The Skylar Experiment : The "X" in Apex

Chapter Thirty-Five - Mutual Trust

The only event that cheered me up was to come back next Monday to join Emma on the field. She'd lost weight. The textbooks she held looked heavier than herself. She looked like she could be knocked down by a gust of wind, and it scared me to hell and back.

"How are you feeling?" I asked her on our path to the doors.

"Tired," she said. She'd foregone makeup. Her hair was left natural. "I don't know how I'm going to catch up with all the homework."

People stared, and I wished I could shield Emma from their prying eyes. Even the teachers had a hard time blinking away when she strolled in. Kids whispered in the bathrooms; some were angry that no one else survived. Emma ignored it all, but I could tell it affected her. At lunchtime, she poked around her food aimlessly.

Then the expected happened.

The police demanded to speak with her—both of us, in fact.

At the station, they broke us apart into different rooms. In their own words, it wasn't a criminal investigation. The goal was to give us privacy with the officer and whatnot. I had some explaining to do, considering I was supposed to follow the crowd and I might have seen something out there. Fifteen minutes in, I'd described finding Emma hidden in the rotting log.

"Was she conscious?"

"Kind of." I knew where the man was going with it, luckily we'd prepared our stories.

She found out about the picture at lunch before I could gently warn her. Some overexcited idiot came to our table, babbling about it and assuming we'd all seen it. The whole school had seen it at least once, except her.

So he was more than glad to oblige when Emma wanted clarifications. She opened her phone, the blood drained from her face, and she excused herself to the bathroom. When I caught up, she was retching her lunch in a stall.

"You carried her all that way to the car?"

"I helped her walk a part of the way, but then I had to carry her when she got weak. She's like, one hundred pounds soaking wet. That's when I found Ethan who was still sending off the remaining kids."

The officer detached his eyes from his notes. "How did Ben Hayward get there?"

"Ethan called before. Cars were full, and he needed another one to get home but when he saw us..."

He scribbled that down. Nobody could verify it was Luc's Rover unless they checked some CCTV footage if it hadn't been wiped. People like Adam could confirm his presence at Homecoming if the cops bothered, but as far as I was concerned, I didn't see him after the dance.

The idea of having his name in these records, of people probing about him for any reason, raised the hair on my neck.

"And you saw nothing in the woods while you searched for your friend?"

"No."

The police officer slid a printed photo across the surface. "One of your classmates took this the same night. This doesn't seem familiar at all?"

I ran my fingers over the famous hunched creature behind the trees, pretending to think hard. "No... I have no clue what this is, and it was too dark for me to see much. I heard screams and howls. We all did. But I was lucky."

He leaned back in his chair, silent all of a sudden. It was a man approaching his forties, I think, with a handsome rugged face but a hoarse voice, almost like that of a smoker. I'd seen him at the memorial service talking to my teacher. His badge read Bauer.

I held his stare, my stretched arm on the table the only thing between us.

He examined my timeline once more, and my patience started to chafe. Bauer gave a subtle nod to his papers and clicked his pen. "That's going to be it for today, Miss Addison. Thank you for your time."