Nearly Gone (3 page)

Our trailer sat on a corner lot, right in the middle of Sunny View Drive. The trailers across the alley were staggered, set back from the street, and from my front porch, I could see all the way to the traffic light at Route 1. Mona had almost reached the end of the street, the sashes of her long coat dangling beside her heels. I slung the trash bag a little too hard and the dented metal cans rattled together before toppling over. The echo bounced off wall after wall of rusting aluminum. My neighbor’s window blinds were drawn shut, her cautious hands prying them back to check the noise.

Mona turned her head, wary eyes checking over her shoulder, heels purposeful over the ruts and loose gravel. I watched until she reached the brighter streetlights at the intersection.

She’d worked nights at Gentleman Jim’s as long as I could remember. When I was younger, I’d slept on Jim’s couch in the back while she waited tables. Now Jim’s phone number was on a yellow sticky note, taped to the phone in the kitchen. I’d called her once when we’d run out of peanut butter for sandwiches. Jim said he’d leave a note in her dressing room, that she was on stage—not waiting tables—and he’d have her call me back between sets. He never gave her the message. And I never called again.

A car turned onto Sunny View Drive, the blue-white halogen beams blinding me. I shielded my eyes until the lights swung back onto the road, and when I looked up, Mona was gone. The car continued its approach, a lean black oldermodel Mercedes with diplomatic tags that was obviously lost. It drifted down the street, and I waited for it to make a clumsy three-point turn in the alley beside our trailer. It didn’t. I stared at the driver’s window, surprised to see Oleksa Petrenko slouched coolly behind the wheel. Our eyes met for a brief second as the Mercedes ghosted by, barely crunching the gravel as it eased into a parking space a few doors down beside Lonny Johnson’s Lexus.

Lonny was a second-year senior, not that he cared. He was a businessman, not a student, home again after consecutive stints in juvie. He’d been gone longer than usual this time and when we passed each other at the mailbox earlier that week, he was taller. Thinner. Eyes deep set and dark. He had new tattoos that climbed up his neck and met the shadow of a beard that hadn’t been there before. A silver bullring hung beneath his nostrils. It matched the barbell under his lip.

A screen door slammed and a security bulb snapped on, illuminating him in a wide halo.
Lonny raked his bleached hair back with tattooed fingers and scanned the street to both sides. His eyes skipped over me like I wasn’t there. But when he leaned over Oleksa’s window, he angled his back to me, blocking my view of the exchange between them. I could see the glint of metal tucked inside his waistband, a reminder to mind my own business.
I turned around and stooped to pick up the overturned cans, crinkling my nose at the scattered debris. A few feet from the cans, tucked just under the lowest porch step, was a small cardboard box. I picked it up, expecting it to be empty, but something shifted inside. It had been loosely taped shut, and a soft scratching sound rasped against the inner walls of the box when I shook it. I held it under the dim porch light, a strange feeling twisting in my gut.
FOR NEARLY,
it said in bold blue letters that felt oddly familiar.
I glanced over my shoulder. No one was there except Lonny and Oleksa, still deep in hushed conversation. Pulling at a loose corner of tape, I slowly opened the top.
I dropped the box and clapped a hand over my mouth. The small mound of rotting flesh was stiff with rigor mortis. Her white throat was crusted with blood.
A dead cat.
The words
DEAD OR ALIVE
were written in blood inside the lid. The letters had dried and crackled like finger paint, but the blocky handwriting was the same as the blue letters on my lab table.
I’d seen the feral calico coming and going from a hole under Mrs. Moates’s trailer. I looked down the street at her window but her lights were already off and I didn’t see any sense in waking her. The poor thing had probably been a stray anyway.
I held my breath and used the box to scoop up the tiny body, dropping her inside the closest trash can and lowering the lid. I breathed through my sleeve and backed away, eyes blurring and throat working from the smell, and stumbled over the other can. The lid crashed to the pavement and wobbled, reverberating through the alley. Oleksa and Lonny stared with narrow eyes. My neighbor peeled back her curtain again when her security light flashed on, her dog barking and scratching through the window. I untangled myself and raced up my front steps, throwing the dead bolt behind me.
Reaching for the metal bat my mother kept propped behind our front door, I slid to the floor, crouching in the dark until the Mercedes’s lights passed over the frayed sofa and peeling walls, tossing the room in one quick pass, then dropping it into darkness. I listened for feet on gravel or a rustle against the window. It was silent except for the cars on Route 1.
Leaving the lights off, I crawled into bed with my clothes on and pulled the blankets to my chin. I lay there, unable to get the smell out of my head. Unable to shake the image of the letters written in blood.
I reached down between the mattress and the box spring for my father’s wedding band, one ear alert for Mona coming home. But I knew I wouldn’t tell her about the cat. I couldn’t let some jerk from school freak her out enough to miss her weekend shifts just to stay home with me. We couldn’t afford it. Besides, it didn’t matter what Schrödinger thought. I’d opened the box and the cat was dead, and there was nothing Mona or I could do for it now.

