Only She Came Back, page 3
“We’re done with school, remember?”
“Oh, God.” Again the nervous laugh. “I don’t know why I’d say that. I saw you at graduation. I just imagine you at school because that’s where I always saw you.”
Because you’ve moved on from school, and I haven’t. “It’s okay,” I said, trying to sound the way Reggie might in this situation—breezy, just on the edge of snarky, like I was above caring whether anybody’s name was a trending hashtag. But I couldn’t meet her eyes. “I get it. Time is weird that way.”
“But you have to know,” she said in a lower voice. “About all the…”
This was the crucial moment. Real podcasters, the ones who tell the untold stories, know how to make people trust them.
“Those reporters are vultures,” I said. “Can’t your parents call the cops on them?”
She relaxed. A fraction, but I felt it. “My dad keeps threatening to. But they’re pros. Usually they stay on the street, but my parents were out, so I guess they got brave and snuck up along our property line. I went out to do yoga on the deck, and suddenly that woman, she was just… in my face. Asking me things.”
She tugged the knot loose and ran her fingers through her hair. It fell around her shoulders the way it did in Callum’s videos—a pale gold cloak for her face, catching the light. Her roots were showing.
I wondered why I hadn’t noticed in English class that she was beautiful. Was it the icy-blond dye job that made the difference? She’d shed any trace of softness since I last saw her, and while her new, hard physique was a little forbidding, it also emphasized her features: brow and cheekbones jutting above her full lips and cleft chin.
Barbie doll, I heard Reggie say dismissively. But she would’ve seen it, too. She would have crushed on Kiri like nobody’s business.
“I should’ve just gone back inside.” Her voice trembled. “I don’t know what made me bolt. They’ve been calling and texting ever since I got off the plane, but I guess that wasn’t enough for them.”
I wanted to know what questions the reporters had asked her, but that would put me on their side, not hers. What would Reggie say in this situation? And then I had it: the airy tone and the words: “Asshats. What’s their deal? Do they think you’ve done something wrong?”
Kiri’s head swiveled toward me. Her eyes were big and dark, such a startling contrast with the hair, and her brows were dark, too.
“Do you think I’ve done something wrong?” she asked.
I forced myself to hold her gaze. “Well, I’m not scared of you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I remembered a series of interviews with a serial killer I’d heard. The FBI agents put him at ease by never hinting they thought there was anything wrong with him. “I mean, like, you’re the quietest person I’ve ever known,” I said. “The worst you could do is drag me off to play a board game or something.”
Her face relaxed into a smile. “Ha. Well. You might be surprised.”
I gazed up at the sky. “People just say things. The media. I kind of ignore it, honestly. Most of it’s not the truth.”
“I don’t know what people are saying anymore.” Kiri parted her hair—loose, it fell past her shoulders—and started to braid it on the left side. “They took my phone, the investigators.” She pronounced each syllable carefully, as if she were a child saying the word for the first time. “My dad won’t get me a new one. And my mom changed the Wi-Fi password so I can’t go online at all. They say it’s for my own good.”
“That’s fucked up,” I said. “You’re an adult.”
“Well, they’re still paying the bills.” Kiri undid her braid and redid it, leaning her head to that side. Then she started on the second pigtail. “What are you doing this month, Sam? Packing for college?”
She wanted to change the subject. I could do that. “Nah. Working at the Grand Nine. I’m going to start CCV in the fall and try to transfer out next year.”
“CCV? They’ve got some good programs, right?” There was the slightest condescension in her tone. If I hadn’t been the one going to community college, I might have sounded the same.
I kicked the cliff with my heel. Couldn’t help it. “I screwed up the first semester of senior year. Got a couple of Ds.”
“You?” She sounded genuinely shocked. Maybe she remembered me as a nerd, which I guess I was before I met Reggie. I was such a child then, thinking my podcast journalism would make me the next big thing. I wanted desperately to prove to my dad and Brenna that I was destined for better than a crappy apartment by the highway.
