The Escape (3 page)

Avery watched the shadows passing across her ceiling, hoping that the monotony would lull her to sleep, but each time the tree branches moved in the wind, her heart fluttered. The house was impossibly quiet, which made each scuff against the stucco outside, each howl of wind, sound that much louder.

Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Fletcher curled up on the forest floor, his lips chapped, his face bruised and streaked with dried blood. It seemed wrong—horribly so—that the kid who lived practically across the street, whose house Avery had passed on a thousand bike rides, was lying in a hospital bed rather than his own.

And she wondered about Adam.

Avery’s father and his group were continuing the search, but the chief had sent her home with Officer Blount at about ten thirty. She had tried to protest, but there was no arguing with him when he had that determined look.

She rolled over to look at the glowing red numbers on her alarm clock: 4:57. She shivered. If Adam was still out there…

A car pulled into the driveway, and Avery listened as the garage door opened. Her father was home. A flitter of nerves coursed through her. Her father would be upset to catch her still awake.

She listened to his footfalls, tracing his routine in her head: The slam of the car door. The whine of the side door opening and closing. The thunk of the chief’s gun belt knocking against the washing machine as he walks through the narrow laundry room. The rush of the kitchen faucet as he fills a glass of water. Then heavy footsteps on the stairs.

Avery listened, waiting for the familiar sounds of her father opening his bedroom door, placing his gun belt on the top shelf of his closet, and flopping down on his bed with a sigh that made her heart heavy.

Instead, there was a quick knock on her door.

“Avy?” The chief pushed the door open, letting in the bright light from the hallway.

Avery held a hand over her eyes. “Dad?” She squinted at him. He was still dressed in his uniform, his gun in his holster. “Did you find Adam?”

The look on her father’s face made a lump form in Avery’s throat.
Was
he
dead?
She didn’t want to ask.

“Not yet.” The chief walked into Avery’s room and picked up the clothes she had worn that day from the chair where she had left them. He tossed them on the end of her bed. “Get dressed. We’re going to the hospital.”

Avery pushed off her blankets and swung her feet to the ground. “What? Why?”

“Fletcher’s starting to talk. He’s beginning to remember some of what happened.”

“Okay…but why am I going to the hospital?”

“Because he’ll only speak with you.” The chief turned without further explanation, shutting Avery’s door behind him.

Avery blinked in the darkness before pulling on a pair of sweatpants. Why did Fletcher want to talk to her? Correction: why would he
only
talk to her? She slipped into an old Dan River Falls High sweatshirt, her unease growing, her fingers going to the fabric. She had what her father called “nervous hands,” so the sleeves of the dark-purple hoodie—as well as the hems of most of her clothes—were frayed from wear and constant picking.

She gathered her brown hair into a sloppy ponytail. She had gone to bed with it still damp from her shower, so now the strands curled every which way. But she didn’t give it a second thought as she pulled on her sneakers and then took the stairs two at a time, meeting her father in the kitchen.

Chief Templeton’s face was drawn, the lack of sleep showing in the dark circles under his brown eyes.

“We can grab McDonald’s on the way,” he said simply, before turning on his heel and heading to the garage.

Avery nodded and followed her father.

In the car, she dutifully clicked her seat belt. Her gaze mimicked his as he checked all his mirrors and put the car into reverse. On better days, he would quiz Avery on what he should do next to prep her for driver’s ed next semester. But in the graying light of dawn, they were silent.

Once they pulled into the drive-through, Avery cleared her throat. “What does Fletcher want, Dad?”

The chief shrugged and placed their orders. “He just said he wanted to talk.”

“If he just wanted to chat, you wouldn’t have pulled me out of bed at five in the morning.”

The expression on the chief’s face didn’t change. He fished a few bills from his wallet.

When they pulled up to the service window, Avery watched her father morph into chief mode, the way he did whenever he was in public. His lips curved into a sure smile, and his eyes shone as he asked about the drive-through woman’s morning. He passed Avery the bags of food, and the lady in the window called, “See ya, Chief! See ya, Chief’s daughter!” as they pulled away.

