Out of Order (17 page)

“That’s not what’s holding us back,” I told him honestly. “Kate’s just not ready yet.” Brandon began to fidget. “That’s not all you wanted to say, though. What’s up? Does it have to do with what’s in your pocket?”

“There’s nothing in my pocket!” Brandon said defensively. Then he sighed. “I wanted to apologize for October. At Mason Lowe’s party, when I said you weren’t gay. I didn’t mean to give you the impression—”

I waved off his concerns and poured myself a glass of punch, feeling relieved. “No offense taken. You were my savior that night.” I took Brandon’s glass from him and pointed out Jessa, dancing mostly by herself in a group of her dance team friends. “Go dance with your girlfriend. Enjoy prom without guilt!”

“You do the same!” he said before he ran off to join Jessa. I smiled, drank my punch, and then walked onto the dance floor to do just that.

I
CLIMBED
into Brandon’s truck and instantly felt nostalgia for Halloween, back when the biggest thing I had to worry about was whether Ricky’s soon-to-be-boyfriend was an asshole or not. Instead of being cold, sweat was pooling in my collarbones. Instead of being angry at my friend, I was angry at the man who had shot her. It was the same truck, but everything else was completely different.

Brandon started the engine, and for the first time in my life I didn’t scramble to put my seat belt on before the wheels started turning. He joined the line of cars leaving the church parking lot; the procession would turn down Main Street and then loop around back to the cemetery, parading the bodies through town like a sideshow. The thought made me feel ill.

“You might want to put on your seat belt,” Brandon said when we jerked to a stop behind a big, blue sedan that clearly belonged to someone out of town. On the back were a set of those doodle-family stickers that were all the rage a few years ago, depicting a set of grandparents with a troop of kid-sticker grandchildren and one freshly added angel. Must be a Fuentes. “I mean, it’s not like we’re in a high-speed chase here, but it
is
the law.”

I reached behind me and pulled the seat belt across my chest, adjusting the height so that it didn’t hit me across the neck. “Who’s driving Robert?” I asked, still staring at the stick-figure family.

“Erica’s father,” he answered, hands patting out a rhythm on the steering wheel. “Can’t imagine
that
isn’t an awkward ride.”

“I really thought Mike would come,” I said, trying not to be irritated by Brandon’s tapping. At least he hadn’t turned on the radio. “I’m disappointed in him. It’s irrational to care about something so trivial on a day like today, but I can’t get over it.”

Brandon’s hands fell silent. “That may have been my fault. And by
may have been
, I mean definitely was.” I looked away from the back of the car in front of us for the first time since we’d gotten into the truck and looked at Brandon’s face. I didn’t react with an exaggerated confused facial expression like I usually might, but my blank stare got the same message across, and he explained. “I told him that if he dared show up to the funeral, I’d—it was at graduation, I was still so—”

“You threatened him.” The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. “Why would you do that?”

“I was so angry.” The tapping started again, harder than before. “I had to say something to someone and all the Fuenteses did was cry and pray and I had to blame someone. If Erica and Robert had gotten their shit together before Christmas, he’d have been her date, and she might’ve gone home with him. I might’ve driven Jessa in my truck instead of getting the limo. You and Kate might’ve gone together.”

“That’s all so hypothetical, and none of it Mike’s fault.” I couldn’t believe I was defending him. “We can’t blame anyone for this but the guy who did it.”

“It’s the not knowing that gets me. And the….” Brandon waved his hand in the air, the other still tapping the wheel. “You know.”

I shook my head, neither nodding nor disagreeing. I didn’t know
exactly
what he meant, but I did know what he meant in the grand scheme of things. The unfinished feeling, the haunting, the sense that it wasn’t over—the fear.

“I just want it to be over. I haven’t been able to think about the future without them in it, or what I’m going to do now. I haven’t mourned yet. I mean I’ve cried a lot, and slept a lot, but I haven’t—” I waved my hand in the air, mocking Brandon just a little. “You know.”

We turned off Main Street behind the long procession, the first time Brandon had had to turn the wheel since exiting the parking lot.

