“That was ten years ago, Ms. Williams.” His voice turns flinty. “Things dead and buried are best left that way.” He peels his lips back from his long teeth into a smile. “They don’t look none too pretty when they come up.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Even before Optimal came to town, there was one place we never cut corners: for more than thirty years, the Barrens Tigers have always played in a two-thousand-seater stadium donated by the great-great-grandson of the town’s original founder. Barrens loves its football. And the team was always really good, too, competing against bigger schools in the state and putting Barrens on the map. More energy went into football and the team than anything else. From a distance, it looks like a gigantic spaceship landed in the middle of a plowed field. It dwarfs the high school next to it, and when I was in school it sometimes doubled up as an auditorium for assemblies.

The whole of Barrens has turned out for the end-of-year PowerHouse game, a tradition that mixes JV and varsity and pits the teams against each other, and includes all the swagger, name-calling, and end zone dancing typically barred at real games. The teams paint their faces and wear costumes over their padding. One person, typically the quarterback, wears a dingy set of fairy wings passed down from class to class.

When I was in high school, I would have killed to walk into the PowerHouse with Brent O’Connell. Now I feel almost embarrassed—as if I’m squeezing into clothes that don’t quite fit anymore.

My hands are raw, sore from scrubbing them too hard before I left home.

Ever since I came home to Barrens, I can’t shake the sensation of dirt embedded beneath my fingernails. Handling Optimal’s documents just makes it worse. It’s like they’re covered with a chemical film that leaves me raw and itching.

When Brent reaches for my hand, I pretend not to notice and stuff my fists deep into my pockets.

Five hundred people, all funneled into the stadium seating, drum their feet along to the rhythm of the marching band—but the crazy thing is I spot Misha right away, or she spots us, one or the other. At the exact same second my eyes pick her out of the crowd, she lifts a hand to wave—a quick spasm that could be either an invitation or a desire to ward us off. Only when I see Annie Baum sitting next to her do I realize she’s sitting exactly where she always sat, four bleachers up, right next to the aisle. There’s even a little gap, a break in the arrangement of people, right next to her—as if an invisible Kaycee is still occupying her spot. A stranger has taken Cora Allen’s place.

For a second, we lock eyes. She gives me a funny little smile.

I’m afraid Brent will want to go and sit with them—Misha converts her wave into a frantic, two-handed come here gesture—but he only lifts a hand and, placing one hand on my lower back, steers me toward an entirely different section of bleachers. I feel a rush of relief.