WHAT SHE STARTED...CHAPTER SIX - by Khadijah Mohammed

A week passed. I lay on my bed most of it, staring at the ceiling the way my mother used to stare out her window, and somewhere in the middle of all that staring I made a decision without really deciding it — I wasn't going to look for whoever had killed her. I wasn't going to look for the necklace, or the chain that had gone missing from beneath my boxers, or the person who'd left a T-shaped pendant beside my mother's body like a signature. I was tired in a way that didn't have a bottom to it, tired past the point where anger or fear could still move me toward answers. My father was right about one thing. This town had taken everything it was going to take from me. I wasn't going to spend what was left of myself trying to make it give any of it back. We were selling the house. We were leaving. I went in to clear out my locker and say goodbye to a few people, because even in the state I was in, some old, stubborn part of me still cared about doing things properly. The hallway looked exactly the same as it always had, which felt wrong somehow, like the building should have noticed something had changed. Nurse Lucy found me near the office before I'd made it halfway down the hall. "Chris." She came toward me quickly, arms already opening, and pulled me into a hug before I could decide whether I wanted one. "I heard you were leaving. I saw the sign go up outside your house last week." She pulled back to look at me, her eyes doing the same searching thing they always did, like she was checking for a fever that wasn't there. "I just want you to know — I'm so sorry, about everything. I wish you all the best, truly. Wherever you end up." "Thank you," I said, because it was easier than saying anything true. She squeezed my shoulder, the way she had every time she'd said something kind to me in that office over the past two years, and it was in that small, ordinary motion that I saw it — her sleeve had ridden up just enough to show her wrist. A bracelet. Gold, thin, a different shade than the one I'd found in my mother's drawer, but the shape of the chain and the small worn clasp were unmistakable, made in the same style as the one Tessa used to wear every single day, the one I remembered clearly because I'd looked at it for a long, terrible moment after I pushed her into the grass and she didn't get back up. I hadn't gone looking for it after — I hadn't thought to, hadn't cared to, hadn't known until the gate that it was even gone from around my own neck. Something in my chest went very still. She started to turn, already moving on to whatever she'd been doing before she saw me, and I heard myself speak before I'd finished deciding to. "Where did you get that?" She stopped. "Get what?" "The bracelet." I nodded at her wrist. "Where did you get it?" For just a second — less than a second, barely long enough to be sure I'd seen it at all — something moved behind her eyes that hadn't been there a moment before. And in that same instant, looking at her properly for maybe the first time in two years, I saw it. The shape of her mouth. The particular way her eyebrows sat, slightly uneven, the left one a fraction higher than the right. The set of her jaw when she wasn't smiling. I had seen that face before. Not on Nurse Lucy. On Tessa, lying still in the grass, looking up at nothing. My hand closed around her wrist before I'd decided to move at all. Students were passing on either side of us, backpacks and noise and none of them slowing down enough to notice, and I kept my voice low even as everything in me wanted to shout it. "It was you." My grip tightened. "Wasn't it. It was you." "Chris, you're hurting me—" "Tell me the truth." She twisted, sharp and sudden, and pulled free of me in one motion, stumbling back a step before she caught herself. For just a moment her face held something raw and unguarded, and then it closed over again, and she was already moving away from me down the hall, fast, not quite running but close to it, disappearing around the corner before I could get another word out. I started after her. And then I heard my name. "Chris." My father was standing at the end of the hallway near the main doors, car keys still in his hand, exactly where he'd said he'd meet me. A few students glanced between us, between me standing there breathing hard in the middle of the corridor and him watching with a question already forming on his face. I couldn't chase her down in front of all of them. I couldn't explain any of this to him, not here, not like this. I let my hands unclench and walked toward my father instead, my locker forgotten, and didn't look back.

What She Started

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