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  DUTTON BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Dutton Books,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Aaron Starmer

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Dutton is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9780735231931

  Edited by Julie Strauss-Gabel

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Image of girl © Danil Nevsky/Stocksy.com

  All other images courtesy of Shutterstock.com

  Jacket design by Samira Iravani

  pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  To Catharine . . . for everything

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Sunday, October 30, One Day After: Logan

  Monday, October 31, Two Days After: Holly

  Saturday, October 29, the Day Of: Grayson

  Thursday, November 3, Five Days After: Logan

  Friday, November 4, Six Days After: Holly

  Grayson

  Holly

  Logan

  Saturday, November 5, Seven Days After: Holly

  Sunday, November 6, Eight Days After: Grayson

  Logan

  Grayson

  Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Holly

  Logan

  Monday, November 7, Nine Days After: Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Holly

  Grayson

  Logan

  Tuesday, November 8, Ten Days After: Grayson

  Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Logan

  Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Logan

  Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Logan

  Holly

  Grayson

  Logan

  Holly

  Grayson

  Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Holly

  Logan

  Grayson

  Holly

  Meeka

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.”

  —RICHARD DAWKINS, THE SELFISH GENE

  “Go fuck yourself @RichardDawkins.”

  —MULTIPLE PEOPLE ON TWITTER

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30

  ONE DAY AFTER

  LOGAN

  WE BURIED COLE WESTON LAST NIGHT, on the hundred acres behind Meeka’s house.

  “Are you sure you want him back here?” I asked her. “Where your parents might snowshoe over him, or something might dig him up? We could still use the firebox.”

  “This is my choice,” Meeka said as she gazed into the waist-deep grave we’d dug on Friday night, out past the orchard and next to the mossy stone wall where Cole had threatened us. “I need to know exactly where he is. If it makes you feel better, you can bury him deeper.”

  It did make us feel better, and with four digging, we deepened the hole to our ears, very nearly the standard six feet under. Cole’s body was encased in a Thule car top carrier. Big enough for an entire family’s skis . . . or one teenager. We lifted the makeshift coffin from the tractor and set it next to the grave. I opened it a crack, barely enough to slip in the bag with our old phones, our only links to this, a failsafe if anyone considered betrayal. Then we pushed it into the ground, piled on the dirt and rocks until the hole was full and we could smack it flat with the backs of shovels and kick leaves over the surface.

  In silence, with the rest of us standing and clinging to the tractor’s frame, Meeka drove back through the mud and dark. Outside the barn, we stripped off our coveralls and bagged them up with everything else that Grayson would throw in the firebox at his family’s sugarhouse. Meeka had filled a pressure sprayer with water and a little bleach and we sprayed down the tractor, and then we all stripped naked and doused each other with the stuff. No one was embarrassed or confused. We were horrified, or at least I was, but not about the nakedness. We’d taken things as far as they could go.

  There’s a good chance we’ll get away with this. A long, snowy winter would help. Plus some time to let it all sink in. It’s crazy how fast it’s gotten to this point. We’re not even into November of our senior year. Up until the end of summer, Cole and Meeka were together. The rest of us were hanging out and hooking up, but they were serious. Plural. They spoke in the language of we, and about the future.

  When we move in together. When we get married. When we have kids.

  That third one nearly came true in July. Apparently, there was a broken condom that Cole neglected to mention. A scare. Crying. Arguments about money. And then, four days later than expected, blood. Relief.

  By the end of August, the relationship was over. It happened in private. Only the two of them knew what was said, but it was enough to turn them against each other. And Meeka went from planning a future to regretting a past.

  That’s when Cole got dangerous.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Are we evil?” Holly asked me last night as we drove away from the barn, the rocks from the dirt road dinging the underside of my Hyundai.

  “No,” I said. “He was the evil one. Would you have rather it been Meeka? Or us? Or other people?”

  “Of course not. And I know, I know, I know we didn’t have a choice.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I know that.”

  “I doubt I’ll sleep for days,” I said, flipping on the high beams just as something skittered into the woods in front of us. “I’m not happy about any of this.”

  “Are you crying?” Holly asked.

  “A little.”

  She was crying too. I could tell from the tremble in her voice. “This will always be a part of us,” she said.

  “But we’ll get over it,” I replied.

  * * *

  • • •

  No one is going to miss Cole. We’re counting on that. Sure, he used to have other friends, guys like Gus Drummond, but they don’t hang out anymore. He used to have us.

