Free Blood Will Tell by April Henry

but don’t talk to the media unless I’m there.”
    Harriman cleared his throat. “And I know some of you will be calling home or texting or whatever on your break. Remember that this is an active investigation. You can’t say anything about who the victim was, you can’t say she was alive when she was first found, you can’t say she was stabbed. You can’t even say she was a she. You know the rules. Even once it’s been officially released to the media, you can only talk about what they’ve already reported. Nothing more.” His hand cut through the air. “No further details.”
    By the time Nick got to the sack lunches, all the ones with “ham” scribbled on them were gone. He reached for the last turkey, but Colton snatched it up with a triumphant grin. Great. All that was left was vegetarian. Nick did not see the point in refusing to eat meat. Prey and predator. It was a fact of life.
    From his sack lunch, Nick pulled out the bag of chips—plain, which was more bad luck, because he saw other people with Doritos—and began to chomp away. While they had been searching, the crowd of onlookers had grown. They watched intently as Harriman photographed the mitten, first close up and then from a distance.
    Nick spotted a familiar face at the far end of the crime scene tape. Kyle. He walked over, conscious of the stares and holding his head a little higher because of them. For once, he didn’t even mind the helmet.
    â€œHey, Kyle, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” He ducked under the tape and they moved off to one side. Heads turned in their direction. A barrel-chested guy in his midthirties was making a show of not listening.
    Kyle kept his eyes on Harriman. “We’ve never had a murder in our neighborhood before. I decided to come over on my lunch break.”
    â€œYou won’t have much of a break, getting here and back.” It was at least a ten-minute drive one-way.
    Shrugging, his brother took off his cap and smoothed back his hair before replacing it. His curls were darker and looser than Nick’s. People sometimes thought he was Italian. Not like Nick, with his light Afro that mostly just confused people. Sometimes they even asked, “What are you exactly?” with a tone that implied he was a different species.
    Wilson, where Nick went to school, was mostly white, with some Hispanic and Asian kids thrown in. He and Kyle had gone to grade school in a poorer but more diverse part of town, while their mom had saved every spare penny. Finally, the summer before Nick entered sixth grade, she had been able to buy a tiny house in Southwest Portland, which had better schools and less crime.
    At his new middle school, Nick started day one knowing nobody, since all his friends were across the river in a different school. He was skinny, he couldn’t sit still, and he didn’t look like everyone else. The other kids, who wanted to prove that they did fit in, made him a target. That first year, he was called names, spit on, pushed around. One kid stuck gum in his hair. His mom ended up just cutting it out, so his crazy curls looked even crazier. Another kid shot staples at him with a rubber band. Nick never knew if it was because of the color of his skin or because he was a stranger or because of who he was underneath those superficial things. Maybe for all those reasons.
    During his time at Wilson, Kyle seemed to fit in far better than Nick ever would. He was a pretty good athlete, and he always had a girlfriend or two. He didn’t worry, didn’t get upset, didn’t seem to care that much about anything. Maybe that was why even though he was new, too, he never seemed to get picked on. No fun in teasing someone who didn’t care.
    When trying to keep his head down didn’t work, Nick had started getting louder. He looked for ways to gain attention. He clowned around, imitated teachers,