Then Reggie came along and taught me that I could have good things right now. That I could be someone who stayed out late, mixed a crack whiskey sour (even if the taste made me puke), and leapt from cliffs and came up scream-laughing. That I could fly.
Until that winter night when I went to see Reggie at Tierney Brenner’s place and left buzzed and crying so hard that I hopped a curb and wrapped my mom’s Hyundai around a lamppost. My BAC was close to the limit, and I was lucky I didn’t get charged and lose my license, or so Mom kept telling me.
Reggie quit the theater after that, and I hadn’t seen her since.
So, maybe I also had stuff I didn’t want to talk about, even if Kiri’s stuff was of national interest. “I’m going to transfer,” I said. “Maybe to UVM.”
Kiri’s second pigtail was done, but she hadn’t secured the ends, and both of them were unraveling. “I was supposed to go to UVM,” she said. A strip of stomach showed under her tee, hard and flat and golden—the abs of an athlete or a model-influencer, not a regular person like me.
“Aren’t you still going?”
“No.” After a moment, she said, “When the world is ending, college is a waste.”
The world was ending. That was what she’d said in her cave video, and Callum liked to talk about the “coming collapse” in his videos, too. “Wow,” I said. “That’s… intense. But I guess I know what you mean.”
We turned our heads toward each other at the same time, and our eyes almost met again, but I looked down.
“My mom changed the password because I kept reading stuff,” she said. “About, you know, me.”
My mouth went dry. “It’s messed up the way people obsess about shit that’s none of their business.”
Reggie could have said that and 100 percent meant it. She liked murder stories, but she didn’t give a flying fuck about trending anything. She was the trend. I tried to say it the way she would have, but I wasn’t sure I sold it.
When I looked up, Kiri was still gazing at me. “You said they’re vultures. Well, that’s how I feel: like a corpse in the desert being picked dry.”
A corpse in the desert. A hum rose in my ears, as if the very air around us were vibrating, and my throat closed. Was this a test? Did she want me to think about Callum’s corpse, to ask about Callum’s corpse? Or did she not want me to?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That fucking sucks.”
She winced—maybe she didn’t like my language. Then she smiled, and I found myself looking right at her white, even teeth.
“That reporter, just now,” she said. “She asked if I thought Callum was dead.”
His name fell like a stone between us, hard and heavy. For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder what I would actually do if she confessed to me. Not that it would ever happen, but—would I keep her secret? Should I?
“Do you think that?” I asked, looking into Kiri’s eyes.
She gazed back. “I can’t be sure. But I think he is, yeah. If he wasn’t, he would come back. He wouldn’t just hide and let people… suspect me. And all those news people, they don’t know the whole story.”
My heart gave a lurch. She was testing me. If I asked for too much now, she would turn around and walk away; she would never trust me again.
“The feds know everything, though, right?” I asked. “You told them everything. I assume they just aren’t releasing it all to the media.”
“I told them most of it.” Kiri pulled up her legs. Scrambled to her feet. “I should go back. Mom freaks if I leave the house for more than a short run.”
Was that it, then? Had I passed or failed? I led the way back up the path through prickly juniper and buckthorn, panting on the steep slope. When I heard a sharp intake of breath behind me, I remembered her bare feet and held the bushes back for her.
“Careful to step over that log.” I held out my hand, and she took it. Hers felt so delicate, but I could see the bitten nails. I tried not to tremble; she would feel it.
At the top, just before we left the cover of the woods, I let her hand go. She said, “Have you ever jumped off these cliffs?”
“Not this one—the water’s too shallow.” I pointed up the coast. “There’s a better spot up there.”
“Kids have died doing it.”
“Yeah, a couple.” That’s why I’d been terrified both times, but why were we talking about cliff jumping? And before I knew what I was doing, I burst out with it: “Should I still call you Katie? Or… is Kiri better now?”
She turned to look at me, and I could swear that for the first time in our conversation, she relaxed. “My parents still call me Katie. But Kiri is who I am.”
