“I’ll buy a lock,” Doug murmured.
“It’s late.” It sounded like her mouth was filled with moss. “Or it’s early.”
Their exhausted nods goodbye were seen only from peripheral vision.
Then it was Saturday. She hauled John into her bed, a rare treat for him, and buried her face in his neck fur. Her head pounded and stomach lurched. Her mom, curious by midday, accepted Liv’s excuse that she was sick. Liv didn’t eat until her mom had left for the Saturday dinner shift, and then just crackers and water. So many possible actions and reactions whirled through her head she could not isolate any one of them. She didn’t look out the back windows until it was almost dark, and only because she had to confirm that the boards were still in place in front of the Armory door. They were.
Then it was Sunday. How many Sundays in a row had Doug knocked on her window to get started checking the traps? Not today. She woke up early anyway. Her morning run—maybe if she went through the motions, she could wipe her brain for a little while, use adrenaline to alleviate the nausea. But as she got dressed, her back and arm muscles ached and she knew why, and she gagged over the sink and splashed water on her face and didn’t dare look in the mirror. She felt as ill as her dad had been during his final year. She curled back into her bed, John’s nose ice cold against her feverish skin.
Only in the afternoon did she force herself into the backyard, each step like a dare, until she got close enough to see that Doug had been there at some point to screw thick metal collars to door and frame and secure a giant padlock through both. Liv wondered if she should feel affronted that he had taken the liberty without her, but instead felt thankful. One of them had to hold it together, and apparently it wasn’t going to be her.
She held her phone in her hand. It felt heavy with significance. She could text Doug, ask him how in the world he was dealing with this. She could call 911, get them out here to make the whole mess disappear, if only her mind wasn’t so conflicted. Would she, who’d mercilessly beat up the thing, be damning herself to a life where any Internet search would bring up her face and details on what she’d done? She didn’t know; she couldn’t think that far. She needed another day. Or two, or three.
School was an assembly-line factory staffed by workers who produced pieces of paper of no consequence. To avoid morning interactions with her friends—was she even capable of speech?—Liv hid on the bottom floor, where no one would see her shaking shoulders, where the shadowy, indistinct hallways perfectly mirrored her mind’s crowded confusion.
When the lunch bell rang, she headed for a far-flung bathroom inside which she could hide some more, but Krista intercepted her, waving excitedly like it was the first day of school all over again, like last week hadn’t happened—if only that were true. Liv forced a smile; the lines of her face felt carved into her cheeks with a putty knife.
“You okay?” Krista asked.
“Mm-hm.” It was the only sound she trusted herself to make without her voice cracking in half, after which who knew what might happen? Sobs breaking out in hot, wet splashes? Jags of ugly confessions splattering like acid?
“Something’s wrong,” Krista surmised.
“Nn-nn,” Liv lied.
Krista put her hand on Liv’s elbow. Flesh against bone—Liv had to bite down to keep from jerking away and kicking out, transported back into the nightmare of the shed. Instead of Krista’s kind smile and patient gaze, it was the skinner’s whorled jaws and bugged eyes. Liv told herself to be calm, be calm, be calm.
“I think I know what it is,” Krista said.
Of course she knew, Liv thought wildly. The evidence must be pressed into every detail of Liv’s face. Guilty, shifting eyes. Veins ballooning her temples with a panicked pulse. Literal blood and fluid crusted in her hair. Liv felt her spinal column slump, the beginning of a full collapse, and could feel the truth frothing at the base of her throat, ready to fizz upward and spill. Unconsciously she gripped Krista back and opened her mouth with a gasp, ready to confess.
“Don’t let Monica get to you,” Krista said.
Liv blinked at Krista as if she, too, were an alien being. Krista smiled gently.
“So you miss a couple meets. You think anyone’s going to care in a few weeks?”
Liv processed Krista’s words individually, like unwrapping mysterious packages. Had she said meats? Liv pictured the skinner’s damp, piled organs. No, meets—cross-country meets. Liv distantly recalled a personal history as brittle as ancient papers. She thought she might like to forge a path back to those delicate, insignificant concerns, but couldn’t see the way. She was lost, as if inside one of Doug’s proposed mazes, and she was so scared.
“People get so wrapped up in their little dramas,” Krista continued. “I mean, it’s high school.”
Liv nodded, wobbly. “Uh-huh.”
“You’ll come back, we’ll win a meet, and you know Monica. She’ll be kissing you on both cheeks.”
Nodding was a way to keep Liv’s heart beating. “Yeah.”
Krista squeezed her arm. “Good. So let’s eat? Or are you sitting with Mr. Latino Dreamboat again?”
Bruno Mayorga hadn’t crossed Liv’s mind in three days. Nothing good in the slightest had. Memories of his face, voice, and body language touched her like John’s nose had in bed, unpleasantly pleasant, a good thing that she, having done bad things, no longer felt she had permission to accept.
“I just—” Liv pointed. “Bathroom.”
Inside a toilet stall, she pressed her hot forehead against cool paint, listening to other girls come in, do their thing, and leave, everything so wildly typical, while a force inside her told her to start running through the halls, screaming to everyone that they were all sheep blind to the existence of wolves, and that they’d deserve what they got if they didn’t listen to Lee Fleming’s warning, albeit three years late.
She saw Doug once, slouching down the hall and clutching a textbook like a shield. Even from afar, Liv could see Doug’s knuckles were torn the same as hers. He moved along, avoiding everyone’s eyes as usual, but when his gaze swept across hers, he held it. Liv felt faint, but thought she could read his thoughts.
They had to feed it. Unless they wanted it to starve.
And that’s not what they wanted, was it?
Krista had reminded Liv of the two cross-country meets from which she was banned, but according to Principal Gamble’s edict, she was back on the practice squad today. Liv didn’t waste time deliberating over whether or not to go. She bolted from school at the final bell, got in the station wagon, and on the way home held her phone in a sweaty hand, desperate to call Doug but distressed by the vague, criminal ramifications of establishing phone records.
Instead, she got home, sat trembling on the front stoop, and waited. She knew him. He’d come. A half hour later, he did. His junker pulled into the driveway, and he got out, and she stood up, instantly feeling a bit stronger, and they nodded as if this were the five hundredth day of this new life together rather than the second. They convened in the kitchen, where Doug fished out a Pop-Tart and gnashed it.
“How was your day?” He sounded tentative, hypersensitive to her reaction—all new tones for him.