“So you don’t know why Fletcher wants to speak with you? You guys aren’t close or anything, friends at school? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him come over to the house.”

“He hasn’t. We
go
to school together, so we know each other. I mean, he and his mom practically live across the street. But we’re not like,
close
close. Not since we were, like, eleven.”

“Did he say anything when you found him?”

Avery shook her head, taking a bite of hash browns and letting the salt, grease, and crunch dissolve in her mouth. “No. Not really.”

“He didn’t mention anything about Adam, anything about what might have happened to him?”

Again, Avery shook her head. “No. I told you. He said he didn’t remember. He had this really weird, vacant look, like he didn’t know who Adam was. Maybe it was shock or something.”

The chief rolled his car to a stop at a red light and turned to her. “What do you know about Adam?”

“Adam?” She bit into her sandwich, not tasting it. “He’s just a regular guy, I guess. Really nice.”

“Do you think he would have any reason to hurt Fletcher?”

“You think Adam was the one who did this?”

Her father gave one of those half nods that meant neither no nor yes. “We haven’t found Adam yet, and Fletcher’s hurt pretty badly.”

“Is Adam a suspect?”

“I’m not saying that. Right now Adam is a missing kid who may have been out alone in the woods all night.”

Avery balled up the remains of her sandwich, no longer hungry.

“Fletcher’s mother called in the missing-person report, but Adam’s family was right behind her. Do you know who suggested the hike?”

“Dad, I don’t know them like that. We never really talked in school or anything, so no, it’s not like we discussed our weekend plans.”

Avery’s mind flashed back to that time in the library with Adam. The electric feeling of being near him, of him reaching out to touch her cheek, was like hitting your funny bone—strange but not unpleasant. His eyes had been warm and comforting. Just his proximity had made her feel safe. She couldn’t imagine Adam turning into a monster.

“I don’t think Adam would do that. He’s—he’s…nice.”

Chief Templeton shot Avery a look that practically delivered a lecture of its own, reminding her that bad guys don’t always “look” bad and good guys can be the ones you least expect.

Then Avery thought back on when she’d found Fletcher in the woods. His eyes had lost focus, as if his mind had gone
somewhere
else
when she asked about the other boy.

Suddenly, Avery’s hash browns sat like a hot rock in her gut.

She remembered reading an article about the brain stashing away memories—even recent ones—until the waking mind could process them. Had Adam attacked Fletcher? Or had whatever happened to Adam been so bad that Fletcher’s brain had locked away the memory?

• • •

Memories, flashbacks, visions of the woods pierced his sleep like shards of broken glass, tearing holes in his relative calm. In the safety of his hospital room, Fletcher shifted, tossing off the thin blankets, wincing at the explosion of pain the movement caused. He pushed back into his pillow, his breathing raspy and shallow.

The images couldn’t have been real. They must have been hallucinations, brought on by the medications the doctors had been pumping into his veins since he’d arrived at the hospital. Why else would he have visions of Adam, his face contorted in anger and then lapsing into pure terror? But Fletcher saw his friend clawing at hands that encircled his throat, heard his desperate gasps for air, the breath that called to him—“Fletch.” It was like watching film footage of an old horror movie.

What
had
happened
to
Adam?

Fletcher glanced at the empty visitor’s chair at the side of his bed, glad that his mother had finally gone home. Otherwise, she sat there, wringing her hands and staring at him. He was tired of being stared at.

He looked around the room for a clock, but there wasn’t one. He guessed marking time somehow went against the healing process. He wondered when Avery would arrive. He didn’t know what he’d say to her, why he’d even asked for her, but when the doctors and officers, even the chief of police, peppered him with questions, his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth. That didn’t stop them from trying to coax him to talk, saying things that shouldn’t come out of adults’ mouths like, “It’s cool, Fletcher. You can talk to us. We’re here to listen.”

