“We’re getting close.” He put his hands up to his head like it was blown. Which was a short trip. “I mean, body parts everywhere, and the smell. Worse than what’s in our refrigerator. I mean, we’re talking dead bodies, Jo. Dead! Except they were moving! And then that—”
“Hallucination of a dragon. You told me.”
“You saw the footage!”
“I know better than this,” she said as she shook her head. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—”
“Jo. It was real. It was fucking real—I saw a monster and . . .”
As Dougie ran through the litany of impossibility again, Jo focused on the rise up ahead. “Yeah, yeah, you already told me. And unlike you, I still have my short-term memory.”
“Chooch, T.J., and Soz saw it, too.”
“You sure about that? ’Cuz when I texted them this morning, they said it was a bad trip. Nothing More.”
“They’re idiots.”
As they hit the incline, she smiled and decided maybe she had over-corrected. She hadn’t fit in with the stick-up-the-ass society types her parents were so into, but by the same token, hanging out with a bunch of going-nowhere stoners wasn’t exactly her bag, either.
Still, they were highly amusing. Most of the time.
And besides, the truth was, she had no idea where she belonged.
“You’ll see,” Dougie announced as he ran to the top of the rise. “Just look!”
Jo joined him—and shook her head at all the yup, okay, so what down below. “Exactly what am I supposed to be looking at? The trees, the buildings or the grass?”
Dougie dropped his arms. “No, no, this is wrong. No—”
“I think you finally broke your brain, Dougie. But that’s what happens when you feed it twelve hits of lysergic acid diethylamide in a six-hour period. At least you thought it was real this time, though, as opposed to that car-meets-tree thing you did for me.”
Yup, there was absolutely nothing unusual down below in what had to be the center of campus. No dead bodies. No body parts. And no smell, either. Nothing but more abandoned buildings, more cold wind, and more nothing-weird.
“No, no, no . . .”
As Dougie ran down, she let him go, hanging back and trying to imagine what the place had looked like when it had been operational. It was hard to think that her mother had gone to classes in these buildings. Slept in them. Had that first dance with her father in one of them.
Funny, the past as it had been seemed as inaccessible as the present currently was with both of those people who had adopted her. The three of them had just never clicked, and although being on her own was tough sometimes, it had been a relief to let go of all those exhausting attempts to fake a bond that had never materialized.
“Jo! Come over here!”
When she cupped her ear and pretended she couldn’t hear him, Dougie rushed back up to her with the messianic zeal of a preacher. Grabbing her hand, he pulled her into a descent behind his flapping Army surplus jacket.
“See how everything is trampled over there? See?”
She let herself get dragged over to an admittedly flattened section of the meadow. But a bunch of horizontal long grass and disturbed undergrowth was hardly a scene out of a Wes Craven movie. And it was definitely not whatever was on that video Dougie had insisted she watch over and over again.
She wasn’t sure how to explain everything. But what she was clear on? She really wasn’t going to give herself a brain cramp trying to reconcile it all.
“You saw what I posted!” Dougie said. “And someone took my phone because they don’t want anyone else to see it!”
“You probably just lost the thing—”
“I was up there.” He pointed to the tallest of the brick buildings. “Right there! That’s where I got the footage!”
“Hey, Dougie, no offense, but I have to get to work—”
“Jo, I’m fucking serious.” He pivoted around in a circle. “Fine, explain this. How did everything get crushed here? Huh?”
“For all I know, you and our three roommates ran around in a circle naked. Actually, let’s not even go there on a hypothetical.”
Dougie faced off at her. “Then how did I get the video? Huh?”
“I don’t know, Dougie. Frankly, it’s so grainy, I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
She gave him some time to hop around with all kinds of what-about-this and what-about-that, and then she was done. “Look, I’m really sorry, but I’m leaving. You can come with me or Uber home. Your choice. Oh, wait. No phone. Guess that means walking?”
As she turned away, he said in a surprisingly adult voice, “I’m serious, Jo. It happened. I don’t care what the three of them say. I know when I’m high and when I’m not.”
When Jo stopped and glanced behind herself, his expression turned hopeful.
“Do you mind if I drop you off at the bus stop on Jefferson? I don’t think I have time to take you all the way back.”
Dougie threw his arms up. “Aw, come on, Jo—let me just show you over here . . .”
“Bus stop it is,” she said. “And remind me of this the next time you drop acid. I want to be prepared.”
FIFTEEN
Sometime later, Mary woke up after a good long rest . . . and smiled at her decidedly asleep mate. Rhage was out like a light, his eyes closed, one blond brow twitching, his jaw grinding as if maybe he were dreaming of an argument or a pool game. His breathing was deep and even, and yes, he was snoring. Not like a chain saw, though. Or an unmuffled Mustang revving at a red light. Or even anything close to Butch’s wounded-badger routine—which was something you had to hear to believe.