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I’m almost out the door at Saint Ambrose, getting ready to meet up with Shane by the woods for our leaf project, when I hear them.
“There’s no mistake. Someone saw. A kid finally came forward to tell their parents, and the parents told me.”
It’s Mr. Larkin, talking to someone in his classroom. I’m about to keep walking when a familiar voice stops me in my tracks.
“You sure the kid was telling the truth?” my father asks.
I stop and press against the wall, even though there’s no one around to see me. I stayed after for extra help in math, and everyone else is long gone. Dad never mentioned coming here, and I don’t know why he would come, unless…
“It’s a reliable source,” Mr. Larkin says. There’s a long pause, and then he says, “Are you trying to deny it? If you are, I can get the police involved
—”
“No,” Dad says heavily. Another pause, until he adds, “I’m not denying it. I’ll get it back to you, okay? Every last cent.”
Shit. Shit. Shit. My heart starts pounding as I clutch the strap of my backpack tighter—my stupid backpack that, once again, doesn’t have the turquoise envelope inside. I waited too long to return it, and now Mr. Larkin knows. He knows.
“It’s not that simple,” Mr. Larkin says. “Why not?” my father asks.
“Because it’s theft. The administration needs to know, and so do the authorities.”
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
A hard edge creeps into my father’s voice. “You just said you wouldn’t get the police involved if I—”
“I never said that,” Mr. Larkin interrupts.
“Come on, Will,” my father says, and I can almost hear him swallowing his anger before adding in a calmer tone, “Can’t we keep things between us?”
“No,” Mr. Larkin says. Curt and dismissive, like he won’t even consider it.
“You don’t understand what this will do to Tripp. It’s not just about the money. It’s—”
“Tripp isn’t my concern,” Mr. Larkin says in the coldest tone I’ve ever heard him use. He barely even sounds like the same person.
They keep arguing, and my stomach keeps churning until Mr. Larkin finally says, “All of this sounds like a you problem, Junior. Not a me problem. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have someplace to be.”
I flatten myself behind the trophy case as he storms out. “You don’t get it, Will,” Dad calls after him, his voice hoarse and almost desperate. “You can’t do this!” He steps into the hallway, hands on his hips as he watches Mr. Larkin walk away. “You can’t do this,” he repeats in a quieter tone.
My heart pounds as I slowly back around the corner without my father seeing me, and slip out a side door. I make my way outside, and when I reach the parking lot, my eyes hit on an unwelcome sight: Mr. Larkin, walking toward the exact same woods where I’m supposed to be. I freeze in place, indecisive. I don’t want to run into him, not after everything I just
heard. Should I go back inside and talk to my father? But the thought makes me too nauseated to consider for long, so I keep walking.
Mr. Larkin does the typical adult thing—instead of hopping the fence, he walks all the way to the edge of Saint Ambrose, where there’s a break between our fence and one of a neighboring yard. I head for the kids’ shortcut, which is a low, sagging bit of fence that’s easy to jump. I toss my backpack over, then wait a few minutes to make sure that Mr. Larkin is well on his way to wherever he’s going.
Tripp isn’t my concern, Mr. Larkin said. The words shouldn’t hurt as much as they do, because I have a much bigger problem. Tomorrow, the entire school will know that my father is a thief.
The bell rings, signaling the end of after-school help at Saint Ambrose, and I take that as my cue to haul myself over the fence. Then I make my way to the birch grove, where I’ll be able to see Shane when he arrives.
Shane, of course, is late, and we argue until we finally split up. It’s a relief to be alone, listening to music while adding leaves to my collection, until I realize I’ve lost track of where I am. I pull out my earbuds, get my bearings at the ridge near Shelton Park, and start to make my way back to Saint Ambrose.
Then the screaming starts.
I crash through trees to follow it, and stop short when I see something blue among all the brown and green. Charlotte’s coat. Her hands are covering her mouth, but they’re not doing much to muffle her screams. Shane is standing next to her, a big rock in his hands and a dazed expression on his face. He’s looking down, staring at the ground, at…
Oh God.
