We Know It Was You (3 page)

The timer blared from the speakers. The camera moved as the cheerleaders started getting into formation for the halftime show.

“Okay, watch carefully,” Benny said. “Watch for anything strange.”

But it was hard to see anything at all. The camera was jerking around, almost spinning. “Brittany, get it together!” one of the girls was shouting. “Brittany. Brittany!”

Then the camera lurched forward. Brittany was running from the field.

“And she's off,” Virginia said. The blackness of the forest bounced wildly in the frame as Brittany careened toward it. For a while there was just darkness and the sound of the mascot costume swishing as she ran. Then the camera was on the ground, and it was still.

“She dropped it,” Benny said.

“On purpose?” Virginia asked.

Benny didn't answer; he didn't know. The camera was pointing toward the bridge, which appeared brightly illuminated by the moon. The whole scene had seemed much darker in real life.

“It's a wide exposure,” Virginia said, answering his thoughts. “That's why it looks so much brighter. But it also distorts the image quality. See how grainy it is?”

Benny nodded. Seconds passed as the video played footage of the empty bridge.

“I bet this is all a dumb prank,” Virginia said. “Watch, I bet we'll see Brittany sneaking out of the costume and then tossing it over the rail. ‘Mascot Commits Suicide.' It's kind of funny.”

“Not really,” Benny said, still staring at the screen.

“Well, yeah, obviously not. But it's the sort of thing those dumb football guys would think is funny.”

“Shhh, listen,” Benny said. In the background they could hear a faint melody:
We're following the leeeeeeader
. “It's about to happen.”

Sure enough, a great lumbering lion came crashing out of the woods. Benny shivered. An hour ago he'd watched a girl jump off this one-hundred-foot bridge, and now he was about to watch it again. The spookiest part was how disconnected he felt from it, from the gravity and finality of death. It was like Brittany wasn't a real person; she was just a question: Why?

“Look, that's you,” Virginia said, pointing to a figure at the edge of the screen.

Benny squinted at it. “That's not me.”

“What?”

“That's not where I was standing. I wasn't that close to the bridge.”

“Well maybe it's me. . . . No, I wasn't standing there either. Um, who is that?”

Benny put his ear to the computer speaker. The raucous chorus of “Following the Leader” still sounded pretty remote. “It's definitely not me,” he said. “The football players and cheerleaders were right behind me. Listen to how far away they sound right now. This guy's out there on his own.”

A muffled sound came from the speaker.

“Turn it up,” Benny said. “I think one of them just said something.”

Virginia rewound the video and cranked up the sound.

Benny leaned his ear to the speaker. “Sounds like ‘fun.' He's yelling ‘fun.' Did you hear it?”

Virginia nodded. “But how did we not hear him when we were standing right there an hour ago?”

“Those stupid idiots were singing right behind us. He could have been shouting a foot away and we wouldn't have heard it.”

Benny switched off the sound.

“Fun, fun,” Virginia was repeating. “Maybe we misheard it. Maybe they're saying
money
? Maybe Brittany had a bunch of cash in her mascot suit, and they were trying to steal it.”

Benny shook his head. “No, look at the way he's just standing there. He's not trying to catch her; he's just . . .”

“What?
What?
”

Benny felt a shiver as he stared at the grainy shadow blocking the exit to the bridge.
He's closing in on her,
he thought.
He's trying to trap her
.

Benny's house, midnight

Every day when Benny came home, his house felt like a theater set that had been carefully staged for his much-anticipated entrance. A glass of milk and a plate of Oreos
sitting on the kitchen counter next to his
Scientific American
or whatever had come in the mail that day. His clothes freshly laundered and stacked neatly at the edge of his bed. An autumnal-scented candle burning on the living room table. Every surface spic-and-span and shining. It was a conspiracy between Benny's mother and grandmother to make every detail perfect and pleasant, as if that could make up for the one huge and very imperfect aspect of the Flax household, which was currently slumped in the living room easy chair with the canned laughter of
The Golden Girls
blaring in his face.

