Victoria’s waving arms were either for balance or to hype up the crowd, it was hard to tell.
“Do it! We’re bored of your brother,” Tucker yelled, his arm around a freshman boy he’d been forcing to fetch his drinks. Tucker Lee clenched the boy tight to him, big hands and big arms like a vise.
“Jump!” Ronnie yelled from somewhere below them, down in the water.
“Yeah, jump!” Matt echoed, seemingly forgetting that he was being paid to guard everyone’s security.
“Do it! Do it!” The rest of the party picked up the chant.
Janet had Victoria perfectly framed. The shot was grainy enough, far enough, to seem real, candid and improvised—and it seemed that way because it was all of those things.
What was Victoria waiting for? This was her moment. Victoria could make a statement here. Make the years ahead of her bearable. Be popular. Janet was in awe, impressed. Janet had pulled herself up the social ladder gradually, but Victoria was fixing to do it all in one night, in one stunt.
And then, finally, after two gymnast’s pumps on the balls of her feet, Victoria jumped.
Later, Janet would swear she had no idea anything was wrong, that the bump against the back of Victoria’s head barely looked like anything. But she did notice. She saw it when it happened. The little jitter, the bounce of Victoria’s face moving suddenly a half inch to the left as the back of her hair moved past the edge of the concrete stack.
Janet might have been the only person out at the reservoir to pinpoint the exact moment the descent changed from a dive to a fall.
Louder than the smack-splash of Victoria’s back connecting with the water was the echoing “oooooo” from everyone gathered, watching. They all must’ve sensed something bad, but no one moved. No one thought to do anything. Why should they? A hundred million billion kids had made that dive before Victoria Hill. There’d been a couple of bent-back toenails and bloody noses, but outside of that, nothing bad had ever happened. So why now?
They waited, just as they’d waited for Ginger’s dye job to reappear, but it didn’t take nearly as long for Victoria to surface.
With her face down. Arms out.
Janet dropped Cole’s phone. It would film the sky until the battery died two hours later. On the live feed, you could hear voices. Screaming. But you couldn’t see Cole dive in. You couldn’t see him pull his sister to shore. You couldn’t see that she looked fine. Like she was sleeping, until you lifted her up and saw the gentle gush of blood at the back of her scalp, parting her wet hair. You couldn’t see what the coroner would report, that the back of her skull had been caved inward on the edge of the stack.
Being there, you couldn’t know what the kids watching the livestream had picked up immediately, down in the comments:
OH SHIT, that girl is dead.
One
ONE YEAR LATER
“Wait! Stop!”
The moving truck backfired and then groaned. Asphalt crunched as the vehicle began to roll forward.
“You can’t leave like this!”
Quinn Maybrook watched, helpless, as her dad flung himself against the side of the truck. He steadied himself on the running board. His stringy forearms tensed, gripping the side mirror, climbing up to plead with the driver through clenched teeth.
It would have been a harrowing action-movie scene . . . except the truck was barely moving.
The driver applied the brakes, the truck shuddering and groaning again, and cracked the window:
“Look, Dr. Maybrook, you paid for delivery and load-out, not load-in. We drove overnight to get here and it’s going to be a whole day to drive back to Philly. We have another gig first thing tomorrow—”
“But I—”
“I’m sorry, but we gotta go,” the man said, moving to roll the window back up. Dad slipped his fingers into the gap, putting his weight on the window.
The guy gave him a look that said I will roll up this window and chop off your fingertips but please don’t make me do that because it’ll be a major headache for everyone.
Her dad let go.
“Don’t review us on Yelp!” the driver yelled, hitting the gas. The sudden start shook her dad loose. He stumble-stepped back to where Quinn stood, and they watched the truck pull down the street. All they could do was sigh.
Glenn Maybrook dusted himself off. He adjusted his glasses.
“Well,” he said, clapping his hands as if he hadn’t been trying to wrestle a truck, “I guess we’re here.” Quinn could see that his composure was about to crack. He muttered, began repeating: “We’re here, we’re here . . .”
“Come on, Dad. It’s not a big deal. This isn’t that much stuff,” Quinn said. The move had been harder than expected, though, and now they needed to get everything inside.
Mom would have thought it was hilarious if she were here. But, of course, if Mom were still around, there’s no way that they’d ever have left Philadelphia to move to Kettle Springs, Missouri.
But Mom wasn’t here, and so they were.
Standing in the middle of the street, Quinn looked to the horizon, as if she could go on tiptoes and see the Comcast building back home. When her father told her where they were moving, Quinn had done some quick googling and concluded that the town would be, like, one big cornfield. That it would be quiet, sleepy, and boring. But that wasn’t fair, because already there was more here than she thought there’d be. Which was good—she might be trying to view the town as a yearlong pit stop between her present and her future, but it’d be nice if the year was halfway enjoyable.
Their new house was a five-minute ride from downtown, which they’d driven through on their way in. Main Street seemed to be not just the main road, but the only way out of Kettle Springs, giving the impression that the Missouri town was more a glorified cul-de-sac. Passing through downtown, Quinn noticed a fifties-style diner and a bookstore that was probably all secondhand paperback romances and mysteries where the detectives owned cats. Or the detectives were cats. Not her scene.
But on the brighter side, there was also a second-run movie theater and not one but two thrift stores, one shuttered. The theater and thrift shops would have been full of hipsters back in Philly, but here they were probably what passed for premium, cutting-edge entertainment. She looked forward to checking them out.
Their new street, Marshall Lane, was lined with four houses on each side, and there were indications of life in each. Two houses had big green John Deere tractors parked out front. Or were they riding lawnmowers? Quinn wasn’t sure what the difference was. But she’d learn. She’d learn that and more. Moving to Kettle Springs would be . . . a learning experience.
She looked back to the curb and their earthly belongings. In the early-morning light, what struck her most was how little of the front yard their stuff covered.
Outside of the boxes, most of which were supplies for Dad’s new practice, there was a leather roll-chair with one plastic wheel chipped; two mattresses, different sizes but the same brand; a doll from when she was little that she hadn’t picked up in years and couldn’t believe had made the trip with them; two milk crates of her dad’s old records but no record player; their TV that they’d wrapped in a frayed old comforter; a twine-tied stack of outdated medical journals that would likely wind up in the basement, never to be untied; an old couch that looked older and uglier on the lawn than it ever had in their old trinity apartment; a fading CRT computer monitor; and a poster tube that’d been bent in half during the move—Audrey Hepburn’s face was almost certainly creased forever.