Mr. Larkin is lying on his back, unnaturally still, his eyes wide open and staring at nothing. The leaves beside his head are stained red. “Is he…” I trail off and step closer, even though every cell in my body wants to run away.
“I don’t know what he is,” Shane rasps out. He’s still clutching the rock, and it’s…Holy hell, it’s literally dripping with blood. Shane’s hands
are smeared, and I watch in horror as a spatter of red lands on his Saint Ambrose chinos.
Maybe Mr. Larkin tripped, I think. He tripped, and hit his head on that rock. But somehow it doesn’t look like that. It doesn’t look like that at all.
“Shane,” I say in the calm tone I use when I’m trying not to scare my neighbor’s neurotic Chihuahua. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Shane says in the same hoarse voice. “Why do you have that rock?” I ask.
“I…It was next to him.”
Something glints on the ground beside Mr. Larkin. I kneel for a closer look, and my heart jumps into my throat. For a second I can’t breathe, can’t do anything except stare at the bright silver disc nestled among the leaves. “My lucky medallions,” Dad always calls them when he twirls his key chain on one finger.
Why is one of my father’s medallions next to Mr. Larkin’s dead body? Because Mr. Larkin has to be dead, right? I haven’t dared to feel for a pulse, but nobody could be this still for this long unless…
Charlotte hasn’t let up. “Stop screaming,” I say tightly. “I can’t think when you’re screaming like that.”
She starts gasping then, struggling mightily to get herself under control, as I quickly palm the silver disc and stuff it into my pocket. I glance at Shane to see if he noticed, but he’s staring at the bloody rock in his hands. “I heard yelling,” he says suddenly. “Like, people arguing. Then it got quiet, and…I saw Mr. Larkin. Just lying there.”
My blood, already running cold thanks to the silver medallion, turns to ice. “I heard yelling,” Shane said.
I heard yelling earlier too.
A series of images flashes through my brain. The things I heard and saw: Dad and Mr. Larkin arguing, Mr. Larkin cutting him off and heading for the woods. And the things I imagine: Dad following, finding Mr. Larkin, losing his temper, and doing something horrible.
Something you can’t take back.
Now what? I have to think. My dad—he didn’t mean to do this, I know it. He was just trying to…God, he was trying to protect me, wasn’t he? He’d told Mr. Larkin, “You don’t understand what this will do to Tripp.” He must have come here to plead his case again, and lost his temper at exactly the wrong moment.
It was an accident, I’m sure of it. But that doesn’t matter when someone’s dead, right? They’ll take Dad away, and then they’ll take me away too.
I push the medallion farther into my pocket as I carefully scan the ground for anything else my father might have left behind. When I’m satisfied that there’s nothing, I return my attention to Shane. We lock eyes, and his are suddenly a lot clearer.
“I heard yelling,” he repeats, and my gut twists. Does he realize what he heard—or who? I can’t let him speak the words and make them real.
“No, you didn’t.” I didn’t plan on saying that, but as soon as I do, I know it’s the right move. Well, not right—nothing about this is right—but it’s my only choice. Shane’s not an independent thinker. He’s a go-with-the- flow kind of kid who’s always happy to follow someone else’s lead, and right now I need him to follow mine.
Shane blinks, and I add, “Do you know how this looks, Shane? You’re holding the rock that must’ve been used to kill Mr. Larkin. Your fingerprints are all over a murder weapon.” I can only hope my father’s aren’t too. But—no. He was wearing gloves when I saw him in the hallway, and he would’ve kept them on outside. There shouldn’t be anything that ties him to the scene, as long as I can keep Shane contained.
“I didn’t…It was…” Shane drops the rock with a thud, startling Charlotte so much that her sobs catch in her throat. She sniffs and shakily wipes her eyes as Shane adds, “Mr. Larkin was already like this. All I did was pick it up.”
“I believe you,” I say. “But if you go around telling people you heard an argument in the woods that nobody else heard”—I glance at Charlotte to see if she’s going to contradict me, but she’s still wiping her eyes—“and meanwhile your hands are covered in blood? You’ll look guilty. Like you’re
making stuff up.” Shane swallows visibly, staring at his hands, and I press my advantage. “You could go to jail for killing Mr. Larkin.”
