While the town may not have cared about Mr. Loomis, they cared about what they were convinced was a murder, and after the police found Mr. Loomis’s body everyone began to question. Why had Jesse been out in the woods in the first place? What had he gone looking for in that house? What had he been hoping to find? Their questions were enough to fuel their fear, but in the end the police couldn’t charge Jesse with murder, no matter how much they frothed with desire to. They found no weapon. Nothing linked Loomis to the house. All the blood had been Jesse’s, and nothing could link Jesse to the river where Loomis died. The coroner listed his death as inconclusive. Inconclusive. The word haunted Mira with its lack of finality. Inconclusive. Yet, it was enough. Combined with the rest of it, it was enough for the police to let Jesse go.

Jesse had gotten lucky, but at school he was a pariah. The black kids wanted nothing to do with him, too afraid they too would be targets for the white students’ hate, and who could blame them when every day felt like an escalation of the one before? One day Jesse left class to go to the restroom and a group of students ganged up on him, beat him bloody, and left him in a crumpled heap on the bathroom floor. They broke into his locker and stole his drawing book, drew pictures of murdered monkeys on all the pages. Another day he came to class and someone had placed a noose on his chair. After school, they hooped and hollered at him as he walked to his truck they’d tagged with slurs. Jesse, through it all, never complained. He said nothing, and the familiarity of his silence pained her to see, because she knew he’d finally learned the lesson she’d been taught to believe.

Jesse dropping out was the final fracture of their friendship. Mira and Celine had already been drifting apart, but without Jesse the distance between them grew. They were drifting, had drifted, until Mira couldn’t figure why they were friends to begin with. Whenever they got together Celine would ask what happened with Jesse that day in the woods and Mira always hesitated. She couldn’t help but feel it was between her and Jesse, and Celine had told before, so what was to keep her from letting the truth slip a second time? “Nothing,” Mira decided, and each time she said nothing she could feel Celine pulling away.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” Celine would ask, not pretending to hide her hurt, but Mira never answered.