Life After Theft (21 page)

“No. I think you’re reading way too much into it,” I said. “Besides, we’re doing the last drop on Monday and then it will be over.”

“I don’t understand you, Jeff.”

“I’m speaking English,
Kimberlee
.”

She gave me one of her melodramatic sighs. “I understand the words you are saying; I don’t understand
you
. You think everyone’s good and noble and whatever. You’re sure Sera is innocent and you totally believe that Khail has no motivation except being a
swell
older brother.” When she said
swell
, she pumped one fist like the protagonist of a 1950s sitcom.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You’re living in a fantasy world. And the longer you pretend, the harder it’s gonna be when you find out we’re all miserable screwups. Especially
her
.”

I looked up from my homework. “And you vilify people. Is that any more realistic?”

“I don’t vilify people,” Kimberlee argued. “I see them as they are.”

“Sure you do.”

“I do!”

“So Langdon’s a nice guy and Sera’s a bitch? I don’t think that has any ground in reality whatsoever.”

“He was nice to me,” she muttered.

“What about Khail?”

“What about him?” Kimberlee asked, looking suddenly quite interested in the
TV Guide
I had left open on the floor.

“He didn’t do anything to you.”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Kimberlee said, waving me off.

“I don’t believe that,” I replied flatly. “You can’t tell me that getting rejected made you so mad you took it out on Khail’s little sister. That doesn’t even make sense.”

“When does love ever make sense?” Kimberlee grumbled.

“Why does he hate you?”

She hesitated. “I can’t tell you.”

I should have known better than to try to have a serious discussion with Kimberlee. “Okay, well, I have a buttload of homework tonight—what channel do you want?” I asked, picking up the remote.

“I’m not lying!”

“You’re
always
lying,” I said, as I channel surfed.

“Not this time.”

“Yeah, okay,” I muttered, tossing down the remote and turning back to my calc book.

Kimberlee watched about two minutes of a tooth-whitener infomercial before breaking the silence. “Khail’s . . . significant other got sent to brat camp. He thinks I was responsible.”

“Brat camp?” I’d heard of parents who sent their “problem children” to special wilderness “retreats” for superharsh discipline, but I’d also heard that most of them got shut down—too many abuse scandals and a couple of deaths or something. I’d certainly never known anyone who’d gone. “Why would Khail think you had anything to do with his girlfriend being sent to brat camp?”

Kimberlee had a strange look on her face, like she was trying to both breathe and hold her breath at the same time. “It wasn’t a girlfriend,” she finally said before burying her face in the beanbag.

“What do you mean it wasn’t a—oh. Oh!” Comprehension dawned on me. “
Khail?
Are you shitting me?”

Her head remained buried in the beanbag, her words muffled and barely comprehensible. “Preston’s parents are superfanatic something-or-others. . . . Somehow they found out what was going on and totally went off the deep end about it. Khail thinks that
somehow
was me.”

“Why would he think that?” But what I wanted to ask was,
What did you do this time?

Kimberlee glared up at me. “I already told you. I really liked him and he brushed me off.
Nobody
brushes me off! I wanted to find out what the deal was and I kind of started . . . following him.”

“You stalked him?”

“It was
not
stalking!”

I waved my hands in an attempt to placate her. “Continue.”

“It wasn’t stalking. Years of stealing have just made me very good at not being seen.”

“I bet.” Everything had just taken a nosedive into surreal.

“And I . . . found out that his best friend . . . was more than a friend.”

“And he
knew
you found out?”

“Duh,” she said, looking at me like I was particularly remedial. “What’s the point of finding out a deep, dark secret if you don’t gloat about it? And a couple weeks later Preston got sent away.”

“Convenient,” I drawled.

“I didn’t do it!” she yelled. “I didn’t tell
anyone
what I knew. Well, except Khail.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“I don’t know!” she protested. “
No one
believes me! Khail cornered me after school one day and tried to get me to admit I’d squealed, but I didn’t have anything to do with it!”

“And that’s why he still hates you a year after you died?”

She paused.

Oh no
.