“When I kept calling you, I was… expecting some sort of closure. Like if you could tell me what happened—you’re my friend, y’know? Not just because we had Jessa in common. We’re friends. You’re the only person going through what I’m—”

Brandon paused, swore bitterly, and then punched the steering wheel so hard his horn beeped, despite not hitting anywhere near the button. He hit the brakes and gripped the wheel tightly in both hands, breathing erratically, huffing and puffing like a woman in labor. The person behind us honked their horn in two short bursts, as though questioning.

“Brandon, you need to move.”

Still puffing, Brandon let up on the brake and slowly caught up to the car ahead of us, which had only crossed half a block. The procession crawled forward like a line of ants following the leader through town.

Brandon cleared his throat. “I haven’t cried yet.”

Stunned, I let the statement sit for a moment as the truck inched forward. All I’d done since the murders was cry. I would cry so hard that I’d get dehydrated, guzzle some water, and cry some more. I couldn’t imagine the pressure building up and not spilling over. I’d go crazy if I hadn’t cried.

“You need to. You can’t hold it in, you’ll explode,” I said, and I meant it. “You’ll go crazy if you don’t.”

Finally, the scene outside the window changed from houses to rows of crosses and angels, big, old tombstones and tiny plaques and statues of cherubs. I watched Brandon while he intently followed the sedan off the paved road and onto the dirt one that ran through the cemetery.

Brandon was silent until he parked, his hands beginning to jitter against the wheel again when he put the car in park. I put my hand over his larger one, holding it still. It was warm and dry against my clammy palm.

“Will you tell me?” he asked, and I sighed. “I understand if you don’t want to. But I need to know what happened.”

His face was open, pleading, and I couldn’t have said no to it even if I’d wanted to. But he was right. We shared something that no one else did. Even Robert—his crush on Ricky was not the same as Brandon’s long-term romance with Jessa, or the fleeting glimpses I’d had into a life with Kate. One could not compare these things rationally, but the difference wasn’t arbitrary; Brandon and I had both lost the ones we’d loved.

“What do you want to know?”

Brandon turned his hand over, and I slid my fingers between his larger ones.

“Did she know it was coming?”

I shook my head. “It was so fast, Brandon. Every second was an eternity, but it happened so fast.” He squeezed my hand encouragingly, his eyes searching my face. I closed my eyes to avoid his gaze. “I could hear screaming after the first shot. I know he shot Kate first, and I don’t think there was a commotion beforehand, so it must have just—happened. Kate wouldn’t have known what hit her, but Jessa… yeah, I think she knew. I think I heard her scream.”

I opened my eyes and realized Brandon was shaking. His hand felt sturdy in mine, but his body was rattling, shivering from the sternum outward. I undid my seat belt and slid across the bench seat to him, never once letting go of his hand.

“I’m sorry, I should’ve lied—”

“No, never lie to me about her,” he growled. “I wanted to know. At least she got a chance to pray before it happened, right? She would’ve said a last prayer.”

“Knowing Jessa, she would have prayed for all of them,” I said.

Brandon nodded solemnly. “I loved her.” His hand slipped from mine, and he reached inside the inner breast pocket of his jacket. “I was going to ask her to marry me.” He offered me a little velvet box from his pocket, just like in the movies. “I almost did it at prom, but I didn’t want to be cliché. So I thought—the Fourth of July, you know? With the fireworks and music at Dobson’s Field, sitting on a haystack in the moonlight….”

“It would’ve been so romantic,” I said, pushing the box back into his hand. I didn’t want to see the ring. It was bad enough I knew about it—that I had another weight to add to the pile of bricks in my chest, pulling me under. He leaned across me to put the box in his glove compartment.

“Do you think she would have said yes?”

“Yes,” I said, and when he turned to me, I saw tears in his eyes. He met my eyes and just like that, Brandon Reyes was kissing me—his hands on either side of my face, his lips pressed hard against mine, his nose pushing roughly against my cheekbone.

