After the Woods (7 page)

“Did you really think I was dead?” Liv asked.

“No. I get confused. Like I said, it's the pain medicine.” I held up the round end of my morphine pump. It had a button in the middle that I pushed every hour. The other end was tipped with a cannula that delivered the drug into my spine. Every part of me hurt, but mostly my ankle, the one Donald Jessup snapped. Ropes and pulleys forced my body to form new bone to repair the break: an impressive contraption that you might mention if you were seeing it for the first time.

“I bet the morphine confuses things. Makes your memories unreliable. But all things considered, that's probably best. Forgetting, in order to move on,” Liv said.

“There are gaps. But I remembered his face enough to ID him. And the things he said.”

Liv's smile went stiff, as though she caught it before it slipped away. “Things?”

I shimmied down into my blanket a touch. Jessup's voice was still in my head: the jangly shouts and the sharp orders. The stammering when he was jonesing. The spooky calmness when he arrived at an idea. “He talked a lot.”

“Did you tell the police what he said?”

Her question confused me. “They weren't interested in what he said to me. They were interested in what he did to me.”

“You weren't raped. They told me you weren't raped,” Liv said quickly.

There are other violations. Like forcing someone to see something in a pit that will haunt them forever.

“I wasn't raped.” I said it wearily.

“See? We're both fine now.” She reached for my hand, but I left it there, tethered to its needle.

“Why are you downplaying it?” I said.

She grabbed my other hand and patted it enthusiastically. “I'm simply trying to say we're okay.”

“We're okay now.” I sounded sour. For a second, I had wished I was her, unblemished and upbeat. Already looking ahead. Maybe I could act normal too, if I could get the fractals of my memory and how Liv was acting right then to make sense. “Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Yes?” Liv said.

“What did you do after you got away?”

Liv asked if I was chilly and didn't wait for my answer. She pulled the sheet to my chin and perched on the bed, speaking mechanically, with measured beats and pauses. “I ran back down the trail. I had no cell—you had yours, remember?—so I had to drive all the way home before I could call the police. They went and looked for you, exactly where I told them, where the Hill crests, to the exact spot where I—”

“Left me.”

She sighed like I was a child.

“Were you with them? The searchers?” I asked.

“Everyone was there. The whole town came out, it was over the top”—
Did she roll her eyes?
—“you'd just vanished.”

“Were you there looking for me?” I had to force myself to be still under my blanket.

“I wanted to,” she said, smoothing the blanket across my chest. “But they wouldn't let me. I had to be examined. Make my report. Besides, they said if I went back in the woods, it would distract the volunteers.”

“They wouldn't let you?” I asked.

“Of course not. I mean, he was still out there,” she said.

“So was I.”

Liv stared hard at the muted TV, twisting a bit of blanket between her fingers. Red, white, and blue streamers rippled across the screen and dissolved into stars that chased one another in a circle and split to re-form the number three. I'd memorized all the promos:
Trust WFYT—the Friend You Can Trust!—for the local angle on the biggest miracle-recovery story since Elizabeth Smart
. Paula Papademetriou folded her arms and nodded. I softened a little, watching Liv frown and pick at the cotton weave, and considered asking what she thought of Paula Papademetriou, just to break the tension.

“To be honest, as long as we're fine, it's really not a big deal,” Liv said.

Her words hurt more than my junk ankle and my briar-shredded back and my hypothermic hands and feet. I twisted on my hip and faced the wall. After a while she left. I rolled back and felt under the sheets for my morphine pump, grabbing the TV remote in my other hand. By then the twenty-four-hour news stations had picked up the story. Every show had some version of the same opening shot—the main entrance to the woods, its trees blanched dry and pale in the camera lights. The woods I knew were wet and black. Newscasters used phrases like
plucky teen
and
heroine
and
remarkable courage
. When one segment ended, I found another on a different station. Some channels covered my story twice in the same hour. The story became more horrific with every telling, proving that we'd been through hell, and that Liv should have been relieved that we were alive, grateful we both made it out, and shocked that it had happened. Yet she was none of these things. And I wanted to know why.

After a while, I let the morphine pump fall, and swore I'd never let anything cloud my mind again.

