“I am sure,” Kami lied, the words bitter between her lips because she could not quite believe them. “I am.”
“You heard her,” Jared said. “She’s sure. So stop trying to turn her against me.”
Kami’s head snapped around. Jared’s eyes met hers and then swung to Ash. His look created a chilly silence around them in the midst of the noisy corridor full of people preparing to go home.
Kami stepped in between Ash and Jared, facing Jared.
“Go on,” Ash told him. “Prove my point. If she stayed away from you, she’d be safe.”
Jared made a sharp abrupt movement, something that would have been a lunge if Kami had moved away like she wanted to. She didn’t. She held her hands up and took a step toward him, and Jared fell back.
“I am safe,” Kami said, and cast a look over her shoulder at Ash. She felt fury wash through her: he could tell anyone in town what he had tried to tell Kami. “And I am sure.”
She wasn’t sure but she was angry, though she could not tell if the anger was hers or Jared’s, and that scared her more than the way Jared had come at Ash. She looked away from Ash and back at Jared. She took another step forward and another, using his desire not to touch her to herd him down that busy corridor.
“Jared Lynburn?” said a voice. Someone touched his elbow, and they both jumped.
Nicola Prendergast, Kami’s childhood best friend, stood beside Jared and smiled up at him. He didn’t move away from her. “Just wanted to say welcome to Sorry-in-the-Vale,” Nicola said. She nodded at Kami, giving the awkward ex-best-friend nod, and then gave Jared an expectant look.
Jared stared at her. He had a very distressing sort of stare.
Nicola bore it for less than a minute, then clearly remembered she had to be somewhere else with someone not so creepy, and darted off.
Jared looked to Kami. “Everyone either wants to welcome me with open arms or punch me in the face.”
“That probably says something very worrying about your personality,” said Kami. “But what?” She turned in toward him, and he almost stumbled back into an empty classroom. Kami followed him inside. The room was filled with desks and chairs knocked awry, and late-afternoon light streamed through the windows. Jared stood there still looking a little wild and completely out of place in her life. She wanted to reach out to him in her mind and get comfort in this impossible situation.
“Ash is right,” she said. She watched him flinch and felt the pang travel through her as well, horrible and senseless: she couldn’t stop feeling what he was feeling. “I don’t know what happened, and I have to know. Jared—Jared, I’m on your side. You believe that.” Jared’s burning-pale eyes were fixed on her. For a moment, she did not know how he would respond.
Yes, he said in her mind.
“I just have to know the truth,” Kami said. “The worst thing that’s happened in my life is my grandmother dying while I was at cricket camp. You know that. I told you that. You haven’t told me about this. I know you hated your father, and I know that the summer before last was bad, that you weren’t with your parents. I know your father’s dead. Tell me how he died.”
Jared looked at her for another moment, then passed a hand through his hair and looked away. The edge of his jaw was hard, scar pulled tight over his cheek.
“My dad hated us,” he said. “Me and Mom. He hated us all the time. He wasn’t drunk all the time, but he was drunk often enough. The summer before last, he gave me this scar, and I ran away.”
There was no emotion in his voice, stripped clean like flesh from dry bone, but Kami knew how he had felt.
“I slept on the streets for a few months, and then I got sick in the fall, and after I was well I thought about Mom and how she always got sick. I thought about how I’d left her alone.”
“You went back for her,” Kami said.
Jared’s mouth twisted. “I went back,” he said. “It was late, and he was drunk. He didn’t let me in the door. We were fighting out in the hall, he was shouting and she was screaming, and he—he fell down the stairs. Broke his neck.”
“Someone pushed him, Ash said.” Kami did not add, Just like someone pushed me.
“When the police came, Mom said I pushed him. She made sure they took me away in handcuffs.” Jared looked at Kami again. His gaze was defiant, almost desperate, as if he was daring her not to believe him. As if he expected her not to. “There was a security camera in our building, and it showed I wasn’t close enough to have pushed him. I hated him enough to kill him, but I didn’t.”
Kami suddenly knew how hate like that felt, the cold absoluteness of it. “I believe you,” she said.
His mother had betrayed him. He’d come back for her, and she’d sent him to a cell. Kami had talked to him when he reached out for her, lonely and desperate, even though she hadn’t known what she was talking him through. He had talked to her the same way when her grandmother died. Even though that had been different, had been an ordinary tragedy, an old woman with a bad heart, and this was a nightmare, she’d meant it when she said she was on his side.
“Ash isn’t going to turn me against you,” Kami told him. “You can trust me.”
There was a flicker of warmth between them, like a match lit.
“Come on, Glass,” said Jared. “I’ll take you home.”
Kami had told him nothing but the truth. She did believe him. She believed he’d hated his father enough to kill him. And she knew, could feel the wall in his mind, that there was something else he was hiding.
Chapter Eleven
The Haunted River
They had to swing by Jared’s locker so he could grab his jacket. “A leather jacket,” Kami said as he shrugged into it. “Aren’t you trying a little too hard to play into certain bad boy clichés?”
“Nah,” said Jared. “You’re thinking of black leather. Black leather’s for bad boys. It’s all in the color. You wouldn’t think I was a bad boy if I was wearing a pink leather jacket.”
