Page 8 of Ringer
Again.
“Gemma.Gemma.”
She’d made it outside before Pete caught up with her. The air was alive with fireflies. Someone had lit the tiki torches; even burning could be made pretty, so long as it was contained. Gemma was struck instead by how insubstantial it all looked, the shadows and the light, the women in their bright dresses: like the scrim that dropped during a play so all the stagehands could get the furniture into position. She spotted her mother and father at the center of a group of dancers. It made her sick, that he could dance like that, arms up, not a care in the world, while in the background a faceless army prepared the audience for the next illusion.
“Talk to me,” Pete said, and put his hands on her face. “Please.”
Before Gemma could answer, April shouted her name. She came ripping out of the crowd, and Gemma had the impression of a curtain swinging aside to release her.
“Where have you been? I got stuck talking to—” She caught sight of Gemma’s face and broke off. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“My dad lied to me.” She felt as if she had to say the words through a fist. “He gave Lyra and Caelum up.”
“Gave them up?” April repeated the words very slowly, as if Gemma were the one in danger of misunderstanding. Gemma felt her anger, so poorly buried, give a sudden lash.
“That’s what I said. He gave them up. He sold them out.” She felt like screaming. She felt like taking one of the stupid tiki torches and lighting the whole place on fire. “Haven’s a PR crisis. That’s what he said. And they’re the biggest leak.” The worst was that she couldn’t even be angry at her dad, not really. He was a liar, and lying was what liars did.
She was the bigger idiot. She’d actually believed him.
April’s eyes passed briefly to Pete—so briefly that Gemma almost missed it.Almost.
“I’m sorry,” April said, and reached out, as if she wanted to touch Gemma’s shoulder, or maybe pat Gemma on the head.
Gemma took a step backward, out of reach. All at once it was as if she was the torch: she was burning with rage, combusting. “You’resorry?” As if that was it, end of story, too bad. As if Gemma’s favorite toy had just been stolen. “You know what this means, don’t you? You remember how theycleaned upJake Witz?”
“Keep your voice down,” Pete said, although it hardlymattered. Everyone was so drunk she could have been shouting.
Gemma spun around, stumbling a little on the grass, too furious to look at either of her friends. But April and Pete caught up to her almost immediately. Pete tried to take her elbow, but Gemma shook him off.
“Gemma, please,” Pete said again. “Can you just... I mean, can we all stop andthink?”
But she couldn’t stop. There was no time. She closed her eyes and saw Jake Witz, the geometric perfection of his smile, the way he neatened his silverware, the intense stillness of his gaze, as if his eyes were a gravity trying to hold you in place. Already, her memories of him were fading. Too often, she saw him now as she did in her nightmares: half alive, half dead, lisping details about the constellations with a swollen tongue.
She kept stumbling on the grass, and nearly twisted her ankle when her wedge drove down into a soft bit of soil. She kicked off her shoes and didn’t bother picking them up. She didn’t have a plan, she didn’t know what she would do now that Fortner had a head start, but she knew she had to keep moving, she had to go fast, she had to outrun Jake and her nightmare vision of his face and the sly orbit of Lyra’s and Caelum’s faces, moving eclipse-like to hang in his place. Pete and April could easily outpace her, but she was first to the narrow path that interlinkedthe front and back yards, and that was so hemmed in by growth they had no choice but to fall back. They were maybe a step behind her, but she heard them the way she heard the distant twitter of birds in the morning—all noise, all background.
“Christ, Gemma, will youwaitfor a second?”
“Can someone please just tell mewhat the fuck happened?”
She broke free of the tangle of azaleas. The cars in the driveway looked like a freeze-frame of a collision about to happen. But before she was halfway to the driveway, Pete had his hand on her arm.
“Jesusspitballs.” He was practically shouting. She’d never seen him mad before, not like this, and a small, distant flare of love went up through the smog of her own pain: you could count on Pete to make up a curse likeJesus spitballs. “Will you talk to us for a minute? Will you actuallylisten?”
That word,us, extinguished the flare right away. April and Pete were on the same side, which meant Gemma was left out. Alone.
“What?” she said. “You want me to listen? So go on. Spit it out,” she prompted, when he said nothing. A floodlight came on automatically, triggered by their movement. In its light, Pete looked hollow and exhausted, and for just a moment, she felt guilty. Then she remembered: it wastwo against one. All her life she’d felt as if she was trying to play a game from outside the stadium, trying to intuit the rules from brief and distant snapshots. But at least April had been with her, and Pete.
By learning the truth, she’d gone somewhere they couldn’t follow. And that was just a fact.
April rocketed out of the growth looking as though she’d done personal battle with every inch of it. There were leaves in her hair, on her shirt, clinging to the wet of her shoes. “I won’t,” she panted, “ask”—more panting—“again.” But she did anyway. “What. The. Hell. Happened?”
Pete still wouldn’t meet Gemma’s eyes, and for some reason that alone made her queasy: it meant for sure he had something to say that she wouldn’t want to hear.
“Lyra and Caelum are in trouble,” she said, keeping her voice as measured as she could. “I have to help. It’s my fault, don’t you get it? I walked them into this. I hand-fed them to my dad. If anything happens to them—” She broke off, suddenly overwhelmed.
In her dreams, Jake spoke to her even with the rope around his neck, puckering the skin around it. In her dreams, they were back on the marshes, and sometimes when he opened his mouth, he had beetles on his tongue.
Would he still be alive if she hadn’t shown up to ask for his help?
