Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97537 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
At Juno’s door, I walk her up. The hallway is the same as last week and somehow nothing is. She stands with the key in her hand and doesn’t use it.
“Arrow,” she says, and my name in her mouth is a question I want to answer with a miracle.
“I’ve got you,” I say, because it’s true. “I’m here.”
She opens the door, goes in, turns, looks like she wants to slam it and invite me in at the same time. She chooses neither. “Tomorrow,” she says. “We start again. And we don’t fall. And we start telling the world the truth.”
“Tomorrow,” I echo.
She closes the door softly. I stand in the empty hall and feel every decision I’ve ever made stack up behind my ribs like books I should have shelved by subject.
Knight drives me home and we’re both quiet the entire ride. We have names. We had a plan. Now we have a body that wasn’t on the whiteboard. Oops is a word for spilled coffee and tripping on curbs. Tonight deserves something with edges.
Coleman. Rook. Beau. Devin. Gray’s shadow. Nico’s ring.
We are done being men in masks. We’re going to take off theirs. And when we do, I want to be looking straight at them in the kind of light that doesn’t forgive.
33
Juno
The kettle clicks off like a polite throat clear and I jump hard enough to slosh coffee onto the counter. That’s where I am, these days—nerves tuned to dog-whistle frequencies, jumping at appliances and my own reflection in the microwave door. It’s been three days since Merritt Voss found out what gravity does to men who think a house will always be a safe place, and the city is still sleeping like it expects a different ending.
I wipe the coffee with the heel of my hand and stare at the paper towels until they blur. I’m not crying. I am, however, negotiating with a quiet, ugly relief that keeps padding into the room like a cat I didn’t invite.
I don’t tell Arrow this. I don’t know how. I don’t know how to tell the man I love that, for one reckless, blazing second in Merritt’s living room, I wanted to be the one to do it. To end it. To put an ending on the page with my hands, not just my marker. I didn’t push him. I didn’t plan that corner or that slick edge or that dull, terrible sound. But when it happened—when the air snapped and the house went very bright and very wrong—something in me stood up and whispered there. And now I am walking around with there in my chest and it feels like a dirty coin under my tongue.
The crime wall watches me from the far side of the room: COLEMAN / ROOK / BEAU / DEVIN in thick black marker, NICO and GRAY circled like twin suns that refuse to share light. MERRITT is there, too, a line through his name that isn’t how I wanted to keep score and yet here we are. The red twine connecting corners looks like veins. The photos look like witnesses who are not enjoying their day.
Gage’s updates pinged all night:
Remaining Four radio silent.
Coleman’s calendar ghosted—private flag on two entries.
Rook’s gym at 5 a.m., same as always; he switched cars on the way out.
Beau canceled a haircut (sign of the apocalypse).
Devin posted about “grind mode” and then deleted it.
Someone, somewhere, hired them.
“Who hired you,” I say to the wall, the way you talk to TVs during playoff games. “Why Arby?”
No one answers. Of course they don’t. Arby’s looking out at me from a dozen angles—pink hair in some, blonde in others, each smile a slightly different lie about how fine she was. She hated symphonies and loved horror movies and once stopped speaking to me for two days because I watched The Shining without her. She would have had a field day with Club Greed. She would have rolled her eyes at tassel loafers. She would have stuck her fingers in my bagel cream cheese and made a noise that Arrow would later try to describe and get flustered and give up.
Bagels. God. I am supposed to eat. My stomach informs me of this by doing a little dance I could charitably call hunger and less charitably call a raccoon in a dryer.
I make myself a cinnamon-raisin and stand at the counter chewing in the reflective way people in sad indie movies do. The first bite tastes like nothing. The second tastes like tonight. I don’t know what that means yet. My brain keeps circling the same options: Go back to Club Greed. Poke Stonehouse. Sit in a car outside Unit 14 and try to listen through the walls. Call my mother and ask her to tell me I’m not a terrible person. And listen to her tell me to go to the police and stop trying to be the police.