Free Accomplice by Eireann Corrigan Page A

communicate with others?” I wanted to raise my hand and tell her about Cam. I wanted to raise my hand and tell her about me. Dean did something kind of kickass, though. He opened his mouth to talk,twisted his lips, and started jerking his head up and down. He looked like our old dog Honey did when she had a seizure at the groomer’s shop. At one point, Dean clutched at his own throat as if he was trying to physically pull out the words. And then stopped all of a sudden, stared at her, and said, “Nope.”
    And I thought, Go, Dean West . I’m not saying we transformed him into the kind of kid who didn’t take any shit from Pseudo Shrink. It seemed like that’s who Dean was all along. But maybe it helped that he knew that someone noticed him for better reasons than the words he couldn’t say.
    They came for Dean during sixth period.
    Usually they called a kid down to the office over the loudspeaker. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Maybe someone saw you tagging a bathroom stall. Or maybe you had an orthodontist’s appointment. But Mr. Gardener came to escort Dean out of class himself. A man I didn’t recognize stood behind him in the doorway. And then I saw the blue uniforms of the two cops in the hallway. It wasn’t just weird—it was wrong.
    Word spread. By the time eighth period let out, most of the junior class stood clumped in clots, blocking the artery of the school’s main corridor. Kate threw her arms around me. “Oh God, Finn. Can you believe it?”
    No. I thought of how Chloe and I had made a to-do list, just like we did before presenting at the 4-H fair each year. And how nothing like this had been on it.
    “He’s an animal.” That was Maddie’s contribution. Kate looked grateful for it.
    “He’s a psycho,” she corrected. “We all know he’s a psycho.”
    The second muffin Dean left in the library stacks was banana walnut. He left it on a napkin and on the napkin, he’d written, DEAR YOU—THIS HAS NUTS, JUST IN CASE YOU’RE ALLERGIC. PLEASE BE CAREFUL. I remembered how Chloe’s peals of laughter earned us a hushing from the librarian. Her whole face had shone. “He’s crazy!” Chloe had said. I’d agreed with her.
    This wasn’t what we meant. Clusters of kids stood around the hallway crafting theories about the kid most of them couldn’t be bothered to listen to. “He must have totally snapped,” I heard someone say. “They found a bunch of pictures in his locker.”
    “I heard the secretaries talking in the office—the pictures were all ripped up. He’d torn them in pieces.” The voices kept crashing around me and I felt like I was drowning. I wanted to claw my way out of the school and sprint to my grandmother’s house. To take Chloe by the shoulders and shake her until she agreed to follow me up from the basement.
    I knew exactly what pictures they’d found torn up in Dean’s locker. I took those pictures. The notes had gone on for weeks and we thought he knew, anyway. But Chloe wanted him to know for sure. So we printed out an eight-by-ten picture of Chloe’s face and cut it out so it looked like puzzle pieces. He probably knew as soon as he saw a strand of her white-blond hair, but we doled out the pieces over two weeks. It was when she was posing for the picture that I figured out that Dean wasn’t just a game to her. She never cared what she looked like in photos, but when we took that one, Chloe posed.
    The pictures couldn’t have been the only reason the cops came for Dean. I tried to keep reassuring myself, but all I kept seeing was his puzzled face looking up at Mr. Gardener calling from the doorway. Kate kept rubbing my arms with her hands. “Finn. Do you wanna sit down? You look like you’re about to pass out.” I ended up sliding down to sit on the floor with my back to the lockers. “You’ve been so strong, Finn.” Kate was cooing at me like she was the white Oprah. “Let go.”
    Sometime in the next twenty years, Kate was going to grow up into