They didn’t get it. They couldn’t, because even he didn’t get it.

Branches
breaking
underfoot, slipping in the mud as he ran, cringing, flinching, everything hurting. The smack of skin against skin, knuckles against bone, his palms scraping against rock, the moisture of—What was it? Blood? Damp?—seeping through his jeans as he fell. Adam, Adam, Adam…

Avery’s mouth was dry. What was she supposed to say to him?

“Just listen,” Chief Templeton said as though he were reading his daughter’s mind. “Just listen to whatever he has to say and be there for him. Like a friend.” He offered her a formal smile that must have been reassuring for victims or witnesses or whoever her father normally dealt with, but it only made her feel more uncomfortable.

She nodded. “I guess.”

Fletcher and his mother had moved into the neighborhood about five years ago. Avery was ten, just about to turn eleven, a tomboy teetering on the edge between liking boys and wanting to strike them out with her wicked three-fingered fastball.

The first time she had seen Fletcher, he had wandered out into the park, a half-abandoned stretch of grass and weeds with bases and a pitcher’s mound scuffed out by the kids who played there. Avery was winding up a pitch, while Adam eyed her, his bat at the ready. A handful of kids were milling on bases or kicking rocks in their makeshift dugout. Fletcher had walked right through the game as if he had no idea anyone was even there.

She thought about that kid now—unaffected, indifferent—and tried to reconcile him with the one she had found in the woods. She thought of Fletcher’s eyes, the desperate way they’d looked at her, begging her to notice him on the
forest
floor
.

Now Avery stood outside Fletcher’s hospital room, her heart thudding in her ears.

Would
he
be
waiting
for
her? Would he even be awake?

Chief Templeton pushed the door open.

Fletcher was sitting up in his bed, looking out at the sunrise.

Chief Templeton cleared his throat. “Avery’s here to talk. I’ll be in the hallway if you need me.”

Fletcher turned slowly, hunched as though he were an old man.

Avery sucked in a breath. His face was clean now, but the bruises remained. A gash above his eye cut across his forehead and shot toward his scalp, where a quarter-sized chunk of his hair had been shaved away. He was covered in scratches.

Fletcher’s smile was lopsided. He gently touched the side of his head. “I probably look really stupid. They wouldn’t even let me see a mirror.”

“No,” Avery said, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment at being caught staring. “You look fine. Good, I mean.”

They both knew it wasn’t true and stared at each other in uncomfortable silence.

“Do you want to sit down?” Fletcher asked

Avery nodded and slid into the visitor’s chair.

They sat in silence for a moment, Avery listening to her careening heartbeat, certain that Fletcher could hear it too. She tried not to stare, but even cleaned up, the wounds on Fletcher’s face were bad. She thought about the possibility that Adam could have been the one to do this to Fletcher. It was impossible, she decided finally, absurd. The person who did this to Fletcher—the person who attacked him and Adam—had to be a monster. There was nothing else to it.

• • •

Fletcher watched Avery. Her actions were stiff and self-conscious. So was he. He had never been this close to a girl before. It felt so intimate, him being so vulnerable.

He didn’t even know why he had asked for her. It just came out of his mouth while everyone was throwing questions at him. His doctor kept holding his hand out to the officers, warning them that Fletcher’s condition could be “touch and go”—that was the phrase he used. But even when the officers backed off, the doctor started in: “Can you move this? Does that hurt? Do you remember if you were hit here…?” It was all a painful, weird blur, memories sharp and faded at the same time.

“I want to talk to Avery,” Fletcher had said before the fog had set in. “I want to talk to Avery, please.”

Maybe it was because she was kind of a loner like him, or because she had been through something traumatic too. Maybe it was because she had been the one to find him.

A thought played on his periphery but Fletcher didn’t want to pay attention to it: had he asked for Avery because she found him or because she saved him?

• • •

“My dad said you wanted to talk to me.”

Fletcher’s cheeks went red.

