She didn’t poison Chestnut right away. I’m not sure why. Maybe she thought that way she’d get away with it.

When I accused her she barely blinked.

He’s so dumb, he probably got into the rat poison all on his own, she said.

Except, she had stolen his collar. So I would know it wasn’t an accident. Even way back then, she liked to turn the truth inside out, to make it look like a lie and vice versa, until you couldn’t know the difference.

The craziest part was that she actually blamed me when I said I would never speak to her again. She actually seemed hurt, like she couldn’t understand why I was being so mean to her.

For the next six years, after she’d grown, after she’d gathered all the subjects she had ever imagined for herself, she never once admitted to touching Chestnut.

And then, on the last day of school, I went to clean out my locker and found Chestnut’s collar hanging neatly from a hook.

She kept it.

All those years, she kept it.

A few hours later, she asked Misha for a ride to Indianapolis, saying she wanted to scout for bartending jobs and would take a bus home later. But she never took the bus home. She never came home at all.

Why did she do it? Why was it the last thing she did?

I drop the collar back into my mom’s jewelry box and latch the whole thing shut.

Sometimes, I think, in her crazy way, Kaycee left me that collar because she knew it would hurt, and hurt was how she knew that I would never forget her.

Other times, I think that maybe she was just saying good-bye.

Chapter Twenty-One

The next day, Thursday, I’m up at an hour even my father couldn’t criticize.

I make my coffee so strong it tastes like mud. I might have gotten four or five hours of sleep max, even though I was home before eight o’clock. I spent the night sweating out cheap alcohol, staring at the ceiling, and twisting between different memories and half-formed ideas.

I slug my mud-coffee and watch Barrens shake off its nighttime mist. I try to see Barrens as a stranger might, and in the early light it looks beautiful. Maybe Brent was right and I am on some kind of witch-hunt. Maybe I want Optimal to be crooked, just so I have something, anything, to straighten out.

Maybe my obsession is all a fantasy.

Or maybe not. But this morning, I’m going to follow Brent’s advice: it’s time for a tour of some of Optimal’s good works.

—

The Barrens-OPI Community Center is halfway between the high school and the gates of the Optimal Plastics Complex, directly across the road from the Westlink Fertilizer & Feed store. The theater that Brent mentioned is complete; it’s a modern, steel-and-glass exterior completely at odds with the squat brick shoeboxes that otherwise define architecture in Barrens. It’s not even nine A.M. and there are already cars in the newly poured lot, and though the doors are locked, when I press my face to the glass I can make out a blur of movement inside. I’m surprised to see Misha in the lobby, pacing, phone pressed between shoulder and cheek.