Page 52 of Bent Heavens

Krista laughed. “She’s actually human. She just doesn’t like anyone to know it.”

She squeezed Liv’s arm and departed. Liv opened her locker and hid her face inside it for half a minute, flushing so hot that she felt as if she were lying on a warm beach towel surrounded by her circle of friends and laughing so loudly she could barely hear the distant tide: Car. Bow. Hole.

Doug wasn’t at school. Liv hadn’t expected him to be. He was off doing—no, she wouldn’t let herself think about it. She had to focus on her future. That meant, for now, presenting a cold front to Bruno. Liv hoped there might be a time when it was safe to resume some kind of relationship with him, if he would accept it. But she’d been too impulsive with too many things. She needed to see Doug one more time and ensure that all danger had passed. For Doug and Liv, yes, but also for anyone Liv might like, or even love.

She didn’t spot Bruno until lunch, and not before she was tucked between Darla and Amber, and Monica was monologuing about how she’d fended off some creep at the movie theater. Bruno stood in the aisle, giving Liv an imploring look. Liv met his eyes once, then looked back to Monica, bolting on a smile that felt like iron and insisting to herself this was the only way forward.

When Liv got home, Aggie was there, in that gap between vet clinic and steakhouse, and she’d changed into clothes suitable for scrubbing crud beneath stovetop burners. The rest of the kitchen was sparkling, and Liv’s head swam in the chemical cloud as she watched her mom scour with a strange zeal, like she was hoping to polish away all evidence of their drunken dinner.

“Hi, Mom,” Liv offered.

Aggie didn’t turn from her task. “Look in the trash.”

Liv stepped on the foot lever. Inside were a dozen bottles of alcohol, all emptied.

“That’s everything in the house,” Aggie said.

Liv had a lot of people to whom she owed apologies, and what had been so surprising at school was how, with every one, she’d felt lighter. If not for Bruno, she might float up into the clouds.

The words were easy, really, once you had practice: “Mom, I’m sorry.”

“You will not be like me,” Aggie said, still scrubbing. “I won’t allow it. If there are problems, we’ll deal with them. No more drinking for me. For you, no more dodging around with Doug or whoever. You’ve got someone you like, you march them straight up to the front door. We’re going to be honest with each other from here on out. It’s the only way we’re going to survive, Liv. We only have a few months left together, after all. Agreed?”

She sounded sad, but it wasn’t a bad thing; the sadness was clear-eyed, aware of its origins. Liv gazed at her mother, hunched uncomfortably over the stove, the back-and-forth jerk of her cleaning arm, her slight frame that, though dented, the world had yet to fell. The rhythmic scratch of the cleaning brush could be the beating of Aggie’s heart, or Liv’s, or both of them, synchronized at last.

“Agreed,” Liv said, discovering she was on tiptoe, already that much closer to clouds.

Doug didn’t show up to school on Tuesday, either. Liv couldn’t help it; she added up his absences. It was an exercise she’d been doing for years so Doug didn’t set off a chain reaction of his father being tracked down and Doug being put into protective custody. He was already veering too close to trouble. If he failed out of the semester due to it, she knew the book would close on Doug Monk for good, and though that might be what he wanted, it stung Liv to imagine. No matter what he’d done, if his hand suddenly appeared, she’d still pull on it, still try to lift him from peril.

Bruno was also absent. She didn’t know what to make of it; surely he was too healthy to ever submit to illness. Liv accepted the possibility it was her coldness that had driven him away. She told herself to accept it. He’d be back soon enough, probably tomorrow, and looking at him would be hard all over again.

Her final class of the day was English. Today it was being held in the library, the same place Doug had once printed out all four hundred pages of the Army Field Manual 2-22.3. The librarian was going over how to access information databases, something they’d need to master for college. Liv was barely listening. Two hours ago, she’d had a surprise encounter with Coach Carney, who’d suggested Liv stop by after school to talk about spring soccer. Liv focused on that: spring, an inconceivable, magical season; sweating for good reasons again; colliding with other bodies in the way that garnered applause.

The database in front of Liv was billed by the librarian as the standard for accessing news content, anything from yesterday’s headlines to Civil War–era circulars. The librarian expressed envy at the students having such a tool at their disposal, but Liv saw Hank, sitting to her left, open a browser to check sports scores. He winked at her, and she smiled.

“Give it a try,” the librarian said. “Search anything you’d like.”

Liv stared at the empty search bar. And the word just sliced into her brain:

Carbajal.

She had every reason not to type it. It was breathtaking how much happier she’d been in the three days since Doug had carried A out of her life. Three days, though … that was too long for him to be gone, wasn’t it? Far longer than it would take him to humanely snuff the life from an injured creature, something he’d done time and again after a squirrel got caught in a trap. An idea that had fluttered just out of her consciousness for days landed home. Doug was not necessarily doing what she thought he was doing.

She killed the thought, cursored over a browser app. She should emulate Hank, load up something frivolous. All she had to do was waste forty minutes, and then she’d be meeting with Coach Carney—and why stop there? Swing over to Principal Gamble’s office just to let him know she was okay, and then drop by the auditorium to make a real apology to Baldwin. No more loose ends, her life fully back on track.

Her fingers, those ten traitors, typed the eight letters and hit enter.

Once started, she couldn’t stop. Every click felt to Liv like Maquahuitl plowing into the shed’s concrete. The database had an intuitive interface; either that, or she was driven by a detective’s gusto, modifying her search within geographical limits, narrowing it to results including terms like alien or strange or mysterious, filtering out magazines and wire feeds in favor of newspapers, and clicking on abstracts to scan the content for anything that might trip an alarm.

After an unknown amount of time, something did.

Liv leaned into the screen until she could see individual pixels. On the screen was a feature article dated six years ago, translated from a Spanish-language Des Moines weekly, an interview with a Charles Grimwig. But the highlighted search result offered this: Grimwig was born under the name Carlos Carbajal, but he adopted the pseudonym when …

Liv brought up the full-text version and swallowed a held breath. Carbajal, the piece explained, had adopted Grimwig when getting started in journalism, wary of institutionalized racism that might keep his résumé unselected. After getting a staff job at the Monroeville Courier, he was stuck with the moniker, though now he went out of his way to do interviews like this one, to make sure positive Latino role models were visible in Iowa.

The bell rang. Students were standing, erupting with the relief only the day’s final bell induced. Hank whistled for Liv’s attention, but she only shook her head, unhappy to pull her eyes from the screen for even that long. Hank frowned before leaving, and Liv knew she had just made a step backward in regaining her status. That would be followed by another: She was going to miss her meeting with Coach Carney, and there would be no apologies to Gamble or Baldwin, not today. She couldn’t leave this computer; the plastic of the mouse felt fused to her fingers.

A search for Charles Grimwig brought an explosion of results.