We Know It Was You (33 page)

“Every second of this hellhole is a punishment,” Zaire answered. Virginia couldn't tell if by “hellhole” she meant Winship, or just life in general.

“You know what?” Virginia said suddenly. “You're not the only one who thinks Winship is stupid. We're all stuck here. We all wish we could be somewhere else. We just have to make the best of it, you know? It doesn't have to be
that
bad.”

Zaire glared at her. “Easy for you. I'm sure Winship is heaven compared to
Florida
.”

“Um, excuse me?”

Benny kicked some leaves around. “Okay, let's focus please. Zaire, you've killed someone, and now you've tried to kill again. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with you. I'm a mystery solver, not the hammer of justice.”

“Just leave me alone, then,” Zaire said.

Benny shook his head. “I don't think I can. What do you think, Virginia?”

She looked at him. Was he really asking her opinion? Or were they just screwing with Zaire's mind?

“I don't know. I guess she should go to jail like a regular killer and rapist.”

Zaire scowled. “Rapist? What the hell do you mean, rapist?”

“You need to examine your actions,” Benny said. “You'll find they meet the criteria for sexual assault.”

“Myopic fixation,” Virginia remarked. “She thinks it doesn't count because she loves him.”

Zaire's hand flew out and whacked Virginia across the face. It was so fast, Virginia didn't even realize what had happened until she felt the stinging on her cheek. Then she felt a whack on her other cheek, this one so hard she
stumbled backward and tripped over the mascot's huge furry feet. She fell to the ground, landing hard on her back.

“Christ, ow!” she groaned, rolling over.

“Hey!” Benny yelled at Zaire. Then he bent down to Virginia. “Are you okay?”

“Ow, yeah . . .”

Benny pulled her to her feet. They looked around. For a second it was like Zaire had disappeared into thin air. Then they saw her sprinting down the path. She'd flung off her high heels and was barefoot. Benny immediately set off after her. Virginia paused to look at the inert lump of mascot by the bank.

“Should I stay with him?” she yelled.

“Um, uh—” Benny shouted back. “Just do what you think!”

Just do what you think.
For a second it was like being overwhelmed with power. She could do whatever she wanted? But the only thing she could think of was to run.

She darted through the trees, keeping her eyes fixed on Benny's back. He was way ahead of her though, and he ran too fast, and by the time she reached the edge of the forest, she lost him for a second. Then she heard the sound of crunching gravel and saw him sprinting toward the Boarders. In the driveway, Zaire had thrown herself into the black Town Car in a flash of luxurious hair and cashmere and slammed the door.

“She's in there,” Benny said breathlessly as Virginia caught up to him.

Virginia banged on the dark tinted window. “Hey! Get out!”

The driver started the engine.

“Zaire! Get out here!” Virginia shouted again. She was so angry all of a sudden. Zaire thought she could just jump in her Town Car as if Virginia were totally invisible. All her snotty comments. The way she acted like she was thirty years old and the rest of them were children to be ignored. Virginia slammed her hands down on the hood.

“I can see you! Don't run away, you stuck-up coward!” She realized the driver thought she was talking to him. He looked confused, but also incredibly pissed that some kid was banging on his car. She could hear Zaire yelling in the backseat. The car lurched forward a foot, making Virginia jump. She backed away a second, then threw herself on the hood of the car.

“Careful!” she heard Benny yell. “Oh my God, get down!”

The car jolted forward, just enough to make Virginia almost fall off the hood. Then she felt a pair of hands around her waist. Benny was yanking her down. They tumbled to the ground, and Virginia felt the gravel scrape her already scraped-up arms and knees. The car sped forward before Virginia could get back up. In seconds it disappeared around the corner, leaving them in the dust.

Then it was quiet. After a moment Benny picked himself up and brushed the dirt off his pants.

“He wouldn't have run me over,” Virginia said. A pink
Band-Aid was peeling from her arm. She ripped it off, revealing a scab that had opened up and was bleeding again.

“Zaire was yelling at him to call the police.”

“Well you should have just let her!”

