by Emily Henry
“How can I be here for them when I can’t even be here for myself? What about what I need?”
Sometimes I thought, She wishes it was him instead. Sometimes I thought, She wishes it had been any of us but Mark.
The joke was, it felt like it had been. Even in his coma, Mark was more real to our parents than Arthur and me. We were ghosts drifting around our house.
We’d faded from existence at home, and in return, home had faded for us. That was probably what had driven us outside that summer, onto bikes and over the fences that circled neighborhood pools, into dark movie theaters through the exits as paying patrons filed out, and across poison-ivy-thick woods.
We spent every waking moment with the living ghosts of Splendor. Remy Nakamura, Levi Lindquist, Sofía Perez, and Nick Colasanti Jr.
At thirteen, Levi was already pushing six feet, with a bleached bowl cut and an obsession with cinema.
He had this idea to make a parody documentary about rock climbers.
Sheriff Nakamura drove us to the park where he used to run, before the accident made it hard for him to walk without pain. The woods there were scrubby and ugly, and as we were winding through them, Nick said, “If this is splendid, I’d rather be ordinary.”
Levi launched into the earliest incarnation of his British-documentary-narrator voice. “In a town such as this, brimming with splendor, our six travelers found that to be ordinary was the greater challenge.”
Then Nick kicked Levi’s butt, and Levi screeched, “NICKY JR.!” in an equally poor imitation of Nick’s mom, screaming to him from the window when he ran out to meet us in his driveway.
In the months since we’d become friends, we hadn’t seen the inside of Nick’s house, and we never saw his mom any closer than that either—she didn’t come outside, like, ever—but she’d sometimes yell through the glass: Nicky Jr., your phone! Or Nicky Jr., don’t you go forgetting your house key!
“Like it’s even possible to get locked out,” Nick would sometimes grumble. “Where you gonna be when I get home, Ma? Paris?”
He was allowed to say that sort of thing about her, but we weren’t. Our families were off limits, and Nick’s especially so—the rest of the town talked about the Colasantis enough.
But the accent—the imitation—he didn’t seem to mind that. He happily screeched back at Levi, “You’re not my real ma, Ma!” as the two of them raced down the path.
When we finally found the sun-bleached boulders, they were bigger than I’d expected, and stacked on top of one another in a haphazard way.
I was the youngest and smallest of the group, and nursing a fear of heights I’d done my best to hide.
I made it to the top of the first rock, but the second was smoother and higher. The others topped it with a bit of knee-scraping, but my hands started to sweat, and my heart raced, and soon, I was too terrified to move.
“You absolutely don’t have to do it, Franny,” Sofía said. “If you don’t want to, don’t let them pressure you.”
“You’ve got this!” Levi assured me.
Nick tried a different approach. “Don’t be a baby, Franny!”
“We won’t let you get hurt,” Remy kept promising.
Levi put his camera down. “Just get halfway. Remy and I will pull you up.”
They lay on their stomachs and held their arms out, and I started to pace, and then cry.
I looked to Arthur. I wanted him to tell me it would be okay, or suggest I climb down and wait at the bottom. Instead his brow furrowed; his freckly nose scrunched. His voice came out sharp. “Climb, Franny.”
I shook my head.
“Climb, Franny,” Arthur said, more loudly.
I ran my hands through my humidity-frizzed hair.
Please, I thought at him. Tell me you won’t let me get hurt.
Arthur set his jaw. “No one is going to help you. Don’t you get that? No one. It has to be you.”
The tears started sliding down my cheeks, but I took hold of the rock. I stepped into a divot and pushed myself up, once, then again. I moved higher, limbs shaking, tears falling. I was almost there when Arthur’s hand caught my arm. With Nick’s and Remy’s help, he hauled me over the lip and pulled me onto my feet.
My brother gripped the back of my neck and stared into my eyes. His gaze was glassy, but then he blinked and it hardened. There was no softness left for me in him.
Something inside me broke. He was right.
No one was going to help us. We were on our own now.
Arthur pulled me into a rough hug, and I cried into his shoulder for the first and last time that summer. Our friends turned away, busying themselves with whatever they could find.
They knew this was the kind of thing you didn’t acknowledge in Splendor. They let me feel my pain alone.
They knew that was what I wanted, because we were the same.
THREE
HALFWAY TO THE CAR, I realized my mistake. I’d spent five years with the same weight resting below my collarbone, and in six hours, I’d nearly forgotten to expect it there.
My hand went to my bare neck. No nautilus shell, no alloy chain.
I’d lost Mark’s necklace.
The sirens were wailing closer, and the others were already piling into the car, but I stopped dead.
“Fran!” Remy screamed when he realized I wasn’t right behind him.
“My necklace!” I turned, scanning the dew-dusted grass. “I must have dropped it.”
“I’m not going to jail, Franny,” Nick screeched at me. “Get in!”
“We’ll come back for it,” Sofía said.
I jogged across the yard, searching the grass for the smooth spiral of the seashell.
“Come on, Franny,” Levi yelled. He was already in the car, Droog’s muddy paws balanced on his mauve pants.
