Free Run Away by Laura Salters

shaped like nothing, really, not a perfect heart or five-­point star like in songs or poems. Just a splodge of pigment that she had tried to lick off when she was tiny, thinking it was melted chocolate. She’d always had a rampant sweet tooth.
    For some reason, she couldn’t get that birthmark out of her head. Would it still exist? Would it still be a quirk of nature, a sign of life, imperfectly printed on his skin? Or was the death long enough ago now that it had started to melt away into the earth?
    Kayla had once voiced a similar thought to Sam. He’d found it strange, even morbid, that she was so concerned with the physical details, not the emotional implications. She didn’t know why, really. Thinking about it from an scientific perspective seemed to hurt less than the alternative. She could deal with the fact that Gabe’s body would eventually become a part of the earth—­a simple shift in energy that’d ultimately claim us all. But what she couldn’t grasp was the fact that he’d never pop his head around her door again to ask if she’d like a cup of tea (strong, with milk and two sugars, just how she liked it) or flop down onto her bed, sinking into the memory-­foam mattress and insisting that she had to listen to this new band he’d discovered on YouTube.
    More than just simple grief, the unbearable boredom of being pent up in her parents’ enormous house all day was suffocating Kayla. Nobody told you how dull it was to be in mourning. Did it make her a monster to admit that?
    It had been nearly four weeks with no clues, no new developments. No reason for hope. The police hadn’t contacted her with any further questions since her meeting with Shepherd. Even though she hadn’t been a suspect for a while, she’d still expected them to be in touch again. She shook off the uneasy feeling that had settled on her shoulders. Shepherd’s strangely disengaged demeanor had left her cold.
    With nothing else to do, she’d read every magazine imaginable, devoured every book on her parents’ bookshelf, given the cleaner a hand with the housework, and even honed her baking skills to perfection with a rather impressive Victoria sponge cake, which her nan had crowned the finest in all of England.
    She hadn’t been out running yet. She used to love it, pounding the English countryside with her beat-­up, muddy trainers. She was never very fast, or particularly graceful, but there was something therapeutic about the rhythm of her thudding feet and deep breathing. Her mum had bought her pair after pair of shiny new Nikes, in vivid shades of neon pink and girly turquoise, but she still loved her old school PE trainers, molded to her feet with hundreds and hundreds of miles built into their worn-­down soles and fraying toes.
    Running gave her time to think, to plug in her headphones and put one foot in front of the other until she’d left every bad grade, traumatic breakup, and argument with her drunken mother behind her on the grassy fields, muddy trails, and potholed roads. But she had a feeling that now, her issues were too great to be cured by the simplest of remedies, and that terrified her. She was too scared to confirm her fears—­to be stranded in a field, miles from home, with only her own thoughts for company.
    No, she didn’t feel ready to run yet. Instead she did something she hadn’t done in a long time: opened the shiny laptop her parents had bought her for passing her A levels. It was wafer thin and ultra-­professional, and all Kayla had ever done on it was read pop culture blogs. Until now.
    Forget what Dr. Myers had said. She needed someone to blame, and she was going to find them.
    Aran Peters. The sum total of Kayla’s communication with the wiry-­haired, pointy-­faced Aran had been his attempts to fondle her blossoming bosom at their end-­of-­school dance, age thirteen and a quarter. Kayla had told her friends she batted him away in disgust. She’d actually granted him an overdress