13 to Life (29 page)

“Oh.” I swallowed and opened my mouth, but it took a moment—a long moment—to push such a seemingly simple question out. “What do you want from me?”

His eyes caught mine. Held them, the faceted depths of his sparking with a fierce inner light. “Understanding.”

“Your accent’s not bad at all. I’m sure plenty of people understand you.”

His hand was heavy and hot on my own. “That’s not the understanding I mean, and you know that.”

Over the next few days, Pietr learned understanding was not easy to find. And forgiveness, from me, at least, was still in short supply. Especially when Sarah started telling me about the
other
study dates—ones I
wasn’t
invited to. Sarah was moving forward quickly with Pietr and was happy to give me the blow-by-blow of what happened each time she visited him.

I knew when he smiled at her, when he laughed, when they held hands, when he looked into her eyes. . . . She even texted once about a kiss. I discovered how indestructible my clunky cell phone was when I threw it against a poorly matched picture frame. I came up with a quick excuse for Dad when he raced into my room absolutely worried. But there was no fooling Annabelle Lee. Thankfully she just didn’t care enough to talk about it.

Pietr also seemed to know when Sarah called. He called almost immediately afterward, equally quick to follow her flowery descriptions with logical explanations. Explanations that always seemed laced with his own grating frustration at his inability to slip free gracefully of the relationship I had pushed him into.

________

By the end of the next week, everyone in Junction was focused on the upcoming town fair. The fair was a big deal in Junction. It brought in outsiders and showed off small-town Americana. The shift in focus also made it easier to obtain library passes here and there to do a little additional research. It seemed I’d found all the real gems about the Phantom Wolves of Farthington and I was ready to give Google a rest when something caught my eye. A retraction had been printed in a local paper about the situation. I hopped right to it.

Yeah
. Huh—that
was
different. Although the final articles regarding the Phantom Wolf—wolves, they’d realized—had claimed both beasts were dead (shot, killed, sent to a lab, and then to the taxidermist famed for stuffing Roy Rogers’s horse Trigger), one guy disagreed with the official story. It appeared when he’d been interviewed originally he’d stuck to the party line.

Yep, two corpses, he’d said. But then he’d demanded a retraction be printed. He claimed he hadn’t gotten the payment he’d been promised for just going along. So he’d grown a conscience (or developed a bitter streak—sometimes hard to tell the difference when it came to whistleblowers) and decided to tell the public the truth. Yeah. On the bottom of page eleven. That showed how highly the reporters thought of him.

Two wolves shot. One taken by him, the other taken somewhere else. And he doubted it was dead, he said. He transported a male, but he swore the other was a female. He referred to her as
the bitch
several times in the brief article, and I wondered if it was because of her gender or because of the rumored damage she’d inflicted protecting her mate in the last moments of their standoff with the cops.

Either way, it was interesting and worthy of my bulletin board and speculation, so I printed it.

Although most of the week’s talk had been about the upcoming fair (because, really, what else was there to talk about in Junction?), I wasn’t prepared. I mean, I knew what I was wearing, knew what time we’d meet and where. . . . But I wasn’t prepared to potentially have fun publicly with Pietr. Last time we’d all been together, his idea of fun had ended in bloodshed. And he’d almost died.

After that whole mess with the drug-sniffing dog, it’d been harder to convince Sarah there was nothing “special” between us. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Sarah’s parents had heard about “the drug incident,” as it had become known around town. Why it wasn’t just as easy to say “the
dog
incident,” I’ll never know. Dad said it was like selling newspapers: The headline was all that mattered, not the facts below.

Sarah’s parents first came to me about the rumor they’d heard. They wanted assurance I wasn’t doing drugs—I was
so
important to their daughter’s recovery and growth. The toughest moment came when I realized by defending my innocence I was also defending Pietr—reassuring them he was okay for their daughter to date.

I could have said, “I have my suspicions about him.” But they wouldn’t have been drug-related. And
suspicion
wasn’t quite what I felt about some of the odd things I’d noticed about Pietr.
Suspicion
was too negative a word. I truly trusted Pietr, but even
that
I didn’t quite understand.

