; he was going to have to shut off his inner monologue unless he wanted to lose his mind.

  “Um, do I need to remind you what Luke is like when he’s mad? Besides, it wasn’t just me. Lacey didn’t want to tell him, either. She was afraid he’d kill me. We came up with, like, all these codes and stuff.” He smiled slightly, as if recollecting a memory. “We called the tree house in my backyard the Kissing Club. KC for short.” It explained the random letters on the necklace, the Casey phone call Max had witnessed. But there were still more important questions to answer. “Don’t you think it’s kind of weird? What difference did it make to him who she dated?” His pitch kept going up at the end of his questions, making him sound like a whiny
child. To make matters worse, Troy had an authoritative deep bass. That night in Jenna’s room, when they’d originally agreed to begin following Troy, Jason had pictured their sleuthing ending in an interrogation in which he masterfully outsmarted Troy, forcing him to own up to everything he had done. This was a far cry from the scene he had imagined.

  Troy looked at him like he was crazy. “You really must not have known Lacey.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “For someone so smart, she could be all kinds of stupid. She’d trust anyone and everyone. There was no one else looking out for her — people see a pretty girl with a big heart, and they think they can get anything they want from her. Luke protected her from them. Sometimes I think …”

  Troy began to choke up. Jason had watched him cry the other night, heaving sobs at the base of the memorial, and he sensed if he kept Troy talking, he was going to get an encore performance. Still, Jason pressed him. “Sometimes you think what?”

  “If he did find out about me and Lacey, if he put a stop to it, maybe things would have been different.”

  Jason’s heart was pounding. Troy was about to confess to the murder. Maybe this had been Jenna’s plan all along. “Different how?” He asked the question as steadily as he could, but his eyes once again went to the knife drawer. On the verge of tears, he had the effect of a gentle giant, but if he’d killed Lacey, whom he’d apparently loved, there was no telling what he might do to Jason after revealing his darkest secret.

  “Maybe she’d still be here.” Now he was full-on crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks. “Maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself.”

  Wait, what?” Jason felt like a starlet at an awards ceremony hearing someone else’s name called for best actress when she was certain she’d win; despite his best efforts, his face betrayed all of the confusion and disappointment that struck him with Troy’s revelation. But Troy didn’t notice.

  “She killed herself because of me. If I hadn’t let the secrets build up like that, she’d still be alive.” Instinctively, Jason grabbed the box of tissues his mom kept on the windowsill and brought them to the table. Troy took one gratefully. His breath was shallow and the tears were streaming down his cheeks; Jason was seized by a desire to snap a photo of the oversize jock turned blubbery child. He’d be a hero to emo kids everywhere who were tormented by guys like Troy on a daily basis. Jason couldn’t remember the last time he’d wept openly, but he’d watched Troy do it twice this week.

  “Do you, um, want a glass of water?”

  Troy looked up at him, his blue eyes clear through the pooling tears. “That’d be great,” he sniffled. Jason brought it to the table, and Troy gulped it down, and slowly the crying subsided.

  Jason sat across from him now. “I’m sorry, I know this stuff is hard for you to talk about, but can you explain what you mean? I thought Lacey’s fall was supposed to have been an accident.”

  “I guess she just got sick of all the secrets,” Troy said slowly. “At Roxy’s party, she was a total mess. We got a few minutes alone, and she said, ‘We have to tell Luke about what’s going on between us tonight,’ but what she didn’t know was that Luke was on the warpath. Mr. Jericho, our craptastic math teacher, was trying to get it so Luke couldn’t start unless he brought up his grade to a B, which was not happening. Usually coach can get us out of stuff like that, but Mr. Jerkwad wasn’t having it, so coach told Luke he had to start getting tutored in trig. By Roxy’s party, he was ready to kill someone.”

  Troy was speaking figuratively, but Jason wondered how ready.

  “So I started to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen. She was like, ‘It has to be now, I can’t live like this anymore,’ and I …” Troy paused, looking stricken, “I told her to stop being such a drama queen.” His face crumbled. “It was the last thing I ever said to her.” Jason waited as Troy put himself together. Could Lacey have really killed herself? Jenna was so certain she hadn’t, but Jenna no longer qualified as a reliable source. As if Troy could read his thoughts, he continued, “Her friend Jenna found us. That was the other reason Lacey didn’t want everyone to know about us. She was worried about what Jenna would do.”

  The queasiness Jason had felt in his car earlier returned. “Why?”

  “I don’t want to sound conceited, but Jenna kind of had a thing for me. I had no idea, because she never said a word when she was around me, but Lacey told me. It started when they were like eleven or something — they’d spy on me and Luke when we were at the Grays’ and they called me penguin because I wore a tux to someone’s bar mitzvah when I was in seventh grade. I literally don’t even remember it.”

