Lacuna(1)

Chapter 15

"Why?" Pip repeated, louder this time; more demanding.

"Someone made us," she sniffed, wiping her nose on her knuckles. "Someone made us do it."

"What do you mean?"

"We—me, Max, Jake, and Millie— we all got a text on that Monday night. From an anonymous number." That's why I didn't know, Evelyn realized. I didn't have a phone, I was 12. "It told us we had to delete every picture of Sal taken on the night Andie disappeared and to upload the rest as normal," Naomi continued. "It told us that at school on Tuesday, we had to ask the principal to call in the police so we could make a statement. And we had to tell them that Sal actually left Max's at ten-thirty and that he'd asked us to lie before."

"But why would you do that?" asked Pip.

"Because whoever it was knew something about us. About something bad we'd done." Naomi explained through the cracks in her voice, hands shaking as they fiddled with the hem of her shirt. Soon, her hands came up from the hem, slapping to her face as she sobbed into them, Cara wasting no time to comfort her sister.

"Max?" Pip said.  

Evelyn knew exactly what was coming next. Every detail. Mostly because she blackmailed Max into telling her.

"We, um ... Something bad happened on New Year's Eve 2013. Something we did."

"We?" Naomi spluttered. "We, Max? It happened because of you. You got us into it, and you're the one that made us leave him there."

"You're lying. We all agreed at the time," he said.

"Don't gaslight her, Maxwell," Evelyn mumbled.

"I was scared."

"Naomi?" Pip said.

"We... um, we went to this party out in Stamford," she said. "And we all had a lot to drink. When the party got shut down, it was impossible to find a rider; we couldn't get a taxi, and it was freezing outside. So Max, who'd driven us there, said he hadn't actually drunk too much and insisted on driving. He convinced me, Millie, and Jake to get in the car with him. It was so stupid. Oh god, if I could go back and change one thing in my life, it would be this..." She trailed off.

"Sal wasn't there?" Pip asked.

"No Sal. I wish he had been because he'd never let us be that stupid. He was with his brother that night. So Max, who was just as drunk as the rest of us, was driving too fast up the highway. It was like four a.m. and there were no other cars on the road. And then"—more tears flowed—"and then..."

"This man comes out of nowhere," Max said.

"No, he didn't! He was standing well back on the shoulder, Max. You lost control of the car."

"Well, then, we remember very differently," Max snapped. "We hit him and spun. When we stopped, I pulled over and went to check on him."

"There was so much blood, oh my god," Naomi wept. "And his legs were bent in all the wrong directions."

"He looked dead, Ok?" Max said. "We checked to see if he was breathing, and we thought he wasn't. We decided it was too late for him. too late to call an ambulance. And we'd all been drinking, so we knew how much trouble we'd be in. Criminal charges, prison. So we all agreed and we left."

"You made us," Naomi mumbled. "You got inside our heads and scared us into agreeing, because you knew you were the one really responsible."

"We all agreed, Naomi!" Max shouted, his face turning red. "We drove back to my house 'cause my parents were in Dubai. We cleaned off the car and then crashed it again into the tree before my driveway."