The Boys Are Back in Town (27 page)

Ashleigh was on her feet, her focus on Caitlyn, when the other girl noticed the blood on her boyfriend's chin.

“Jesus,” Caitlyn whispered, staring at him. “Will, you're bleeding. Your mouth is bleeding.”

His hands shaking, he reached for his mouth. His fingers touched his lower lip and he winced from the pain. Ashleigh watched as he ran his tongue out and licked the blood from the wound. He glanced down at his fingers, now slick with his own blood from where he touched his chin and lips.

Then Will fell apart. He was her best friend, and it broke Ashleigh's heart to see the grief contort his face as he began to cry.

“Why him?” Will said, the words catching in his throat. “Why did it have to be him?”

Ashleigh started to reach for him, to offer him some kind of comfort, but Will could not even meet her eyes. He pushed past Danny and stumbled slightly as he raced for the door to the men's room. The door crashed open and then whispered shut behind him.

For a long time the three of them stared at that door. Eventually, Danny and Caitlyn both realized they had to get to homeroom, but Ashleigh only said good-bye and promised they would talk later. All of them were hurting.

But Ashleigh did not leave the corridor. She wiped the tears from her face and waited patiently for Will to emerge from the bathroom. When he did, she took him by the hand and forced him to look into her eyes.

“Will,” she said. “We need to talk.”

T
IRED, DIRTY, AND VERY BADLY IN NEED
of a shave, Will James stood waiting for Brian outside the Eastborough Savings Bank and wondered if passersby would assume he was homeless. Sunday had seemed to drag on forever, yet somehow the grief and remorse he felt over the events of Saturday night had served to numb him sufficiently to survive the day.

Brian insisted that Mike had been pushed out in front of the car. Will wasn't to blame. Yet the memories of the sickening noise it had made when the car had struck Mike and the blood pooling under his corpse on the pavement lingered in his mind. No matter how many times Will tried to shake those things from his head, he could not.

Yet he had come to learn in recent days that perhaps no memory was permanent. Things could be eroded. Or erased.

For two nights they had slept in the hayloft in Jillian Mansur's barn. They had whispered to one another and argued and wept and Will had wavered back and forth as the hours went by and the sun rose, wondering if there was some way Brian might really be involved in this. He doubted it, not with the pain in his old friend's eyes. But Will was no longer willing to trust anything, not his eyes, not his memories . . . not even his friends.

Over the course of that Sunday, however, he had made a conscious decision to trust Brian. Will felt he had little choice. And he had to confess, at least to himself, that there was some small comfort in not being completely alone in this.

Sunday had been spent planning and debating. Brian thought that they should go back to Ashleigh, but Will insisted they not risk it. His insistence, however, had less to do with risk than with the simple fact that he could not have brought himself to tell her that they'd fucked up, that they—that he had killed Mike Lebo himself. Bile rose up in the back of his throat every time he thought about it. Telling Ashleigh how her father's windshield had been cracked would have torn him up inside.

So they weren't going back to Ashleigh's, but they still needed a car and they could not steal one when they had no idea how long they might have to survive before returning to their own time period. They also needed food and shelter. Fortunately, they discovered that between them they had forty-seven dollars in bills that were old enough to spend without anyone catching the date and thinking they were counterfeiters.

Forty-seven dollars had gone a long way. The moment the pharmacy opened they had bought a couple of toothbrushes and a travel-size tube of toothpaste. Will was glad that Brian had agreed with him on this part of the plan, because he was compulsive about brushing his teeth and also because Brian had horrible morning breath. They had skipped breakfast, had subs for lunch and pizza for dinner, and still had fourteen dollars and change left over by the time they snuck back into the Mansurs' barn that night.

But by this morning, things that had not been that much of an issue the day before had become more troubling. A two-day growth of beard, extremely wrinkled clothes, and the stale smell of unwashed bodies were going to be a problem for the rest of their plan. After waking up this morning and leaving the barn they had walked to the center of town, where Brian had spent their remaining money on a can of Right Guard and a cheap Eastborough sweatshirt sold in the pharmacy for $9.99.