Benny shook his head. “No, it wouldn't have been good. Zaire's not even on Detective Disco's radar, whereas we . . . It would have looked bad.”

“Whatever.” Virginia plunked down on the front porch steps. While they were gone, suitcases had appeared up against the wall. Virginia could hear people bustling around inside. It was the only time the Boarders ever seemed to come to life—when everyone was getting the hell out of there.

“What was that yelling?” Chrissie White poked her head out the door, looking bedraggled and hungover.

“Just saying farewell to Zaire,” Virginia said glumly.

“Oh my God, did she leave? She was supposed to give me a ride! Now I have to call Mrs. Morehouse? Oh my God!” Chrissie stood there for a minute, apparently waiting for Benny and Virginia to chime in with outrage, as if anyone besides her cared whether she made it to the airport or not. Finally she slammed the screen door and went back inside.

“So . . . what now?” Virginia asked.

“I don't know . . . ,” Benny said. “When is she coming back?”

“Sometime next week. I can find out from Chrissie.”

Neither of them said anything for a minute. The sun had risen higher. Virginia took off her jacket and sat down next to Benny. Someone inside was using Zaire's espresso machine, the sound of its gurgling and spitting coming through the open common-room window.

After a while Benny said, “I guess we should go back and get Gottfried.”

“Oh yeah . . . What if he rolled into the river and drowned?”

Benny shot her a disapproving look. Then he said, “I don't think we should tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

“What Zaire was doing to him.”

“Oh . . .”

“Do you think that's the right thing?”

Virginia thought about it. “Who knows . . . His mind is such a maze already. Why add to the chaos?”

“That's sort of what I was thinking. . . . We'll have to unhypnotize him somehow.”

“Oh God. I forgot he was hypnotized. . . .” Virginia stood up. “I'm gonna get a Coke; you want one?”

Benny shook his head. “I don't think I can drink that stuff anymore. All that sugar. Yuck.”

“Yeah, it's pretty bad once you realize. Maybe I shouldn't have told you.”

“Nah,” Benny said. “It's better to know. Some things, anyway.”

One Week Later, Saturday

Gainesville, GA, 4:15 a.m.

This was the best part—the blond twins lovingly rubbing mayonnaise on each other's faces as a moisturizing mask. He watched it through his tears, clutching a pair of pristine blue panties to his chest.

It's over.

Normally Min-Jun wasn't this pathetic. He made money off pathetic guys; he wasn't supposed to be one of them. Yet here he was, pigging out on honey chili Korean Doritos and weeping into a pair of girls underwear. He'd even grabbed a jar of mayonnaise from the refrigerator and begun dabbing it on his cheeks so he could feel what the girls on the screen were feeling. But his face was too tender from getting bashed in by that crazy asshole jock last weekend. So he just held the mayo to his nose and smelled it.

You wouldn't believe the kind of stuff girls put on their faces. Min-Jun had seen it all in that locker room. Mayo, bananas, toothpaste, fat-free yogurt—all the condiments imaginable—it was fascinating. Girls didn't
eat
food; they
applied it to the surface of themselves. And clearly its magic worked. They were all exquisite, like the one hundred forbidden daughters of a god.

Christ, get a grip,
Min-Jun told himself. He shoved a handful of Doritos into his mouth and hit fast-forward on the remote. What was he going to do now? He had eight thousand dollars in advances for
Wildcats Up Close and Personal
, and the idea of returning the checks made him want to cry, as if he weren't already crying.

Most of the money was from a backer in Boca Raton who wanted more cameras and more variety of girls, not just cheerleaders. Min-Jun had planned to coast on that perv all the way to the bank, but without Choi, the whole system fell apart. There was an assistant soccer coach at Lowell who said he could get cameras in the locker rooms there—
Locker Room Lions
had a nice ring to it. But the backer said it had to be Winship or he was pulling his money. Min-Jun had been annoyed at first—girls in their underwear were pretty much all the same, weren't they? Who cared if their pom-poms were yellow or purple, if they were Wildcats or Lions or Baboons for God's sake. But now he suddenly got it. These girls were special. They were the brand.

