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“Bugs,” I say automatically, having watched Rue search for a snack more times than I can count.

“Bugs and worms and all kinds of shit—sorry. All kinds of gross stuff you didn’t know was there and maybe didn’t need to know,” Riley says. “You turn over this rock, you’re going to see those things. Things that people want left under there, in the dark.”

“I do need to know,” I tell him.

“Then be careful,” he says. “And only believe about half of what you hear.”

“Okay,” I say. “Thank you. Thank you for talking to me.”

“And, kid?”

“Yeah?”

“If half of what you hear doesn’t make your parents sound like great people . . . well, that’s probably the half that’s true.”

I clench the phone in my hand, the hard ball of words turning into something else, hot anger, surging, ready to come up and blister Riley’s ear, giving him something to take with him into retirement. But I don’t have time to turn the emotion into words before he hangs up.

I think of the Turnado car, splashing past me. I think of Lenore Usher, her lips a thin line when she tells me nobody knows what happened to my parents.

“Somebody knows,” I say into my phone, even though no one is listening.

“Felicity Turnado knows.”

Chapter 35

Felicity

“I don’t know!” I spit back at her. I’m pissed, but it’s lacking the sharp edges of earlier, and not just because before when I got rowdy I think she might have broken my ankle. No, I’m not kicking and screaming because this time . . . I think she might have me.

That day that we drove past Tress in the rain is something that never stuck well with me, watching my former best friend flipping us off in the rearview mirror, dirty water running down her face. It’s a moment that might have come up in truth or dare, if someone asked me what I’m most ashamed of in my life. Or, at least, in seventh grade. But we stopped playing truth or dare a long time ago, moved on to spin the bottle and strip poker.

I never was very good at cards.

Driving past Tress that day was a shitty thing to do, and I know it, deep down. I told Brynn about it once, when I’d had too much to drink and we were both taking a time-out at one of Gretchen’s parties, just kind of chilling in lawn chairs and staring up at the stars.

“Well,” Brynn had said, brow furrowed and thinking hard. “If it was a dog, would you have stopped and picked it up?”

The truth is that yes, I would have. The truth is, that I would treat a dog better than I treated Tress Montor that day.

But it’s also true that I wasn’t the one driving. I remember my mom flicking on the windshield wipers, Tress’s figure disappearing in the rain. Mom left her there on purpose, leaving a not-so-subtle message in her wake. Did she do the same with the cops? Let them know that if the Montor disappearance was not-so-thoroughly investigated, the Turnados would appreciate that . . . possibly in the form of a donation that made it possible for them to buy a new fleet of police cruisers that year?

Whatever is left in my stomach rolls at the thought, and my mind revolts along with it. If that happened, it wasn’t my fault.

“I couldn’t just force my mom to pull over, you know,” I say, adding a brick to my defense, just as Tress reaches for one of her own. A more solid one to trump my metaphor, because another truth is that I can construct quite the wall of self-righteous, blustering excuses to defend myself, but the one Tress is building is very real, and growing rapidly.

22 rows of bricks / 3 = 7.333

I’m nearly a third of the way toward being dead. I don’t like math anymore.

It’s like the boa constrictor song we sang as kids, with the snake slowly swallowing us up, except I’m not sliding down a snake’s throat. The bricks are rising like the tide, and once they close over my head—

“Tress,” I say madly, hoping to distract her as she lays some mortar, sliding the first brick of the sixth row into place. “Have you really thought about this? Like actually, truly, really sat down and thought about this?”

“Yep,” she says, tapping the brick into place.

“And you thought about the fact that you could go to jail?”

She’s on her knees, fitting the last one with precision, when she leans back and gives me a long, cold stare.