They'll Never Catch Us by Jessica Goodman

Author:Jessica Goodman [Goodman, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2021-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

18

STELLA

By the time I get to school on Monday, all I want to do is practice. It’s been almost a week since Coach held an all-squad session and I can feel my muscles rebelling, softening. But when I see the reporters, relegated to the patch of browning grass across the street, which is technically not Edgewater High property, I know this week will be shot.

Principal Pérez looks like she’s giving them a stern talking-to, but that doesn’t stop a perky woman with a mousy-brown updo. “Raven Tannenbaum!” she yells. “Do you think Mila ran away like your sister?” Raven blinks but doesn’t say anything as she picks up her pace, hiding her face behind a shield of red hair.

“Stella Steckler!” calls a white man with pimples and curly blond hair. “How did you feel about losing to Mila in the first meet of the year?”

I grit my teeth as Ellie wraps her hand around my elbow, a signal to not engage, to keep moving forward.

“So what if I lost to her?” I mutter under my breath. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

Ellie nods solemnly, but twitches with discomfort. Dark bags hang under her eyes and her shoulders sag like she’s exhausted by all of this. “They want to turn you into a monster,” she whispers.

She said the same thing last year, after I came home from the police station, where Parker kept me in that cold, stark conference room for hours, questioning me about Allison Tarley, making me relive the worst five seconds of my life, telling me things about myself as if I were a specimen, an object.

“You’re competitive, Stella,” he said, his voice calm and deep. “We’ve known that for years. You’ll stop at nothing to win, to be the best, to take others down. Isn’t that right?” He looked so much like his son Calvin in that moment, tough and broad, handsome and cocky.

That’s what made me shut down and stop talking. I wasn’t going to convince him of the truth. It was obvious then. My silence didn’t help, I learned later. But it was my coping mechanism. How could it have been the wrong one?

“They want to turn you into a monster,” Ellie said at the time. Both of us had hair that was wet from the shower and she curled up against the foot of my bed. “You should pretend you’re not.”

Now, in the halls, lockers slam with urgency. Everything seems to be moving slower, like we’re all wading through molasses. There’s a heightened sense of worry simmering below the surface. Students look at each other with wide-open eyes, as if to ask, Again?

We were all in elementary school when the murders happened, and middle school when Shira went missing. But I remember what it was like, how even the wind blowing a door open would make teachers jump, how the girls were given curfews, how our parents installed deadbolts on the doors.

When we get to the junior lockers, Ellie shoves an elbow in my side and gives me a look.

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