She was desperate for anything to take her mind off that uneasy, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling. Because she knew it was coming. In the form of a second visit either from the police, or from the shadows—or both.
That morning, a PA announcement had informed them that the evening’s Social would be canceled out of respect for Todd’s passing, and that classes would be dismissed an hour early so the students could have time to change and arrive at the cemetery at three o’clock. As if the whole school weren’t already dressed for a funeral all the time.
Luce had never seen so many people congregating in one place on the campus. Randy was parked at the center of the group in a calf-length pleated gray skirt and thick, rubber-soled black shoes. A misty-eyed Miss Sophia and a handkerchief-wielding Mr. Cole stood behind her in mourning clothes. Ms. Tross and Coach Diante stood in a black-clad cluster with a group of other faculty and administrators Luce had never seen before.
The students were seated in alphabetic rows. At the front, Luce could see Joel Bland, the kid who’d won the swimming race last week, blowing his nose into a dirty handkerchief. Luce was in the nowhere land of P’s, but she could see Daniel, annoyingly positioned in the G’s right next to Gabbe, two rows ahead. He was dressed impeccably in a fitted black pinstriped blazer, but his head seemed to hang lower than everyone’s around him. Even from the back, Daniel managed to look devastatingly somber.
Luce thought about the white peonies he’d brought her. Randy hadn’t let her take the vase with her when she left the infirmary, so Luce had carried the flowers up to her room and gotten pretty inventive, cutting off the top of a plastic water bottle with a pair of manicure scissors.
The blooms were fragrant and soothing, but the message they offered was unclear. Usually when a guy brought you flowers, you didn’t have to second-guess his feelings. But with Daniel, those kinds of assumptions were always a bad idea. It was so much safer to assume he’d brought them to her because that was what you did when someone went through a trauma.
But still: He’d brought her flowers! If she leaned forward now in her folding chair and looked up at the dorm, through the metal bars on the third window from the left, she could almost make them out.
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” a pay-by-the-hour minister warbled from the front of the crowd. “Till thou return unto the ground. For out of it wast thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
He was a thin man about seventy, lost in a big black jacket. His beat-up athletic shoes were fraying at the laces; his face was lumpy and sunburned. He spoke into a microphone attached to an old plastic boom box that looked like it was from the eighties. The sound that came out was staticky and distorted and hardly carried across the crowd.
Everything about this service was inadequate and completely wrong.
No one was paying Todd any respect by being here. The whole memorial seemed more like an attempt to teach the students how unfair life could be. That Todd’s body wasn’t even present said so much about the school’s relationship—or utter lack thereof—with the departed boy. None of them had known him; none of them ever would. There was something false about standing here today in this crowd, something made worse by the few people who were crying. It made Luce feel like Todd was even more of a stranger to her than he actually had been.
Let Todd rest in peace. Let the rest of them just move on.
A white horned owl crooned in the high branch of the oak tree over their heads. Luce knew there was a nest somewhere nearby with a clan of new baby owls. She’d been hearing the mother’s fearful chant each night this week, followed by the frantic beating of the father’s wings on the descent from his nightly hunt.
And then it was over. Luce stood up from her chair, feeling weak with the unfairness of it all. Todd had been as innocent as she was guilty, though of what she didn’t know.
As she followed the other students in single file toward the so-called reception, an arm looped around her waist and pulled her back.
Daniel?
But no, it was Cam.
His green eyes searched hers and seemed to pick up her disappointment, which only made her feel worse. She bit her lip to keep from dissolving into a sob. Seeing Cam shouldn’t make her cry—she was just so emotionally drained, teetering on the brink of a collapse. She bit so hard she tasted blood, then wiped her mouth on her hand.
“Hey,” Cam said, smoothing the back of her hair. She winced. She still had a bump back there from where she’d hit her head on the steps. “Do you want to go somewhere and talk?”
They’d been walking with the others across the grass toward the reception under the shade of one of the oak trees. A cluster of chairs had been set up practically one on top of the other. A nearby folding card table was strewn with stacks of stale-looking cookies, pulled from their generic boxes but still sitting in their inner plastic shells. A cheap plastic punch bowl had been filled with syrupy red liquid and had attracted several flies, the way a corpse might do. It was such a pathetic reception, few of the other students even bothered with it. Luce spotted Penn in a black skirt suit, shaking hands with the minister. Daniel was looking away from them all, whispering something to Gabbe.
When Luce turned back to Cam, his finger dragged lightly across her collarbone, then lingered in the hollow of her neck. She inhaled and felt goose bumps rise on her skin.
“If you don’t like the necklace,” he said, leaning into her, “I can get you something else.”
His lips were so close to brushing her neck that Luce pressed a hand to his shoulder and stepped back.
“I do like it,” she said, thinking of the box lying on her desk. It had ended up right next to Daniel’s flowers, and she’d spent half the night before looking back and forth between them, weighing the gifts and the intentions behind them. Cam was so much clearer, easier to figure out. Like he was algebra and Daniel was calculus. And she had always loved calculus, the way it sometimes took an hour to figure out a single proof.
“I think the necklace is great,” she told Cam. “I just haven’t had a chance to wear it yet.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, pursing his lips. “I shouldn’t press you.”
His dark hair was slicked back and showed more of his face than usual. It made him look older, more mature. And the way he looked at her was so intense, his big green eyes probing into her, like he approved of everything she held inside.
“Miss Sophia kept saying to give you space these last couple of days. I know she’s right, you’ve been through so much. But you should know how much I thought about you. All the time. I wanted to see you.”
He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand and Luce felt tears welling up. She had been through so much. And she felt terrible that here she was, about to cry, not over Todd—whose death did matter, and should have mattered more—but for selfish reasons. Because the past two days brought back too much past pain about Trevor and her life before Sword & Cross, things she thought she’d dealt with and could never explain, not to anyone. More shadows to push away.
It was like Cam sensed this, or at least part of this, because he folded her into his arms, pressed her head against his strong, broad chest, and rocked her from side to side.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”