Page 60 of You Belong Here

BEFORE: THE CRIME

After I exited the tunnels, I stepped out of Beckett Hall into the steady snow. And then I started to run. It was a long way on foot to the old president’s house, but I knew these woods so well. I knew this whole place by heart.

I smelled the smoke far sooner than I thought I should—it drew my gaze up. And there, through the falling snow, I saw flames above the tree line in the distance, licking the sky.

I started running faster. Something was burning. I burst into the clearing to find that the entire barn was up in flames. Students stood around it like it was nothing but a raging bonfire.

I pulled the mask from my face. I couldn’t breathe. And then I screamed: “Does anyone have a phone? Call 911! There might be people in there!”

Then I started screaming for Adalyn. Adalyn, with the key. Adalyn, with the only way to save them.

A girl turned around, eyes glassy. “It was her. She set the fire. I watched her do it,” she said. “She’s not here anymore.”

I shook my head, backing away.

I started to run in a blind panic. Twigs hitting my face. Tripping over roots poking through the snow. I kept moving until I was back at Beckett Hall.

I’d left the whole series of tunnel doors open for when we released them. But the final door was shut and locked.

It wouldn’t budge. I rammed it with my body, pulled against it with my foot braced against the stone wall. I tried to get my dorm key to work, my house key, my car key. But the smoke had already seeped into the space where I was standing, and I couldn’t get a breath. I couldn’t get them out.

I’d gone off looking for her after. I screamed her name into the cold dark until my voice was gone, lungs seized by the smoke and the fear.

All through the night, I’d searched, as if finding her could somehow undo it all.

As if it weren’t already too late. An accident, I wanted to believe, so desperately.

An accident, and I couldn’t find the key.

I raced down to the quarry. Stumbled back through a dark alley behind the Low Bar, wild with panic. I couldn’t stop moving, or searching, or calling her name. Couldn’t stop the tears of rage and grief and shame, ice-cold in the bitter air.

Even then I feared the stillness.

Eventually I made it back to the dorm, thinking: One last place.

Thinking: Maybe she got them out instead.

But I knew it as soon as I saw that open window: She was gone.

She’d taken her things, and she’d left. Left me. Left nothing behind. Not even the key to the tunnels—the only thing that could’ve freed them.

In the stillness, I knew, there was nothing left to look for; nowhere left to go; no one left to save.

I curled up on my bed, where I waited for someone to come and find me.

To discover what I had done.