“It’s okay, you know,” Avery continued, nerves humming. She wanted to comfort Fletcher. She wanted to be as good as her dad. But seeing Fletcher in front of her—part friend, part victim—shook her. “You don’t have to talk to me. I mean, you don’t have to tell me anything. Unless you want to. I won’t… It can be between us.” She was stammering, her hands flopping in front of her as she talked.

Fletcher opened his mouth, and then he shrugged. His shoulders looked small and bony beneath the oversized hospital gown. He looked fragile beyond the cuts and bruises, and Avery wondered how Fletcher was able to defend himself at all.

He looked down at his lap, his chin on his chest.

“Maybe you could tell me when you guys decided to go hiking. I mean, I didn’t know you and Adam really hung out.”

Fletcher’s head snapped up. “Me and Adam are friends. We hang out.” The edge in his voice frightened Avery. Then his face softened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get mad. It’s just…you know, people think I’m a geek. And why would someone who is popular like Adam hang out with the geek?”

Except people didn’t call Fletcher a geek. They coughed
freak
or
loser
into their hands when he passed or asked a question in school. They called Avery a geek.

Fletcher traced the pattern on his pajamas with his fingernail. “The hike wasn’t really anyone’s idea. We’d been talking about hiking, checking out the woods, and just got in the car. It’s not something we did all the time. We aren’t mountain men or anything.”

Avery nodded. “Yeah, it’s usually a good idea to bring water and a map with you.”

“A map?” He laughed. “Care to join us in the digital age, Avery? It’s called GPS.”

She laughed despite feeling stung. “It’s called no cell towers in the forest.”

Fletcher reached out, his fingers featherlight on the back of her hand. “And then you found me.”

Avery matched Fletcher’s small smile, but something felt off.

• • •

We
were
just
going
to
go
for
a
hike.
Nothing big, just a walk in the woods.

“Hey, Fletch. You’ve got to see this!”

Adam’s voice was a subtle call in the back of Fletcher’s head, and he squeezed his eyes shut. He could see his own sneakered feet and the tamped-down ground around him. He could feel the wind on his cheeks and see where Adam had stopped up ahead.

And
then
what
happened?

An explosion of white-hot pain shot behind Fletcher’s right eye, and his vision went black.

“Hey, Fletch. Hey, are you okay?”

Hey, Fletch…

It was Avery this time and Fletcher wanted to grab her, wanted to hang on to her for dear life. If she wrapped her arms around him, could she keep him here, could she keep him from slipping into the blackness? He tried to speak, but all that came out was a shallow groan.

Fletcher could feel the shift of Avery’s weight on the mattress as she moved toward him.

“Should I call the nurse? Are you okay?”

“No, don’t,” Fletcher panted, the pain shooting waves of nausea into his stomach. “I’m okay.” The pain started to subside.

He remembered the doctor’s fingers on his scalp, gently feeling along his forehead until he yelped at the same explosion of pain. The doctor had rattled off notes to the nurse:
cranial
damage, frontal lobe injury.

Avery stared at him, her eyes intense. “Fletch?”

“I’m sorry. I… Sometimes there are these…pains.”

She cocked her head, her eyebrows diving into a concerned V. “You look like you took a pretty big hit.”

Fletcher watched Avery’s fingers—delicate and slim—brush a lock of hair from his face. The light pressure from her fingers over his forehead sent a shiver through him.

“Does it hurt much?”

“Yeah. But the pain, the headaches, I mean… I’ve had those before.”

Avery’s hands dipped back into her lap and Fletcher went on.

“I guess I hit my head pretty badly.” He gingerly touched the zigzag of stitches that crossed his hairline. “Or whatever hit me.”

“Do you know? Do you have any—”

Fletcher shook his head. “I start to remember and then…there’s nothing.”

Avery looked toward the door. “After…after I lost my mom, it was that way for me too.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Sometimes I couldn’t even remember what she looked like. All I could see was…” She shuddered.

Fletcher vaulted back to the Founder’s Day celebration that summer. That night he had felt a part of something, a part of
them
. The whole school—the whole town—was there, and everyone seemed happy, accepting.

