The Kids Aren't Alright

Chapter 76: Jasper

A stray ribbon of caution tape flutters against my arm, blown loose by the wind. I brush it away. The whole beach is littered with the stuff— the police didn't do a very good job cleaning up after themselves, and I can still see the indents in the pebbles from where their feet were. The footprints don't seem to follow a sensible path; they just circle around the beach aimlessly, until they reach the shoreline and disappear.

I watch as the strand of caution tape drifts lazily through the air, until the breeze blows it into the water and it floats away.

Everything looks so normal now, as if what happened here last night didn't really happen at all. Other than the abundance of yellow tape, there's no proof that Finn's story is true; even the wrecked motorboat, which Ronan and Becca left behind at the docks, has been hitched up to the back of a pick-up truck and hauled off to the repair shop. Gone, just like everything else.

There's no bullets. No bloodstains. As I sit there on the dock, my legs dangling over the calmly moving water, it's almost impossible to imagine anything horrible happening here. Corpus delicti— no evidence, no crime.

The lake isn't giving away any of its secrets, either. It looks peaceful now, or at least satiated for the time being, which is strange because it always used to look so restless, like it was waiting for something to happen.

Maybe last night was the night it had been waiting for this entire summer.

The mist has vanished too, relinquishing its persistent, months-long hold on the lake. Its disappearance has allowed the faraway shore to be visible once more. Hordes of bristling evergreens and birch sway in the shadows of distant mountains on the opposite bank, drawing my thoughts back to the ghost story that Clancey used to tell during the Sunday bonfires— how thirteen miners were once crushed beneath the same mountains I'm looking at now. I wonder if there's any truth to Clancey's stories, or if the bodies of the miners are still there, buried deep below the unfeeling rock; the pressure slowly fossilizing them over time. Now that I think about it, that can't be too terrible a fate. There are worse places to be put to rest than the wild mountains of Alaska.

"... and then I woke up in the Med Cabin, and the Director came and told me that Owen had escaped, and we all had to leave camp early," Finn concludes. "The Director had me sleep in the Med Cabin overnight and she wanted to keep me there today too, but I wasn't showing any signs of a concussion so she let me go to breakfast. You know the rest."

"Thank you for telling me the truth," I say. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I almost cringe at how cliché they sound— I feel like I'm acting the part of a counselor during Sharing Circle— but I don't know how else to phrase it. I really am thankful that Finn told me what happened last night. I know that it would have been easy for him to lie to me, like he did to the rest of the camp, which is why it means so much that he didn't. I turn away from the mountains to face him. "I'm serious. Thank you."

"That's not all," Ronan pipes up. In a sudden bout of unexpected helpfulness, he fills in the parts where Finn was underwater, talking about how Owen commandeered the boat and forced them to sail back to shore without him. Finn nods as Ronan recites his tale, satisfied with the retelling. Oddly enough, neither of them brings up Becca.

I consider asking why, then decide against it. If Finn and Ronan aren't bringing up Becca— even though there's no way she wasn't involved in this mess— then they must have a reason; a reason that I'm sure is messy and tangled and complicated in the way that all reasons that deal with relationships are. Maybe Finn and Becca finally broke up. That's probably the only thing that could split up their trio so effectively.

"Clancey was telling the truth afterall," Ronan finishes, wrenching my thoughts away from doomed teenage relationships. "He might have been a violent idiot, but he did try to warn us about Owen, in the end."