Only one of them could wear the sweatshirt, but they shared the Right Guard, ducking behind a Dumpster to take an aerosol shower. Will loved his Red Sox jersey, but on its third day he would have been more than happy to replace it with something clean, preferably after an actual shower rather than just a blast of deodorant. For the moment, however, Brian had to be the one with the sweatshirt because he was the one with the money.

Or, at least, Young Brian had money. And Not-Quite-So-Young Brian needed to get his hands on some of it.

And now the plan was under way.

Of course, Will did not think they had a chance in hell of actually pulling it off, but the alternative was living like homeless people in Eastborough while they were trying to stop people from being hurt and killed. In downtown Boston, that would have made them invisible. It would have been a simple thing to move around unnoticed posing as a homeless man. But in Eastborough, it was bound to draw attention.

So, the plan.

Will glanced impatiently at his watch, but even as he looked up from it Brian was walking out of the bank with a satisfied smile upon his face. He had been able to wash up somewhat in the bathroom of the place where they had bought subs for lunch the day before, but even with the blood gone he had several purple bruises from the beatings Will had given him on Saturday.

Brian reached him and kept going on down the sidewalk. “Let's take a walk.”

“You can't be serious,” Will said, hurrying to catch up, glancing around guiltily and shoving his hands in his pockets as though they had just robbed the bank and he was worried the police might arrive at any moment.

They fell into step beside one another, and a tremor of nostalgia went through Will. This was how it had been between them a long time ago, side by side on missions of exploration that took them all over Eastborough and beyond. It seemed to him that he had lost a great deal in growing up. And now someone had taken even more.

“Talk to me,” Will said, and all the lightheartedness was gone from his voice.

“One thousand dollars.”

Will stopped short on the sidewalk right in front of Sunshine Cleaners. “You're shitting me.”

Brian smiled, and then told him. The Schnells were not a wealthy family, but a large and generous one. From birth he had received toys and games and clothes from his parents, but the gifts from his aunts and uncles and grandparents had always been monetary, not only for his birthday and Christmas but for every important event in his life. Brian had had a paper route from the age of ten until he turned fourteen. His father had helped him deliver the papers but had never taken a dime of the money. The Schnells were also frugal.

By the time he was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, Brian Schnell had eighteen thousand dollars in the bank.

“What, it isn't obvious you're not seventeen?” Will demanded. “So you walk in, fill out a withdrawal slip, manage to remember your savings account number—”

“I still have that account.”

Will brushed the words off and kept going. “—So what happened when she asked to see your license?”

Brian smiled, reached up, and scratched at the stubble that would soon turn his goatee into a full-fledged beard if he didn't do something about it. Then he pulled out his wallet and opened it up, police-style, to flash his license inside a plastic sheath. He didn't live there anymore, but Brian still had a Massachusetts license. And the way he was holding it, his thumb covered the birth date.

“She was busy. I told her I couldn't get it out of the plastic but I showed it to her and rattled off my license number while she was looking at it. The woman glanced at it for about three seconds. She matched my face to the picture, then gave me my money.”

Will shook his head in amazement. “With those bruises I can't believe she didn't pay more attention.”

Brian shrugged. “Maybe she just figured it was none of her business.”

“You know you just robbed yourself, right?”

“I'll pay me back.”

The two of them stared at one another, there on a sidewalk they'd trodden together hundreds of times before. Will broke first, soft laughter coming from deep within his chest. He shook his head and began to laugh harder, and now Brian joined in. Within a few moments they were wiping their eyes and leaning upon one another, sighing as they tried to quash the temptation to lapse into an outright fit of giggles.

Grinning, Will let out a long breath. “We must look like a couple of lunatics.”

“Smelly, unshaven lunatics.”

Slowly, Will caught his breath. “You realize we're getting a little hysterical.”

Brian frowned deeply. “No. I'm just funny.”

