We all stopped struggling, yelling, even breathing, and stared at Zak.
His eyes were wide; he drew jerky breaths.
Calmly Michael broke free of Brandon and stood up, blood dripping from his arm. He took two steps toward Zak. “Son, put the knife down.”
Zak gasped, looked confused, glanced at the knife then dropped it like a hot coal. It clattered to the floor.
Sharon darted forward to pick it up. Silently Michael turned away, stepped past Brandon, and out of the front door.
I followed him. There was no point staying to explain. No point at all.
I was halfway across the cinema parking lot when Zak Rohr caught up with me. He came with a message from his mom.
“Tell Dad to stay away from the house,” he warned.
“Mom means it about calling the cops. Next time she won’t be fooling.”
I didn’t slow my pace, just kept on walking.
“You hear me?” Zak insisted. “You and Dad need to stay away from us!”
“Tell him yourself,” I snapped. “I don’t even know the guy!”
For a second Zak hesitated, giving me the chance to reach my car and open the door. But then he ran toward me and grabbed the door handle, resisting my attempt to slam it behind me.
I tugged hard and won the battle. With the door finally shut, I turned the ignition and was already moving off when Zak vaulted in beside me. He landed neatly in the passenger seat and grabbed the steering wheel. As the car veered toward a row of parked cars, I slammed on the brake and squealed to a halt a foot from the back of a Ford truck.
“Are you crazy?”
Zak kept his hand on the wheel, gripping it tight—the hand that two minutes earlier had been brandishing the knife. “Is that true? You didn’t hook up with my dad?”
“I met him once—early today. That’s it.”
“So why visit the house with him?”
“That wasn’t planned, it happened by chance. He and your mom were already fighting when I showed up, remember?”
It took a while, but gradually Zak realized I might be telling the truth so he relaxed his hold on my steering wheel. “So again—why the visit?”
“I wanted to talk to your mom about Phoenix,” I admitted.
He shook his head, raising his hand like a traffic cop.
“Uh-uh.”
“Not a good idea?”
“Don’t even go there.”
For a while we sat in silence, the car slewed at an angle and looking like it had been abandoned between two neat rows. I realized that dusk was falling and was glad that the line for the movie had disappeared. At least Hannah, Zoey, and Jordan wouldn’t be witnessing this. “Sharon blames me,” I muttered. “I heard what she told Michael—if it wasn’t for me, Phoenix would still be alive.”
“She gave him the story about Phoenix running late?” Zak’s eyes narrowed. His mood had altered suddenly, from crazy, out-of-control kid to been-there, got-the-T-shirt cynic. It made me look him in the face for the first time.
“She said that was how the fight started—Phoenix pushed a kid named Nathan out of the line at the gas station because he was in a hurry to see me. That was the flashpoint.”
“The gospel according to Brandon,” Zak muttered, opening the car door and putting one foot on the asphalt.
I grasped at a straw of hope. “You’re saying it’s not true?”
“I’m saying you don’t listen to everything Brandon says.” He was out of the car, flipping up the hood of his sweatshirt, shooting one last glance in my direction as if he almost took pity on me and wanted to make me feel better.
“Right. So what are you saying, Zak?”
“Maybe that wasn’t exactly the way it was.” His voice was hardly audible as he turned to walk away.
I jumped out and followed him, grabbed him by the arm. “And you know different? How come?”
“Because I was there,” he admitted before he ran off. “I saw the whole thing—the start of the argument, who was there, who said stuff, who joined in…everything.”
“You were there?” I called after him. “So you know how Phoenix died?”
My question hung heavy in the air as Zak sprinted between the rows of cars. Somewhere way down on East Queen Street, an ambulance siren began to wail.
• • •
Ever since I first went out to Foxton and found the Beautiful Dead, some part of me has wished it could be over. For twelve whole months, I’ve fought for them with every atom of myself—for Jonas to be released and to give Zoey her life back, for Arizona and Raven, her damaged and gifted kid brother, for pure-hearted Summer who lived for music.
I do it—I rescue them and set them free, yet my heart doesn’t beat smoothly. In my mouth I carry the taste of death and ashes.
In the end there’s no one to turn to. I see myself walking a hard, straight road to nowhere. The trees are burned and black, the steep hills and rocky horizons are desolate.
“It’s a dream,” Phoenix whispers, and I wake. It was the middle of the night, my window was open, and the white curtains billowed toward us.
Phoenix lay down beside me. “There is no road. You’re not alone.”
For a while I said nothing. I thought back through the day just gone to the fight in Sharon’s house, to the knife in Zak’s hand, the broken mirror, and the blood running down Michael’s arm.
I recalled the way Sharon had looked. In the street, in a room full of people, hers is not a face you would normally notice—she has small, tight features, her gray eyes are heavy lidded and guarded. But today in her hallway, she was different. Lit up by anger, with color in her thin cheeks, her jaw and mouth set in firm lines, she seemed stronger than her ex-husband and her two sons, for all their muscle.
“All her life, that’s the way she’s had to be.” In the dark, lying beside me, Phoenix read my mind.
“It’s no good—no way will she talk to me now.” I sighed. “You should tell Hunter what happened. Tell him we have to think of another plan.”
