Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield Page A

like cold sandpaper, a rough caress. I thought of James, and my breath caught in my throat.
    “You okay?” Lindsay asked.
    “Yeah. Fine.”
    “You looked pretty out of it back there,” she said, gesturing back toward the restaurant. “That stuff bothers you, huh? It’s pretty gross, right? I don’t think Stan’s even supposed to be talking about it.”
    “It doesn’t bother me, really,” I said. “I just was hoping . . . I don’t know.” I trailed off, then felt my body stiffen as Lindsay suddenly shifted her weight next to me. She had moved next to me, leaning against the wall, when she suddenly laid her head on my shoulder.
    “Rebecca Williams,” she cooed at me. “Are you actually getting
interested
in the local goings-on?”
    I struggled to laugh; it was meant to be a joke. She had no way of knowing that all summer long, late at night, I’d lain awake and felt myself dragged down by questions—echoes of townie chatter that circled the dusty roadside and pelted the corpse who lay still in a cold, stainless-steel drawer and kept her bloodless blue-gray lips closed tight against the onslaught.
    Who are you?
    Who killed you?
    Where is he now?
    There were no answers, and the investigation was slowing. Information trickled out now in dribs and drabs, yielding nothing significant, but it didn’t matter. We hungered for it.
    I hungered for it.
    * * *
     
    The last-year-me wouldn’t have. That girl, forward-looking and future-focused, wasn’t interested in what happened here. It was
there
that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light.
    The yearning for elsewhere had always left me only half engaged with the day-to-day of here. I was aloof, strange, disinterested in the little whirlings of our high school world. Some people thought it made me suspicious, untrustworthy. Even Craig, who knew firsthand the existence of Somewhere Else, thought I was dreaming beyond my rights.
    “For small-town trash,” he’d said to me a few days after our first meeting, “you think awfully highly of yourself.”
    Lindsay was still peering at me, curious.
    “Me, interested. Yeah, that would be weird, right?” I joked, and reached a hand up to pat Lindsay’s cheek. She giggled back, in character, always ready to play the flirt. I wondered how it was that this impersonal warmth, the maneuvering sweetness of a girl I’d grown up alongside without ever really knowing, could make me feel better. Lighter. My fingers uncurled and lay slack and comfortable at my side; I hadn’t known I was clenching them.
    “Out of character, more like it,” she laughed. “But you know, I totally understand.” She lifted her head and looked at me, her eyes like black pools in the opaque orange light.
    “Oh, yeah?” I said, and instantly felt sorry for it. The words had come out fast and too bitter.
    “I just mean, I think I get how you feel,” she said. She held her hands up, palms facing forward, a living illustration of
Hey, man, didn’t mean nothing.
“You’re gone at the end of the summer, right? If I were going away to school, I wouldn’t care about any of this small-town bullshit either.”
    “You’re not going to school?” I feigned the surprise I wished I felt. It happened every year—kids who graduated like all the rest, but seemed to