Dead Girls Don't Lie (14 page)

I drop my crutches down and sit on a slanted stone with my knees tucked up in my skirt. I lean my head against my legs, overwhelmed but not sure if I have the strength to cry. The air is heavy with the smell of dirt and rain.

A twig cracks, and I jerk my head up. It feels like someone is with me, watching. I listen, but I don’t hear anything else, not even the little bird. Suddenly sitting among so many dead people gives me the creeps. I reach for my crutches and try to stand, not wanting to touch the stones on either side of me. I lose my grip and slip forward.

A hand on my arm steadies me. I jerk away and scream as I turn and face Eduardo. “What are you doing here?” I screech at him.

He lets go of my arm and shakes his head. He has a half-wilted bunch of lilacs in his hand. Lilacs were Rachel’s favorite flower. He steps forward and puts them on Rachel’s grave without answering me.

We stand together not talking, looking across the cemetery, both hurting with something we can’t express. As hard as it is, I feel like I have to say something. He might be the only one I can talk to now. The only one who understands how I feel. “I miss her,” I say quietly. He nods. I take a breath and feel the weight of my guilt pressing into my chest. “I’m sorry for what I said to you, about it being your fault.” I shake my head and swallow the lump in my throat. “Sometimes I think it was my fault. If I’d stayed her friend, if I’d only answered …” But I can’t tell him about the text. I glance at him, looking for his reaction to my confession. He crosses his arms over his chest like he’s shutting me out, but he doesn’t leave.

I try again. “You were right about me. I lost the last six months of her life because I was stupid, because I was jealous.” The truth of that word hurts my throat, and my eyes sting with tears I won’t let fall. I suddenly need to confess everything to someone, “There was this”—I swallow—“guy and—”

“No.” He cuts me off without even looking up. “It was my fault.” His voice is hollow, like my chest. “Only me. They killed her because of me.”

“Who?” Skyler’s words come back to me.
Maybe she was with the wrong person
. I turn around and look at him, my hands shaking, but he doesn’t notice. He seems to be in his own world, consumed by guilt or anger or something, muttering to himself in Spanish. Finally I grip his arm with a kind of desperation I didn’t realize I felt. “Do you know who killed her? If you do we have to—”

He shakes me off, so hard that I trip backward, but I keep from falling. “It was them. The Cempoalli.”

The Cempoalli was the gang Skyler was talking about, but why would they come here? I shake my head in disbelief. “There aren’t any gangs in Lake Ridge.”

“They’re everywhere, boba. You can’t escape them.”

I don’t want to believe him, but my best friend is dead, and her front porch was tagged with gang symbols. “But why her?” He won’t look at me. I get closer and say it louder this time, demanding an answer. “Why her?”

He finally looks up. “Because of me, because of this.” He touches the tattoo on his back. “Because I was a Cempoalli.”

I stare at him in disbelief. “You were … one of them?”

He nods. “They were my homies, my gang, before my mom sent me here. To get away from them.”

My heart races. Skyler said that was the name of the gang whose symbols were painted on Rachel’s front porch. I think about what Rachel said,
You don’t know what they can do
. Did she mean a gang? “Was Rachel part of … was she one of them? Was she part of your gang?”

“No!” he explodes. “You knew her. She wasn’t like that.”

“But you were.” I say it carefully, not wanting to make him even angrier. I’m afraid if I push too hard he’ll run away from me again. “Why?”

“Where I came from in California, Pico Rivera, gangs are life. You were part of a gang or you were caught in the cross-fire. You were in and you didn’t get out.”

I look at Eduardo. He can’t be much older than me, just sixteen. “How long were you part of …?”

“When I was ten I was a lookout and a runner. By eleven, I was jumped in.”

“Jumped in?”

“Beaten. By the whole gang. To prove I could take it. To prove I was worthy.”

My stomach hurts. “They beat you? To make you part of them?”

He nods.

“Why would you … why would anyone do that?”

He looks down, muttering again. “You wouldn’t understand.”

I don’t understand, not at all. He talks about beatings and murder like they were the norm. To me it’s sickening. Insane. “Why would anyone choose to live like that?”

He looks into my eyes, daring me to understand him. “There’s no choice. It’s where I was born, my home. There was nowhere else to go, no money to get out.”

I take a breath. “But you got out. How?”