“He wants to know what Zak told you,” Phoenix whispered.
I rolled and reached across him to turn on the lamp. The soft yellow light cast deep shadows across his pale, beautiful face. “Who did he send to spy on me this time?”
“Dean. He saw you and Zak leave the house, but he couldn’t get close enough to hear.”
Biting my bottom lip, I lay back against my pillow and stared up at the ceiling.
“Did Dean tell you how come Michael left the house covered in blood? How Brandon got the cut on his face? Did he tell you about Zak and the kitchen knife?”
This was all news to Phoenix. He put together the pieces and jumped to the wrong conclusion. “You’re saying that Zak—”
“No, don’t panic. Michael and Brandon fought. They broke a mirror. There was glass everywhere.”
He swallowed hard and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed so that his back was to me.
“Darina, if you want to give up on me and my lousy family, I won’t blame you.”
I sat up beside him. “They don’t do too much talking, do they?”
“The Rohrs have short fuses,” he admitted. “No one stops to think.”
“Or listen to what other people have to say. And I thought my family was bad that way.” I turned to catch Phoenix in profile, head down.
“Some days it was like living in a war zone,” he muttered. “First, when I was a little kid, my dad and mom were always fighting. Then it was Brandon and Mom. As soon as I grew old enough, age ten, I took every chance I could to walk out of there. I didn’t care where, just so long as I didn’t have to stay in the house.”
Little lost kid roaming the streets. “Hey, look at me,” I whispered. Phoenix didn’t respond. “Look at me!”
Slowly he turned his head. “I gue
ss Mom told Dad a lot of bad stuff, back at the house?”
I nodded. “She wanted to know where he was when Brandon went to the correctional facility, when you got suspended from school in Cleveland…”
“You heard it all?”
“It’s OK. It doesn’t make any difference to the way I feel.”
“Sure?” There was a knot of doubt between his eyes, as if he was waiting for me to back off now that I knew the worst about him.
I studied his face. “Did you really punch a kid during a football game?”
Phoenix blinked, and the frown deepened. “Luke Missoni. He threw the first punch—from behind. I went down in the dirt, and while I was down, he kicked me in the ribs.”
“They didn’t see that?”
He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair. The stray lock at the front swung back across his forehead.
“Missoni lied about it later.”
“I believe you.” Relieved, I raised my hand and pushed the lock back again, deciding that this was the moment to release my guilt avalanche. “There’s something else. Sharon told Michael that the fight at the gas station started because of me. You pushed into the line ahead of a kid named Nathan because you knew I was waiting at Deer Creek. You punched him in the jaw.”
Tell me it isn’t true. Let me off the hook. Give me another version that doesn’t involve me, like the fight on the football field. But that would have been too easy—for Phoenix to have perfect recall of the events leading to his death. The fact that he couldn’t was the whole reason we were here.
He looked down. “No way. Where did Mom get that idea?”
“Nice try.” I sighed. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know he was lying. “You don’t remember anything about the Nathan incident, do you?”
Shaking his head, Phoenix stood up and walked to the open window, where he gazed out at a black, cloudy sky. He seemed to be weary of a weight he carried, of the confusion, the fight, the blade, the blood.
“Something else I learned today,” I went on. “Zak told me he was at the gas station with you that night.”
Phoenix stood silently in the shadows.
“Was he? Do you remember that part?”
The answer, when it came, was slow and unsure. “Let me think it through. I guess I remember leaving the house. For some reason I was late—Mom wanted me to run an errand, she needed cash from the ATM machine. Then she said would I drive Zak to a buddy’s house in Forest Lake? I didn’t want to do that—I was already running late, plus I was out of gas.”
“Keep going,” I urged as Phoenix ground to a halt.
We were reaching the limit—soon everything would collapse into a huge black void. This happens with all the Beautiful Dead—when they get close to the point of dying, there’s a big hole in their memory, as if the trauma of that sudden, violent moment of leaving this life turns their brain cells to mush. “Did you lose the argument with Sharon? Did Zak get in the car with you?”
He nodded. “I planned to get gas then drive him out to Forest Lake. Then it was back to Deer Creek to meet you.”
“Gas first?” We needed to be clear. “So Zak was there.”
“I guess.”
“But you don’t remember clearly? Listen, that’s OK. We assume you two left the house together. But if Zak was there all along, why didn’t he say so before now?”
“Because!” Phoenix said quietly.
“Keeping quiet was your mom’s idea,” I guessed. “She wanted to keep his name out of it. It was bad enough that Brandon was being interviewed by the cops.”
Mother tiger protects her cubs. Quietly I went to stand beside him. We stared out of the window at the clouds drifting clear of the moon. “I’ll talk to Zak again,” I decided. “Somewhere, deep down, I get a feeling that he’s on my side.”
• • •
Jacob Miller wasn’t a kid you would normally want to spend time with. As soon as he hit funky fourteen, he stopped washing and started shaving and piercing. He doesn’t change his clothes more than once a month, and his hair is so short you can see every bump and dent in his Neanderthal skull. But the next day I went looking for him after school.
