By the Skin of Her Teeth

At 7:51 a.m., Mr. Feng heard you zap yourself on a stripped wire.

You were always screwing with those old trucks in Evie Reed’s back lot; he didn’t think anything of it. He would’ve been more concerned if he went a full day without hearing you cuss out a corroded spark plug. It was part of the ambience as he smoked out his bedroom window: the buzz of bees, the rustle of leaves, and you, elbow deep in an engine, yanking pistons out with pliers and cursing every time you got burned.

At 7:58 a.m., Harrison Levitt saw you roll through the stop sign outside the hardware store.

He’d taken you for more of a complete-stop-and-look-both-ways kind of guy, but there wasn’t anyone else on the road. The truck you drove was rusty, dusty, and old as hell. It didn’t look like you were on a mad tear through town — you even shot him a pearly grin when he caught your eye. Who could you hurt, really, doing twenty-two on the cracked pavement while Harry unlocked the doors?

At 7:59 a.m., old Mrs. Molloy smelled burnt rubber bleeding through the begonias she was tending.

You must have picked up speed the closer you got to the town line. The odor was acrid, gas and oil and something like decay. Mrs. Molloy said it didn’t go away when she buried her nose in the blossoms. Her hearing’s been shot for a decade, but she could tell just from the tang on the air that someone had taken a turn way too hard for such an early hour.

At 8:02 a.m., Emi Ortiz felt the ground shake as you left behind the only trace of you that anybody could find.

You hit that big puddle, the one by the diner that fills with tadpoles in the spring, and hopped a curb when you whipped past the post office, stamping damp tire tracks over the July-dry grass. According to Emi, the mailbox chattered when your wheels hit the road. One of the screws holding it down wiggled loose.

I know the whole “Why’d you run if you’re not guilty” thing doesn’t always hold water, but I can’t help feeling like it does right now. I mean, you didn’t just run, Jamie. You stole a truck. Hot-wired it and everything. Innocent people don’t hot-wire trucks. Innocent people don’t hide what you hid.

The cops were on our doorstep at 8:25, but they turned back the clock when they questioned me. They told me their timestamps; I didn’t share mine.

At 7:44 a.m., Maura Landry’s parents found her bed cold and empty when they tried to wake her up for school.

At 7:54 a.m., I found her teeth.

All of them. The whole set. Under a floorboard, Poe-style. Did they gnash at you when you tried to sleep? Is that what made you run?

I swear I wasn’t snooping when I found your hiding spot. My sock caught on the edge of it when I came around the side of your bed to throw back the covers. The you-sized lump of pillows under the duvet threw me for a second, because I thought they only did that in movies, but I shook it off pretty quick. I was more worried about my sock than I was about you. I looked down to check for a hole in it.

I probably would have ignored the floorboard entirely if the sun hadn’t caught that flash of silver just right. The splinter that drove itself under my thumbnail as I reached for it nearly kept me from digging, but I was beyond curious now. I plucked the sliver out with my teeth and grabbed at the board again, prying it up without incident this time. I figured maybe there’d be pot underneath, or a fake ID, or your birthday money so I’d stop stealing singles to turn into quarters at the arcade.

Nope. It was teeth.

I knew they were hers from the chip in one of the canines. We’d been jumping on her mom’s bed, two little monkeys, and she’d slipped on a pillow. She fell face-first into the wooden frame — mouth-first, really — and later she told me she could feel the pain flood across the roof of her mouth and down her throat like she’d housed a bottle of hot sauce. The tooth turned black two days later, then inexplicably back to white after a week, a bruise in a place I hadn’t known was possible to get one. I always wondered why it never fell out. It’s out now, though.

One of the molars had a silver filling. The sun still glinted off of it, winking at me, a smug little inside joke.

I put the board back and went for breakfast.

“Is he coming?” Mom asked, and you know what? There wasn’t so much as a second where I considered telling her the truth.

I should’ve, obviously. I should’ve screamed when I saw what you did.

“Nicki?” Mom glanced at me over her shoulder, pushing some eggs around in a pan.

I thought about your empty bed and the teeth in the floor, and I slid open the bread box, and I said, “He must be sick or something. He wouldn’t come out from under the covers.” Maybe if I’d said something else, something true, they could’ve caught you.

At 8:15, Mom got the call.

Everybody heard it through the grapevine that stretched from one end of town to the other. Missing and then found and then found dead, belly-up in the quarry, eyes wide open, teeth all gone.

Half the town stood in their lawns and on their porches; some were learning through the open windows of stopped cars in the middle of the street. Nobody was going to work anymore. No one was headed to school. I only caught a glimpse of it all before the police turned up with notepads at the ready and mustaches furrowed into frowns.

It’s funny, talking to the cops in a town this tiny. “State your relation to Jeremy Omundson,” Officer Engles said, like he wasn’t Johnny E. two pews ahead of us in church every Sunday. I told him you’re my brother; he wrote it down as if that were news to literally anyone. He wandered around your bedroom while he asked his questions, and I pressed my heel down hard on the floorboard. He never noticed.

It’s 11:42 now. The coffee Mom made for the officers has gone cold in the pot. You could be in Crescent City by now, or Clearwater, or maybe even Fort Rock if you floored it. I tried to picture you on the highway, but I couldn’t imagine what you’re driving. Neither could Harry when they questioned him; all he remembered was a withered air freshener hanging off the rearview.

Pretty genius to take one of Evie’s old junker trucks. Nobody knew what the hell she had rusting in that back lot, least of all her. The best she could give the cops when they asked what sort of car they should be looking out for was, “Maybe a Ford. Or a Chevy. Coulda been a Dodge, actually, come to think of it.” They asked her for a color, and she said, “No clue. I could hose ‘em all down and show you a rainbow, but right now, they’re plain brown. Dirt’ll do that.”

They might figure out for sure that it was you. They knew enough to come asking, at least. They know enough to keep trying to track you down. Did you leave something behind at the scene, but remember to tuck away the most damning pieces of evidence after prying them out of her head? Why’d you keep them? Why’d you do it? Where’d you go?

I guess I’m just wondering if you’re gonna explain it all. The teeth and the truck and the girl in the water. Every minute, the time ticks up in the corner of my screen. Every minute, you get further away.

Write me back, Jamie.

Tell me why.

Sent 11:50 a.m.