by Sarah Gailey
“Did you get assigned this part of the grid?” I ask.
“No,” she says, and starts taking measured steps forward but not even pretending to look at the ground. “I just wanted to be over here. By you.”
I sneak a glance at her. “Cool.” I try to say it normally, but it comes out a whisper.
“How come you didn’t come over and say hello?” she asks, stepping over a tree root.
“I don’t know.” I look at a tree fifty feet ahead of us. Am I supposed to go around it? Of course I’m supposed to go around it, that’s a stupid thing to think, it’s not like I could go through it. “I didn’t think I was, um. I didn’t know if you wanted me to.”
“Why wouldn’t I want you to?” Roya asks. Her voice verges on impatient. I sneak a glance at her, but I can’t read her face at a sidelong angle like this, not while I’m trying to pretend I’m not looking.
I don’t say anything. I let myself get absorbed in picking my way around a four-inch-tall thistle. How do I answer a question like “Why wouldn’t I want you to?” The real answer is, “Because you secretly think you made a huge mistake yesterday,” or “Because you don’t like me the way you thought you did,” or “Because I’m a bad lay.” Or “Because I might have ruined our friendship by having sex with you and you don’t know how to tell me that you don’t want anything to do with me anymore.” But all of those answers will sound like I’m looking for her to comfort me, or like I’m needy, or like I expect yesterday to have meant something more than what it probably did. So I don’t say anything. Roya waits for me to answer her, but she’s not very good at waiting. She does a big I’m-being-patient sigh and then immediately loses her patience.
“Hey, about last night … ?” She says it slowly and my heart sinks. “If you didn’t, um. If you didn’t want to have that mean anything, or if you didn’t want it to be a thing …”
“No,” I whisper before I can think better of it, even though I probably should say that it’s fine and it’s whatever and I don’t care. “It meant something. It meant a lot.” I focus on the terrain, looking for spiders or lizards or prickly plants that will snag my jeans. I try to feel the way the dry patches of grass crunch under my sneakers. I wish my heart would slow down. I wish she would stop looking at me.
“Well. It meant a lot to me, too.” She reaches over and grabs my hand—we’re supposed to stay arm’s-length apart, I think, and even as I think it, she draws me a little closer to her. And then closer, and then she’s walking right next to me like we’re on a date instead of pretending to look for a dead boy in the woods. It meant a lot to me, too. What does that mean? It’s the kind of thing you say to make someone feel better. It feels like a pat on the head. I shouldn’t have said anything. Did I say something? I can’t remember.
It’s so hot outside, and so bright, and the air is so close and so thick. And Roya is so close.
She’s right next to me. Mint smell and warmth. Something cool bumps my wrist, and I look down to see what it is—she’s wearing the bangle again. She’s been wearing it a lot lately. She stops walking, and I realize we’ve come to the tree that I noticed before, the one that will need to be gone around. But Roya doesn’t let go of my hand. I can’t make myself look at her face. My heart is pounding and the tree is in the way and she won’t let go of my hand but she also hasn’t said—
A finger under my chin, gentle pressure. She turns my head until I’m looking at her face. “What’s going on?”
My eyes burn. “I’m really scared that you’ll change your mind.”
“Okay.” That’s all she says. She’s looking at me, and she’s so close. I wait for her to say something else—to tell me I’m being stupid, or that I shouldn’t worry, or to ask what I think she’ll change her mind about. But she doesn’t. She waits.
So I keep going. “I don’t want to start something if it doesn’t mean the same thing to both of us. I—I know that you probably don’t feel the same about me as I do about you and I just really don’t want to make a mistake. And our friendship is more important to me than anything, so if you don’t want to—”
She cocks her head. “Why do you think I don’t feel the same?”
“Because you aren’t in love with me,” I say. I immediately regret it. “I mean, I don’t mean like, I didn’t—”
She kisses me. It’s a light kiss, a stop-talking kiss, a featherlight brush of her lips against mine. It works. I stop talking. I stop breathing. I stop thinking. I stop worrying. There’s just her lips, right there, a thought away from mine. Her breath and mine, together.
“I don’t know if I’m in love,” Roya says. She pulls me closer, so close that her hair is brushing my shoulders. The big oak tree leans over us and I can’t help but wonder if I’m meant to always be closest to Roya in leaf-filtered light. I can’t help but wonder how much Marcelina already knows about us, because of what the trees have told her. “I don’t know what that means. But I want to find out. And I want to find out with you.”
“Since when?”
“Since always, dummy,” she says, bumping my nose with hers. “Since forever. I don’t know.”
“But—”
“Look,” she says, cutting me off. “I’ve been into you for a really long time. And I know that we’ve missed each other a lot. I know that we’ve both done the whole there’s no way she likes me back thing for like a hundred years. But I’m done with that, okay? We hid body parts together. If we can figure that out, we can figure this out too. I want to figure it out.” She brushes her nose across mine. “I want to figure it out with you.”
She kisses me again, a longer kiss, a believe me kiss. And I try. I try to believe her.