They were walking from the celebration. He remembered the sound of Adam’s voice reverberating through the trees as he and some other kid hollered and laughed about something. How Avery looked walking along, her hands in the pockets of her shorts. A bunch of other kids was there too, and Fletcher was right in the thick of them as they walked the shoulder of the forest road. Then he remembered the moment when everything changed.

They came around the curve in the road, and it was like stepping into a new scene in a movie: the stinking smell of gasoline and burnt rubber and something else that hung in the night air—something he couldn’t place. Then Avery’s face was illuminated by the flashing red-and-blue lights of the police cars stopped on the side of the road. He saw the careless smile fall from her lips. Recognition flit through her eyes and then anguish so deep that he could practically feel her pain.

Avery took off running toward the hissing chunk of twisted metal balanced on the edge of the road, one single tire raised to the sky.

It was a car.

Fletcher recognized it as the car that Avery’s mother had been driving.

He could still hear Avery’s cry. He could still see her fingers grabbing at the air as one of the officers tried to hold her back. But Avery got past him and scudded to her knees on the asphalt, digging at the car. Someone else grabbed her and she screamed. At some point Chief Templeton arrived, and Fletcher remembered the silent exchange between Avery and her father as he pulled her toward his police cruiser. Avery looked at Fletcher then, their eyes locking for one aching minute, her world crashing down, his standing still.

Fletcher ran his tongue over the front of his teeth, anxiety burning in the pit of his stomach. “Did you ever have blackouts? You know, about that night?”

He watched Avery’s hands clasped in her lap. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick. He had never noticed that before. She cleared her throat. “Sometimes. I don’t know if they were really blackouts though. Just…”

“Dark spots?”

She nodded carefully. “Yeah, some details fade in and out. Or I start to wonder if something I know happened actually did. I heard that the brain can block out things that it can’t deal with.”

They were both silent for a moment. Then Fletcher spoke. “Do you ever wonder what it feels like to die?”

• • •

Avery’s eyes widened. “No.”

But she was only telling half the truth. After her mother died, Avery thought about those last few minutes of her mother’s life, wondering what her mom was thinking, what she must have felt. Did she know she was dying? Did she wish for more time? Did she think of Avery?

Even now, it made Avery tear up. She tried not to think about her mother or death.

“I can’t help but wonder what happens during…and after.” Fletcher looked at her as if he expected her to have the answers. “Do you?” he asked. “Wonder?”

Avery opened her mouth to answer, but there was a knock on the door. Chief Templeton poked his head in. “Avery? Can I see you for a minute?”

• • •

Fletcher didn’t want Avery to leave, but he had no reason to ask her to stay. He couldn’t remember anything important from the woods, details he knew she was hoping he’d share. And even when he wasn’t banged and stitched up, Fletcher had never been a great conversationalist. He offered her a small smile and feigned a yawn. “I should probably get some rest,” he said.

Avery stood from the chair and nodded. “Okay. That’s probably a good idea.” She turned and paused, scrawling something on a piece of paper before handing it to Fletcher. “This is my cell number. Call me if you ever want to talk. Not just about”—she waved her arm indicating the hospital room—“but whatever.”

Fletcher took the paper. No girl had ever given him her number before, and although he was certain it had more to do with his injuries than her interest in him, he was okay with it.

He waved as Avery closed the door behind herself, and he sunk back in his pillows. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he smiled. His eyes were heavy, but he didn’t want to fall asleep. He didn’t want to have another fragmented dream, but even more, he didn’t want to forget the sweet smile on Avery’s face.

• • •

Avery and her father walked down the hospital corridor in silence. When they got into the elevator, Avery turned to him, arms crossed in front of her chest. She suddenly felt protective of Fletcher after seeing him dwarfed in that hospital bed, his face and body ravaged. She was annoyed that her father would make her a go-between.

“So you want the breakdown?” she snapped. “Because he didn’t say much.”