“Don't make him watch that,” Benny said, setting his book bag down. His mom followed him inside.

“Your grandmother's watching it. And he doesn't know the difference.”

Yes he does,
Benny thought, but he didn't feel like having the same argument for the ten-thousandth time. He went over to the TV and changed the channel to PBS. It was a show about South American slugs, which wasn't much better than
The Golden Girls
in terms of mental stimulation, but at least it was science.

“What did he say today?” Benny asked.

“Light cold no fine,” Mrs. Flax answered, as if “light-cold-no-fine” were one single word instead of four.

Benny sat at the kitchen counter and pulled a
National Geographic
calendar from his backpack. He felt fidgety and overexcited. He wanted to go on a long walk outside to
calm his nerves and review the events of the night over and over in his mind. But he had a job to do.

In the square for October 3 he wrote
light, cold, no, fine
. Then he highlighted the word “cold” in yellow and “fine” in green. Yellow meant a new word; green meant a word his dad had said twice within the space of five days. There were more than fourteen highlighter colors in Benny's system, and 480 words so far, most of them with only one or two syllables—words like “cup” and “door” from a man who had once said things like “orbital mechanics” and “hyperbolic trajectory” on a regular basis.

Mr. Flax had been an aerospace engineer for twenty years. But sixteen months ago there'd been an accident on the test flight for the AeroStream V4
Spinetail
, designed to be the fastest, most advanced plane ever commercially flown. It was the
Titanic
of planes, and just like the ship, it had sprung a leak. Mr. Flax was running diagnostics in the back of the plane when it depressurized. The tertiary backups failed to bring the aircraft down to breathable airspace, and the pilots stopped responding. As the plane seeped oxygen, Mr. Flax's brain cells died by the millions. It was a full twenty minutes before the autoland system recovered. By then the pilots were already dead.

Mr. Flax lived but was left with extreme brain damage from hypoxia. Benny had seen the CAT scans showing purple splotches indicating areas of his father's cerebrum that were irreversibly damaged. But it was too depressing
to think that the brain could be broken, like a ligament or a collarbone. It wasn't just a muscle; it was
the mind  
! Surely it was more than tissue and cells. Surely his old dad—his
real
dad—was in there somewhere, lost in that lavender-colored fog.

To prove this, Benny had embarked on a project of obsessively documenting every word his father said, convinced that his father was trying to say something. The ironic thing was that before the crash, Benny and his dad could have talked all the time, but they hardly ever spoke to each other. Mr. Flax had been a workaholic and wasn't home much. Few conversations from before the accident stuck out in Benny's mind. There was really only one: When he was thirteen, Benny had discovered that the
Spinetail
was costing AeroStream eighty-eight million dollars to build, which seemed like an ungodly amount at the time. He remembered asking his dad if it was wrong to spend that much money on a faster plane when people in the world were starving and homeless. His father had answered, “Progress should never wait. If we waited for everyone in the world to be clothed and fed before we advanced ourselves, we'd have no civilization.”

Now, on the sofa, that same man stared blankly at the TV, drinking from a child's sippy cup decorated with bright cartoons of planes. Mr. Flax could still feed himself, but his left arm was paralyzed, and his right arm had periodic spasms and twitches that made normal
glassware impossible. Nana had bought the sippy cup, cheerfully pointing out, “Look, it has planes on it!” Benny had almost cried.

“Now what's this foolishness about someone dying?” Mrs. Flax asked, dumping leftover spaghetti into a Tupperware.

“A cheerleader jumped off the bridge,” Benny said. “I'm trying to figure out why. It's for my club.”

Mrs. Flax sighed loudly. “Well I'm sure no one asked you to. I don't see why you have to create problems for yourself and make life difficult.” She glanced at Benny's color-coded calendar. Obviously she wasn't talking about Mystery Club.