“I should tell you something,” I whisper against her lips. I don’t want to tell her, but I know I have to. It would be dishonest not to, and if there’s anything I don’t want to do to Roya, it’s lie. “I was going to sleep with Josh because I wanted to make you jealous. I know it’s stupid. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Well. Almost-done.” She doesn’t laugh. “But. I don’t know. I thought that maybe if I slept with him, you’d get mad, and we’d have a big fight, and you’d yell at me for sleeping with some guy I barely know, and then I could say, ‘Well, it’s none of your business anyway, it’s not like you’re my girlfriend!’ ” She does laugh at that, barely, just a breath, and I’m flooded with relief. “And then you would say, ‘Well, why not?!’ and we’d kiss and all of this would happen.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she says. And then she laughs again, another small, breathy laugh. A little incredulous. “And it’s probably exactly what would have happened.”
“I know.” I shake my head, and because our foreheads are still pressed together, it makes her shake her head too. “I’m sorry. It was stupid and manipulative and it was the only way that I could think of to make you see me the way I see you.”
“How do you see me?” she murmurs.
“Glowing,” I murmur back, kissing her with each word. “Brilliant. Loud. Fast. Wild. Kind, when you think no one is looking.” She laughs and her teeth bump my lip. “Magic.”
“Then I see you exactly how you see me,” she says. “Except add anxious and silly and kind, even when you think people are looking.” She considers me for a moment, then adds, “And maybe a little scary.”
I step back. “Scary?”
“A little,” she says. “You did something to Josh that we didn’t know was possible. I know it wasn’t on purpose, but. You know. He’s dead. That’s a little scary.”
It hurts to hear, but I shouldn’t expect anything less from Roya. She’s honest, but not particularly gentle. She’s not trying to make me feel bad. She’s just telling me the truth. And it’s true—I’m a little scary now. I’ve never been scary before, but I am. Just a little. I open my mouth to say something, I don’t even know what. Something that will make it okay that I’m scary. But she stops me from saying anything. She stops me in the best way possible.
For a
minute—just a minute—my whole world is a curtain of Roya’s hair, and the smell of her vanilla-mint lip balm on my mouth, and the feeling of her fingers on the back of my neck. She kisses me the way she kissed me in the meadow: with everything she is, and everything I am, and something extra that’s outside both of us. She kisses me so hard that the breath leaves my lungs and my toes curl inside my hiking boots.
She kisses me like there’s no plan.
When she pulls away, there are sunflowers brushing against our hips. They’ve pushed up out of the soil in a circle around us, ringing us in bright yellow.
“I mean it,” she says. “No matter what happens, remember that I mean it. Okay? I want this.”
“I know.” I don’t know if I know, but I want to know, and maybe for now that can be enough.
21.
I SEE MOVEMENT OUT OF the corner of my eye a scant few seconds before I hear Paulie crowing. “All riiiiiight!” When I look over, she’s got both fists in the air, and her face is split into a wide grin. “Finally!”
“Break it up already,” Iris calls from behind her. Next to them, Maryam and Marcelina cackle. Roya laughs into my mouth and gives me a tiny last kiss before she pulls away.
Not a last kiss, I remind myself. Just … the last for now.
“What are you doing here?” I ask when they get closer. “I thought you were with another group.”
“We swapped with Angela and Gina and the Matts,” Maryam says. “We figured it would be better if we were all together.”
I bite my lip. “Actually, yeah. It’s really nice to all be together for this.” Roya squeezes my hand. “And since we’re all together … there’s something I should tell you guys.”
We start walking, our paces slow and even. We’re arm’s-length apart, except for me and Roya. The two of us keep our fingers linked. Her palm is soft against mine. It’s the only thing I want to pay attention to, the only thing I want to talk about: me and Roya, Roya and me, look, we’re a We, are you all seeing this? But there’s something else that needs to be said, and I need to say it while we’re all alone together.
I squeeze Roya’s hand the way she just squeezed mine, because that’s something we get to do now.
And then I tell them all that Josh’s heart has disappeared.
Paulie’s eyes are on the uneven ground in front of her. “Could someone have taken it? Nico, maybe?”
“Why would they?” I ask. “The bag was in the same place I left it. No, I think … I think it just disappeared. When, uh. When Roya and I got rid of her last piece.”
“What do we do now?” Marcelina whispers, and no one answers. We follow a trail of stirred soil deep into the woods, far from the ongoing searches. We pass through a thick section of twisting black oaks that look like something out of a scary story. I duck under a low-hanging branch and get trailing moss in my hair. I’ve never seen trailing moss before, except in documentaries about bayous and horror movies about haunted houses in the Deep South. Paulie ducks between two of the trees and disappears into shadow. I’m pulling moss out of my hair and looking at Paulie’s retreating form, about to follow her, when a shadow detaches itself from the trunk of an oak just a few feet away from her.
“Paulie,” I hiss.
“What?” she whispers back. I point to the shadow, and Paulie freezes.
It’s the coyote.
Her ears are low, almost flat. She’s staring at me, her yellow eyes wide with alarm. I try to send her calm and comfort and certainty that we won’t do harm, that we’ve just stumbled across her path by accident. I try not to distract myself with prayers that she’s not going to panic and hurt Paulie or me.