My alarm blasts Kiss 108. I roll over and hammer the top with my fist, then feel for the thick glasses I abandoned for contacts in sixth grade. My notebook lies, propped on its fanned pages, spine-up on the floor next to my bed. The memory trails off like the ends of clouds. I grab a pen and scribble in the growing light:

Things I Know About Liv:

- Drove home before calling the police

- Said my memory is unreliable

- Lied

 

FOUR

355 Days After the Woods

Principal Ligand splits his pants as he mounts the brick wall, unsteady in wingtips. He yanks down the back of his tweed jacket. Someone hands him an electronic bullhorn.

“All students must now report to their homerooms!” He turns side to side like he has a rod in his back. “If you do not enter the school now, you will be marked tardy.”

A line of male teachers stand with their arms crossed like undersized bouncers. We huddle in clumps, the bus kids and the kids whose parents drop them off, and the ones who drive, like me, all standing outside in the bright, cold morning ignoring Ligand and his visible boxers along with the first bell. We shift and shiver and steal looks at the white vans with their curlicue cables and satellite dishes parked in a wagon circle around the WELCOME TO SHIVERTON HIGH SCHOOL! HOME OF THE CHIEFTAINS! sign. The WFYT van has driven up on the grass, its wheels sinking in the mud. The crowd of students gives off a dangerous, honing energy looking for a place to land. A pack forms around a boy named Ari, the son of a wealthy computer executive and a leader because of his brutal sarcasm and contempt for authority. He dashes across the driveway and a patch of butterscotch grass, circling the vans and disappearing behind the welcome sign. Two boys shove each other until one, then the other, follows Ari across the grass.

The kids near the wall dissolve, and there is Liv near the curb. She stands stiffly, feet together, wearing a cropped puffer jacket and pencil jeans, an arc of space between her legs. She spots me and holds my eye, her mouth a line of fear. I close my eyes for a second and try to shed the anger from last night's stupid dream. I start toward her. At the same moment, the crowd follows the boys and Ari, and I am swept onto the lawn, pressed in among morning smells of body spray and clean hair. Everyone ignores the drunken sounds of Ligand garbling into his megaphone. Ari scales the back of the sign and pokes his head over the top, balancing on his stomach and waving his hands over a reporter's head. When the camera light trained on him dies, the reporter shoves up the sleeves of his logoed half-zip and charges behind the sign. Ari and the two boys fly back across the lawn to cheers.

A black SUV pulls up on the grass. Everyone buzzes and cranes to see if it's really her, because everyone in Shiverton claims to be six degrees from Paula Papademetriou. The thrill of seeing Paula in her official capacity is infectious. They speculate that she's in her own car because she probably came straight here, maybe from Starbucks, because someone saw her there in her tennis skirt last week. And in the long line for the pharmacy at CVS. Buying kale at the farmers' market on the town common. A lot of TV people are tiny in real life, but Paula is tall—not Madonna-sized, not fun-sized, they say. Serious and real.

Her hair is the color of espresso and brushed straight back from her face, which is made of angles and hard planes. We jam our hands in our pockets and huddle against the brisk November morning air, but she looks at ease, coatless in a pantsuit. She holds notes that she passes to a man crouching nearby as the camera starts to roll. Her camera voice is lower than in real life; I know this because I've heard her at the organic pizza place, holding a glass of chardonnay at a tall table. Mom and I were on the other side of a hedge of plastic plants. That night, her voice matched the high, shrieky voices of the other mothers. This voice is much better.

“A real-life horror story is unfolding here in Shiverton, now that police have identified the body of eighteen-year-old Ana Alvarez, who went missing while jogging in a remote section of the Middlesex Fells Reservation in August 2013. The police will not say exactly where she was found, only that her death is suspicious. Alvarez was a freshman at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, and sources tell me that officials have seized her computer and smartphone in their investigations into whether or not she knew her killer. I'm here at Shiverton High School, where the two students who were attacked last November by the man many believe is the prime suspect in Alvarez's murder are enrolled as juniors. That man, Donald Jessup, committed suicide in jail while awaiting trial. This latest development only intensifies the scrutiny local law enforcement faces, as new questions are raised about this predator who many say should have been under the strict surveillance of the police.”

The light dims and Paula crouches, shuffling papers. She holds a phone to her ear and looks up at the cameraman, wrinkles layering her forehead.

