Free Translucent by Dan Rix

holding on more firmly. “It can’t wait. If you know something, you need to tell me now .” He let go and forced his hands through his hair. “I’m sorry. Go. Just go.”
    “It’s not your fault,” I said, staring at my lap. “You need closure.”
    “I don’t give a damn about closure,” he said, shaking his head. “Closure is when you want to forget. I don’t want to forget her. I don’t ever want to forget. I don’t care that the police have given up. I’m never giving up, I can’t . . . because there’s something really fucked up going on here.” He raised his gaze to mine, eyes brimming with tears, and continued in a vicious whisper, “I’m going to find out who’s responsible for what happened, because they need to go to jail. I don’t care what anyone else says. I know Ashley was murdered.”
    “He knows,” I gasped, knotting my fingers in my hair. “Emory knows. He’s going to go to the police.”
    “Calm down, just calm down,” Megan raised her palms, “and tell me what happened.”
    After Emory dropped me off, I’d practically sprinted to my best friend’s house. The cleanup crew had visited her too, it turned out, although the contamination in her room wasn’t nearly as severe.
    Most of her stuff had been left untouched.
    I took a deep breath. “He knows about Ashley.”
    “Knows what?”
    “ Things , I don’t know . . . he knows things .”
    “Okay, slow down.” She pulled her door shut and continued in an urgent voice. “Tell me exactly what happened. Who told you this?”
    I pulled my fingers out of my hair, and a few strands came away stuck on them. I swiped them loose and went to the adjoining bathroom to wash my hands, lathering them in soap. Even though cold, the water felt warm on my shivering skin. “Megan, he knows.”
    “No one saw us,” she whispered. “The police stopped looking.”
    “Yeah, but they’re this all-American family, right? They’re rich, they’ve got connections.” I toweled off and returned to her bedroom, but now my crackling adrenaline seemed to gather in the tips of my fingers, and my thumb made little circles on the pad of my index finger. “They’re going to keep looking.”
    My skin still felt sticky.
    “What connections?” she said.
    “He drives this convertible. I don’t know, it looked expensive.” I pulled my fingers apart—and felt the sticky stuff pull apart into a strand—then pressed them together again, squishing it.
    “Let’s look up their family,” said Megan, sprawling on her bed and opening her laptop. “Emory Lacroix . . . see what his parents do.” She began typing.
    “Wait, don’t. Just don’t . . . looking him up, that seems suspicious.”
    She scrolled through the search hits. “You’re being paranoid. I’ll clear my browsing history.”
    “They’re the police .”
    “Looking up a hot senior isn’t weird, Leona. We’ll say we have a crush on him—hey, here’s his dad . . .” She gave a low whistle. “Yep, he’s loaded. Guy works for a defense contractor called Rincon Systems.”
    I slammed her laptop shut and glared at her. “ Don’t . We talked about this. No obsessing over the family, no looking them up.”
    “You’re the one obsessing,” she said.
    “I’m not obsessing, I’m worried.”
    Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know Emory drives a convertible?”
    I lowered my eyes, rolling whatever was on my finger into a ball. “I . . . kind of talked to him.”
    “You what? ”
    “I didn’t mean to,” I said guiltily. “I followed him after school, and . . . and he offered to give me a ride home. I didn’t know what to do.”
    “You are so stupid,” she breathed. “You are so fucking stupid.”
    Her words stung. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”
    “You’re telling me not to look him up because that would be showing a suspicious amount of interest in him, and yet you followed him. Are you insane?”
    “I wanted to see how it affected