Charlotte blanches as Shane gulps, “Really?”
“Really. It happens all the time,” I say, like I’m some kind of crime expert instead of a terrified kid.
Charlotte clutches Shane’s arm, pulling him close. “We can’t let Shane get arrested,” she says urgently, and I say a quick prayer of thanks for Charlotte’s Shane obsession. If we were with any other kid, she’s bossy enough to argue with me—and ask questions, maybe, about why I’m laying it on so thick. But Shane? Shane, she just wants to protect.
“We won’t,” I say. “We just need a single, simple story. We’ll tell everybody that we went into the woods together, that we never heard or saw anybody else, and that we found Mr. Larkin just like this. Shane picked up the rock without thinking, and then we realized that we needed to get help. Right?” They both nod. “Good. Now pay attention, because details matter and our stories have to be identical. Here’s what we’re going to say.”
I’ve managed to keep that story inside for almost four years, and now Brynn Gallagher, of all the damn people, knows that my father killed Mr. Larkin and I covered it up. With a naïve, childish, boneheaded plan that actually worked. For weeks afterward, I was afraid the pressure would get too intense for Shane and he’d cave. Or that Charlotte, once I accidentally framed her with the class-trip money, would change her story to deflect attention.
But nothing like that happened. Shane, Charlotte, and I became sympathetic, almost heroic witnesses, and nobody—with the possible exception of Officer Patz—ever suspected that we were really just a bunch of well-rehearsed liars. “We tell the police our story,” I’d told Shane and Charlotte, “and then never, ever talk about it again. Not to each other, and not to anybody else. That way we won’t accidentally say the wrong thing.”
Sometimes I still can’t believe we got away with it. That none of us ever slipped up, or got tired of the pretense, or reached the point where the truth clawed its way out no matter how hard we tried to shove it down.
Until now.
I can’t look at Brynn, can’t stand the thought of what her expression must be. And then dread starts seeping through my entire body, curling around my heart and lungs until it’s almost impossible to breathe. She’s going to tell someone; of course she is. How could she not? What have I done, what have I done, what have I done…
“Tripp, no!” Brynn is shaking my arm. I pull away, still unable to look at her. “That’s not what happened. It couldn’t have happened.”
“Your magic truth compass is broken, Brynn,” I say bitterly. “It happened.”
“No,” she says, tugging harder at my arm. “You need to listen to me. My dad and I—we were at school then too. I was working late at the school paper and he picked me up. Only, when he tried to restart the car, the engine wouldn’t turn over.” Her voice is rushed and urgent, her words tumbling over one another. “So he got out of the car and looked around for somebody who might have jumper cables. There was no one in the parking lot, so I went back into Saint Ambrose to see if I could find a teacher, and I saw your dad.”
“Saw my dad what?” I ask, stomach churning.
“Standing near the trophy case. I asked him for help, and he came outside with me. He got jumper cables out of his trunk and connected them to our car.”
“What…what time was that?” I say thickly. “I told you. After school.”
“But when after school?” I press. Dad’s always been in semi-decent shape, and he can move fast when he wants to. When he needs to. If Brynn’s dad’s car broke down even half an hour after my father and Mr. Larkin argued, none of this matters. “What exact time?”
“I don’t know, but…” Brynn scrunches her face for a few agonizing moments, and then her expression clears. “Oh! The after-school bell rang right after I asked your dad for help, so it would have been…whenever that is. Three-thirty, maybe?”
“The after-school bell rang,” I repeat. I stare at my sneakers, remembering how I hopped the fence right after that bell—just a few minutes behind a very much alive Mr. Larkin. “You’re sure?”
“I’m positive,” Brynn says. “Because your dad said, ‘Looks like you’ve been saved by the bell’ like a giant dork.” She attempts a smile I can’t yet return, and adds, “Turns out it wasn’t the battery, so my dad called a tow truck, and yours took me home. He hung out with me and my mom and Ellie for a while, till my dad got back from the garage. He was there when the police called. Tripp, my God.” When I finally look at Brynn, her eyes are equal parts sympathetic and horrified. “How could you not know that? Didn’t he tell you where he was?”