Liv appears before me. Up close, I can see that her pupils are a shade too large, and her hair hangs in matte clumps.

“What do we do?” she asks, her voice pitchy.

“We stay together,” I say.

My phone vibrates in my back jeans pocket. I wonder if it's Mom, mobilized and ready to dismiss me from school. My hand drifts to my phone. Paula pops up and peers into the student mass. The cameraman follows her gaze and rips off his baseball cap. The mob swells as Ligand's voice grows hoarse. I step back and get shoved from behind, taking Liv with me. A circle widens around us. A pug-faced senior named Seamus points at me.

“She's over here! They're both over here!” Seamus yells toward the vans.

“Oh my God,” murmurs Liv.

Paula charges toward us holding her mike like a torch trailed by the man balancing his camera on his shoulder. The reporter in the half-zip follows behind. To my right, I feel the sounds of a scuffle,
thump-thump-oomph
, less a noise than a vibration, someone shoving and someone shoving back. I turn to see Seamus bouncing on his toes and snapping his head to his shoulder like a boxer. Strings of spit fly from his mouth as he curls his fingers, beckoning a boy with his back to us, hair curled around the edges of a purple hoodie.

I know that back.

Kellan MacDougall aims a roundhouse punch at Seamus's skull, and Seamus ducks just in time, covering his head with his arms. Girls scream. Seamus sends a hook to Kellan's sternum while he's off-balance. Kellan staggers for a second, then lunges for Seamus. They lock arms and teeter like drunks. The circle around them widens, and I step back numbly along with them. Kellan bear-hugs Seamus, whose face turns white as Kellan draws his knee into his gut and leaves Seamus crumpled on the grass.

Liv shrieks. The reporters are almost upon us.

A hand grabs me by the waist. I grasp the inside of Liv's arm and squeeze, thumb to bone. We follow the back of Kellan's head, past bookish types clutching books to their chests and musical types holding their instruments in front of them like shields and more boys, intoxicated by Seamus's blood, swinging wildly at anyone who will swing back at them. Kids scatter to the student parking lot, taking advantage of the distraction to hit Starbucks. When we reach Kellan's dented Jeep Cherokee, I rest my arm on the car to catch my breath, but Kellan pushes my head down cop-and-perp-style and shoves me into the backseat.

“We can't leave,” I say.

“You want to pick your way back through that mob and get crushed?” Kellan says. “Make room, incoming!”

Liv lands in my lap. Kellan jumps into the driver's seat and peels out. Liv springs upright and yells, “Let me out!”

“You hear that siren? Ligand called the cops. If I stop now, I'll need to explain why I slugged Ligand's nephew. I'm thinking for now I'd like to remain Anonymous Hooded Student, even if that nephew is the biggest drug dealer at Shiverton. Then there's what my father's going to think about this.”

Liv digs in her backpack and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. Her fingertips are blue and shaky. She tries to light one skinny stick.

My eyes pop. “You
smoke
now?” I ask her.

Kellan eyes her in the rearview mirror, and calls back, “Not in my truck!”

Liv jams the cigarette into the pack until it snaps. Swearing, she fights to roll down the sticky window and tosses the broken butt into the wind.

“Couldn't spring for electric windows?” Liv asks.

“Wow, you're welcome,” Kellan says.

“Thank you for saving us,” I say, embarrassed for Liv. Apparently her one-time hook-up with Kellan left things awkward. Kellan is hot, beyond hot, and beyond me. He's also smart, and nice to everyone. Thus everyone loves him. I love him. Whereas I'd been over the moon after Liv's conquest, the day after, she barely said “meh.” Liv could get anyone, but she never truly crushes on any one guy. When she does hook up, she does it grudgingly, as a response to the attention the guy is giving her, the equivalent of petting a puppy. I always figure she's picky, but in the back of my mind I wonder if Deborah screwed her up in some related way, that all her crazy axioms—“The worst lies are the lies women tell to themselves. That a man will love them if they let themselves slip, even the tiniest bit” or, “You stole my figure. Now you'd better take care of it” And the worst, “You can be very difficult to love”—left something dead inside Liv. Accepted truths that made her unable to care about anybody. Guys were too much work, especially if the odds of being loved were so slim.