Page 6

When I stepped into the interview room, Keme didn’t look over. He kept staring straight ahead, his gaze fixed on his reflection in the mirror, arms folded across his chest. The bruises looked worse without the filter of dark glass between us, and although his hands were tucked under his arms, I wouldn’t be surprised to see split knuckles. He sat very still, his breathing shallow, and I wondered how many more bruises hid under the hoodie.

The room was small, with fluorescent panels and oatmeal-colored walls and straight-back metal chairs that looked like they had zero lumbar support. It smelled like Funyuns, and it was bright enough that I thought too long in this light would give me a splitting headache.

I pulled out the chair next to Keme. My knee bumped his, and he pulled his leg away, but he didn’t look at me.

“Hi,” I said.

Nothing.

“Are you okay?”

Still nothing.

“That was a dumb question,” I said. “How are you doing?”

His breathing was still high and thin. Sitting next to him, I could almost feel his heart racing. How long had they had him in here? How long had he been alone, panicked, frozen? I knew what it was like to be a suspect in a murder investigation. It was, to put it bluntly, horrible. It was disorienting. It was terrifying. There was a kind of dissociative disbelief, like I’d stepped out of my life by accident and couldn’t quite get back. And I’d been in my late twenties, with parents who would, at a bare minimum, provide the financial resources I needed. What would it be like to be a teenager whose mom couldn’t be bothered to come down to the station because her latest boyfriend was trying to make a point? A teenager who’d had to rely on himself for most of his life? Who had learned the hard way that even the people you thought you could depend on weren’t going to be there for you? Like his mom.

Or Bobby.

The thought flashed through me. It left my fingertips tingling, and a faint tremor in my hands.

I worked saliva into my mouth. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s okay. But I want you to know that nobody who knows you thinks you did this. We don’t think you did it. I don’t think you did it. I know you didn’t do it. And we’re going to make sure you’re okay.”

The muscles in his jaw tightened. How hard was he trying, I wanted to know, not to show anything? Not to give away even a single moment of weakness—or what must have felt to him like weakness?

“But I hope you’ll think about telling us where you were last night. Even if it’s embarrassing, or you think we’ll be disappointed in you, or you did something you’re not proud of, it doesn’t matter, Keme. What matters right now is proving you couldn’t have done this. So, we need to know where you were last night. And we need you to help us.”

His eyes were dark. They shimmered with the rainbow drift of the fluorescents.

Relationships had never been a strong suit for me. I mean, my whole romantic life had been a series of ongoing disasters, mostly because of my indecisiveness and my general lack of self-confidence when it came to knowing what the heck was going on. It had been true to a lesser extent with friends, and so my friend groups had always been small, and they’d always been more about who wanted to invite me to things than about active effort on my part to cultivate meaningful relationships. (See above about indecisiveness and lack of self-confidence—plus, I overanalyzed everything and because, you know, social interaction made me want to scream into a pillow.)

But I’d been trying to do better. To take risks. To make myself vulnerable. And Keme was my friend.

Which was why it only took me about thirty seconds of panic-calculating before I reached out to touch his arm. His whole body went stiff, which wasn’t exactly encouraging, but I plunged forward. “And I want you to know that all of us—Bobby and Fox and Indira and Millie—”

Keme didn’t exactly flinch. But he did shift away from me in his seat.

“—and I, we care about you so much.”

And then came the truly scary part.

I was a little embarrassed by the thought that Bobby would be proud of me.

I scooted forward in my seat, and I brought my arms around Keme to hug him. “We love you—”

Keme knocked my arms away. He shot up from his seat, his face reduced to dark lines, and he shoved me.

The force of the push threw me out of my chair. I landed hard on my butt. My elbow cracked against the table, and it must have gotten my funny bone exactly right because it felt like I grabbed a live wire. I stared up at Keme.

He had backed himself into a corner, his hands held out in front of him like I might come after him. His face was impossible to read, but he was breathing like he’d just finished a race, and his hands were shaking.

The door swung open, and Sheriff Acosta stepped into the room. She had her hand on her gun, although it was still holstered, and she looked at Keme first and then at me.

“I’m okay,” I said. It certainly seemed true—my arm was zinging, and my butt ached, but those were minor things. “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m okay.”

To prove it, I used the table to get to my feet.

I looked at Keme. His eyes were blank, like he wasn’t seeing me. Or like he’d never seen me before.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He stared at me.

“Step out here,” the sheriff said.

I moved backward, unable to take my gaze off Keme until I reached the hallway and the sheriff shut the door.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I nodded, rubbing my arm. (Better than rubbing my butt.) “I shouldn’t have—he doesn’t like—” Tears welled up, and I blinked desperately to keep them from falling. The tide of embarrassment at my reaction only made things worse, though, and despite my best efforts, my voice thinned as I tried to say, “I should have known.”

“It’s okay,” the sheriff said. “As long as you’re okay.”

I shook my head, but I didn’t know at what. “I’m going to get him a lawyer.” My face was hot. I was starting to shake. “I should get him a lawyer. I’ll call Lyda.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” the sheriff said. “Dash, why don’t you sit down for a moment?”

I shook my head again, and I managed to firm up my voice a little. “Can you—can you wait? To arrest him, I mean. It’ll be on his record, you know, if you arrest him. So, if you could wait. Like, a day.” She looked back at me with unhappy eyes. “I know you have to do it eventually, but just a day. Please.”

Slowly, the sheriff said, “I have to charge him by the end of the day tomorrow.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

“I really think you need to sit down. Let me find you somewhere private—”

Waving off the words, I turned and stumbled toward the closest exit.