  He doesn’t even have a family. Ever since his brother , Craig, took off to work the oil fields somewhere in the nowhere of Canada, Cole had been living alone in their trailer. No dad, no mom, no one.

  Meeka says the last time Cole talked to his dad was in middle school, when the wispy-bearded guy passed through town on his way from Montreal to Florida. He was driving a pickup with who knows what stashed in the truck box, and he stopped by to tell his sons “not to fuck up your lives like certain people do.”

  It was a not-so-subtle dig on Cole’s mom, Teri. A sweet woman who worked the register at Carlton’s Bakery, Teri had struggled with addiction for years. Alcohol and painkillers at first, but by the time we were in high school and stuff like fentanyl was getting big around here, she dove in and never resurfaced. In the winter of our junior year, she passed away. Heart attack was what the obituary said, but we all knew it was the drugs that did her in. She had that bad skin, those mossy teeth, the dead eyes. It was inevitable.

  Meeka worked at Carlton’s on weekends and had known Teri. Teri had even revealed a secret to her. “I had another kid,” she whispered early one Sunday morning as they crouched down to fill the display case with chocolate croissants. “When I was a teenager. I gave her up for adoption.”

  “Wow,” Meeka replied. “That must’ve been . . . difficult.”

  Teri sat on the floor, stared at the wall, and said, “Tell me it was the right choice.”

  It was an awkward and unreasonable request, and Meeka was split between two decisions: push the woman away or hug her. She chose to hug, and as Teri wept in her arms, Meeka said, “It was the right choice. Kids like me have it way better than we would’ve otherwise.”

  When Teri died, Meeka told us she was surprised by how devastated she felt, so she wrapped her arms around Teri’s son. Their grieving bound them together.

  Meeka and Cole said they loved each other early and often, but when things got bad, Meeka knew it had never been true. They needed each other, maybe. They needed too much of each other, I think. But for different reasons, and that’s what really broke them up.

  After the breakup, Cole decided to not return to Plainview High for senior year. His grades were terrible, and college didn’t seem like an option. He had a bit of money, though. Not from a job, but somehow he was paying for all the computers and gadgets he had stuffed in his trailer. He could afford takeout for almost every meal. Lots of Subway and pizza, but even that adds up after a while.

  Cole wasn’t dealing—I mean, he saw what drugs did to his mom—so Meeka suspected he was scamming old people out of their money. You know, like those con artists from Russia or Nigeria? Only Cole was smoother. He was fluent in both English and lies. Plus, he was from Vermont, and people naturally trust people from Vermont.

  Whenever I was in Cole’s trailer, there was this constant humming in the background and lights flickering on the switches of power strips, which were hung from hooks like flowers left to dry. The windows were covered in newspapers to keep the light out and there were always at least three screens glowing. Cole had mountains of tech. I don’t know if he knew anything about coding. What he knew was how to find stuff.

  He was always keyed into the latest viral video before it went viral. “Check this out,” he’d say to me, and thrust a laptop in my face, and there would be some weird person yelling, or dancing, or, more often than not, getting hurt. His favorite was this video of a kid singing, “Walk like a man, talk like a man, walk like a man, my son,” in the shrillest, most tone-deaf voice imaginable.

  “Gets me every fucking time,” he’d say, wiping tears from his eyes. It was a bit funny, I guess, but only the first time. After that, it seemed sad.

  But it was infinitely better than most of the other things he’d watch. Disturbing stuff. With a few keystrokes, Cole could cue up a video with some shrouded guy chopping off another guy’s head in the desert. Or worse, if you can imagine worse, and I hope you can’t.

  “Look at it, Logan,” he’d squeal, chasing me around the trailer with a laptop. “You know you wanna see this shit. You know you want it to haunt your dreams.”

  I’d close my eyes and try to block out the images of death. My mind couldn’t handle stuff like that. So it’s fitting, in a way, that it’s the image of Cole’s dead body that I’ll never have the luxury of blocking out. I’ll be haunted, like he always wanted me to be. But trust me, I’d be more haunted if he had lived.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 31

  TWO DAYS AFTER

  HOLLY

  DO THEY KNOW I’M A MURDERER? See it in my spine when I hunch over my desk? Feel the flutters from my chest vibrating through the halls? God. God. God. When I look at the door, do they sense that I want to escape, to run and to never stop running? When I duck into the bathroom, do they think it’s because I’m sick? Or do they know exactly why I need to hold my head and catch my breath? Will they whisper, “Don’t worry, we understand, it’s okay.” Are they happy about what I’ve done?