“We have to come back anyway,” Arthur yelled. “We’ll find it then.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” Nick demanded. “I’m not coming anywhere near this place again.”
Sofía smacked his arm. “Of course we’ll come back. Franny, just get in!”
Something glinted in the grass off to my left, just inside the range of trees at the muddy edge of the yard. I ran toward it, picked up the bit of metal before I even realized none of us had been over there last night.
My stomach jerked at the object’s cold weight. A bullet.
A handful more were scattered in the mud, in a spray along a series of boot prints.
My gaze trailed the prints from the woods and across the gravel road, where they vanished only to reappear on the far side and lead up to the fence, though further left than where we’d climbed it.
None of us had gone near these muddy prints.
My pulse spiked. Had someone else been here last night? Could they could tell us what we’d missed, what had happened in those six lost hours?
I scanned the length of the fence for any sign of life, but if anyone had seen what happened, they were gone now.
“FRANNY!” Nick screeched over the sirens. “NOW, OR I’M HIJACKING THIS CAR AND LEAVING YOUR GAH-DAMN ASS!”
I tucked the bullet into my pocket and sprinted back to the car.
Remy peeled backward down Jenkins, then dropped back to one mile per hour under the speed limit once we were on the cross street. He tossed his phone at Levi. “Text my dad. Tell him we all fell asleep at your house. Hopefully we’ll beat him there.”
“If someone saw a bunch of teenagers trespassing at an electrical plant and called it in,” Levi said, already typing, “the sheriff will respond to that first. I’m sure we’re fine!”
Levi, as a rule, was as upbeat as his splashy wardrobe.
“All the more reason we shouldn’t be here,” Sofía said. She took a deep breath. “We broke the law.”
“Will someone tell Handsom
e Remy to speed up?” Nick yelped. “We’re not driving through the main hallway of an old folks’ home.”
“No,” Remy snapped, “but I am driving six people and a dog around in a tiny car, after breaking like four laws and missing my curfew. I’m not getting pulled over for speeding!”
To me, Sofía’s parents and Remy’s seemed like harsh disciplinarians, but once when I’d said that to Arthur, he’d scrunched his brow and scowled at me. “We used to have rules too, Franny, remember? It’s because their parents still give a shit.”
I’d done my best to forget that there was a before, a time when cussing might earn Mark a mouthful of soap, when riding our bikes home two hours after Mom had told us to be back for dinner would result in a weekend with a list of chores and no video games.
Now we didn’t have rules. We also didn’t have family dinners.
“Take this next turn, Remy,” Arthur said. “It’s faster.”
Sofía reached around me to roll the window down a couple more inches. A series of purple welts branched across her hand, the same kinds of burns Arthur and I had. Through the back of the headrest, a similar angry pattern spread up the back of Levi’s neck.
What had happened to us?
I touched the markings on my hand. They didn’t hurt. At least there was that.
I craned my neck to look one last time toward the twisted metal and misty gravel, and the towers gleaming in the early light.
It didn’t look malevolent, but something about it made my stomach turn, like my body was remembering what my mind refused to.
The siren faded behind us as we drove in silence. No music, just the whirring of the engine and the mourning doves cooing and Nick drumming out a restless pattern on the foggy window.
“It must’ve been a piece of the comet,” Sofía said finally. “Some kind of . . . trapped energy.”
“Right.” Nick’s accent thickened and his bulgy eyes rolled. “That explains everything.”
Remy’s gaze caught mine in the rearview mirror. His face was pale and drawn. He shook his head, but whatever he was silently communicating, I wasn’t getting it.
“Once everyone has breakfast, we’ll feel better,” Levi said. “I have donuts at my house. I’ll make a French press and—”
“Give it a rest, dude,” Nick said. “Not every occasion calls for a party at your empty McMansion! We just got, like, brain-melted by space junk, and some of us might not want to go watch Citizen freakin’ Kane!”
Levi slumped.
“Chill, Grandpa,” Remy said sharply. “You don’t need to be mean.”
“And we didn’t get brain-melted by space junk,” Sofía said. “There’s an explanation for . . . whatever happened.”
I thought back to the moment Arthur reached for the disc: the humidity of the night, the chirp of the crickets. And then—even in my memory—the flash of light and resulting pain were so intense I had to close my eyes and bite my hand to keep from screaming.
“Fran?” Remy said, eyes catching mine in the mirror. “Franny? Are you––”
“Just a yawn,” I lied. There was no use stoking everyone’s worries. Melting down never led to anything good. Besides, the memory was fading, the crushing red pain drawing back.
“Maybe we should go to the hospital,” Sofía said.
If there was one place I tried my best to avoid, it was the hospital. Not just because we were already drowning in bills from Mark’s five-year stay, but because everything about it brought me back to that horrible summer.
“No hospitals,” Arthur said firmly.
“I think . . . I think we just got shocked,” I said.
Levi gasped and turned around in his seat. “You did? By that thing?”
“You did too,” Nick grumbled. “Back of your neck.” Levi reached back, his thick fingers testing the ridge of welts. Beside me, Nick tugged the collar of his T-shirt down to look at his own strange burns, like fingers reaching between his clavicles.