My heart battered my chest wall, though climbing the hill was a contributing factor. “Okay. Kiri, then.”
“Will you come see me tonight? I don’t go out, but I can have visitors. My folks won’t bug us if we stay in my room or the den.”
“I have to close at work. I won’t be done till one.”
“Come then. I’m always up late. If you leave your bike under the tarp in the garage, my parents won’t even know you’re there. Just tap on the basement slider window that faces the woods.”
Her face was turned away from me, but there was a wistful note in her voice. “I get lonely sometimes at night. Scared.”
3
AUGUST 8, 8:00 PM
Anyone can see that the Grand Nine is a tax shelter. Old Man Brenner, who owns it and a bunch of other movie theaters and real estate in greater Burlington, lives in Florida playing golf with other millionaires. He drops by once a year to pat us on the heads and show off his leathery tan, and he doesn’t seem to care that we sell two hundred tickets on an average weekend and sometimes as few as ten on days like Tuesday.
The Grand Nine doesn’t have reclining chairs or stadium seating or burgers and fries like the Imperial Ten, the flagship of the Brenner empire, in the spiffy new shopping center on the other side of town. The Ten supports the empire, with lines snaking out the doors for every new DC or Marvel release. The Nine just sits. The carpet never gets changed out and the broken restroom locks never get repaired and the projection booths stink of cigarettes and I kind of love it.
It was Thursday, with a preview of Friday’s new blockbuster release at seven, and three of us were working. A few couples came for the preview, followed by a brief rush of moms and dads sweet-talking bawling toddlers on their way to the latest DreamWorks cartoon. Once all the six thirty or seven o’clock shows had started, the great lull began. At the register, I ate stale popcorn and scrolled through my true-crime feeds.
A new case out in California—a pregnant woman’s disappearance on a Walmart run—had caught people’s attention, but there was plenty of Kiri/Callum buzz, too. Callum’s mom had done a tearful interview on a morning talk show. When the host asked if she believed Kiri’s story about what had happened in the desert, she said, “I don’t believe there was some mystery person who wished ill to my son. Callum wasn’t someone who made enemies. Beyond that, I won’t speculate.”
On my favorite channel, Murder Most F**ked Up, Aliza Deene was doing video analyses of every single vid Callum had posted on his YouTube from the desert, with diagrams and commentary. Everybody had noticed that Kiri and Callum both looked much thinner in the last video than the first, and Aliza called her “horrifically emaciated.”
I remembered Kiri crying out when she thought I’d fallen, and a chill seized me around the middle. She’d filled out some in a week; she wasn’t skeletal anymore. But the hardness that I’d noticed did give her a haunted look.
I get lonely sometimes at night.
Maybe she didn’t trust me yet, but she did want to see me again. I’d made her laugh.
“That girl wasn’t eating,” Aliza droned on inside my earbuds. “And, given what Callum said about how they were getting most of their food from hunting and gathering in the effing desert, is anybody surprised? Now, watch what happens in this scene where Callum and Kiri count out the beef jerky sticks they’ve got left.”
I already knew what happened. Kiri slipped a jerky stick in her back pocket. Callum did a second count, caught the discrepancy, and turned to her with a goofy surprised look: “You got one by me!” She gave him the jerky and made a funny face, too, as if she’d just been testing him to see if he’d notice. But in the moment before she handed it back, her smile slipped. She looked scared.
“Hey, Sam!” Maren Armstrong, the manager on duty, shoved open the gate of our ticket booth / refreshment stand. “Could you go clean Two? I’ll take over here.”
“Sure thing.” I’d been too absorbed to notice that the glorified slasher in Theater Two was over and people were trickling out—in my defense, there were only a handful of them.
