Or at least I thought we all ran.
But now something nags at my mind. The image of Lillian sprawled on the ground.
Did she run?
And if she didn’t, what happened to her?
Where is Lillian now?
12
Kayla and I are sitting on the bottom bunk in our room. The campers are having s’mores after dinner and we’ve come inside while Andy tells some of his “infamous” ghost stories. I haven’t heard any of them yet, but Cora says they’re pretty lame, though highly entertaining.
“So, you don’t think Lillian ran?” Kayla asks. Her fingers knit together and then she unfolds them like she’s performing jazz hands.
Her back is straight as a board and I don’t think she’s blinked in the past few minutes.
“I can’t be sure. But I don’t remember seeing her get up,” I say.
“That doesn’t mean she didn’t.”
“I know that.”
Kayla shakes her head.
“She could have.” I take a breath that feels like I’m swallowing razors. “But she was already hurt.”
“Maybe she was still there when the cops arrived and they picked her up?”
I kick my feet up on the mattress. “Maybe. But last night Olly said that no one knows who started the fire. If the cops picked Lillian up, then surely they would’ve pinned it on her.”
“What if the cops couldn’t say anything publicly because she was a minor?” Kayla says.
“Okay, I’m not really interested in what the cops think.”
“You should be, Esme!”
“We know she didn’t light the damn fire—we did! What I’m worried about is what happened to her after we ran. Were we the last ones to see her? Did she get into some sort of trouble?”
Kayla and I panicked and ran, flattening ourselves against trees and watching to see whether any lights came on in the cabins. We never bothered to look back.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” she says.
I shake my head. “I guess because I wasn’t sure. But every time I think about it, I hear the roar of the fire and those screams.”
“Okay. Okay.” Kayla sits even taller. “Right. Okay. Right.”
Ugh, I want to throw something at her. “Kayla, use other words!”
“I’m thinking! You know, it wasn’t our fault. We weren’t the ones who started the trouble that night.”
That sounds like something you say to justify your actions. Are you guilty because you didn’t stop something from happening? Yes. We had the power that night to help and we didn’t do anything.
“We need to find out where Lillian is,” I tell Kayla.
I can’t stop thinking that maybe she was injured more than we thought.
“I’m going to Google her. There could be an article about it, right?” I say, pulling my phone out of my bag on the floor.
Kayla leans forward to look over my shoulder as I type fire, Texas and Lillian Campbell into the search bar.
I shake my head, scrolling as I pass names and faces that don’t match.
Come on.
I bite my lip in frustration. No one looks familiar.
Please.
“None of these kids look like Lillian,” I say.
“Well, that’s good. We don’t want to find her in the news.”
“True,” I mutter. I sigh and drop my phone in my lap when the internet comes up empty. “Okay, I’ve got nothing.”
“Good.” Kayla brushes her hair over her shoulders. “That means we didn’t do anything.”
I side-eye her. “It only means it’s not online. What we did was very real.”
“Esme.” Kayla says my name like all of this is exclusively my fault.
We were so dumb that night, thinking we were cool for sneaking out like the older kids. Kayla was so excited as we left the cabin, thinking about how she was going to tell them the next day.
But when we got into bed that night, we vowed to never tell anyone.
That night she also lost her desire to be popular. Mostly.
Kayla wants this to all go away, for it to be a buried memory that she never digs up.
Something is wrong here. I feel it in the skittering of my heart whenever I think about that night. Lillian was a little girl alone in the woods. We had no idea who she was; we only spoke to her for about five minutes before the fire got out of hand.
“Come on, let’s go join the others before they get suspicious,” I say, sliding my useless phone back in my bag. This is getting us nowhere.
Kayla hops up and knocks her water bottle off the dresser at the end of our bunk. It rolls under her bed.
“Damn it,” she hisses, kneeling on the floor to reach under the bed and pick the bottle up.
At this point, we don’t even need me to state the obvious. Kayla is worried too.
She ducks her head, refusing to meet my eye. I wasn’t going to say anything to her anyway.
“Let’s get a s’more,” I say as we walk outside.
That’s code for “let’s act normal.”
“All right, campers,” Andy says. “We need you to get a good night’s sleep tonight because tomorrow there is a summer school exam you’re required to take.”
A rumble of unhappy conversation tears through the groups of kids.
Kayla and I look at each other.
“What’s this about?” I ask Cora as we sit next to her.
She shrugs, her mouth failing to hide a smile.
Oh, I get it. Andy’s pranking them.
“Settle down, settle down,” he says, waving his arms up and down. “This will be the only test you have to take and it’s for us to see what math group to put you in.”
“Math!”
I don’t know who said it; I only know that the sound pierced my freaking eardrums. Wincing, I plug my knuckles into my ears and rattle them until the ringing stops.
Andy laughs and addresses the loud child. “All right, Cady.” He turns to the group. “I was, of course, joking. There are no tests at camp.”
The children grumble at his lame attempt to prank them but cheer for the lack of tests.