“He said…he said he was at Saint Ambrose to drop off an invoice, and then he started to say something else, but…I interrupted,” I say. Every time my father said a word in the police station, unless it was about me, I tried to stop him.
I couldn’t keep the police from talking to him on their own, of course, so he probably explained the car breakdown then. I never asked, though. For months, every time he tried to bring up that day, I put him off. I was looking at my father through such a distorted lens that everything about him seemed shifty and wrong. All my attention was focused on making sure that Shane, Charlotte, and I had our stories straight, that I never let it slip that my father had argued with Mr. Larkin right before he died, and that nobody knew about—
“The medallion,” I say abruptly. “The silver disc I found next to Mr.
Larkin’s body. I thought…I could’ve sworn that belonged to my dad.”
“Well, maybe it did,” Brynn says. “He could have lost it another day, although it’s strange that you’d find it right there, right then.” Her eyes take on a sudden gleam. “Hold on. Mr. Larkin was wearing a silver chain when he died. It was broken, so…the medallion could’ve come off when he was attacked.” She twists in her seat, newly animated. “Do you still have it?”
“I don’t know.” As soon as I got home and had a minute alone, I shoved the medallion into the back of a drawer without looking at it. I haven’t looked at it since, so it’s entirely possible that it’s still there, but I
can’t pivot that fast. Not when there’s this much at stake. “Brynn, look, I need you to…You gotta be totally honest, okay? Are you sure my dad never left you guys? Not at any point?”
“I’m positive. I was with him, and so were my parents. My dad came forward to let the police know he’d been in the parking lot that day, and he told them what happened with our car. He was basically a witness to your dad’s alibi. Not that anybody thought he needed one, because he didn’t. Oh my God.” Her hands are in mine now, squeezing hard. “I can’t believe that you’ve been thinking all this time that your dad killed Mr. Larkin. All you had to do was ask. If you and I had still been speaking, I’d have mentioned that he helped us out. Your dad might be a thief, but he’s not a murderer.”
He’s not a murderer.
The story I crafted four years ago was just that—a story. A fabrication. I should feel overjoyed and relieved now, but instead, I’m numb. I don’t feel any different. I still feel cursed.
“But I covered it up,” I say. “Or thought I did. I was willing to… I let Mr. Larkin be buried with his name tainted, and I never said a word—”
I start to slump back into the cushions, but Brynn pulls me upright. “No,” she says firmly. “Don’t punish yourself with a new crime before you’ve even accepted that the old one wasn’t real. You were thirteen, scared, and loved your dad. He was all you had, and that’s a terrifying place to be for a kid. So don’t keep drowning yourself in alcohol because you chose to protect him. That doesn’t make you a bad person. Besides,” she adds, letting go of my hands as if she suddenly decided she shouldn’t be holding them. “There’s another problem we need to focus on.”
“Oh really?” I scoff. “What’s bigger than me making a false confession about a teacher’s murder?”
“Yes,” Brynn replies. “Because here’s the thing. One of the main reasons Shane didn’t get into trouble back then—even though his fingerprints were all over the murder weapon—was because you said he and Charlotte were with you the whole time. That all three of you arrived at the woods together, that you never lost sight of one another, and that you found Mr. Larkin together. You weren’t friends with Shane back then, so nobody thought you’d lie about what happened. And while you thought you were protecting your dad, he didn’t actually need it.” Understanding seeps into my foggy mind, and I stare at Brynn as she finishes, “In the end, the person you ended up protecting was Shane.”
There’s probably a lot I should say to that, but the only thing that comes to mind is, “Well, fuck.”
Just then, the guesthouse door rattles, and we both jump. It creaks open, letting in a blast of icy January air, and for the first time all week, I actually feel the cold. A shadow appears, resolving into a familiar figure as he steps inside and leans against the doorframe. His gaze shifts between Brynn and me before settling on me.
“What’s going on, T?” Shane asks.