I stood on my toes in the crowd clustered by the chem lab. Lab grades were posted next to the door every Monday morning, so we’d all know exactly where we stood. Like I needed any reminders.

There I was.
Boswell, Nearly.
Second place below Bui, Anh Thi. On paper, it was only

a few millimeters of space—one half of a percent between friends—but in my mind those millimeters were miles. I had about five weeks left to narrow that gap, or I’d have to shake Anh’s hand and congratulate her on walking away with my ticket out of Sunny View.

Hugging textbooks to my chest, I pushed through the pack of hopefuls, trying not to touch any of them skin to skin. I’d almost made it out of the herd when I tripped over someone’s shoe and went sprawling across the hall, colliding into something hard. My books scattered over the floor and a tall guy with messy dark hair and multiple piercings in his eyebrow glared down at me, obviously offended. His cold blue eyes were ringed with shadows, like he hadn’t slept well in a long, long time and he was looking for someone to blame.

I backed out of his way as he bent to pick something off the floor. He came up holding a black motorcycle helmet, turning it over in his fingers and checking it for scratches before tucking it into the crook of his tattooed arm. Beside him, Lonny Johnson chewed the barbell in his lip, snapping it between his teeth, and I swallowed whatever I’d been planning to say.

I muttered an apology, but the guy just shoved me aside, growling, “Watch it.” Then he kicked my books out of reach with a heavy black boot and walked away.

I watched them go, glaring at Lonny’s friend as I plucked my books from the floor. The guy had to be new. I’d never seen him in school before. I would have remembered him. As he walked, students spread away from him on either side, like water from an oil slick.

“People say he killed someone.” Anh snuck up beside me, watching him with narrow eyes as she bent to help me collect my books.

“People say a lot of stupid things.” I should know. Most of them were about me. Lonny’s new friend may have been an asshole, but I refused to feed the West River rumor mill solely on principle.

I hadn’t realized I was still staring at him until I noticed Anh staring too. Her hair tipped to the side as she studied his retreating form. “Not exactly prom date material, but I guess he’s cute, if you’re into that whole bad-boy thing. His butt’s not bad either,” she said, watching it disappear around a corner.

I shot her a surprised look. “I’m not looking for a prom date.” “Well, you’re obviously looking for someone.” “I have someone,” I said with a grin. “I have Albert Einstein.” “I hear he’s a terrible kisser.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“What about Jeremy? Has he asked you yet?” I looked at
her like she must be joking, but she wasn’t.

