Part 32 (2/2)

Even then, with his d.i.c.k seven inches into her, Craig couldn't remember her name, and he'd told her that.

But Perry.

Craig had known something at that moment. Something transcendent. Truly, this time, as Perry was straddling him, staring down at him, slamming him into the floor, Craig had felt his whole life grabbed like his T-s.h.i.+rt in Perry's fist, and yanked, and shoved back down, and it was a spiritual experience.

”f.u.c.ker. a.s.shole. Listen. You stupid, stupid idiot.”

Perry was his friend. His first real friend.

He didn't want to kill Perry. He wanted Perry to be Perry. Underlining s.h.i.+t in a book like his life depended on it, giving Craig advice on how to keep his side of the room a little bit tidier, piling up his salad bowl with things his mother must have threatened him for eighteen years to eat, and that he was still eating. He wanted Perry to be his roommate, his friend.

But what he had to do was see Nicole.

That had nothing to do with Perry.

Luckily, Perry didn't speak.

Craig grabbed his coat and closed the door more carefully than usual behind him-not slamming it, but not leaving any doubt that he was closing it, either.

He headed for Lucas's room.

He didn't have time to walk to the OTT house.

He needed a car.

77.

Jeremy purred in her lap as Sh.e.l.ly sat at the computer and scrolled through the articles. There were a hundred of them, and she was familiar with all of them, but they were cast in a new light now.

The lake of blood, the beyond recognition, the burned over ninety-percent of her body, the driver of the car fleeing the scene on foot, and herself: the middle-aged woman who was the first to arrive on the scene, and who failed to give the emergency operator enough information about the location of the accident for the paramedics to locate it in time to save the victim.

According to the articles, by the time the EMTs had arrived, the victim had been abandoned, lying in a lake of her own blood, burned beyond recognition, in the backseat of the vehicle for over an hour.

No.

Not even close.

Sh.e.l.ly remembered one EMT hurrying out of the ambulance. He had a large black satchel in one hand and a fire extinguisher under his arm. Sh.e.l.ly had stood up from where she'd been kneeling beside the girl and the boy, on the other side of the ditch of water she'd had to wade through to get there.

She'd waved her arms to get his attention.

Naturally enough, he'd gone first to the car, and he was peering in the window. He had no way of knowing that the victim had been thrown from the vehicle, and how far.

”Over here,” Sh.e.l.ly had called out, and he'd turned, looking confused.

Where, she'd wondered then, were the others? Surely, there was someone with him-following, driving, on the way.

”Ma'am,” the EMT had shouted. ”Don't touch her! Step back! Please return to your own vehicle immediately.”

Reluctantly, Sh.e.l.ly had followed his directions. She made her way back through the ditch of cold water, pa.s.sing him as she did so. He didn't even look at her. He'd tossed the fire extinguisher onto the ground, and he seemed to be muttering under his breath.

When she stumbled up on the other side, she'd looked behind her again: The couple in the moonlight.

The boy with his arms wrapped around the girl.

Sh.e.l.ly had seen the girl up close. She'd seen and touched both of them. They were warm. They were alive. She'd been grateful to feel that warmth. The girl was wearing a black dress, and it made her bright gold hair s.h.i.+ne even more brightly in the moonlight. When Sh.e.l.ly put her hand on the girl's neck to feel for a pulse (and she had felt it, that little insistent throbbing of some artery beneath the skin), her eyelids had fluttered. The boy had kissed her forehead then, and then he'd sobbed with relief. He'd said her name. Nicole. And at the sound of her name, Nicole had opened her eyes and looked at him, smiling and wincing at the same time.

Fine, Sh.e.l.ly had thought. She's fine. Bruised and shocked and disoriented, but utterly alive.

Sh.e.l.ly opened the next, familiar Google result, and there was Josie in her black dress, black sungla.s.ses, a wristful of black bracelets. The sun shone down on her black hair and those elaborate, exotic earrings she was wearing, which were Denise Graham's dead great-grandmother's. Beyond her, a fresh orchard was in bloom.

Sh.e.l.ly enlarged the photo.

She looked more closely.

They were all wearing the same black dress.

Every single sorority sister.

The same V neck, the ruffle at the hem. The sleevelessness and drape of the dresses identical. The small satin ribbon around the waist. Sh.e.l.ly remembered saying to Josie one afternoon in bed, ”The thing I hated about being in a sorority was that we were all supposed to look and act alike.” And how Josie had snorted. ”Like that's not how it is with everybody? Like all the lesbians your age aren't all trying to look and act alike? Like all the counter-culture kids, or all the conservatives, or all the professors or librarians or bookstore clerks around here aren't, every one of them, completely interchangeable?”

Interchangeable.

The word, frankly, had surprised Sh.e.l.ly.

It had seemed beyond Josie, somehow, that word, as if she'd been thinking about sameness, about sororities, about the human condition or something for a long time, trying to find just the right word to describe it. Thumbing through the thesaurus. The effect of hearing Josie use this word, so perfect, was not unlike the way it might have felt if Jeremy had suddenly turned to her and expressed a dislike for a certain brand of cat food. (I would prefer no more Fancy Feast, if you don't mind.) It seemed somehow to change the rules of the game she thought they'd been playing, if only for a second or two.

In this photograph, there were at least thirty girls, and every one wore the exact same dress. Where had they gotten so many at once, especially since nearly every one of these girls would have been the same size? What store, what catalog, what warehouse, could possibly have held them all?

And the black sungla.s.ses. The black bracelets. Some with straight blond hair, shoulder length, and the rest with straight black hair, shoulder length. Not one of them was smiling, but neither were any of them crying.

Sh.e.l.ly enlarged the image once more, and then again, and when she leaned farther forward, with more urgency this time, Jeremy jumped off her lap and went scrambling across the wood floors, sliding on his claws into the hallway.

”Jeremy? Baby?” Sh.e.l.ly called after him, still intent on her computer screen, but he didn't come back. She'd scared him.

One more double click, and the central thing in this image became something she had only peripherally registered until now: A single blurred girl behind the scenes, moving with what looked like genuine swiftness through the parking lot behind them all. Her arms were swinging at her sides as if she were moving quickly. One foot was an inch above the ground. Her blond hair was blowing around behind her, either because of the swiftness with which she was traveling or because of a stiff breeze. There was a purposeful expression on her face. She was looking straight ahead. A few nice cars glinted in the sunlight around her.

There were still a couple of branches of blossoms framing the screen.

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