A brown girl with long box braids sits alone in one of the tables in the library, her fingers work on the keyboard of her laptop while her eyes go from the screen to the book laid open under the green lamp.
Her phone rings. The girl fishes her headphones off her bag and answers the call.
"Hi, Si," the girl on the other side says. Sierra leans back in her chair and looks blankly at the word document she's been working on for the last couple of hours.
"What's up?"
"I just came out of the police station." Her voice sounds uncertain, nervous. "Did they ask you about Ace too?"
"Yes," Sierra says, biting down her knuckles. "The detective did. He wanted to know if Levi had ever talked to me about him, if he ever complained."
"They asked me the same thing," the girl says. "What did you say?"
Sierra thinks about everything that happened, everything that's still happening, and bites down her knuckles hard enough to sting, "I don't think Levi ever complained about anything."
There's a silence on the line. It lasts only a few seconds.
"Did you tell him about that day in the prairie? When Ruth said she thought maybe Ace was jealous?" Every word that leaves the other girl's mouth reaches this side covered in nervous sweats.
"Jealous?" Sierra frowns. She remembers the grass tickling her skin, the smell of sage, the joint between her fingers, the sound of her friends' voices, and laughter. She thinks maybe the joint was what made her forget this.
"Jealous of whom?" she finally asks.
"Of Levi."
YOU ARE READING
One for the Team
Mystery / ThrillerThe body of a missing student is buried in the woods. But only a few know this. At first, it was just a running joke in the hallways of Northwoods High, a lowbrow school in a lower brow town. Finn Sexton never really thought the joke was funny, but...
