And as I did so, I felt buoyed. I’d been avoiding a lot of the town’s streets and lanes over the past months, careful to avoid Charlie, Billy, and James, and now I wondered why. This was my town, after all. My home. This afternoon Jenny was coming to my house, and what were the other three in the light of that? A few sad boys, lost in a fantasy, while my own world was blossoming, its petals opening, the future ahead of me full of possibility. Right then, I felt more than strong enough to face them down if I had to.
The walk took me around the edge of the town, and then up past the old playground at its heart. If I was going to see them anywhere, it would be here, and sure enough, as I approached along the dusty lane, I saw there was someone there.
James.
He was alone for the moment, sitting on the bottom rung of the ancient jungle gym. When I had been younger, that thing had seemed huge, the ground perilously far away when you were at the top, but in reality it was hardly taller than I was now. Even so, James looked small in comparison to it, sitting hunched over. When I’d seen him in the last weeks of classes, he’d seemed diminished and drained, as though the life were slowly being sucked from him, but now he appeared almost skeletal, the shadow of his body all but indistinguishable from the ones cast by the thin metal frame around him.
My resolve faltered a little. But I made myself continue.
He looked up as I got nearer, his face hollow, and when he saw me he looked quickly away.
I walked past deliberately slowly.
I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was a show of dominance—some attempt to make him realize I didn’t care—but if so, that was stupid. Because I did care. In those few moments, in fact, the events of the past couple of months fell away. My life had moved far enough on from his betrayal that, even if I didn’t entirely forgive him for what he’d done, I at least understood the reasons why, and pitied him slightly because of them.
After I’d passed, I looked back and noticed again how fragile he seemed. How scared. And that’s the memory of James I have from that day: a lost little boy who didn’t know how to escape from the situation he’d found himself in. Sitting there waiting, a condemned prisoner anticipating punishment.
You have to do something about Charlie.
That thought again. It wasn’t rational, but there are moments in life like that, I think—moments you understand on some level are pivotal. Where everything will change, and you’ll regret it forever if you don’t do something you know you should.
Perhaps it was the strangeness of the day that made me believe this was such a moment. That whatever Charlie had been planning was coming to a head, and that if I turned around and walked away now I would never shake the guilt from it.
You have to do something about Charlie.
Before it’s too late.
And so I walked slowly back to the playground. I stepped over the shin-high wooden fence that separated it from the road, and approached the jungle gym. James’s back was to me. I don’t know if he heard me, but he didn’t seem startled as I put the shopping bags down on the ground. He just turned and looked at me with those sad, haunted eyes.
“Hey,” I said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
* * *
I remember the sense of relief I had when I got back home afterward. I packed the groceries away with a swing in my step. Perhaps I was even feeling slightly triumphant.
You have to do something about Charlie.
And I had.
I’d told James everything I’d learned from Marie, which meant that any duty of mine had been fulfilled, and it was now his responsibility to act on what I’d said. I had no idea if the information I’d given him would help or change anything, but right then it didn’t feel like that mattered. The important thing was that it was now in James’s hands to deal with, not mine.
I’d also managed to do it without giving away any ground. When I’d started talking, I’d seen a flash of something on his face. Hope, perhaps. But my own expression had quickly killed that dead. I’d made sure he understood I wasn’t there to rescue him, or to rebuild bridges. It was just that I had to warn him, and so I did. He’d shaken his head, confused, but I could tell that what I was saying chimed with him in some way, as though I’d given him a piece of a puzzle he knew fitted somewhere, even if he didn’t quite know yet where to place it.
Be careful.
Those were the last words I ever said to him, and I said them coldly, making sure the message behind them was clear. We weren’t friends again now, and we wouldn’t be in the future.
Then I’d picked up the plastic bags and come home.
I remember I finished putting the shopping away and then pushed the encounter from my mind. By that point, it wasn’t too long until Jenny would be here, and I decided to let myself feel excited about that instead. There was an odd mixture of excitement and fear in my chest, my heart beating a little faster with every passing minute.
One o’clock.
The time came and went.
For a while afterward I paced around the living room, frequently checking out the front window, expecting to see her here at any moment, bright and beautiful in the afternoon sun, opening the gate and walking up to the house.
But the street and front path remained empty.
And then I spent the next few hours wondering what had gone wrong. Perhaps she had come to her senses about me and changed her mind. Or maybe something had come up and she hadn’t been able to make it and right then she was stuck at home, feeling awful about letting me down. Her mother might have found out where she was going and told her no. I oscillated between all the likely explanations for her not showing up. The possibilities circled me.
A knock at the door locked them into place.
I was up in my room at that point, looking out at the woods. I ran quickly down the stairs. By then I’d given up on Jenny coming around, and my parents would be back home soon anyway, but I still thought it must be her. That would be fine too. Everything else could wait, I told myself. Maybe I could even introduce her to my mother.
But when I opened the door, there were two police officers standing there. Their car was parked out front of the house, its lights rotating pointlessly in the late afternoon sun.
“Paul Adams?” one of the officers said.
“Yes.”
He rested his forearm on the side of the door and peered inside past me, as though searching for something. Then he looked me up and down, his face set hard, devoid of emotion.
“Am I right in thinking you knew a girl called Jenny Chambers?”
“Yes.” I paused. “Why?”
He looked at me as though I already knew.
“Oh, she’s dead.”
THIRTY-TWO
NOW
I am dreaming right now.
Even after so many years, I had never lost the sense of wonder that accompanied that realization, and it arrived again now as I found myself staring at Gritten Park School, amazed as always that my sleeping mind was capable of conjuring up something so realistic. I’ve perfected it over all these years, and much of what Charlie originally said was true.
I crouched down and employed the environment technique: rubbing my palm over the ground and feeling the rough texture of the road. A tapping sound was coming from nearby. I looked to my right and saw the tarp stretched tight around the construction area. That was long gone in real life, of course. But this was the school as it had been then, not as it was now.