LITMIR.BIZ

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with a teasing lilt that made even the most banal statements seem vaguely intriguing. “What’s up with you?”

      Adam Frost leaned in from the driver’s seat, his head staggered a few inches behind his brother’s, creating a kind of mini–Mount Rushmore effect. The Frost twins were famously handsome—identical dreadlocked slackers with square jaws, sleepy eyes, and the lithe bodies of the athletes they might have been if they hadn’t been wasted all the time. Jill was pretty sure they’d graduated the year before, but she still saw them a lot in school, mostly in the art room, though they never seemed to do any art. They just sat around like retired guys, observing the young strivers with an air of benevolent amusement. The drawing teacher, Ms. Coomey, seemed to enjoy their company, chatting and laughing with them while her students worked independently. She was around fifty, married, and overweight, but a rumor had nonetheless spread through the school that she and the Frost brothers sometimes got it on in the supply closet during her free periods.

      “Hop in,” Adam called out. He had a row of piercings in his right eyebrow, which was the main way people distinguished him from Scott. “Let’s go for a ride.”

      “We have to go to school,” Jill muttered, speaking more to Aimee than the twins.

      “Fuck that,” said Scott. “Come hang out at our house, it’ll be fun.”

      “What kind of fun?” Aimee inquired.

      “We have a Ping-Pong table.”

      “And some Vicodin,” Adam added.

      “Now you’re talking.” Aimee turned to Jill with a hopeful smile. “Whaddaya think?”

      “I don’t know.” Jill felt the heat of embarrassment spreading across her face. “I’ve been missing a lot of school lately.”

      “Me too,” Aimee said. “One more day’s not gonna matter.”

      It was a reasonable point. Jill glanced at the twins, who were nodding in unison to “Buffalo Soldier,” sending out a subliminal message of encouragement.

      “I don’t know,” she said again.

      Aimee released a pointed sigh, but Jill remained motionless. She couldn’t understand what was holding her back. The Chemistry test was already under way. The rest of the day would just be a footnote to her failure.

      “Whatever.” Aimee opened the door and climbed into the backseat, staring at Jill the whole time. “You coming?”

      “That’s okay,” Jill told her. “You guys go ahead.”

      “You sure?” Scott asked as Aimee shut the door. He seemed genuinely disappointed.

      Jill nodded and Scott’s window hummed shut, slowly obscuring his beautiful face. The sealed-up Prius didn’t move for a second or two, and neither did Jill. A sharp feeling of regret took hold of her as she stared at the tinted glass.

      “Wait!” she called out.

      Her voice sounded loud in her own ears, almost desperate, but they must not have heard her, because the car lurched into motion just as she was reaching for the door, and moved noiselessly down the street without her.

      SHE WAS still high when she got to school, but not in the giggly way that made most mornings with Aimee feel like a goofy adventure, the two of them pretending to be spies or cracking up at things that weren’t even funny, which somehow made them laugh even harder. Today’s buzz felt heavy and sad, just a weird bad mood.

      Technically, she was supposed to sign herself in at the main office, but that was one of those regulations nobody paid much attention to anymore, a holdover from a more orderly and obedient time. Jill had only been in high school for five weeks before the Sudden Departure, but she still had a vivid memory of what it was like back then, the teachers serious and demanding, the kids focused and motivated, full of energy. Almost everybody played an instrument or went out for a sport. Nobody smoked in the bathroom; you could get suspended for making out in the hall. People walked faster in those days—at least that’s how she remembered it—and they always seemed to know exactly where they were going.

      Jill opened her locker and grabbed her copy of Our Town, which she hadn’t even started, despite the fact that they’d been discussing it in English for the past three weeks. There were still ten minutes to go before the end of second period, and she would have been happy to plop down on the floor and at least skim the first few pages, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate, not with Jett Oristaglio, Mapleton High’s wandering troubadour, sitting directly across from her, strumming his acoustic guitar and singing “Fire and Rain” for the thousandth time. That song just gave her the creeps.

      She thought about ducking into the library, but there wasn’t enough time to get anything done, so she figured she’d just head upstairs to English. On the way, she took a quick detour past Mr. Skandarian’s room, where her classmates were finishing up the Chem test.

      She wasn’t sure what possessed her to look inside. The last thing she wanted was for Mr. S. to see her and realize that she wasn’t sick. That would totally blow any chance she had of getting him to let her take a makeup test. Luckily, he was filling in a Sudoku when she peeked through the window, completely absorbed in the little boxes.

      It must have been a hard test. Albert Chin was finished, of course—he was messing with his iPhone to kill time—and Greg Wilcox had gone to sleep, but everybody else was still working, doing the kind of stuff you do when you’re trying to think and the clock is running out—lips were being bitten; hair was being wound around fingers; legs were bouncing up and down. Katie Brennan was scratching at her arm like she had a skin disease, and Pete Rodriguez kept tapping himself in the forehead with the eraser end of his pencil.

      She only stood there for a minute or two, but even so, you might have expected someone to look up and see her, maybe smile or throw a quick wave. That’s what usually happened when somebody peered into a classroom during a test. But everybody just kept working or sleeping or spacing out. It was as if Jill no longer existed, as if all that remained of her was an empty desk in the second row, a memorial to the girl who used to sit there.

      SPECIAL SOMEONE

      TOM GARVEY DIDN’T HAVE TO ask why the girl was standing on his doorstep, suitcase in hand. For weeks now, he’d felt the hope leaving his body in a slow leak—it was a little like going broke—and now it was gone. He was emotionally bankrupt. The girl smiled wryly, as if she could read his thoughts.

      “You Tom?”

      He nodded. She handed him an envelope with his name written across the front.

      “Congratulations,” she said. “You’re my new babysitter.”

      He’d seen her before, but never up close, and she was even more beautiful than he’d realized—a tiny Asian girl, sixteen at most, with impossibly black hair and a perfect teardrop of a face. Christine, he remembered, the fourth bride. She let him stare for a while, then got tired of it.

      “Here,” she said, pulling out her iPhone. “Why don’t you just take a picture?”

      Two days later, the FBI and Oregon State Police arrested Mr. Gilchrest in what the TV news insisted on calling a “surprise early-morning raid,” even though it was no surprise to anyone, least of all Mr. Gilchrest himself. Ever since Anna Ford’s betrayal, he’d been warning his followers of dark times ahead, trying to convince them it was all for the best.

      “Whatsoever happens to me,” he’d written in his last e-mail, “do not despair. It happens for a reason.”

      Though he’d expected the arrest, Tom was taken aback by the severity of the charges—multiple counts of second-and third-degree rape and sodomy, as well as tax evasion and illegal transportation of a minor across state lines—and offended by the obvious pleasure the newscasters took in what they called “the spectacular downfall of the self-styled messiah,” the “shocking allegations” that left his “saintly reputation in tatters”

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