I hear Davey come down the stairs.
“The name of their group spells FART,” I call.
“I know,” he says. “It’s ridiculous.”
I turn around and see him reaching underneath his gray sweater to tuck his blue plaid shirt behind his tan belt. “I like your finger,” I blurt.
“You mentioned.” He raises his eyebrows. “Thanks.”
“You’re very welcome.” It comes out sounding too loud. Something about Davey makes me want to raise my voice and talk in all caps. Like, NO MATTER WHAT I’M SAYING I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW I’M HERE AND VERY EXCITED.
I gesture at the computer screen. “Thanks for letting me read this. It’s important to be able to trust your investigative team, even with things like personal emails. I particularly liked the part where she tells you she loves you in all caps. It reminded me of this one time that Ruth and I were in the grocery store parking lot and saw this woman screaming at her three-year-old kid. She kept shouting, ‘Why you crying? I love you.’”
“I didn’t show you the email because I wanted to talk about Ruth,” Davey says, not looking at me.
“Oh.” I blush. For a second I let myself pretend he’s trying to tell me it’s just me and him, and there’s no one dead between us, and we would have started hanging out no matter what, because he would want to be my friend forever, no matter if any of this happened.
Really I think he just doesn’t like to talk about his feelings.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Sometimes crazy stuff happens—like this email—and you need to share it with someone, otherwise it’s not real.”
“Yeah,” I add hopefully. “And maybe sometimes you share things because of the person and not because of the things that are happening.”
A group of four people, one of whom I’m pretty sure I recognize as a lunch lady at our high school, is standing with Miss Rosa right next to Friendship Church’s yellow school bus. I notice the engine is running.
“Hi!” I call.
Miss Rosa looks exactly the same. Big Coke-bottle glasses that make her eyes look like an owl’s, witchy hair pulled back tight into a ponytail that’s as skinny as a pencil. She’s got on corduroy cargo pants with an elastic waist and orthopedic shoes.
“Hm!” Miss Rosa grunts. She waddles over to me. “Your face is seeming very familiar to mine.” She squints up at me suspiciously. Behind her, three men I’ve never seen before and the lunch lady smoke cigarettes in silence.
“It’s me, Kippy Bushman,” I tell her, smiling sweetly. “I came a really long time ago for . . . overexcitement, remember?” I gesture to Davey who’s holding a tray of peanut butter tasties. They’re all black on the bottom, but they’re homemade and in Friendship that’s what’s important. “I brought snacks.”
“Banzai!” Miss Rosa grins. Her hands jerk up in front of her as if she’s going to grab me, but then she frowns and murmurs quietly to herself, “No touching.”
“What’s Banzai?” Davey whispers in my ear.
“I’ll tell you later,” I hiss.
“Please, welcome—welcome.” Miss Rosa wiggles her shoulders and makes a sort of gurgling noise, like a pigeon. “So you are experiencing the relapse, eh? Pouncing everyone every place, am I right? Squeezing . . .” She strokes her hands excitedly and does a little hop. “Who have you bitten?”
Before I can explain, she turns to Davey and hunches her top lip toward her nose, squinting again. “You.” She points a finger at him and draws a little circle in the air. “Who is this? Hm. Boyfriend perhaps? No spying at NVCG. Safe space for hyenas—in this case relearning giraffe.” Her English has gotten a lot better.
“Actually, Miss Rosa—”
“You are good to Banzai, no?” Her eyes expand behind her glasses. Behind her, the smokers toe out their cigarettes. “You treat her with the respect?”
Davey looks around nervously. “Not exactly,” he says.
Miss Rosa bares her little teeth.
“No, see, Davey and I are having some problems,” I say quickly.
“I keep hitting her,” he says. “But I want to stop.”
“You can’t see the bruises because they’re underneath my clothes,” I add.
“Geeze the Louise!” Miss Rosa is pointing frantically at Davey’s bad hand. “Banzai! You have bitten off the finger.”
Davey and I exchange a look. “Exactly,” he says.
Miss Rosa licks her lips, her eyes swimming behind her glasses. “Simple relapse, we are here for to help.” She whistles at the group behind her, then points at the church bus. “You will come with us then,” she says to Davey and me. “Today is maze day.”
We’re going seventy miles per hour down Route 51, the same rural interstate that runs between Ruth’s house and mine. One of the group members is driving. His red, braided ponytail is so long he’s literally sitting on it.
“I used to truck,” he barks when Davey asks if he’s qualified to operate a bus.
There are three other guys aside from Davey, and then the lunch lady from school. Each of us has to sit in our own seat. (“No sharing!” Miss Rosa instructed. “No touching!”) Davey is across the aisle from me. The bus belongs to the church and is wallpapered with Jesus posters: JESUSAVES written in red, white, and blue graffiti-like script; 40 THINGS THAT PROVE GOD CARES ABOUT GIRLS including He made babies so cute! and He invented Australian accents! and There are no diets in heaven!
“NVCG is now field-trip based,” Miss Rosa says, turning around in her seat to talk to me. She crosses her arms over the seat back and rests her chin against her hands. “Too much basement makes for crazy.”
“So where are we going, exactly?” I ask.
“It’s fuckin’ maze day,” the driver booms.
“We go to cornfield maze,” Miss Rosa clarifies. “Many cornfield mazes in Friendship, but are closed currently, so we must go more west.”
The lunch lady clears her throat right behind my ear. I spin around to see she’s leaning over the back of my seat, listening to our conversation.
“I know why they’re closed,” she says. She’s got a really deep voice. “It’s because of that Jewish girl’s murder.”
Davey’s looking at his hands, playing with his stitches.
Even though everyone around here makes Jewish jokes, there’s something about the lady’s tone that sounds different. As if people shouldn’t be so worked up about Ruth, or that it would make sense shutting down the cornfields for a Friendship Church person, but not otherwise. I guess I should be mad but I’m more curious. I get out Ruth’s journal and start a list on the inside cover, where I can access it easily.
Potential suspect types
1. Racist-ish
“You know Miss Rosa is Jewish,” Miss Rosa says, peering at the lunch lady.
“I knew her,” the lunch lady adds in a bragging voice, as if having seen Ruth once or twice in the cafeteria means she can say whatever she wants. She stares me down. “You knew her, too.”
I shrug. “I mean, we went to the same school.” Before we came here, I told Davey that if the Ruth thing came up we should downplay it as much as possible. The point was to figure out their secrets, not to steal the show with ours.
“Terrible, terrible.” Miss Rosa stifles a burp and raises her eyebrows in apology. “We hear about this murder all the way in Nekoosa, is where I live.”
“My folks heard about it all the way in Milwaukee,” says the driver.
The lunch lady grunts. “I think we should let alligators eat her boyfriend’s balls off. That kid was always asking for meat loaf on non—meat loaf days, like I’d go and make it for him just because he was pretty.”