“I told you, I’m not going. School functions give me hives.
Big masses of stupid people in a low-volume space increase the density of the whole idea.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t calculate the probability of having a good time at a dance.”
“Sure I can. Me going to the dance is a singular event. Me enjoying myself at the dance is one of only two possible outcomes of said event. If the event and the outcome are mutually exclusive, it is safe to conclude that there is no possible way in hell I would have fun at the dance.” Anh laughed. “You’re such a nerd.”
“That’s why you love me. Since when are you so bent on going to prom anyway?”
“Since my brother decided I don’t need to have a life. He won’t let me do anything except work at the store and study.
He’s got me scheduled to work every Friday and Saturday night between now and the end of the school year. The only reason he’s letting me go to the play on Friday is because I told him it was a mandatory requirement for lit class. I figure if I can find a date for prom and buy a dress before he says no, then he’ll have to let me go to that too.” She slumped against a wall and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “I can’t wait until the semester’s over and he stops riding me about this stupid scholarship.”
The warning bell rang and our smiles faded as our eyes cut to the chem lab door. Monday mornings after rankings were posted were the hardest, when crossing the lab threshold felt like stepping through the ropes to a death match. Students lingered in the hall, waiting for the bell. I braced myself as I walked past Vince where he huddled quietly with a handful of his teammates. He didn’t look up, which made me eerily cautious. He’d never passed up an opportunity to humiliate me before. It was like he hadn’t even noticed the spectacle I’d just made of myself, even though his blond head stood several inches taller than the rest of his friends’ and I was sure he’d had an unobstructed view. Strange. The hallway hummed with a somber intensity, everyone talking in
hushed tones, including Vince, who didn’t come with a volume control.
Inside the lab, the air lightened considerably. Oleksa perched on top of a table, one long leg dangled coolly off the side, his red shoelaces grazing the floor. A cluster of boys hovered around him, which was odd. Oleksa was a loner—the kind with a razor-wire wall that said
No Trespassing
in big red letters. Don’t get me wrong, the guy wasn’t bad-looking. If he ever smiled, he might even be handsome, with his full lips and sharp cheekbones—but those features didn’t necessarily equate to attractive. More like he was good-looking in a dangerous, off-putting sort of way.
Oleksa shrugged off his hoodie. “How much?” His lab partner, a mouthy kid named Eric Miller, whipped out a small stack of dollar bills and slapped them on the desk like some heavyweight high roller.
“Fifteen bucks,” he said, rolling his narrow shoulders and looking Oleksa in the eye. I wondered if Eric would’ve been so ballsy if Oleksa had been standing up. Eric looked like maybe he was having the same thought. He took a small step back and looked away.
“We’re in too.” Four others dropped their own money on top of Eric’s.
Part of me wanted to get closer to see what they were doing, but I stayed back.
Oleksa’s clear gray eyes revealed nothing as he glanced at their faces, then at the cash.
“Deal,” he said. He didn’t move. Simply inclined his head and gestured with a quick curl of his long fingers. “Give to me.”
Eric withdrew a Rubik’s cube from the pockets of his baggy shorts. He grinned, twisting the sides of the puzzle until it was a jumble of random colors. Another boy drew up a sleeve and poised his watch in the air, fingers twitching over the stop mechanism. Oleksa’s eyes met theirs. He didn’t blink.
“Ten seconds,” the timer said, shuffling from foot to foot.
“Starting . . . now!”
Oleksa caught the cube and his fingers flashed over the surface in quick successive turns, each pass aligning the colors with increasing accuracy. My heart sped up as I counted down in my head.
“There’s no way . . .” Eric clenched his hands, glancing at his money. “The world record is just under seven.” I rocked forward, inching up on my toes for a better look.
The timer looked from Oleksa to his watch. “Five . . . four . . . three . . .”
Oleksa gave the cube a final turn and slammed it down on the desk between them.
“I win,” he said.
The class bell shattered the silence. Mouths hung open, but no one spoke. The watch’s alarm rang, rubbing in Oleksa’s victory. Students filtered into the room and took their seats, but my feet were glued in place. Oleksa could give Anh and me both a run for our money for the scholarship. And probably win.