“Last year, one of my homies went to visit some
chola
from La Puente and never came home. We found him three days later, rotting in a Dumpster, with a bullet in his head.” He says all of this without any emotion, but it makes me want to throw up.

“My mom was done with it. She didn’t want that to be me, so we came here, to stay with my uncle. To get away from them.”

“We?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

“Me and Manny.
Mi primo
.”

My mind races through the little bit of Spanish I know. “Your cousin? Manuel, the boy who died last summer, he was your cousin?”

He crosses his arms, his hands gripping his biceps hard, his eyes, harder. He nods.

“We came here to be safe, and now he’s dead.” He laughs a little. “Nowhere is safe.”

“So you think your gang, the Cempoalli, killed Manuel and Rachel too, because she was with you?”

He nods, and his face is stone, but I can see the side of his mouth working, like he’s struggling to keep any emotion off his face.

“Why?”

“Because you don’t cross the Cempoalli. You don’t walk away.”

I hug my arms trying to keep myself from shaking. “Are they still here? I heard the police found a gun—”

“They’re lying!” He turns on me, his face clouded over. “Arrest a Chicano, any Chicano, and then everyone is safe again. But Jose Ortiz isn’t a gangbanger. He’s an old man. He didn’t even know her.” He’s working himself up again. “We should have stayed in our own
barrio
. We should have stayed where we belonged. At least there we had some street cred, at least there we had some protection.” His voice thickens with pain. “If we had stayed, she wouldn’t be here.”

I step back, afraid, as he kneels down by Rachel’s grave. “I swear they will pay for what they did.” He crushes a handful of fresh dirt from the grave and lets it slide through his fingers.

My heart churns for him, for Rachel. I’m afraid of him, of his anger and pain, but at the same time, I feel it too. For the town who condemned her so quickly, and whoever killed her.
I’ve been raised to forgive, but I’m not sure I can forgive whoever did this. I whisper, “What are you going to do?”

He looks at me, his eyes blazing. “Whatever I have to do.”

“Do you think they’re still here? That it was someone who lives here?”

He nods. “The workers here, they come from everywhere. Some are hiding, like me. They leave the gang behind, but they keep their loyalties.” He touches his shoulder again. “All I need is a name, or just a face.”

“I want to help.” I lean toward him, a rush of fear and exhilaration floods every part of me. I’m a part of this now. “Rachel was my best friend, I owe her—”

He turns around. “Did you find what she left for you? Her journal, did you find it?”

“No. Not a journal. I just found her necklace and—”

“Give it to me.”

“No.” Despite what Rachel said, I’m not sure I can trust him. “I … I haven’t figured out what she wanted me to do with it yet.”

“Just give it to me. I’ll take care of it.”

I’m shaking my head. After everything he’s told me about where he’s come from, I’m not handing over the only piece of Rachel I have left. “Rachel wanted me to help. I’ll figure out what it means and then we can—”

He laughs. “What can you do?”

“I’ve lived here longer, I know people, I can …” I’m trying to come off confident, even though everything inside me is quaking with fear. “I can do lots of things.”

“No!” He turns around and faces me with eyes on fire. “Do you think I want your blood on my hands too? First Manny and now Rachel!” He turns his back on me, mixing Spanish with English again, going off. I catch enough to get that he thinks I’m a small-town hick looking to get myself killed.

I stay still for a long time, arguing with myself as much as with him. He’s right. I should stay out of it. It isn’t safe, but I can’t get Rachel’s text out of my mind. Finally I speak, “I lied to you. I
was
there.” I lick my lips. “I was with Rachel the night Manny died. I saw someone, at the old house. Not someone I could identify, but still …”

He turns around, shock and horror on his face.

I face him, pleading. “I’m already part of this, and Rachel wanted us to work together. We’ll find out who it was. We’ll get evidence, and we’ll go to the police.”

His laugh has a bitter edge. “The police don’t care about us. They don’t care about her. Just Mexicans killing Mexicans, another bloodstain they have to clean up. Send someone back across the border, and it’s all over, the town is safe again.”

“The FBI, then, someone has to listen. Once we have proof—”

He laughs again. “Give me Rachel’s necklace and forget you ever knew her. Go back to church, boba, pray for her soul and pretend we never talked to each other. Forget what you saw. Keep thinking you’re safe here. As long as you stay away from us, maybe you will be.”

