Searching for clues was like sifting through glass—too many pieces, all of them sharp. There: the word Doug. There: Monk. And there: that psycho and freak and Popeye, the last a reference to Doug’s biceps. No firm details, but inference suggested it was happening soon. Then Liv saw a word she would never forget.
Show.
The context was a conversation between two former teammates. Guess i’ll go to dm’s show, wrote one. We hav big crew coming! wrote the other, to which the first responded, Show and tell!!! Liv knew she had to keep reading, but she thought she might throw up, or pass out, or both, so she tossed her phone into the passenger seat, shifted the gears, and lurched from the parking space.
Once she hit the main road, she called Doug, whose contact had migrated back to her Recents since the capture of A. She’d rather text, but she was driving, and so tapped his icon, while swerving to avoid a car exiting Burger City. Her cheeks hurt from wincing, defense against the voice she expected to hear.
Instead, she got a leave-a-message beep. Liv exhaled in frustration and relief.
“It’s me. I don’t know what you’re planning, but don’t do it, okay? I’m glad you think A could change people’s minds about Dad, I am, but this, whatever it is, isn’t the way to do it. I know we fought. I know we hurt each other’s feelings. But listen, those sounds A was making? They’re a name. I don’t know whose name yet, but—”
Another call was coming in. Liv tried to ignore it. Emotion was pouring from her, clean and pure, and she needed to finish describing to Doug the aches she felt in her heart. But the second caller was Bruno, so recently entered into her phone, and his was a name that carried its own new weight. The speech she had going for Doug cracked at the stern. What she’d already said would have to do. She ended the call, and the signal changed.
“It’s Bruno!” he said.
“Uh-huh,” she replied.
“Hey, I just got this text about Doug.”
The ferocity of her reaction blinded her. She pictured herself racing through the rain and finding Bruno and shrieking into his face how he was never to mention Doug again, and if he knew what was good for him, he’d run home, pile his mother and three sisters and three dogs into the car, and keep on driving, keep on dodging.
Bruno continued, “He’s having some—I guess it’s a show?”
That word again: She tore into it, dreading confirmation of her suspicion. “Where? Do you know where?”
“Your place. At eight.” Bruno paused. “You don’t know about this?”
Liv’s heart crashed around. She couldn’t breathe.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s—I don’t—”
“Anyway, I mean, I know you just saw me—saw a lot of me—but maybe we can sort of go to it together?”
Please, no, she thought, and that’s what she blurted out: “No.”
The signal tsked for five seconds, a second, hissing rain.
“Why not?”
She felt physical pain, of course she did, because in the costume room she’d managed to scale a hill of happiness she hadn’t deserved and now, right on schedule, she’d been toppled from it. So many people were lost to her already: her dad, her mom, her friends. Did she have to lose Bruno, too?
She gasped, drowning in rain. Even here and now, steering through slippery streets, the answer was clear: Yes, she did have to lose him, and right away, like forced vomiting after the ingestion of a poisoned delight. If Bruno came to her house, that site of unfathomable secrets, he might learn what she’d been doing for the entire time he’d known her. She didn’t think she could bear having him know the monstrous truth.
“I just … I don’t want you there.”
More signal loss, tsking, tsking.
“Is it … because of what we just did?”
Liv imagined saying yes—it would be the most shameful word she ever said, but it would do the job. Their relationship had no future, because she had no future. Bruno’s affiliation with her could shatter his family by exposing them to government scrutiny. She should have accepted all this earlier. The secret of A was always going to come out eventually. It just hurt that the end with Bruno had to come so quickly, in an unplanned, impersonal phone call, a sucker punch to a boy who’d given her the best clue so far—Carbajal—and who’d only called to spend more time with her.
“Liv—”
She swallowed a typhoon of hot tears.
“You’re too much,” she said. “You’re too clingy. I’m not into it.”
“Wait, what?”
“We’ll talk later,” and even this lie was rancid: They might never talk again, not if this night played out as it probably would. By morning, her photo, more salacious for being drawn from BHS yearbooks, might be splashed all over the news, and not just local media, but national, international. The whole world would know. No college, no future. She’d felt sick a lot over the past month, but this was different: Her innards melted into lava, and her head dunked under it. She slapped a hand to the door and powered down the window so that rain would pelt her.
“Liv, don’t hang up. Talk to me. If there’s anything—”
“Don’t call me back,” she pleaded. “Don’t call me back.”
The tears she wouldn’t let her eyes leak came running from her pores. The phone, slick now, began to slip from her palm, and she jabbed at the screen’s red button, three or four times, until Bruno’s name winked out, and then a truck horn was blaring, and she was way over the center line, and she wrenched the wheel, and cars behind her laid on their horns, too, and her heart burst through the hot sludge of her chest, but she was alive, still alive, or something close to it.
22.
Fifty yards from her house, Liv rolled past a single red car parked on the Custer Road shoulder, just visible in the rainy twilight. A soft glow meant that the person was killing time on their phone. Given the patchy distribution of Doug’s invite through what Liv imagined were emails and texts, confusion could be expected, and this person was ninety minutes early. Another would arrive soon, then another. But she still had time: She’d put the whole thing off, nail boards over the shed door, whatever it took. She just had to grab a couple of things, then get out to the shed and get to work.
But her return to the house was met with a surprise as unpleasant as any invading army of skinners: her mother thumping a knife against a cutting board while two pans sizzled on the stovetop. The place was a fog of rich smells that, to Liv at this moment, smelled worse than blood. Mom was not supposed to be here. She could not be here.
“Mom,” Liv said, and continued in her head: You have to leave right now.
“I took the night off, baby. Going to make us a special dinner.”
Her mother grinned gaily, once again the young woman Liv had seen in the photographs she’d shoved in A’s face. It felt like a knife was sliding in and out of Liv’s gut. Aggie Fleming was trying to work past the destruction of her family, trying to turn around the mess of their lives. It was the most worthwhile of ambitions—but why did it have to be tonight?
Liv smiled or nodded, she didn’t remember, and floated toward the living room window.