Page 9 of Hostile

By the time the park outside the window had resolved from darkness into the thin gray of early morning, I knew the full extent of what she’d built, and I had the beginning of a plan, and I was no closer to being ready for what was going to happen next than I’d been at two in the morning.

Some things, it turned out, you couldn’t prepare for by reading the report twice.

You just had to show up.

I was very good at showing up.

CHAPTER FOUR

WYATT: THE PAST

The student parking lot at our high school was a social map disguised as asphalt. Where you parked said who you were. The seniors with names held the row nearest the gate. The strivers parked close enough to be seen yet far enough to be humble. And along the fence at the western edge, in the thin shade of a line of crepe myrtles, the kids whose cars were older than they were parked.

I had the third spot from the gate, because I was an Aldridge, and the map had been drawn with us in mind.

I spent my senior year parked in the best spot in that lot and looking at the worst one.

“You’re doing it again,” Jayce said.

It was a Friday in April, warm enough that half the school was loitering on the asphalt instead of leaving, and Jayce Ellison was sitting on my tailgate, working through a bag of sunflower seeds with the patience of a man who had nowhere to be until baseball season ended. I had been listening to him talk about the Braves’ bullpen for ten minutes. Apparently, I had also been doing it again.

“Doing what?”

“Staring at Megan Hale,” he said, conversational, around a seed hull, the way you’d point out traffic⁠—

“I’m watching the lot.”

“You’re watching one-fiftieth of the lot.” Jayce spat a hull into the grass and regarded me with the unhurried amusement of a friend who has been sitting on information for a while and has decided today is the day. “You know what’s funny? You could have any girl at this school. That’s not a compliment, so don’t enjoy it—it’s just arithmetic. You’re an Aldridge, you look like that, and this is Savannah. Girls have been doing the math since eighth grade.” He tipped the bag toward the western fence. “All of them except exactly one. And that’s the one you can’t stop staring at.”

“I’m not⁠—”

“She doesn’t care that you exist, man,” he said without cruelty. That was the terrible thing about Jayce; he was never cruel, just accurate. “I’ve watched it all year. She has never once looked over here. Not at the truck, not at the spot, not at the name. To Megan Hale, you are a rumor about a person.”

He was wrong, as it turned out, in ways it would take me eleven years and a rain-soaked sidewalk to learn. But standing in that lot at seventeen, I believed him completely. Here is the part I never said out loud to anyone: it was the single most interesting thing about her.

Every girl who did the math saw the name. The truck, the manor, the fourth-generation weight of it. They performed for it—some subtle, some not, but all of it performance, all of it aimed at something that wasn’t me so much as the gate I happened to be standing in front of. Megan Hale performed for nothing. She crossed that lot every afternoon with her spine straight, her books clutched to her chest, her face closed like a well-run ledger, on her way to a sun-bleached sedan older than both of us. She needed nothing from my name at all. She was the only person in that school who treated Wyatt Aldridge as optional.

I have never entirely recovered.

The rankings went up that Friday. Top of the class, posted on the office window for anyone who cared to look: Hale, Megan—first, by a distance the second name would not close. Everyone had known it was coming. Everyone said so all day, in the tone Savannah uses for other people’s achievements, like the tide coming in—impressive, inevitable, nothing to do with them.

I watched her come out the side doors at three-fifteen, with Christine beside her, talking with both hands, delighted enough for the two of them, and Megan allowing it the way she allowed things—a half-smile, rationed, her eyes already on the parking lot, the sedan, and whatever came after this place. She had just won the only contest this school kept honest books on, and she was carrying it like a Tuesday.

And I was crossing the lot before I had decided to.

I want to be accurate about the distance because I’ve measured it in my memory for eleven years: it was maybe forty yards from my truck to the crepe myrtles, and I covered about twenty-five of them. Jayce said something behind me that I didn’t process. The asphalt tilted, as the ground does when you’re finally doing the thing. I had no plan. I had one word—congratulations—and the vague conviction that a man could survive on one word if he delivered it standing up.

Fifteen yards out, she felt it. People do when you cross a distance that has rules. She turned from the sedan’s door, her eyes came up, and found me already looking⁠—

And held.

I need you to understand what that was worth at seventeen. Two years of a closed face, and now the deep ocean blue of her eyes fixed on mine across fifteen yards of April, not startled, not performing, simply looking back—seeing me look, and letting me see her see it. Christine’s hands had stopped moving. Somewhere behind me, the lot went on with its afternoon. I opened my mouth.

“Hale—”

A hand closed on my arm.

“There you are.” Blair materialized at my elbow with the timing she was born with, her voice pitched just loud enough to be overheard and just warm enough to be unaccountable. “Daddy’s been calling you—the Fitzgeralds are at the house, and he wants you presentable by five.” Then, lower, just for me, pleasant as sweet tea: “Also, the staring. She’s not one of your fan club, Wyatt—look at her. You’re embarrassing her in front of the entire lot. Congratulations from an Aldridge, today of all days? Everyone will say she earned the ranking on her knees by Monday, and she will know exactly who to thank for it. If you like the girl at all, be kind.” A small, sisterly squeeze of my arm, for the audience. “Walk away.”