What was he supposed to do now? That Virginia girl had seemed game, but Min-Jun couldn't figure her out. Maybe she was a narc. Or maybe she was just a virgin. He certainly didn't have a problem with
that
. The problem was she had four hundred dollars that belonged to him. He imagined it
hidden in her room—in her underwear drawer—the dirty bills pressed against fresh pairs of lacy pink thongs and B-cup bras. It was cute, but not cute enough to sit back and let some child rob him.

On the screen, the girls whizzed around in fast motion. Min-Jun hit play again as two of them reached out tenderly to hug each other. There was something about watching girls hug each other, feeling excluded from their girlish bond . . . it gave Min-Jun a weird, jealous boner. He hit fast-forward again, skipping to the part where the girls came out of the shower, dripping in their skimpy towels. He knew the video by heart, and every girl in it. It wasn't just the money he'd miss, it was
them
.

Saturday

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, 7:05 a.m.

Benny gazed at the enormous
Yangchuanosaurus
skeleton. Sunlight poured down from the atrium's glass ceiling, making the curves of the fossils shine. He adjusted his glasses and read the little plaque:

THE ASIAN GIANT. At 33 feet (10 meters) long,
Yangchuanosaurus
is one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs ever discovered. Its main prey was likely the plant-eating dinosaur
Tuojiangosaurus
, a Chinese relative of the widely-known spiked
Stegosaurus
from North America.

“I never thought about a Chinese dinosaur,” he said.

Virginia burst out laughing. “That's the funniest sentence I've ever heard. ‘I never thought about a Chinese dinosaur.' ”

“Seriously though,” Benny said. “Isn't it fascinating how
we attribute nationality to life-forms that existed more than a hundred million years ago? Not only is ‘China' a set of artificial boundaries that exist only in our minds, ‘China' didn't even exist as a physical reality during the Jurassic period. The continent had only just begun to break up at that point. The world was basically still Pangaea.”

“You're obsessed with Pangaea,” Virginia said.

Benny looked at her. “Am I?”

“You talk about it all the time.”

“Do I?”

“You're also the only person in the history of this airport who has ever looked at the dinosaur exhibit.”

This seemed to be true. Hartsfield-Jackson was famously the busiest airport in the world. More than 260,000 people passed through the airport each day, and not a single one, it seemed, was interested in pausing to examine a
Yangchuanosaurus
on their way to Chicago or Toronto or Rome.

Benny looked at his watch: 7:08. People had begun trickling through the international arrivals gate. He used to come here all the time with his mom, waiting for his dad to come home from conferences. Now he was here with Virginia, waiting for a murderer to come home from vacation. It was amazing how much your life could change, and yet you always felt like the same person somehow.

“Ask those ladies if they were on the red-eye from Barcelona,” he told Virginia.

Without hesitating, she went up to them.

“Excuse me. Are you coming from Barcelona?”

They had loud print jackets on and alligator purses. Their hair was fluffy and dyed rust colored. They reminded Virginia of the women at the Sapphire Lounge, except their clothes fit better and were obviously expensive.

“Yeah,” one of them said, not even looking at her. Virginia scurried back to Benny and the
Yangchuanosaurus
.

“Yeah, this is it,” she said.

“Okay, eyes open. Don't even blink.”

“She's kind of hard to miss,” Virginia said.

The trickle of people became a stream. Caffeine-powered men in wrinkled suits trying to get ahead of the line, parents dragging sleepy-headed kids and snapping at each other in Spanish, tourists still wearing their half-deflated neck pillows and bumbling with their customs forms. Old ladies stopping in the middle of the path to fish through their purses. A man with a plastic briefcase, who made Virginia feel depressed. Wasn't there enough money in the world for every man to have a decent briefcase? It must be horrible to be a man and to have so little to show for your life that your briefcase is made of plastic.

People kept streaming by, with no sign of Zaire.

Virginia approached an academic-looking man in a tweed jacket. “Excuse me, are you coming in from Barcelona? Flight 881?”

“Uh,
non
,” the man said. His voice had an accent. “Parees.”