I jerked back and in the rebound managed to hit our heads together, startling us both with the sharp pain of collision. My cheeks were wet with Brandon’s tears. His hands were still on my face, but they were shaking. He looked, with his wet eyes and red mouth hanging open, like he might be sick.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped, letting his hands fall away to hang awkwardly in the air between us. “I’m so sorry. That was—inappropriate, and I don’t—I’m so—”

Brandon’s sobs shook the truck. It was like a dam had broken, and suddenly the strong man I’d come to know had been reduced to a shell, bent double like a tree in the wind. I put an arm around his shaking shoulders as he fell apart and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

“It’s okay,” I said, although it wasn’t. “I understand,” I said, although I didn’t.

Brandon folded into me, his hands pawing desperately at my hair and his wet face disappearing into the crook of my neck. I held him to me, rocking slightly, shushing him occasionally. I watched through the windshield as cars emptied well-dressed people onto the dusty dirt road. Groups of stragglers hurried over the gently hilled green toward where three black flags had been erected, directing the mourning to the three fresh graves. As though they couldn’t follow the slow movements of the men carrying the heavy caskets, some of them hired hands because there hadn’t been enough volunteers.

I petted Brandon’s thick black hair, the sleek curls hooking onto my fingers as though even his hair couldn’t bear to let me go yet. He cried with his whole body, shaking violently with sobs in the cab of his truck. Still, I hushed him. Still, I held him. We weren’t missing the burial yet. We had time to sit here. We had time.

I don’t know what it was that tipped me off at first. From this distance, the mourners gathered up the hill were nearly indistinguishable from each other. Still, one figure caught my eye, standing off to the side a little awkwardly. Clearly a young man, he shifted around with his hands in both pockets, bouncing back on the balls of his feet—and then he pulled from his pocket a red baseball cap and put it on his head.

My mouth went dry. “Brandon, Brandon snap out of it!” I desperately pushed at Brandon’s shoulders until he was sitting up, and then I smacked his chest with my hands. “He’s here! Brandon, who is that? Brandon!”

Brandon looked at me with a dazed expression and then followed the line of my finger, his eyes bleary from crying. “Who?”

“There, in the ball cap—he’s gone.” I desperately searched the crowd for the hat, but the mass of black suits made it hard to tell one figure from another. “I saw him, Brandon, I saw—!”

I all but threw myself out of the cab of the truck, hurrying to get to the burial. My heels sank in the soft dirt of the hill, and I stumbled, pulling one off and then the other, running much better in bare feet. I heard the truck’s door slam as Brandon stumbled out of it, following me. He met me halfway up the hill, his legs longer than mine and his shoes better suited to running.

“Who did you see? The man who killed them? You saw
him
? Are you sure?”

I ignored Brandon’s frantic questions as I reached the top of the hill, scanning faces. I pushed through people, ignoring their cries of anger and “Hey!”s and “Watch it!”s. I stopped when I reached the grave that would soon be Kate’s, a man moving out of my sight line to reveal the awful sight:

A brown-haired man in a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap, leaning close to whisper something in the ear of Kate’s mother—of
his
mother. The name and the face, which had haunted my mind since I watched him pull that trigger, finally came together in my mind; Dustin Adams was Kate’s half brother—and her killer.

For a moment I just stared at him, the connections not happening in my brain. Then Brandon caught up to me, hands dropping onto my shoulders, and I began to scream.

“You killed your sister!” I screamed. “You killed her! You killed them!” A stream of filthy swears exited my mouth in quick succession; all the while Brandon held me back from running at him. I would have throttled him with my bare hands if I’d reached him.

“He killed them! It was him! It was him!”

My voice went hoarse after only a few moments of this caterwauling, but it didn’t take long for people to understand what I was shouting, and who I was shouting at. Dustin made a break for it—tried to run—but he was in the presence of half a dozen military men, and although Ricky’s dad wasn’t the one who took him down, he was the one whose knee was pressed to Dustin’s back until the police arrived.

I was told later that Dustin had started crying the moment Phillip demanded to know if he had killed his baby girl. Some reports said that he wet his pants, but others were mum on the subject.

I don’t know for sure if this is an exaggeration or not; I screamed until there were black spots in my vision. I had to be carried back to my parents’ car by my father and Brandon, kicking and screaming at the top of my lungs. I don’t remember any of it. I’ve blocked it out.