Benny stood abruptly. He scooped up his calendar and highlighters and dumped them in his book bag. He took his plate of cookies and started toward his room.

“Good night.”

“Do your homework,” Mrs. Flax called after him.

Benny closed his door and sat at his desk. He pulled out his chemistry book and stared at it for a second. Then he pushed it aside. He reached under his desk and grabbed his freshman yearbook, flipping to his class and scanning the
M
s.

Montague
.

Angie's and Brittany's pictures were side by side. Identical faces, identical smiles. People thought of the two of them as basically interchangeable, which they'd never
seemed to mind. In fact they exploited it all the time—dressing alike, wearing their hair the same, making little effort to carve out separate identities. But now one was a corpse, and one was still alive.

What made Brittany different?

Saturday

The football field, 8:30 a.m.

It was sunny but windy, a wind that accentuated the emptiness of the football field. It swooshed across the crisp green grass, with not a single body to offer resistance. Benny checked his watch. Virginia was late.

“Sorry, sorry,” she panted as she ran up to him. “They were late serving breakfast.”

“Oh,” Benny said. It was depressing, imagining the boarders having Saturday breakfast in the cafeteria. Empty tables, lukewarm eggs, toast from the bread heels left over from the sandwich bar. Always late because the weekend staff didn't give a shit.

“So what are we looking for?” Virginia asked, still catching her breath.

“You don't look
for
anything,” Benny said. “You just look.”

Virginia stood still, trying to look like she was looking. A huge white cloud passed overhead. It was so quiet, it took her a moment to notice the sound of distant chatter. It was coming from the woods.

“It's the cops,” Benny said, nodding toward the voices. “There are about ten of them at the bridge. Probably destroying the crime scene.” He gave an impatient sigh. “Not that they know it's a crime scene. Idiots. They still think it's a basic suicide.”

Virginia looked at him. She knew Benny was weird about police, but it seemed kind of unreasonable to call them idiots. The only reason
he
knew it wasn't a “basic suicide” was because
she
had spotted the camera in the woods.

“So . . . are we waiting for them to leave?” she asked him.

“No. It's a mistake to be obsessed with the bridge,” Benny said. “The field is where it started. It's where she started running.”

He kept staring at the field. Virginia glanced at him a few times.

“She was sitting on the sidelines,” he said, “looking that way.” He pointed across the field. It was an unusual football field because there was only one side of bleachers. On the other side was a small bit of woods, half concealing a three-level parking garage. They were the only school with a garage in addition to a lot, a recent one up in an ongoing facilities race between Winship and its rivals.

“Maybe she saw someone on the roof of the garage. Someone she wanted to get away from. And then when they saw her running into the forest, they ran down to corner her at the bridge.”

“Stop, stop,” Benny said, holding up a hand. “It's way too early to start forming a narrative. You'll confuse your brain and start seeing things that aren't there.”

“What, like hallucinating?” Virginia asked.

Benny rolled his eyes. “I'm gonna look under the bleachers.”

He ducked under the metal stands. The air instantly felt about five degrees cooler. Dirty paper cups and napkins littered the ground. Benny took out his phone and snapped a few pictures. A torn, crumpled French quiz. Someone's half-eaten hot dog, lying in its own ketchup like it was a blood splatter. A few cigarette butts, but not too many. Winship had an incredibly strict no-smoking policy, and for most people it wasn't worth getting kicked out of school just to seem cool. A used condom caught his eye, half shoved in its torn wrapper. Benny frowned at it. People were so gross and callous. If Benny were going to have sex, he hoped he'd treat his ejaculate with a little more reverence. Not in a perverted way—it's not like he'd frame it or something—but didn't people realize their fluids were the wellspring of life? You don't just pump them out and leave them on the ground.

“Benny!”

Benny jumped, and his head slammed against the metal stands. “Ow, fuuu . . . ,” he said, stumbling forward. Benny never cursed, at least not completely. He always stopped himself before the whole word came out.

“BENNY!” Virginia shouted again.