I tossed my empty popcorn bag and went to the supply closet for the broom and dustpan, silently thanking Maren for not cussing me out for being on my phone the way Dictator Debra would have. Maren was my favorite manager since Reggie left. The best thing about her was that she’d just graduated from UVM and had an out-of-state job lined up for September, at which point I hoped to be promoted into her place. It was either me or Owen, and Owen was even grumpier with the customers than I was. He mostly worked up top in the projection room, dealing with the balky hard drives the movies came on.
Luckily, the one who made the hiring decisions was Old Man Brenner’s boring, balding son, Kevin, and not Kevin’s own offspring, Tierney the Dickwad, who sometimes came to strut around the place and play manager. He hadn’t been around much since Reggie left, though.
A familiar shudder ran down my spine as I crossed the dimly lit corridor and swung open the door of Theater Two. Reggie was always smart about people, except for guys like Tierney Brenner. A sexy sneer switched her brain right off and something else on.
Still, we had fun last fall, Reggie and Owen and Tierney and I, giving ourselves a midnight preview of the big Halloween horror release. Just four of us in the biggest theater, passing a flask and giggling helplessly and falling into each other’s laps and yelling at the screen: “Don’t go in the basement, shit for brains! Don’t go there!”
After that, we went to the cemetery, where Reggie and Tierney practically made out in front of me. It was a joke until it wasn’t. “It’s nothing serious,” she told me the next day. “Sometimes I just want a warm body against mine.”
No. I wasn’t going to think about that dillweed, and I wasn’t going to think about Reggie. I was going to focus on sweeping dust and straw wrappers and popcorn from this grimy theater floor while the credits of a slasher flick played to nobody.
I was in the tenth row when the double doors swung open behind me, and a familiar voice said, “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Fancy meeting you, well-known fan of shitty movies.” I bowed to Lore like an old-time usher as I waved them into their favorite spot, right at dead center. “Still addicted to toxic ‘butter’ topping, too, by the smell of you.”
Lore bowed back. Unlike me and everybody else at the Grand Nine, they were dressed like they gave a damn, in a cute floral dress and bike shorts. “I brought my own homemade kombucha, at least.”
“Of course you did.” Lore plans to weather the collapse of civilization on an organic goat farm, preferably with the help of a nonhierarchical femme collective. They foster kittens and refuse to see movies where animals are ever in the slightest peril, but people getting sliced and diced by psychopaths is another matter.
“I’m freaking out about moving into the dorms,” Lore said, settling themself and carefully balancing the popcorn in an empty seat. “Puffball won’t be ready for adoption till late September, and I don’t like leaving him. I wish I were staying at home like you.”
“It’s a half-hour drive. And your dad loves Puffball.” I knew Lore didn’t mean to rub it in—that they were moving, if only to Middlebury, and I wasn’t. It still felt that way.
The two of us have been friends since fifth grade, when we discovered we both preferred hanging out at the rink to after-school soccer. We both took figure skating lessons, though only Lore was good at it. The mean girls at our school who gave Lore shit for their weight never saw Lore on the ice—dipping, swanning, jumping, spinning like a top.
My first month or two working at the Grand Nine, Lore would come by every few days, and I’d sneak them in free and join them to whisper and snark through bad movies. Then Lore decided they didn’t like Reggie, though they claimed they didn’t have a problem with Reggie herself, just with “who I was around her.” In November, the Owen debacle happened, and it was no wonder our conversations were still a little awkward.
Nearly two weeks had passed since we’d seen each other. We kept texting about going swimming, but Lore was always busy buying college supplies and attending “mixers” and meeting cool new cosmopolitan people on their dorm’s Discord server, and I had so little going on that I worried if we did meet up, I’d be the most boring person in the world. And maybe that was why I just burst out with it: “Do you remember Kiri Dunsmore from school?”
Lore frowned, seemingly clueless.
“You know. The girl who came back from the desert.” She was the headline in our local paper today; I’d seen a copy in the theater lobby. But Lore didn’t read papers. “Katie Dunsmore. They think she could have killed that YouTuber.”
Recognition bloomed on Lore’s face, followed by surprise. “The couple who went out West? That was Katie?”