I clench my jaw to keep my voice even. “Fine. You do this your way, and I’ll do it mine. But I’m keeping the necklace and anything else I find.”

He clenches his fist. For a second I think he might hit me. Instead, he shakes his head. “You’re just like her. She wouldn’t listen to me either.” He turns his back on me and heads down the hill.

I think about what he said. I’m not like Rachel, not at all. I’m not pretty and I’m not brave. Eduardo scares me. I can only imagine what the rest of his gang is like. But Rachel trusted me; she thought I could help. Maybe I can be like her. I have to do this. I watch Eduardo walk away.

And it looks like I have to do it on my own.

Chapter 15

“Where have you been? Are you skipping church or avoiding me?” Skyler’s ticked. He’s standing at the door to my dad’s truck, dressed in a white shirt and tie. After Eduardo left, I couldn’t be at the cemetery alone, but I couldn’t go into the church either. My ankle hurt too much to walk home, so I curled up in the truck to think and wait for my dad to come out.

I lean forward to hide my face so he can’t see the marks the tears left on my cheeks. “I just couldn’t handle church today.”

He opens the door, climbs in next to me, and puts his arm around me. I turn my head and stare at the door. His voice softens. “Are you okay?”

I’m not. I’m so not, but I don’t know how to tell him that. As I limped back down the hill, all my bravado faded. I’m scared of what I have to do, but I can’t tell Skyler that. All I can do is shake my head. He shuts the door behind him, reaches over, and gathers me in his arms. I lean my cheek
against the warmth of his chest and listen to his heartbeat. My heart aches and my body feels heavy with the weight of guilt and responsibility.

“What’s going on?” he says into my hair.

I lean into his arms and shake my head against his chest. Part of me wants to tell Skyler everything and part of me wants to melt into his arms and forget. “Mrs. Francis and Mrs. O’Dell and Claire’s mom were saying nasty things about Rachel, so I left. I walked to the cemetery and went to her grave.” His arm goes stiff around my shoulders, but he doesn’t pull away. “I saw—” I stop myself, not sure how he would react to my conversation with Eduardo. “They said someone has been arrested, that she was …”

He nods. “I heard.”

“Do you believe it?” I ask, looking up into his eyes.

“I don’t know.” He hesitates, avoiding my gaze. “I didn’t really know her.”

“She wasn’t what they said she was,” I say, tears pushing their way past the corners of my eyes. He doesn’t move. I know my tears are making him uncomfortable, but I can’t stop talking. “Maybe I could have helped her. Maybe I could have saved her. If I’d—”

“Don’t talk like that.” His voice is so sharp that I pull away. “She made her own choices.” I stop crying, shocked, as he continues. “Sorry, I just don’t think you should beat yourself up for someone else’s mistakes. There’s nothing you could have done.”

I look up at him. “You’re just like the rest of them!” I try to
wiggle out of his arms. “You just said you didn’t know her, but you’re sitting there condemning her like it was her fault.”

He holds me tight. “I didn’t say that. I said it wasn’t your fault. That you shouldn’t feel responsible for something you can’t change.”

I take a breath. “I wish I—” He stops me by leaning into my lips and kissing me. I pull away, irritated that he wants to kiss and I want to talk. “What are you doing?”

He looks sheepish. “I’m sorry. I thought it might help. You looked like you could use a kiss.”

“I guess … I …” But I don’t know what’s appropriate when it comes to kissing and mourning, I’ve never been here before. “It was nice.”

He kisses me again, softer, slower. I close my eyes, wrap my arms around his neck, and lean into him. I want to erase everything in my brain, just let his lips take me away. We kiss for a few minutes, soft, feather-light kisses changing into longer, deeper kisses. Skyler adjusts his hold on my waist, pulling me closer to him. His mouth opens and his tongue slides across my lips. I pull back, suddenly realizing what I’m doing. I’m afraid that someone might see us. I can hear the not-so-hushed whispers from Mrs. Francis now: “… making out in her dad’s truck during church.” I wonder how fast it would take them to jump to the same conclusions about me that they did about Rachel. Skyler leans in to kiss me again, but I shake my head.

He looks at the church and nods like he understands. He twines his hand in mine. “You want to go somewhere else? We could go for a drive. Get away.”