Remy pulled his collar away and glanced between it and the road. “Me too. Stomach.”
“Not on those washboard skateboarding abs?” Nick grumbled, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“I think when it touched me, it got me,” Arthur said, “and then I guess it jumped from me to Franny, because she was touching me.” His face was flushed and his eyes were bright; he looked like he was hopped up on something.
“And then somehow to the rest of us?” Sofía sounded unconvinced.
“You’re the scientist,” Nick said. “What was that thing?”
“Passing science class doesn’t make me a scientist,” Sofía said.
Sofía had never merely passed a class.
“I don’t know what it was,” Arthur buzzed. “But it was something amazing.”
Remy and I shared a wary look. Amazing was one word for it.
We did not beat the sheriff to Levi’s house. When we got there, he was leaned against the hood of his squad car, his lips pressed into a tight line. Even with all his weight on his good leg, he looked like he might be in pain.
“Guess you guys probably can’t stay for breakfast then?” Levi said, as if Nick hadn’t already punched that idea off the table. Levi’s parents traveled so much that he essentially lived alone, and I sometimes got the feeling he was just waiting for the force majeure that would finally fuse the six of us together and eliminate any shred of alone time from his schedule.
Sheriff Nakamura crossed his arms over his beige-clad chest as we climbed out of the Metro, like clowns spilling from a prop car in an old comedy. Droog bounded toward him, wagging excitedly, and my stomach jarred at the trail of missing fur across her back haunch: a purple lightning-shaped scar that looked like it had long since healed.
Her too.
The thought made me dizzy. I shoved it away and focused on Sheriff Nakamura’s appraising gaze.
“If you’re sleep-driving, son,” he said, “you should probably go to a doctor.”
Remy grimaced. I looked around, wondering whether anyone was going to explain. Sofía looked like the effort not to spill everything was costing her something precious and irretrievable. After a minute, Sheriff Nakamura sighed and tipped his head toward the Metro. “You go on home, Rem. I’ll take the others.”
“I can take them,” Remy said.
“Oh, no you can’t,” his father contradicted.
Remy shot me a fierce look that made it clear there was something he needed to tell me but did no good whatsoever in communicating what that might be.
Nick apparently intercepted it. “What are you doing, dude?” he asked. “You look like you’re pooping your pants.”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” Remy said, face flushing.
The sheriff’s gaze flicked suspiciously between all of us. “You do realize I’m a police officer, right? If you’re trying to pass around secrets, don’t do it right in front of me. Now, Remy, go home. We’ll talk about this later.”
And that was that. Remy got back into the Metro, throwing me one last worried look, and the rest of us piled into the cruiser.
When we reached Sofía’s house, the sheriff put the car in park then turned to survey us. “I’m not going to ask you what you were doing,” he said. “I’m just going to hope to God I’m wrong, and that even if I’m not, we can’t find any evidence.” His eyes went specifically to Nick and Arthur, who were in the back seat with me. “You’re good kids. Don’t let yourselves get punished like bad adults.”
We nodded understanding, but honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about. Even if someone had seen us trespassing—the big-footed person with the dropped bullets?—they couldn’t possibly think we’d destroyed the tower.
How would we have done that? Shot it with a cannon?
Arthur opened his mouth as if to pose the question, but the sheriff held up a hand. “Not a pee
p, Arthur Schmidt. Remember that anything you say to me can and will be used against you in a court of law, so it’s best just not to say anything without your dad here. And possibly a lawyer.”
Still, Arthur couldn’t resist. Impulse control: not a thing for him. “What are we being accused of, exactly?”
Sheriff Nakamura sighed. “Nothing just yet. So let’s keep it that way.”
He caught my eyes in the rearview mirror and gave me a strained smile. It was unconvincing, his true emotions far overshooting his feigned one.
That was something I’d always loved about Remy and his dad, that their feelings were out in the open, honest, even when their words weren’t.
Ever since the accident, there’d been an anger in me that never burned quite strong enough to escape. It was stuck in my gut, embers that never died, even as layers of sadness and fear and whatever else got piled over it.
I was angry at the world, for what it had done to us. Angry it would never care. Angry that it would go on like it always had and never acknowledge what had changed.
The voiceless anger had started in the hospital waiting room, my throat aching with all the screams that couldn’t find a way out, and that was when I’d looked across the room and seen him.
A boy who couldn’t stop screaming. A thrashing boy. Fighting tooth and nail against what was happening, like he could stop it, or at least force the world to bear witness to his pain.
And I’d thought, You.
You are like me.
You feel what I feel.
* * *
* * *
The hospital parking lot was hot, even though it was only May, but the waiting room outside the ER was so cold that all the hair on my body jerked upright.
Voices echoed off the mint-green walls and the televisions playing the local news from the uppermost corners of the room. The ugly pink-and-green chairs along the walls went unused; everyone was standing.
A handful of police officers crowded around the double doors to the ICU, and people were clustered there, arguing with them.
My vision fuzzed as I scanned the mass of people for Mom. Where’d she go?