  I did it. I did it. There were three other people involved, but I made a choice to be involved, so I am to blame. It only happened because of my actions. The pills came from me. The idea came from me. I wasn’t coerced and I shouldn’t convince myself otherwise. Even though I want to. Need to.

  All day, I walk from class to class and somehow I don’t cry. People smile, I smile back, and it seems to trick them. Happy Holly, Happy Holly, perpetually Happy Holly. That’s my Halloween costume this year: my old self. I answer a few questions in all my classes because that’s what I’d normally do. I make it through Monday, the second day since we did it. I wonder how long it will take me to stop counting the days.

  After school, I go to soccer. Obviously. If I ever missed soccer, they’d call 911.

  “Do you think you’ll break it?” Tanya asks me during stretches.

  Tanya’s always talking, and this time she’s talking about the single-season state scoring record. That’s regular season only; counting playoffs is unfair to girls on terrible teams. For twenty-five years, the record has stayed put at forty-seven goals. Well done, Harwood striker Kim Friggett. She’s probably a mom now, with kids of her own who play soccer. But I bet it’s my stats she’s paying the most attention to. I’ve got forty-five goals with two games left to go. I really only need one game. A hat trick will break the record for me, and I’ve had my share. Kim Friggett must know that. She probably also knows that the competition is tougher now than it’s ever been. And even if my total stayed at forty-five, I’m still way better than she was. Sounds conceited, but it’s the truth. Not that I’d ever say it out loud.

  “I’m not thinking about breaking anything,” I tell Tanya as I lean forward to stretch my hip flexor. “Finishing the season strong. Only thing on my mind.”

  God, I wish that were the case. Throughout practice, even as I cut and pass and scream for the ball, my mind keeps going over every detail of Saturday night. Every awful moment.

  * * *

  • • •

  The drive up to the trailer. The knock on the door. The smug look on Cole’s face when Logan told him that Meeka wanted to see him at the barn. The wink to assure him we were on his side. (Of course, we weren’t. We would never be on his side.) The drive to the parking lot where it was supposed to end. The calculation of it all.

  Who were we that night? How could we do those things?

  We did those things.

  We crushed the pills and dissolved them in a bottle of Wild Turkey. Then we placed the bottle under the passenger seat so that when Logan sped up on the hilly section of the Malvern Loop, it rolled to the back and hit Cole’s boots.

  We did those things and those things worked.

  “Hello there, stranger,” Cole said when he picked up the bottle.

  “That’s for later,” Logan called back, counting on the fact that Cole was going to drink it anyway. A given. I turned the music up because I didn’t need to hear the actual drinking. That would be like hea ring a knife going into someone.

  “It’s later now,” Cole said after a few seconds, and even though I couldn’t hear it, I know he did more than drink. He chugged. Then he thrust the bottle forward to offer me some.

  Rather than touch it, I put my hands in my lap and told Logan, “Should be about five minutes, tops.”

  “Good,” Logan said as he slowed the car and guided it into the rail trail access lot.

  “Five minutes for what?” Cole asked, and he took another swig.

  Logan didn’t say a thing. He stopped and put the car in park as I struggled to breathe.

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29

  THE DAY OF

  GRAYSON

  COLE WAS HEAVING HIS GUTS OUT in the lot for the rail trail when I pulled up in my Jeep. Saturday, October 29, eight o’clock sharp. Right on time, I’ll have you know. Logan was sitting on the hood of his Elantra, all bug-eyed like he was watching a snake eat a rat. Holly was in the car with her hands over her face and music thumping loud.

  Cole saw me and groaned, “What’s this fucker doing here?”

  Then he puked. Splatter all over the gravel. I had my rifle wrapped in a towel in case we needed it. I wanted to grab it and—Pop!—be done, but Holly wanted to keep things “clean.”

  Clean. What a joke. Kid was a mess, puke running all down his shirt. I walked up to Cole and told him, “This fucker is here to watch you die.”

  I would’ve kicked him in the ribs if he weren’t suffering plenty already.

  “Shut up, Gray,” Logan said. “Cole doesn’t know.”

  “He doesn’t know?” I said. “What’s the point of making him OD if he doesn’t know?”

  Cole was on his hands and knees by that point, hacking into a puddle. It was rippling in the headlights. Kinda pretty. Still sitting on his hood, Logan craned his neck, tried to get a look into my Jeep, probably checking to see what I forgot to bring. Typical, and wrong. I brought everything I was supposed to. I’m not the forgetful one in this bunch.