So when school was dismissed early for the fair, I didn’t know what to expect. In fact, the last thing I expected happened. Dad announced it was necessary to Annabelle Lee’s socialization to attend the fair. Only thing was, he was pulling an extended shift. So Annabelle Lee’s appropriate socialization became
my
assignment. I knew exactly what Dad was doing. Chaperoning by proxy.

Annabelle Lee met me as the halls were emptying, ready for the walk to the park. Occasionally pausing to snatch up a new bit of text from the paperback edition of
War and Peace
she carried, she was a very slow traveling companion. By the time we arrived at the fair, the gang was already milling around the senior class’s booth. Colorful palm trees, mustard yellow sand, and a turquoise ocean shimmering with glitter glue decorated the hand-me-down concession stand. The beach theme clashed garishly with the naturally modest town fair setting. Feeling the autumn breeze pick up, I thought the seniors were as overly optimistic as they were underinspired.

“Hey,” I greeted everyone.

“Hey,” Annabelle Lee mimicked. Almost perfectly. She glanced again at her book.

Sarah held out a cup of warm mulled cider to me—the first blatantly nice thing she’d done since Pietr loaned me his sweater.

“Thanks.” I took a long sip, slowly turning to look at the fair and the bustling crowd of people. The smells of fresh French fries and vinegar warred with hamburgers and hot dogs. Down the slope beyond the main stage was the rides area with its pulsing lines of large colored lightbulbs, the sight punctuated by the occasional shrieks of riders. Cables and extension cords stretched and crisscrossed between rides like lazy snakes. Yes, even compared to the rides, the senior stand looked cheap.

“What’s up first?” I asked.

Sarah smiled up at Pietr, tucking her latest read more firmly into her purse. Huh.
The Catcher in the Rye.
“How about the Ferris wheel?” she suggested. “We can see the whole fair from the
apex
and decide then.”

Amy, just behind the pair of them, looked at Sarah and then at me. She rolled her eyes.

Annabelle Lee stifled a snicker.

We bought our tickets and headed down the gravel path past the indoor art and flower arrangement competition and beside the John Deere tractor display. Near the rides the scent changed, food giving way to the smells of animals and fresh manure. Yes, there was nothing quite like a small-town fair.

Sarah grabbed Pietr, bounding up the Ferris wheel’s ramp and tugging him into a seat with her. As they sat, so did Annabelle Lee, wedging herself between them and bringing her book back to nose level, looking like quite the chaperone.

I almost missed her smirk. “Annabelle Lee—” I warned, but Pietr chuckled, plucked off her ill-fitting hat, tousled her hair, and set the hat back on her head. As the safety bar came down across the trio’s laps, I noticed neither girl seemed very pleased anymore.

Pietr winked at me.

I rode with Amy. She asked, “So has Sarah totally flipped her lid yet?”

“What?”

“Sarah,” she whispered, eyeing their basket warily. “Has she lost it? Snapped? Blown a gasket? Blown a fuse? Gone round the bend—off to the loony bin—a few fries short of a Happy Meal—you know, cuckoo?”

“Amy!” I nearly laughed at her rapid-fire list, but didn’t because I knew I was dealing with a serious issue.

“No. She has these weird moments—times when I think she must be dreaming of where to hide my body, and then it’s like”—I waved my hand in front of my face and grinned—“back to happy, loving, word-a-day-calendar Sarah.”

“You both need your heads examined.” She looked out over the fairgrounds. “So what are you going to do?”

I leaned over the safety bar, rocking the seat. “I
don’t
know. I think I need to keep going on like she can be my best friend—like she’ll never go psycho again. Maybe if—”

“If what?” Amy snorted. “If you believe hard enough for
both
of you? This isn’t some movie, you know. There’s no hero on a white horse, no way to clap and bring fairies back to life. It’s like you’re expecting some sitcom moment where I smile at you and say, ‘that’s crazy enough, it just might work.’ ” Amy shook her head. “Holy crap, Jessie. Step back from the ledge. You’ve been playing with fire since the accident. You can try to tame it, make it good and useful, but the moment you aren’t careful anymore, fire will
burn
you.”

“She’s my best friend,” I defended.

“Look, I understand keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, but every time you say she’s your
best
friend, I get the urge to slap you.”

“Oh.” I thought about it a second. “She’s
one
of my best friends? Amy, I never meant . . .”