Because she might hurt us. She’s an animal, a creature. She’s not a dog and she’s not a person and she has teeth that are made to tear into soft flesh like mine. And if she’s scared of us, she’ll do what she thinks she has to do in order to survive.
But then, impossibly, she takes a step toward me. It’s slow, hesitant—her paw hovers a few inches above the ground before she lets it fall. Her eyes are locked on mine. Paulie is looking at me too, and I shake my head, hoping that she’ll understand what I mean: don’t do anything.
The coyote doesn’t bite me. She approaches, impossibly slow, and pushes the top of her head into my palm.
Strange smell meat found yours come follow come now meat strange new come
Before I can answer—before I can really even begin to understand—the coyote turns and starts to walk slowly between the trees. She slinks with her tail low, glancing behind her.
It’s not that I don’t have a choice, but—what else am I going to do? Of course I follow her. As I pass Paulie, I have just enough time to whisper, “Follow me. Not too close.”
Paulie’s face is frozen with something between fear and disbelief, but there’s no time to explain. By the time I turn back to the coyote, the dappled shade of the trees has almost swallowed her up.
I follow ten feet back, my fingers still warm from where Roya was holding my hand before. I’m just close enough to see Paulie’s movement. She turns to look at me occasionally, the line of her back taut. I can just hear Paulie, Maryam, Marcelina, and Iris following, another twenty feet between us. They don’t talk. Good. Human voices might be too much right now, might make the coyote panic. All of this is too much right now, I think, and I have to bite back a hysterical laugh.
We go just far enough from the trail that I know we didn’t stumble across the coyote by accident. It feels impossible, but—she came to find us. To find me.
She finally stops in front of a fallen tree, one that’s overgrown with weeds and fungus. She looks behind me to the girls, her ears flat, her tail low.
She doesn’t run, but she’s close to it.
I put my hand out and manage to brush her head with my fingertips. Friend friend friend friend packmate ally friend—I’m saying everything I know how to say to calm her, but there are too many people here and they’re all too close to her. She’s got her lip lifted at me, showing a few teeth that don’t look as sharp as I know they’d feel. There’s blood caked on her muzzle.
She jerks her head from under my hand, and I flinch, but she isn’t snapping at me. Instead, she lowers her nose to the overgrown weeds in front of the fallen tree.
It’s hard to make out shapes in the uneven light that falls through the trees. I recognize the leg first.
“Oh my god.” I say it out loud without thinking, lifting my hands to my mouth, and the sound of my voice is the last straw for the coyote. She takes off into the trees, loping lower than she would if she wasn’t already trying to hide from us. She’s fast—not as fast as she’d be out in the open, but still faster than my best sprint. She moves through the woods like a stiff breeze, and then she’s gone.
My friends are still too far away to see what I’m seeing. I’m alone.
It’s just me and the body.
It’s just me and Josh.
22.
HE’S WHOLE.
He’s here.
Josh is right here, in the woods in front of me, naked, sprawled out in the weeds. I fall to my knees and reach for him, press my hands to his chest, to his face. He’s—oh god, he’s warm.
“I think he’s still alive!” I shout it at the top of my lungs, and I don’t hear my friends come running because of the static in my ears, a high steady rush of panic. I don’t hear them come running, but then they’re there, and Roya is next to me again, pressing her fingers to the skin under Josh’s jaw, and then to his wrist, and then to the inside of his thigh.
“No.” She shakes her head. “There’s no pulse, but—”
“But he’s warm,” Iris says, and she’s across from us, touching Josh too. Everyone is touching him. Iris’s hands start to flicker with uncontrolled light—she still hasn’t figured out how to manage her magic without looking at it. “He’s warm, maybe we can—”
“Don’t,” Maryam warns. “Don’t try to heal him—remember what happened last time? And be
sides, you can’t—”
“But we have to—” Marcelina starts, and before she can finish, Roya and Iris have locked eyes and shifted positions. Iris cups Josh’s head, pushing his jaw forward and gripping the base of his skull. Roya laces her fingers together and presses the heels of her hands into Josh’s sternum, presses hard and rhythmic, again and again, counting under her breath.
His arm flops around with each compression, and I look for the birthmark that I didn’t notice when I was on top of him in his bedroom after prom. But then I realize I’m looking at the wrong arm.
The other one’s missing, torn off at the shoulder. I remember the blood on the coyote’s muzzle. Did she know she was helping us, or was she just taking her percentage?
I’m frozen. I’m useless. I’m not doing anything. They’re trying to bring him back, doing CPR like—like they’ve practiced a hundred times, like they learned just in case, and I’m just sitting here thinking about a missing arm. I’m not doing anything. I have to do something.
After a minute, they switch places. Iris mutters, “Do we do breaths? I can’t remember, they changed it,” and Roya says, “Don’t worry about it, just take over,” and then Iris is doing compressions. As she presses down, something in Josh’s chest makes a crackling noise.
“Hey,” Roya says, looking me in the eyes. “Call my mom.”
“But—” I hesitate, but she keeps her eyes locked on mine as she holds Josh by the head, and I nod. “Right. Right, yeah.” I take my phone out of my pocket and make the call.