I’d chalked Oleksa’s poor grades up to laziness, a lack of competitive edge, but the steel in his eyes told me I was wrong. He clearly had the edge. So why wasn’t he leveraging it? Oleksa turned his cold stare on me, that same gouging look I’d seen in Sunny View on Friday night. Then his hand shot out, smooth and quick, palming the money just as Rankin came through the door.
I hustled to my desk, feeling Oleksa’s eyes on my back.
The blue ink letters were lighter today, as if the custodian had tried unsuccessfully to scrub them out. I covered them with textbooks, but the words
dead or alive
felt like more
than random graffiti and only intensified the feeling of being watched.
“Attention, people,” Rankin called the class to order. He stepped through the aisles, pausing to count off sheets of paper. He dropped a stack in front of me and I took one before pushing them to Anh. “You have forty-five minutes to complete this assignment.”
The room was quiet as we all read the instructions for today’s lab. “We will be identifying mystery solutions. If you completed your homework assignment, then you have already researched the sixteen solutions you will correctly identify today.”
Eric groaned. “Hydrochloric again? When do we get to work with something cool, like hydrofluoric?”
Half the room turned to stare at him. Oleksa uttered something in Ukrainian and looked annoyed to share a lab table with him. Rankin raised an eyebrow at Eric. “You are quite obviously behind on your reading or you’d know that hydrofluoric acid is lethally toxic and highly corrosive.” His gaze drifted down to the orange juice stain on the front of Eric’s white shirt. “And given that you are infinitely clumsy, you would do well to stick with the assignment at hand.” Rankin leaned over his desk and stared around the room, waiting for our laughter to hush. “I’ll take a moment to recognize our top three scholarship candidates: Anh Bui, Nearly Boswell, and Thomas Wiles, in that order.” He nodded to the seat behind me. “Does anyone know if Mr. Wiles plans to join us today?”
We all turned to TJ’s empty chair. As if summoned, his blue-and-white letterman jacket appeared in the door. “I’m sorry I’m late.” He eased into his chair, leaving his stiff left leg protruding into the aisle.
“Do you have a tardy slip?”
TJ frowned. Sweat pinned his dark curls to his forehead and trickled into the neck of his jersey. He didn’t have a car and varsity football players wouldn’t be caught dead on the bus, no matter how long or hot the walk from Sunny View, or how hard it was on a bum leg.
“No, sir,” he said quietly. Rankin nodded gently. No sarcasm. No witty admonishments. He simply said, “Don’t let it happen again.” Then he looked at the wall clock. “Forty-two minutes.”
A flurry of activity and whispers broke out around me.
I looked down at the assignment and started to write my name.
“Miss Boswell,” Rankin spoke over the heads of students as they gathered Bunsen burners and titration equipment from the cabinets at the front of the room. “A quick word if
I may?”
The tip of my pencil snapped, scattering lead over the page. Beside me, Anh bit her lip and glanced at the clock. I pushed back my chair and walked with my head down. Students in white lab coats hunched in circles, talking in low tones behind cupped rubber gloves as if the odd heaviness in the hall had followed TJ into the room.
Rankin spoke quietly. “You won’t be tutoring Emily this afternoon. Miss Reinnert was involved in an unfortunate set of circumstances on Friday. The principal informs me she won’t be returning to school for a while.”
“Is she okay?”
Rankin’s eyes flicked to TJ and he lowered his voice, apparently as aware as everyone else that TJ and Emily Reinnert were dating. The small show of sensitivity was out of character and I suspected Emily’s situation was worse than he let on. “Marcia Steckler is on the waiting list for a math tutor. I’ll arrange for you to meet with her on Mondays so you don’t fall behind in your community service. I’ll send a note to her second period class and ask her to confirm. If you don’t hear from me otherwise, please plan to meet Marcia here at two forty-five.” I opened my mouth to ask what had happened to Emily, but he gestured to my desk with his coffee mug. “That is all.” My eyes drifted to TJ as I returned to my table. He looked lost in his own thoughts, absently massaging his leg brace while his partner worked double time to set up their lab.
Across the aisle, our classmates whispered to each other as they worked, casting him sidelong sympathetic looks. Emily’s name carried across the room in hushed, worried tones. “Hey,” I whispered to Anh. She was labeling glass vials with indelible marker and my eyes watered from the fumes. “Heard anything about what happened to Emily Reinnert on Friday?” Anh’s concentration was focused on the lab. She didn’t look up as she set the vials carefully into a rack. “People were talking about it on the bus this morning,” she said absently,