“Yeah. I’m okay with it. You occasionally put your foot in your mouth. And chew. And sometimes you seem to take time to even swallow.” Amy sighed.

My face prickled, surely crimson.

“And I know what you mean. But, Jessie. Sarah’s not herself.” She studied her hands on the safety bar before adding softly, “Not yet.”

The ride stopped and we got out.

I smiled at Sarah and Pietr. They were holding hands. Pietr pulled out his cell phone to check the time. “So, where to?”

“Let’s look at the animals,” Sarah suggested.

She would suggest that.
Anyone who wasn’t around animals every day would never imagine it was dull to see them all again—just in a more confined and unnatural setting.

A familiar couple caught my eye at the edge of the shifting crowd. Ugh. Jenny and Derek, hand in hand by the popcorn.

I didn’t get it. Jenny had Derek and yet she always looked so miserable. He was joking with her about something, but she just looked like she’d burst out bawling any moment. She struggled to smile, but it looked completely forced.

Some girls were never happy even when they had what they really wanted.

I tried to remain upbeat. “Okay, you guys lead,” I said. Amy made faces behind Sarah’s and Pietr’s backs again.

“Hey.” I realized our group was one person short. “Where’s Annabelle Lee?”

Pietr blinked. “She was just with us,” he said.

I scanned the crowd. “Yeah, but
now
?”

“Restroom?” Amy asked, heading toward it. I raced after her. We pushed ahead in the line, blanketing apologies as we popped our heads down at each stall door to check shoes.

“Annabelle Lee!” I yelled, peeking at pair after pair of unrelated shoes. “Annabelle Lee?” But she wasn’t in any of the slightly slanting stalls. We raced out the building’s other side and back to Pietr and Sarah.

They were deep in discussion.

“No, she wouldn’t go to look at the chickens
or
the rabbits,” Sarah said.

Pietr looked at me, worry clear in his eyes. “Nothing?”

My heart raced. I scanned the crowd again, wondering why she’d ditch me—or what could cause her to ditch Pietr (whom I was starting to suspect she was also crushing on). My anxious
eyes stopped, stuck on something lying loose on the ground by the Ferris wheel. I gasped. “Oh, no.”

Annabelle Lee’s hat lay in a crumpled heap, abandoned. I pointed in silent horror at the lonely hat left on the ground by the ramp.

Pietr snatched it up. He recognized it, too. “Would she just—”

“I don’t know.” Annabelle Lee might not mind messing with me, but she’d never run off. It wasn’t her style.

Sarah and Amy hugged me, and Pietr—well, Pietr put the hat to his mouth and nose, striking a thoughtful pose. But I got the distinct feeling he was
smelling
Annabelle Lee’s hat.

I watched through tear-blurred eyes, mid-hug, as Pietr searched the crowd. His expression suddenly changed. “Follow me,” he murmured.

Taking Amy and Sarah by the hand, I followed Pietr through the wandering crowd, an awkward chain of girls following the strangest guy I’d ever met. We wove our way through the mass of humanity, barely seeing more than a body or two ahead of us. Pietr changed direction, his head snapping to the left as we did a quick hairpin turn. Then another. A few more yards and yet another sudden turn. If I hadn’t noticed how often he looked over his shoulder to check our progress, I would have thought he was trying to lose us.

I’d seen Hunter scent after rabbits and squirrels—it was amazing how similar his focus was to Pietr’s right then, like they experienced the same thing. But I didn’t question, didn’t stall—there would be time to ask him later about the
how.
Right now I was just fixated on the
where.

And then I saw her, looking frightened and out of sorts by the funnel cake stand.

“Annabelle Lee!” I shouted, dropping Sarah and Amy’s hands.
I ran to her, hugging my little sister like she’d been gone for days, not minutes. “Are you okay?

“Oh, Annabelle!” a familiar female voice called from nearby. “Thank
God
you’re here!”

I turned, releasing Annabelle Lee and staring at Wanda, her ponytail swinging. She looked from Pietr to Annabelle Lee, to Pietr, to the hat still in his hand and back to Annabelle Lee, her expression relieved and yet smug. “I was so worried when I realized I’d gotten separated from you.”

“Separated from
you?
” I demanded. “How did that happen? She”—I turned back to stare at Annabelle Lee—“was supposed to be with
me.
”