Page 59 of The Bright Lands

“If you play them back you can guess the answers.”

Her phone buzzed. She snatched it off the counter.

“Christ, Clark, I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour.” It was Joel. He was driving somewhere, by the sound of it.

“I was sleeping,” she lied, not caring for his sharp tone. “You might try it.”

“I envy you. I’ve been trying to sleep for days.”

Clark felt that prickling heat in her scalp again. “Have you been having strange dreams?”

“It sounds like everyone has,” he said, sounding annoyed she would mention it. “Clark, listen to me, that’s not why I called. I think whatever happened to Troy happened to Dylan—”

“Joel, I’ve been over all this with Investigator Mayfield—”

“They were gay, Clark.”

The sound of Joel’s car seemed to fade in her ear. The table grew distant. Her brother’s face appeared briefly in front of her kitchen window as Joel Whitley, very distantly, said, “Troy and Dylan, they were both gay.”

THURSDAY

SMOKE

JAMAL

Jamal’s mother pulled up to the front of the school. “Your father and I gave you too much rope.”

“It’ll be fine,” Jamal said, and told himself he meant it.

His mother said nothing as he climbed down from her car. He would learn later that her next stop was a lawyer’s office.

He pushed open the school’s front doors and stepped into a trembling tunnel of green and yellow crepe. The cheerleaders had arrived early, he saw, and thrown themselves into the spirit of the biggest game of the season. He shouldn’t be surprised. This town would never allow something as trivial as a homicide to stop the Bison herd.

Hand-painted posters covered every wall. Bison stickers clogged the lockers. No wonder the school didn’t have the money to bring in grief counselors, Jamal thought. The cost of all this green tinsel alone would have paid for his lunch for a month.

The door of Dylan’s locker was so loaded down with ribbons and pennants and bouquets of flowers it almost seemed to be gloating. His photo, the one you saw everywhere around town, was stuck in the center, and beneath it was printed “RIP Leading the Big Herd in the Sky.”

Jesus. Dylan. One of the few guys on the team who’d ever been decent to Jamal had been reduced to a poster as sweet and sad as flat soda.

Wait: someone already scrawled a line of graffiti on a corner of Dylan’s photo. Could nothing in life stay good anymore?

Jamal leaned in, squinted at the words.

help it feeds help

The fuck?

Jamal’s locker stood almost bare beside Dylan’s, untouched but for the words WE BELIEVE IN YOU scrawled across the metal in green Sharpie. It was nice to know someone did. The sloping handwriting, he recognized, with a little smile, was Kimbra Lott’s.

His body ached from the pummeling he’d taken all week at practice—that fat fuck Parter had made a special project of Jamal. Never mind that a good quarterback behind a solid line is only sacked a handful of times in a season. For the last two days, Parter had sent his heaviest tackles after his new QB at every opportunity until Jamal was now half-certain the man had broken something in his brain.

How else could Jamal explain everything he saw when he slept?

He felt a fist strike his shoulder. Garrett and Mitchell ambled by, laughing to themselves. For the hundredth time this week, Garrett asked, a little singsong lilt in his voice, “Where were you last weekend, Reynolds?”

Jamal massaged the pain flaring down his arm. He wondered how much more of this treatment he could take.

He thought (as he’d been thinking all week) of Bethany, and immediately he was livid.“You should go for it, bro,”Dylan had said last month.“I think she’s really into you.”