No, I definitely couldn’t say that last part. I wasn’t even sure it was true.
Besides, I still ached for Tyler.
Simon didn’t say anything, and he didn’t move, so we just stood there, staring into the darkness.
When I finally broke the silence again, my voice came out resigned rather than critical. “She’s crazy, Simon. Griffin. I talked to her, and she’s out of her mind. What were you thinking bringing us here?”
He sighed, a breathy sound that only added to the calm of the night. “She’s not crazy, she’s just . . . unhappy.”
“Unhappy my ass,” I said, glancing sideways at him. “I get the sense she’d like to play target practice with your skull. Besides, I’m unhappy too. You know we’ve been in lockdown ever since we got here, don’t you? How long’s this gonna last?” I doubted anyone, not even Nyla, could hear us, but I kept my voice hushed all the same. “And what’s all this about Willow and Thom knowing each other? Griffin says Willow’s the reason none of you are friends anymore.”
I half expected a denial, but he just nodded. “It’s true. But probably not for the reasons Griffin said. She has a way of twisting things around.”
I guessed that much already. Griffin seemed like the type who enjoyed manipulating words and facts until they suited her. “She didn’t say why, just that it was Willow’s fault. That everything would’ve been fine if Willow hadn’t come along.”
Simon smiled sadly. “Of course that’s the way she’d see it. Revisionists have a way of changing history to suit themselves.”
The sound of footsteps interrupted us, and Nyla appeared, wearing a Time’s up expression.
“Please,” I begged. “Just a few more minutes?”
She looked from me to Simon and then rolled her eyes. It was her reluctant way of giving in. “Make it fast. You have five minutes.”
When she was gone again, I said to Simon, “Okay, so what does Griffin have against Willow?”
Simon caught hold of my hand as he dragged me deeper into the desert. His fingers were strong and warm, and as much as I wanted to uncoil my fingers so I could lace them through his, I stubbornly refused, keeping my fist tightly curled.
He spoke more urgently now that Nyla had put us on a clock, and at first his story mirrored Griffin’s exactly as he explained how he and Thom and Griffin had once worked together. “But it wasn’t Willow’s fault,” he insisted at the point where their versions deviated. “Willow didn’t do anything wrong, other than the fact that she was different from the other girls Thom and I were sent after. She wasn’t like anyone we’d ever come across before. She didn’t have that lost-puppy sense about her that most of the new Returned had. She wasn’t freaking out the way most of us do.”
I might have taken offense, if he hadn’t included himself in that description as well.
“Here she’d been taken and experimented on and then returned, and she just . . . what?” He shrugged more to himself than to me. “She just accepted it, the way you would that the sky is blue and a bear shits in the woods.” He looked me right in the eye and nodded. “Yeah, that was it. It was that no-nonsense thing about her. Willow’s biggest fault, at least in Griffin’s eyes, was that Thom and I admired her. That and the fact that Thom and I thought maybe she could work with us, the same way Griff did.”
My stomach lurched at the casual way he said Griff. I wasn’t born yesterday—girls like “Griff,” with their push-up bras and badass attitudes, had a way of wiggling their way inside guys’ heads, and I couldn’t stop from wondering if she was there now—in Simon’s head.
But Simon was oblivious to what was going on inside my head. “No matter what we said,” he continued, “Griffin hated Willow from the get-go. And she went out of her way to undermine her every chance she got.
“At first I thought she’d get over it. I mean, just because we were taking an interest in Willow, that didn’t mean we’d replaced Griffin. But Griffin was never like that. She had to be the best at everything. The center of the universe. She didn’t like Thom and me having our interests divided by the new girl.” He was quiet for several long seconds, and then he said, “I just never realized how far Griffin would go to get Willow out of the way.” Simon spat in the sand, as if the memory were too sour to swallow.
“What did she do?”
“At the time, Blackwater was having serious problems with the Daylighters. That Agent Truman guy wasn’t around back then, at least not that I know of, but there was this other guy, and he was just as relentless. He always seemed to know about our recruiting missions even before we got there. Franco warned us all to be careful every time we left the camp. But no matter how many precautions we took, that agent was always one step ahead of us, and he would snag the new Returned before we could get to them.” He shook his head. “We started to suspect someone inside the camp was feeding him information.”
“And Griffin thought it was Willow?” I asked, piecing the puzzle together myself.
He shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t think she ever really believed it was Willow, but that’s what she told Franco. She convinced him that all our trouble started about the time Willow showed up, which was pretty much the truth. She said Willow shouldn’t be trusted.”
“And he believed Griffin?”