I glared at the cell. “It could have been like this for forty-eight hours? What if we missed him?”
“We didn’t. C’mon. The plan wasn’t going to work. At first I thought, maybe. But the more thought I give to it, the less likely the whole thing seems. No one’s going to incriminate themselves like that.”
“I’ll see you at the rock.”
“Don’t hang up angry. If you believe it’ll work, we’ll walk up there in the morning before school, okay? We’ll fix it first thing tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“See you in a couple hours.”
“Yeah.” I hung up.
I paced like a caged animal for about five minutes. I yanked my hair, kicked at worn pajama pants on the floor, and decided it was stupid to wait for Graham to help me fix the camera.
I’d do it myself. A twenty-minute hike up, a fifteen-minute hike to the rock. I wore red—a dress as Viv made me promise—slipped on leggings underneath, and boots, a fleece coat she never had to see over it.
Equipped with a flashlight, I entered the open space through the gate in our backyard. The rock formations and trees melting and wavering in the orange sunset. It would be dark soon. I took the trail worn into the grass that ran behind the Driftwood properties. Where the pines dotted the hills, the grasses couldn’t grow because of the acidity of the needles they shed. I used the flashlight under the broken canopy and kicked the pinecones from my path. Once, Viv and I had collected a basketful. We were going to paint them gold until pincher bugs began escaping their crevices and headed for her bedroom carpet.
In passing, I rested my hand on the tree with a constellation of hollows in its straight trunk that made it easy to climb. Graham and I dared to its top. Neither of us got higher than ten feet. There was still the frayed rope on its lowest branch from our rope swing.
A few scant sunbeams filtered in through the trees. Specks of dirt and pollen hovered in and out of the light. Then, as if a giant had shuttered the sky, the bolts of light were gone. The sun had tucked under the Pacific. Near to the tunnel I began to wonder: What if the exact moment I visited the camera was the exact moment Goldilocks’s killer checked the tunnel for a witness?
I sniffed and swung my arms harder. I was not afraid. How unlikely—near impossible—that would be. A tiny quivering voice in me answered, As unlikely as a meteorite not leaving a crater. There was the tree ahead. I spotted a knot about four feet up its trunk to step on. I flipped the flashlight off, tossed it to the ground, hiked up my dress, and grunted and shimmied my way up. The branch really wasn’t so high, eight or ten feet from the ground. I was unfastening the Velcro of the armband when a distant crunch froze me.
I tried to peer to the ground by looking over my shoulder without losing balance. Crunches like footsteps came from the direction of the turnout where we’d parked the SUV the other night. My breathing picked up, lungs suddenly desperate for air, hands soggy gripping the bough. Let it be Graham. Of course it had to be him; he’d got off the phone with me, realized what a jerk he’d been, how important fixing the camera’s angle was. I opened my mouth to call out his name, but the strobe of a flashlight and a brown sleeve attached to it locked my jaw shut.
I knew that jacket. The evening wasn’t so dim that I couldn’t recognize my father.
Dad grimaced as he walked. His pace slowed approaching the mouth of the tunnel. He disappeared into its shadow. Emerged after an amount of time I measured only by how deeply my fingernails dug into bark. He stood undecided, shifted his flashlight back and forth. I could no longer make out his face.
He trudged the way he came. When my nails were pulling away from their skin, I dropped from the branch. Nothing caught me, not my feet or my hands. I rolled forward onto my shoulder, needles stuck in my hair and jacket as I staggered up.
Panic came in waves. Rolled up from my gut to my chest to my head. The tree trunks doubled, tripled, the sparse wood transmuted to a forest. I careened down. Running. White sheets fell over my thoughts. Not blankness. Shapes moved under them. Rippled them. Things I couldn’t let myself think yet.
I clipped a trunk, spun out, hit the ground. Stayed on all fours. I was angry at a jacket; I tore mine off. Left it in the dirt. Up again. I’d lost my flashlight, or maybe left it by the tree. I ran from memory. I could see the rock, or rather the golden eye of the bonfire saw me.
There were figures milling around on the meteorite. Mine. It wasn’t a scary place. It wasn’t responsible for Goldilocks’s death at all. Our games and dares and questions didn’t draw her in. Not us kids. The grown-ups did it. I shook my head into the night. Clamped my mind shut. I wasn’t ready to think. To acknowledge.
I crossed the field for the rock. Caught my breath. There: this is how lungs work. Breathe in. Out. I picked pine needles from my hair. Let each one fall to the ground. Reordered my features until they belonged to an ordinary girl who knew nothing.
“Where’d you come from?” Graham asked as he noticed me prowling around the rock.
Harry turned. His features fell. I didn’t imagine that. Both boys wore red like I did.
Viv was amid the initiates. They’d come, all in white like we’d instructed. Viv swung her hips between Rachel’s and Jess’s, dancing to music I couldn’t hear, the red tulle of her skirt flaring out. I smiled at her. Felt warmth in my chest; felt alive again. Why had I experienced such ugly panic minutes before? I’d washed the reason from my thoughts. It no longer existed. There was Viv. Celebrating. Happy. As radiant as she was onstage.
I went to her. Took her hand. Twirled her under my arm. “You’re late,” she said, pretending to pout, eyes like gemstones, a tiny red rose tucked behind each ear.
“I’m here now,” I said, words tinny and strange.
She offered me a flower. “For you.” Viv slipped it behind my ear. She opened her arms and wrapped me in them, pressed her cheek to mine, and whispered, “No matter what happens, I am so grateful that you are my best friend.”
Graham cleared his throat. Called out for everyone to gather around, make a circle. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember my lines. There was a script. But my mind was wiped. Viv would jump in; she was good about memorizing every line in a performance. The initiates’ faces were out of focus, like pencil drawings I’d taken my finger to. I felt like I was standing unnaturally still. Like glass. No. Not glass. A stronger substance, surely. Iron. Space rock.
Graham pointed our dagger to the sky, nicked his palm with it, took a drag of a new batch of his truth serum, and passed both items on.