“Well . . . maybe that’s not the
only
reason.”

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse. “What?” I said, more to my book than her.

“Preston’s parents sent him off before he could say good-bye to anyone, so all Khail had to remember him by were the two things he’d left at Khail’s house.”

“Lemme guess,” I said, not even bothering to put any inflection in my voice. “A Yankees hat and red boxers.”

Kimberlee had the decency to look chagrined.

My first run-in with Khail made a whole lot more sense now. “How does Sera fit into all this?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

She shrugged.

“Oh, come on. Let’s not play this game again.”

“What do you want me to say? Preston was gone and Khail acted like he didn’t even care, and so I started picking on Sera instead because I knew it would bug the hell out of him. And maybe I got carried away. It was more fun to pick on Sera; she got all mad and flustery,” Kimberlee said, as if we were talking about the weather instead of how she’d bullied my girlfriend. “Bullying Khail is like beating on a brick wall, but turn on Sera and they
both
go off the deep end. It’s surprisingly satisfying.”

“You really are crazy.” I meant it. I was seriously horrified.

Kimberlee rolled her eyes and turned back to the television. “Whatever. I wasn’t Miss Nice to Everyone. That’s hardly news. But I
never
told anyone except you about Khail
or
Preston.”

“Oh yes, you’re
completely
innocent.” My head spun.
Tell her I hate her
. Khail had meant every word.

And now I knew why.

“Why’d you tell me anyway? Are you hoping I’ll go plead your case to Khail?” I asked, already dreading
that
conversation.

“No!” Kimberlee said, turning around to face me again, her eyes deadly serious. “You cannot tell him! You have to promise. I don’t know if even Sera knows about him. So he’ll figure out exactly who told you and then he’ll
never
believe I didn’t out him and Preston.”

“Why do you care what he thinks? I mean this in the nicest way possible; you are
dead
.”

Her expression immediately snapped to a practiced neutral. “I just do, okay?” she said, turning back to the infomercial.

Someone’s crush didn’t die with her
. In her own warped way, Kimberlee really did care for Khail. Still. Talk about doomed love.
He’s gay, she’s dead, stay tuned
.

I turned back to my calculus homework, but was having trouble focusing. I felt like I was keeping secrets from everyone. Sera, my parents—now Khail, the one person who knew everything about Kimberlee. Weirder, it was his own secret I was keeping from him.

One more drop
, I told myself. Then I could go back to my life, and Khail could go back to his, and he’d never have to find out that I knew the one thing he apparently didn’t want
anyone
to know.

Three days. And this would all be over.

FRIDAY MORNING THE PLAN WENT
into action. Step one was ridiculously simple. Khail leaned over to a girl in his first-hour class and said, “I heard the Red Rose Returner is going to pull something big on Monday.”

It took off from there. By lunchtime the whole student body was buzzing about it.

I expected Sera to be pissy as usual about anything having to do with the Red Returner, but she didn’t seem mad. She seemed
scared
. I tried to bring up the possibility of a date, but she brushed me off for the first time since we’d gotten together.

“I have tons of homework,” she said vaguely. “I can’t do anything this weekend.”

“But you just finished your big project for history and you haven’t mentioned anything else.”

“Yeah, well, my homework is hardly the most exciting thing to talk about,” she insisted.

“You have to eat sometime,” I pressed. “Can’t I take you out for a quick lunch on Saturday or Sunday?”

“I just don’t have time,” she said, pushing past me toward her next class.

I grabbed her hand and pulled her to a stop. “Did I do something wrong?” I asked quietly.

Her eyes softened. “No, not at all.” She pulled my face down to hers and kissed me. “You’re wonderful. I just . . . I have a special project I’m working on this weekend and I have to do it alone. Okay? Next weekend we’ll get back to normal, I promise.”

“Okay,” I said, defeated for the moment. “I’ll see you on Monday, then.” I watched her hips sway as she walked, blinking only when the door closed behind her.

“I don’t like it,” Kimberlee said over my left shoulder.