her voice more than a whisper. “They said she disappeared after the soccer game at North Hampton. She went into the school to use the bathroom and never came back.” TJ’s chair screeched, attracting everyone’s attention. His sweaty brow was furrowed, and I couldn’t tell if he was angry or if he was going to be sick. He snatched the hall pass off a hook by the door as he limped from the room.
Anh and I looked guiltily at each other. I donned my goggles and rubber apron, determined to forget about it and get back to work, but the whispers around the room were persistent, and I was having a hard time concentrating.
“Did they find her?” I finally asked.
Anh shrugged. “Yeah. Sounds like it was a team prank that went a little too far. The custodian found her naked and unconscious in the gym under the bleachers. People say it was
roofies
.” Anh shook her head and capped her marker. “Sick. They painted her.”
I scrunched up my face. “What do you mean, they painted her? Like Picasso-painted her?”
Anh rolled her eyes. “Nothing quite so sophisticated. This is the soccer team we’re talking about. Think paint by numbers.” She poured a solution into the vials, recording their
reactions. “They literally painted her. They drew the number ten in permanent marker on her arm and then painted the rest of her body in those creepy oil paints people put all over their faces during the games.”
I fought the urge to look over my shoulder at TJ’s empty chair, only now beginning to understand the strange shift in the school’s collective mood. “Ten? Why ten?”
“No one knows. Probably someone’s jersey number.” She waved it off. “A bunch of the players were in the store this morning and my brother heard them talking. The Hornets’ captain is number ten, but he’s pointing the finger at Vince DiMorello.” “Wait.
Our
Vince DiMorello? Vince-Who’s-Overly-Fondof-His-Middle-Finger DiMorello?” Vince was number ten for our team, but I couldn’t imagine him pulling a stunt like this.
TJ and Vince were best friends. “Why would they think Vince had anything to do with it?”
Anh pushed a fresh pencil toward me, as if to remind me to get my head back in our own game. “Apparently, Vince and Emily have been fighting a lot lately.” I remembered the look on his face before the pep rally, when she’d smacked the back of his head in front of all his teammates. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. The rest of the team is standing by him. They told the police Vince was with them after the game. And everyone on North Hampton’s team was accounted for.”
Of course they’d say whatever they needed to in order to protect their star player. But this sounded like more than a prank. Getting drugged, stripped, and marked, and left under the bleachers was a lot worse than stink bombs in your locker or marker on your lab table. Even worse than a dead cat on your porch.
I shook off the news and concentrated on helping Anh, but my mind had a slippery unfocused feeling. The nagging kind that slinks around behind your thoughts like a word on the tip of your tongue. My brain stuck stubbornly on the image of Emily. Her blue cheerleader uniform. Her limp body under the bleachers.
Under the bleachers
.
Newton was wrong. We clash with yellow. Find me tonight under the bleachers.
I eased into my chair as the colors of Newton’s wheel spun in my mind. Isaac Newton’s color theory was based on a wheel.
Colors that appear opposite each other on the wheel are complementary. But if we were talking about school colors, like in the case of Friday’s game, the opposing colors wouldn’t complement. They would . . . clash. Our school color was blue.
The color directly opposite blue on the wheel was . . .
We clash with yellow.
“Their school colors . . .” I muttered, a prickling curiosity creeping through me. I reached for a beaker and kept my voice as matter-of-fact as I could. “Do you know what colors they painted her?”
Anh slipped off her gloves, the lab completed before I’d even had a chance to start. “One side of her was painted blue and other side was—”
Yellow,
I thought. Only I must have said it out loud. Anh looked at me, analytical eyes asking all kinds of questions. I turned away. Began clumsily collecting up the tools, knowing I was stuck with the dishes since she’d done all the work. I shrugged as if I wasn’t at all surprised before I answered the question on her face. “Just a hunch.”
• • •
That afternoon, I was still thinking about Emily when I felt the light tug on my sleeve.
“Hey, are you okay?”
I withdrew my arm. I didn’t like being touched, but Marcia Steckler was an “artist,” and they tended to be touchy-feely like that.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I pushed my glasses up my nose for the six hundred and ninety-seventh time. They slid back down again. I thought about taking them off, but I was unfocused enough as it was. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?” “It’s okay.” Marcia stretched gracefully. “I’m distracted too.