“That’s true,” Kami said. “What I would think of you, I do not know. So what does brown leather mean, then?”
“I’m going for manly,” Jared said. “Maybe a little rugged.”
“It’s bits of dead cow; don’t ask it to perform miracles.”
Jared laughed. “Come on, I brought a spare helmet for you,” he said, reaching into his locker again.
As he spoke, she reached for him in her mind, and felt the pleasure he felt in his motorbike. She could taste some of the thrill, the speed and the danger.
“Ahahaha!” said Kami. “No, you didn’t. You brought it for someone else, someone who doesn’t know that you have crashed that bike fifty-eight times!”
“Technically speaking, only fifty-one of those times were my fault.”
“Technically speaking, you drive like a rabid chicken who has hijacked a tractor.”
“Like a bat out of hell,” Jared said. “Nice simile. Sounds sort of dangerous and cool. Consider it.”
“Not a chance. I like my brains the way they are, not lightly scrambled and scattered across a road. And speaking of bad boy clichés, really, a motorcycle?”
“Again, I say: rugged,” Jared told her. “Manly.”
“I often see Holly on hers,” Kami said solemnly. “When she stops for traffic, sometimes she puts on some manly lip gloss. I’m not getting on a bike.”
Jared shrugged. “Okay. So I’ll walk you home.” He shut his locker door, turned, and made his way down the hall.
Kami felt duty bound to point out, “You can’t keep following me around.”
Jared frowned. “You don’t—do you mind?”
“I mean, you can’t,” Kami explained. “You know how Angela moved to town when I was eleven? And you know how girls at that age are joined at the hip and want to do absolutely everything their new best friend in all the world does? Do you remember how long that stage lasted for me and Angela?”
Jared hesitated. “Well—”
“Two and a half hours,” Kami told him. “Then Angela collapsed and started to cry. It was the only time I’ve ever seen Angela cry.”
“Are you implying I won’t be able to keep up with you?”
Kami pushed open the school door, glanced up, and found him smiling. “I’m not implying so much as just outright saying.”
“I think I can manage,” Jared told her.
“You’re welcome to try,” Kami said serenely. “I’m planning to take a shortcut through the woods on our way home.” She sailed down the school steps. He was keeping up with her so far, but then, they had barely started.
“A shortcut through the woods that mysteriously brings us to the scene of a crime?”
“The woods aren’t signposted,” Kami said. “It’s easy to get a little lost, wander about. Who knows what you might stumble upon!”
“Kami,” said Jared. “I can read your mind.”
“Well, that won’t hold up in court,” Kami informed him. “It sounds crazy.”
Kami had not planned her investigative foray into the woods ahead of time, or she would’ve worn dark jeans and boots. But even with the disadvantage of a belted button-down red skirt and kitten heels, she was able to keep ahead of the city boy. When Kami jumped over a stile, he looked at it as if he’d never seen one before.
“I have never seen one before,” Jared said, keeping close to the fence and eyeing the sheep on the other side with suspicion.
A lamb nudged its pink snub nose in Kami’s direction, and she patted its white woolly head. She always meant to stop eating lamb because they were so adorable. But she always succumbed when it landed on the table, because it was so delicious.
One of the lambs fixed its attention on Jared. “Baa,” it flirted.
“Boo,” said Jared.
“Oh my God, Jared. Don’t tough-talk the lambs.”
“It was giving me a funny look,” Jared claimed, boosting himself over the next stile. “I thought the countryside would have more open fields and fewer fences and barbed wire.”
“So you thought all the animals wandered onto other people’s land, getting run over by reckless drivers such as yourself?” Kami asked. “We like fences. And we have rolling fields. We have fields that rock and roll.” She waved at the expanse of green, the landscape changing hands from tree to field until finally it all melded with the sky to become blue mist in the distance. She was surprised to find herself feeling defensive.
“Kami,” said Jared. “I like it.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
“I do anyway,” said Jared.
They went over the wooden bridge over the Sorrier River, stands of bright red wolfberries waving at them from the bank.
“The Sorrier River?” Jared asked when he saw the sign by the bridge.
“It’s haunted,” Kami said, with some pride.
“The river is haunted?”
“During the Wars of the Roses—a big fight over who should be the king of England, Richard of York or Henry of Lancaster,” Kami supplied, “Sorry-in-the-Vale stood for Richard. Henry won through vile treachery. Anyway, since Henry was a cruel tyrant, he decided everyone who had fought for Richard—who was king of England at the time!—was a traitor, and started seizing lands and squeezing people for cash.”
“Classic tyranny,” Jared observed. “Not very imaginative.”
“So the people of Sorry-in-the-Vale hid their valuables when the king’s men were going by. You know the tower attached to Aurimere? It used to be a bell tower, but the bell was carved and made of gold. Well, gold leaf, probably, but at this stage everyone says gold. Elinor Lynburn ordered that the bell be sunk in the river. What with one king and another, they didn’t bring the bell up from the river until Elizabeth I was on the throne, and then nobody was able to find it. The legend goes that when Sorry-in-the-Vale is in danger, the bells in the river ring out a warning.” Kami beamed with satisfaction.