“Jacob, I need Zak Rohr’s number,” I began, skipping the “Hey, how’re you doing?” and “Good, thanks” preliminaries. We were out in the schoolyard, close to the janitor’s office, huddled under an awning because the clouds from last night still hung low over the mountains and had turned to slow rain.
Jacob stared at me like I was the one who’d crawled out from under a stone.
“Zak’s number?” I said again.
You couldn’t print his answer, only that it ended with the words cradle snatcher. A couple of kids from his class were standing nearby, and they let out croaky hyena laughs.
“OK, but this is important.” I kept my voice steady. “When do they let him back in school?”
“Who’s asking?” Jacob’s little gang gathered around, fixing on me as the after-school entertainment. I saw his sidekick, Taylor Stafford, lurking in the background.
Remember—Taylor, Jacob, and Zak were involved together in the small matter of arson earlier in the year.
“I’m asking, Jacob. Now do me a favor, tell me where I can find Zak.”
“That would be a no.” Jacob grunted, sticking his fists deep in his low-slung jeans pockets.
“N-O, no,” Taylor echoed, stepping forward and getting right in my face. Taylor is marginally less nasty than Jacob, but then that isn’t too much of a stretch.
I refused to back off. “Where does Zak hang out? Are you going to tell me or do I waste my time hanging out on his street corner until he shows up?”
I got a second unprintable reply, then Zoey interrupted our cozy chat. I guess she thought, rightly, that I needed rescuing from this bunch of gorillas.
“Darina, you missed a great movie!” she breezed from the driver’s seat of her shiny black SUV—a recent gift from her dad for coming through her surgeries and months of physical therapy. “Get in,” she invited, leaning across to open the passenger door.
I didn’t want to disappoint her. Besides, Zak’s buddies were quickly sliding out of control with the abuse and physical intimidation. “Thanks.” I sighed, sinking into the black leather seat.
“Do you have time to drive out to Turkey Shoot with me?”
“I have an hour.” Glancing over my shoulder, I saw a single red rose wrapped in cellophane, resting on the backseat. Turkey Shoot Ridge was where Jonas crashed his Harley—a trip back there would be a pilgrimage for Zoey.
She nodded. “Good. We can talk while we drive.”
Talking meant Zoey taking care of me, checking that I was doing OK as Phoenix’s anniversary drew near. “You look wrecked,” she began as we drove out through Centennial. “I guess you’re not sleeping.”
“Not a whole lot.”
“Twelve months is coming up. Look at it one way, it feels like a lifetime. Look again, and it just happened yesterday.”
“It hurts the same, if that’s what you mean.”
“I know. I still walk into school and expect to see Jonas sitting with Lucas and Christian. I swear he’s there. Then I blink, and he’s gone.”
“I see Phoenix,” I murmured. Really, I do!
“But somehow it’s not hurting me anymore,” Zoey explained, taking a turn down a quiet residential road. “I can drive this street where Jonas picked me up that day, and now I’m not in pain. Rather, I remember how sunny it was, how great he looked, how he smiled at me in that special way when he pulled up at the curb.”
I told her I was glad to hear it. “Getting through the anniversary, watching the procession out of town to Turkey Shoot—was that tough for you?”
She thought a while. “I was really not expecting to get through it like I did. But you recall what happened just
before—when I was out in the stable yard that time with Merlin and Pepper, and I felt Jonas came to see me to tell me he was OK, that he loved me and I should live my life knowing that? It sounds weird now, doesn’t it?”
“I remember,” I murmured. “And no, it doesn’t sound weird.” If I’d done one wholly selfless thing this past year, it had been to argue with Hunter to let Beautiful Dead Jonas visit Zoey one last time.
“You have to know the same thing—that Phoenix totally loved you,” Zoey confided.
He did, right from the start—I’m certain of that.
• • •
In the beginning.
“You dropped this.” Phoenix Rohr picks up my silver bracelet and hands it to me. His fingertips touch my palm. It’s Hannah’s sixteenth birthday party, at her big house next to the bank in the center of town. I’ve been hanging out with Logan, acting as if I don’t need or like anyone in the whole universe. We’re talking fifteen, sixteen months ago, when I was hyper-uncomfortable in my own skin, hiding behind the biggest new thing in fashion, hair, cosmetics.
“Thanks,” I mumble, bending my head, struggling to refasten the bracelet.
“Let me,” Phoenix offers.
I hold out my arm, watch his fingers deal with the delicate clasp. Honestly, it feels like an electric shock as he touches my wrist. He feels it, too, clips the tiny hook through the loop then quickly drops his hands to his sides, looking down and away.
“Thanks,” I say again. I twist my wrist and shake the bracelet to check it’s secure.
“Cool party,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Looks like everyone made it.”
“Except Christian. He’s out at Foxton with his dad.”
It feels like the lame conversation is about to die from lack of air. Inside I’m kicking myself for being so dumb. I mean, I’ve had Phoenix Rohr on my radar ever since he arrived at Ellerton High, he’s so totally beautiful. Every day my eye secretly seeks him out at the end of corridors, across classrooms, at the mall, the movies, at coffee bars. Along with a hundred other girls.