For several moments they were silent, amusement slowly seeping out of them as the viral dread that had been the constant third party to their reunion reasserted itself. They had been unable to prevent Mike Lebo's death, had instead been manipulated into the hideous irony of causing it.

Will stared at a crack in the sidewalk as cars rolled past them. He shivered a little, but he was not nearly as cold as he had been in the Mansurs' hayloft. He lifted his gaze to the blue sky, felt the warm sunlight on his face.

At least the sun was out.

“We've got to get the book,” Will said, his tone grave now, all trace of nostalgia gone. The calm of despair seemed to fog around him and he turned to Brian. “We fucked up, but it might not be too late.”

“Will, come on.” Brian wore a pained expression. “We talked about this. Even if the book is where you think it is, even if we got it and we tried to use it, there's no way to know if the spell would work. And you . . . shit, Will, you feel it just like I do. We had our shot. One shot. That's all we get.”

The words seared him but Will could not deny they were true. They'd had one chance to save Lebo. One chance. And the kid was dead. Will had washed Mike's blood off of Mr. Wheeler's car himself. Ever since the moment they had pulled away and left his broken body bleeding on the road, the reality in which Mike had not died, and that other, second time line in which he had been run down by someone else, not by Will and Brian, had begun to fade. Will still remembered
knowing
that there was more than one set of memories, that Mike had graduated with them and been a friend to him for years after high school, but Will recalled these bits of information as though he had learned them by reading about them instead of having lived them.

If he and Brian returned to their own time now, it might well be to a future in which they no longer remembered things any other way, and then what of Ashleigh and Tess and Bonnie? They just couldn't risk it. Their only choice was to go forward, to play it out. To see what the future would bring.

“Let's go.” Will started down the sidewalk, pulling the rolled-up want ads out of the back pocket of his jeans. “We've got a lot to do.”

Someone or something was here in Eastborough, right now, stalking their friends with malevolent intent. Will hadn't been able to keep Mike Lebo alive. The way things had been altered, Tess and Ashleigh would both be raped on Friday night and Bonnie murdered on Saturday night. But now he and Brian had come back in time and set a third, entirely different time line in motion. There was no way to know what effect that would have. If whoever was responsible for all of this knew that Will and Brian were here, trying to interfere—and Will had to believe that—then the events might not follow the same sequence.

He and Brian had talked it out. They had to start by contacting Ashleigh again and by keeping watch over her. Unless he could stop it, sometime soon his best friend, his girl next door, was going to be raped. The picture of her changing before his eyes, fading into a woman with a scar on her soul, remained with him even now. He thought of Ashleigh's twins and of that look on her face after the altered past had changed her, and he picked up his pace.

Not Ashleigh,
he thought.
Not her.

I
N MANY WAYS,
A
SHLEIGH FELT
that the strangest thing about Mike Lebo's death was how little real impact it had on her life. She would never have admitted to such thoughts for fear that someone would misinterpret them, accuse her of being heartless. That was so far from the truth. Mike had not been her closest friend, but he was a sweet, funny guy who was a part of nearly every day for her.

Or had been.

The horror of his death was barely twelve hours old, and it had shrouded her in a cloud of despair and hesitation. She felt as though her reactions to everything were too slow. When someone spoke to her, it took an extra second or two for the words to even register. This kind of thing happened on the news, in other towns than Eastborough. Or it happened to adults. It sure as hell didn't happen to people she had known, to boys who had been stealing chocolate pudding off of her tray in the cafeteria since the third grade.

More than anything, there was an emptiness in her mind where Mike should have been, a wound, bleeding tears of sorrow and the dark truth of the world. The truth was, high school kids didn't only die in other towns, in places she heard about on television.

And yet . . .

School continued. The Homecoming game was this Saturday and the dance would follow, and though Mike would doubtless be remembered and tears would be shed for him, the momentum of all their lives continued uninterrupted. Only his wake and funeral would interfere, and those not for very long. Mike's death would be woven into the fabric of things, and then the rest of them—the ones who still lived—would move on.