  Ask her if she still has the penguin’s shirt in the back of her closet. His skin was crawling now.

  “Lacey really cared about Jenna, and she didn’t want her to get hurt. She made me go out of my way to be super friendly to her whenever I was around, which was fine; Jenna’s a nice girl.”

  “Depends what you mean by nice.” It was only after the words were out of his mouth that Jason realized he had spoken them aloud.

  “You know Jenna?” Troy sounded surprised.

  “I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to interrupt your story. What happened after Jenna found you guys?”

  All the hesitance Troy had exhibited when he first sat down was gone now. He was caught up in the relief of confession. He hadn’t talked to anyone about this, and Jason could tell he wasn’t the type of guy who was meant to keep his feelings bottled up, even if that’s what everyone expected of him.

  “Jenna said she needed to talk to her. At first, Lacey was like, ‘We can talk here, there’s something I need to tell you anyway,’ but I was shaking my head, trying to get her to shut up. So then she pulled Lacey aside, and I had to pretend like we were in the middle of a normal conversation. I kept waiting for another chance to get Lacey alone because we weren’t done figuring out what to do about Luke, but she disappeared. And then, the next morning, when I realized what happened …” He’d gone hoarse, but he didn’t cry this time. He went on flatly, “I knew it was my fault.”

  “Troy, did you see Jenna again that night?” Once the question was past his lips, Jason realized he was terrified of the answer. He didn’t believe Jenna was capable of murder because he didn’t want her to be. In spite of everything, he was surprised to find that he still liked Jenna.

  He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Dude, I don’t get it. You just told me you barely knew Lacey. Why do you care so much? About any of this? Why did you call her house?”

  “I don’t think Lacey killed herself.” It was the simplest reply.

  Suddenly, the big man on campus bravado was back. “And how would you know?”

  “Because I think someone pushed her.”

  Troy stared at Jason with a mixture of confusion and hurt, but before he could speak, something barreled across the kitchen and tackled him.

  “How you like that?” Rakesh yelped as he ground Troy’s shoulder into the kitchen floor.

  “Rakesh! He didn’t do anything!” But it was too late. Troy had knocked Rakesh off of him and pinned him down.

  “Who are you?” Troy growled. Jason pulled him off and both boys scrambled to their feet.

  “Both of you, calm down!” The effort of separating them had inflamed the pain in Jason’s ribs. He stood, panting, and then turned to Rakesh. “Jesus, what are you doing here?”

  “That’s the thanks I get for rescuing you from this psychopath?”

  “Seriously, who is this guy?”

  “Troy, Rakesh, Rakesh, Troy. There, now everyone knows each other. Rock, what’s the deal?”

  “I could ask you the same question. You haven’t answered any of my texts in the last two hours. So I came by to make sure everything was okay, because last I checked, the Brighton lacrosse team was out for your blood. And then lo and behold, Mr. Brighton Lacrosse himself is sitting at your kitchen table. What
was I supposed to do?”

  “Not break into my house?”

  “I didn’t break in — I have keys!”

  “Why didn’t you knock?”

  “There’s a car outside with a bumper sticker that has a skull and crossbones made out of lacrosse sticks that says ‘Brighton’ underneath. I called you twice from outside — why does your phone keep going to voice mail?”

  “I turned it off.”

  “Why? What’s going on here?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” Troy grumbled.

  “Rock, Lacey’s dead,” and then when he saw Rakesh start toward Troy again, he quickly added, “Troy didn’t do it! Troy, I promised I’d explain everything, but I’m going to have to start at the beginning. Can we all be civil to each other?” Rakesh and Troy eyed each other warily, but they both assented. “All right, good. This is gonna take a while, so let’s at least sit down.”

  And so Jason began with his message to Lacey and the response he got three months later. Their easy rapport, the way he fell for her. How he found the obituary. The run-in with Jenna at the memorial, and Lacey’s pleading e-mails to him implicating Troy. Troy listened to all of it quietly, interrupting here and there with a question. As Jason went on, knowing what he now knew, the story sounded stranger and stranger. Why hadn’t he realized what was happening sooner? He carefully avoided eye contact as he described tailing Troy to the cemetery, and Rakesh eagerly took over the narration when he got to Luke Gray’s attack the following morning.

  And then there was nothing left except the thing he hadn’t had the nerve to say out loud yet. “And now I know Lacey was never the one Facebooking me. It was Jenna all along.”

  Rakesh gasped. “Hold up. What?”

  “Yeah. I went over there this morning, and I used her computer. She was signed into Lacey’s profile. Jenna’s been lying to me — to everyone — this whole time. She’s the one who sent the messages, the one who told me to break into Luke’s car. She’s been setting Troy up.”