“I could use a drink. Any bad sing-along karaoke around here?” Joe gives me a nudge, and I know he’s trying to make up for forcing my little confession that I’m from here earlier. That’s one of the things you have to love about Joe—off the clock, he always feels guilty for being great at his job. “You can give me the tour of the ol’ stomping grounds.”
“I’m too wiped,” I say, which is half true, and I’ve gotta see my dad, which I don’t even want to get into with Joe. “Besides, don’t you have to drive back to Indianapolis?”
“You’re. No. Fun.” Even his voice changes once he leaves the office, and he told me, when I once pointed that out, that mine does, too.
“Trust me, Carrigan’s isn’t really your scene.”
Joe gives me a wave and gets into his car. I turn away from the dust kicked up by his rental.
I have a headache from puzzling over records old and new. Patterns are like truth. They’ll set you free, but first they’ll give you a bitch of a migraine.
—
The sky is in that in-between phase, day and night throwing up a confused riot of blues and pinks and oranges to a soundtrack of crickets. At this hour, Barrens looks beautiful: the fields are wrapped in haze. That’s how beauty works in Barrens, by sidling up to you when you least expect it.
Muscle memory takes me straight out to the Barrens Dam. I spent a lot of time here when I was growing up, especially in summer, when the water was low and the current would wrap around my ankles. It was always freezing, but that never seemed to matter. If the weather was nice, it could be pretty lively. Kids catching crayfish, swinging on ropes, floating on tire tubes, fishermen in thighwaders trying their luck with the newly stocked trout.
Today there’s not a soul in sight. The water is high and rough and would surely knock me over. I close my eyes and imagine wading in anyway. I imagine the shock of the cold, the sudden weight of all that water. The pressure of the current like a long line of clutching hands trying to pull me under. I stumble backward, hardly managing to keep my balance.
Then: a distant sound of laugher makes me turn. Two girls, one dark-haired, one corn-silk blond, dart hand in hand into the trees, scattering dust and pebbles with every footstep.
Time wrenches away from the present, and instead it’s me and Kaycee I see, scabby kneed and wild.
The dark-haired girl drops a sandal and twists around to retrieve it, breaking from her friend. When she spots me, suspicion tightens her face. She looks as if she might say something, but her friend grabs her again by the hand and off they go. I exhale before realizing I’d been holding my breath.
I used to see her everywhere. I grabbed a girl on the L only last year, shouldered my way through a holiday-packed train car and barely managed to hook a hand around her purse strap before she plunged onto the platform.
“Kaycee,” I panted out, until she turned and I realized she was far too young—she was the age Kaycee was when she ran, not how old she would have been now.
One time, late senior year, I found her on her knees in the bathroom, the toilet flecked with blood. She kept saying the same thing, over and over, as I stood there wanting to feel vindicated but feeling nothing but panic and a hard dread: if this thing had come for Kaycee, none of us were safe.
She reached out a hand, but not as if she wanted me to take it. As if she was fumbling blind in the dark for something to hang on to. What’s happening to me? A convulsion worked through her and she turned to the toilet to retch.
I remember thinking the blood was far too red.
I remember, later, thinking, How would you fake that?
Chapter Four
I know where I’m supposed to be going, but I stall a little longer and end up in the drive-in parking lot of Sunny Jay’s: the seedy general store slash liquor shop where all the high school kids used to buy without ID. Myself included. Across the street, what used to be a patch of scrubby land used informally as a secondary dump has been cleared out, irrigated, and converted into a public playground: a few screaming kids coast down a bright red plastic slide and pump their legs on a spanking-new swing set while their parents wilt in the shade. A big sign on the chain-link fence reads Optimal Cares! Not exactly subtle.
I shift my car into park and practically jog to the door. Inside, I head straight for the meager wine section, scanning the crappy pink zinfandel box wines and the Yellow Tail and the jugs of Carlo Rossi. I’m about to pull a decent-looking albeit dusty Malbec from the shelf—hard to go wrong there—when someone speaks up behind me.
“Need help?”
“No, thanks—” I turn and the bottle slips. I barely manage to catch it.
There are a lot of things I’ve never forgotten about Barrens—a lot of things I can’t forget. The smell of chicken farms in summertime. The feeling of being stuck in the wrong place, or in the wrong body, or both. The pitch-black night, the silence.
But I have forgotten this: you can’t go anywhere in this town without running into someone. It’s one of the first things you shed in a city, the feeling of being watched, observed, and noticed; the feeling of racketing like a pinball between familiar people and places, and no way to get out. First Misha, and now…
“You need anything, you let me know.” Dave Condor—who always went by his last name—goes back to counting money into a register. His hair half obscures his face. Something about him always set me on edge, even in high school. Maybe because he was always quiet, fluid, like he’d just yawned into being.
I slide the bottle back onto the shelf and take a couple of steps toward the door, already regretting the detour. My dad would probably say this was punishment for wanting a drink in the first place.
Before I can make it outside, he looks up. “Wine’s pretty old. Not in a good way. More of beer and liquor people around here,” he tells me. “Not from here?”
He doesn’t recognize me. It feels like an achievement. I smile. “Why do you say that?” I ask, genuinely curious. Maybe the small-town stain can be scrubbed away after all.
But he just shrugs and grins. “I know all the girls in Barrens. The pretty ones especially.”
“I’m sure you do,” I say, and he squints at me, as if he’s seeing me through a filter of smoke.
I remember all the stories about Condor in high school. He got in trouble for dealing weed—I remember that—and he dropped out a few months shy of graduation, when I was still a junior. I remember Annie Baum getting in Condor’s face the same year he got his girlfriend, Stephanie, pregnant. So Condor, she said, I hear you like putana? Because Stephanie’s dad came from Ecuador. And Condor had stood up without saying a word, grabbed his bag, and walked out.
Putana was probably the only Spanish word Annie Baum ever learned.
But there was something else—something involving the Game. I never heard exactly. Condor was a slippery kind of person, always sliding through cracks just before you could pin him into place. He wasn’t popular, but he wasn’t unpopular, either. He lived outside the system. Even the stories about him got refracted and rounded off, bounced back to us before they’d had a chance to solidify. Brent O’Connell and his friends supposedly went to Condor’s house and beat the shit out of him. Was it something he did to Kaycee? Or tried to do? It was after Becky Sarinelli died, I know that. And I remember, too, that Condor and Becky Sarinelli were friends.