I jumped and knocked into some freshmen, who looked at me funny but didn’t say anything. I
had
to be getting a rep for being totally spastic. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I hissed as quietly as possible. I headed toward calculus and Kimberlee caught up with me.

Kimberlee glanced back at the door Sera had disappeared through. “She’s acting weird. You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

“It’s midterms. Everyone’s stressed.”

“How long has she been acting this way?”

“I don’t know,” I shot back. “Since midterms started?”

“How about since she got called into Hennigan’s office?”

I turned to look at Kimberlee, glad the halls were mostly empty—even if it was because I was late for class. “I admit, the timing is weird, and whatever Hennigan said obviously upset her a lot. But she seems to know that you were the person who stole all this stuff that’s making a sudden reappearance. Can you think of
any reason
why she might be so upset at the thought of you?”

For a few seconds Kimberlee looked everywhere but at me. Finally she met my eyes. “She could be spying for Hennigan.”

I snorted in disbelief, a second before the direness of the possibility hit me. “No way. She wouldn’t do that.”

“You’d be surprised what people will do under the right kind of pressure.”

“You’re biased, and—”

“I know,” Kimberlee said with a sigh. “I’m just saying—I’m not even accusing. I want you to be careful. You’re almost done—everything will be over by Monday.” Her cocky demeanor clicked back on as quickly as it had vanished. “Just try not to get your ass caught in the meantime, okay?”

Saturday morning I met Khail down at the cave to load everything up. As we worked, we went over our plan for Monday.

True to his promise to be extra careful, he’d borrowed a truck from a friend in Santa Barbara to load all the bags into. He’d stow it in his parents’ guesthouse garage before they got home and retrieve it after they left for work Monday morning.

“So at eight ten I’ll be all ready to go,” he said, dragging out the last box. As in, the last box in the whole godforsaken cave.

I’d been trying to build up the courage to say it for an hour, and this was my last chance. “Watch out for Sera,” I blurted.

Khail paused and I could see the muscles in his arms flex. “Why?” he said with a forced nonchalance.

“I think there might be . . . a possibility—a small possibility,” I revised, “that she’s trying to find out who we are.”

Khail’s head lifted and he glared at me. “What are you talking about? Like
spying
?”

“Forget it,” I said. “It was a stupid thing to say.”

Khail jumped down from the truck and walked around to face me. “No, explain,” he said, crossing his massive forearms over his chest. “I want to know what makes you think she’d spy on us.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I repeated.

“No, you wouldn’t bring it up if you didn’t have a good reason; I want to hear what it is.”

I sighed. “She got called into Hennigan’s office right after the break-in and she’s been acting really weird ever since.”

“So?”

“She was looking in your pockets while you were in the shower when I came over—going through your cell phone.”

Khail laughed openly now. “This is how I can tell you’re an only child, Jeff. That’s totally normal. I snoop on her all the time, too.” He grinned. “Oh man, the things I could tell you.”

I hesitated for a few seconds before playing my final card. It was the only way I was going to find out for sure. “I bet you could. I’ve heard some things about Sera . . . um, freshman year . . . ?” I left the question open.

Khail’s smile immediately melted away. “You can’t hold that against her, Jeff. She didn’t know what was happening. You of all people know she would never deliberately let someone die.”

Holy shit!
“What?”

Khail’s jaw clamped shut. “Damn it,” he whispered, running his fingers through his hair. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I just assumed Kimberlee would have told you. She’s not exact a good secret-keeper,” he almost growled.

Oh boy, this is awkward
. I figured my best course of action was to just keep my mouth shut.

Khail pursed his lips, then something changed in his eyes. “I’m only telling you this so you hear the truth, understand?” He glanced around like someone might be listening. “It was a rough time. My dad got fired; he said we might lose the house and everything. . . . He and my mom were talking divorce—yelling divorce, really. They fought constantly. Like the bad fighting you see on TV, except that it was real and it was our life. Sera was only fourteen, and she took it really hard. I . . . I got involved with someone, so I wasn’t around. I’ve always wondered if things would have turned out differently if I’d been there for her.” He shrugged. “But I wasn’t and I can’t change that now.