sweatsuit his mother had given her. He rubbed his eyes. When he looked at her again, even in the dark he could see the worry on her face.
She sat on the bed and shoved him with her hip so that he made room. They both sat with their backs against the head-board.
“I can’t sleep,” she said. “Whenever I close my eyes I see him.”
“Who?” Then he understood. “Oh.”
She drew her legs up and hugged them, as if protecting herself.
Ren said, “I saw him, too, Charlie. I went looking for you at your place and I found him. I was really scared that something had happened to you, too. Where’d you go?”
“The old mine.”
Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of it? Two summers ago, while they were hiking along the Copper River a couple of miles outside of town, they stumbled onto an old mine dug into a steep, rocky ridge overlooking the river. They’d been picking blackberries and had felt an unusually cool pocket of air that seemed to have its source somewhere behind the thicket. Charlie scaled the ridge and dropped behind the vines, then hollered for Ren to do the same. He found her standing at the mouth of an excavation, a hole not much taller than they but wide enough for both of them to fit in together. Sunlight penetrated the tunnel, revealing a collapsed ceiling a dozen feet beyond the entrance, which blocked further access. The beams that had been used to shore up the opening were still in place and seemed solid. That whole summer they’d used the old mine-which Ren suspected had been the work of one of the early gold prospectors-as a hideout. Mornings, they’d head off with a packed lunch, swim in the river where the water pooled below the ridge, then hike to the cave and eat in the cool shade it provided. From there, unseen, they watched fishermen and canoeists and kayakers, and once saw a couple of teenagers swim naked in the same stretch of water they’d just enjoyed.
“You stayed there this whole time?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You should have told me or something. I was going crazy. I thought you were…” He didn’t finish, didn’t want say the word dead.
“I freaked. I wasn’t thinking.” She put her chin on her knees and stared at the window, which was streaked with rain. “Not really.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, I was thinking. And one of the things I thought was that I knew it was going to happen.”
“Like, psychic?”
“No, just that someday because of his drinking he’d be dead like that. Just like that.”
She grabbed the pillow from behind her back and put it close to her face and spoke at it angrily.
“I wanted to yell at him, Ren. I wanted to kick him and yell at him and tell him, ‘I told you so, you total screwup. You and your drunk buddies. Why couldn’t you just stop?’ ” She buried her face in the pillow.
A moment passed, then Ren ventured quietly, “Alcohol’s like that. It doesn’t let you go.”
“Other people stop. Why couldn’t he?” She threw the pillow across the room. It hit Ren’s desk and something toppled to the floor. “Sorry.”
“It was just my Hellboy model.”
“Sounded like I broke it.”
“A little glue, it’ll be okay.”
“Ren?” Her voice got soft. “What if I’d been in there?”
“You weren’t.”
“I could’ve been.”
“But you weren’t, and I’m glad.”
“Maybe everything would be better if I had.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What am I going to do? I’m, like, an orphan.”
Orphan. It was an odd word to Ren, archaic somehow, from a different era. It made him think of that comic- strip character with orange frizzy hair. But Charlie was right. That’s exactly what she was.
“You can stay with us,” he said.
“Oh yeah, like those social service freakazoids are going to let that happen.”
“I mean it. We’ll figure a way.”
Lightning flashed somewhere in the distance, an instant of blue light that filled the room and made Charlie a bright, solid presence in his bed.
“I thought for a while you were dead,” he said.
She turned her head, her face dark, unreadable. “Why?”
“They pulled a dead girl from the lake today. We heard she was a teenager. I thought at first it was going to be you.”
“Who was it?”
“They don’t know.”
“Ren.” She drew in a sudden breath. “Maybe it was the same body Stash saw in the river.”
“I was thinking that, too.”
“Was she from around here?”
“Constable Hodder said he didn’t think he’d ever seen her before. He said he would have remembered because she had this weird tattoo on her arm.”
“What kind of tattoo?”
“A snake or something.”
He felt Charlie stiffen.
“Which arm?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Left?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
She turned to face him, tucking her legs under her. “Did he say anything else?”
“Like what?”
“How big was she? Small like you?”
“I’m not small.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Why are you asking all these questions?”
“I might know her. There’s this girl at Providence House. She’s there all the time. Her name’s Sara Wolf. She has a big-I mean really big-snake tattoo on her left arm.”
Ren thought back to that afternoon and remembered something. “The constable said it was big for such a small girl. He also said she had lots of piercings.”
“Oh shit.” Charlie sank back. “How?”
“They think suicide.”
“Bullshit. That’s bullshit.”
“ Shhh. Keep your voice down.”
“No way she’d off herself.”
“Don’t get mad at me. I’m just telling you what they said.”
Another flash of lightning, so far away the sound of the thunder took forever to reach them. In the long quiet, Ren heard Charlie crying. Charlie never cried. He wasn’t sure what to do. Awkwardly he reached an arm around her shoulders. She laid her head against his chest, and he felt her shaking.
“The world is fucked, Ren. Totally, screamingly fucked,” she sobbed.
After a minute, she pulled away and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her borrowed sweatshirt. She lay down next to Ren and rolled over so that her back was to him. He gently nudged his pillow under her head. In a little while, he could tell from her breathing that she’d gone to sleep.
Ren lay a long time staring up at the ceiling, listening to the sound of the storm outside, thinking Charlie was probably right about the state of the world.
Totally, screamingly fucked.
