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should be able to pass this to the right people. We should be able to run like frightened kids, to point and pant and cower someplace safe. The real truth shouldn’t be for us to discover. Laura Wishart has been hanged, and Jasper Jones is in serious trouble. Somehow I am here among it.
    Jasper softens. He squats and roughly ruffles his own hair.
    “But, Charlie, just so you know. I mean, if you stick with me here, if you help me, nuthin is going to happen to you. At all. I mean that. If something happens, I’ll do everything it takes to keep you clear, orright? You don’t have to worry about that. And that’s a promise.”
    I nod again.
    “You got to get brave, Charlie. It’s all it is. I know you unnerstand what I bin saying and why I’m in so much trouble. Me, I had to get brave in a hurry. Since I can remember. I had to do it all real quick, Charlie. Some days I feel so
old
, you know?”
    “Yeah, I know it,” I say.
    “See, everyone here’s afraid of something and nuthin. This town, that’s how they live, and they don’t even know it. They stick to what they know, what they bin told. They don’t unnerstand that it’s just a choice you make.”
    I raise my head and look Jasper in the eye.
    “I mean, I know people have always bin afraid of me. Kids specially, but old people too. Wary. They reckon I’m just half an animalwith half a vote. That I’m no good. And I always used to think,
why
? They don’t even
know
me. Nobody does. It never made sense. But then I realized, that’s exactly why. That’s all it is. It’s so stupid, Charlie. But it means I don’t hate them anymore.”
    How eerie and distilled this night is. How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snow-dome paperweight that’s been shaken. There’s a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it’s now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris. A book I knew by heart, torn up and thrown into the air. Everything has been rocked with such rigor and tumult. Everything has been uprooted and broken. A dozen disasters at once. I can’t begin to collect the pieces and try to set them as they were. It’s like I’ve got to crawl out of my own eggshell and emerge. And, a little like Jasper Jones, I no longer have the luxury of choosing the right time. I can’t unfurl from my cocoon when I’m good and ready. I’ve been pulled out early and left in the cold.
    We nurse this strange, empty silence for a while. Our heads turned away from the tree.
    Jasper finally suggests that we have one last look around. One final survey of the surrounds before we disrupt them forever. I don’t object, but I stick right by him, shrinking when we approach Laura’s body.
    I’m too distracted to really concentrate on details. I don’t even really know what I’m supposed to be looking for. Footprints, I guess. Evidence. A scrawled confession. Anything. But everything is so unfamiliar anyway that I have no idea what’s inconsistent. It just reaffirms how hopeless this mess is. How firmly the odds are stacked against us. Jasper frowns and bends slightly as he walks.
    We scour the whole area by moonlight. It doesn’t take too long. When Jasper finishes inspecting the last of the surrounding shrubs, running his hands across their skeletal branches, he nods, satisfied.
    “Well, they must have come in the same way I always do. Same way we come in before,” he says finally, motioning toward the wattlebush, deep in thought. He points. “But look, there’s some grass up tillthis bottlebrush which looks like it’s bin trampled. Not much, though. I dunno. It could mean anythin. Maybe she tried to escape. Maybe not. We don’t know. We don’t know anythin. We don’t even know if they hanged her. Proper, I mean.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, anythin could have happened here, Charlie. They might’ve killed her and then strung her up to make it look like she