by Hannah Jayne
Copyright © 2014 by Hannah Jayne
Cover and internal design © 2014 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Nicole Komasinski
Cover image © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images
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CONTENTS
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Acknowledgments
An excerpt from Truly, Madly, Deadly
About the Author
Back Cover
To those of us who tread water even when it seems easier to sink.
ONE
The moonlight streaked across the water as it lapped over Brynna Chase’s bare shoulders. She spun, feeling the surf against her skin as she breathed in the salt-misted air. She loved the ocean at night—it was dark, like a smoky sapphire that never ended, water blurring into sky, both going on forever. The shore was out there, somewhere over her left shoulder, but she didn’t care.
Erica Shaw popped up next to her, her black hair breaking the surface. She sucked in a lungful of air and grinned. “I love it out here. Hey! Stop daydreaming!” She slapped at the water, sending a spray over Brynna’s head.
“I’m not daydreaming. It’s the middle of the night.” Brynna splashed her best friend back, and Erica reacted by making a smooth dive, her body sinewy and thin as she darted through the surf. She popped up twenty feet from Brynna, her features hidden in the darkness, her head and shoulders outlined against the pale moonlight.
“Seriously, I’d make the perfect mermaid!” Erica yelled, her voice echoing on the waves.
“Yeah, but where are you going to find two clamshells small enough for your flat chest?”
“I’m not listening to you! I’m a mermaid!” Erica dove down again, her head popping up behind Brynna, making her spin in the water.
“You’re so weird!”
“Mermaid!” Erica sang again, head and shoulders going under, the dark water swallowing her whole.
Brynna kept kicking, buoyant on the water, turning, trying to predict where Erica’s grinning mug would pop up next. “Erica!” she called out, spinning toward the dock at Harding Beach. “Stop playing mermaid and face me like a man!” She giggled, her voice trailing off and sounding suddenly ominous, echoing in the cove.
But the surface of the water remained unbroken, the sheer midnight blue of the surf looking darker than Brynna remembered, almost black. She kicked at the water that had suddenly taken on a bone-deep chill. Her teeth chattered. “Er?”
Brynna scanned the surface, but something inside her told her that Erica wasn’t going to pop up, wasn’t playing a prank.
“Erica?” Brynna dove, her strong legs driving her downward, her hands clawing as she dug through the surf. The water pushed her back, squeezing the air out of her lungs in a tight, sizzling burn. She was groping blindly, her fingers sifting through sand, raking over rocks and kelp. Finally, she pushed her eyes open, letting the upturned sand settle.
That’s when she saw Erica.
Her best friend’s brown eyes were wide with terror. She thrashed and flailed, her black hair a matted mess as she struggled. She was clawing at the ground, her feet driving into the sandy ocean floor.
Someone was pushing her down.
Brynna could see Erica’s attacker—the long, slim legs, well-muscled as they calmly pressed through the water, the wave of sandy blond hair that now tangled with Erica’s. Brynna dove for her, grabbing at the woman whose hands were around Erica’s throat. The girl barely bucked, even when Brynna grabbed a fistful of her hair, yanking with all her might. Erica thrashed underneath. Every beat of Brynna’s heart was a burning ache, desperate for breath, but still she grabbed at the woman, trying to look into Erica’s eyes, trying to silently implore her to hold on.
That’s when Erica’s legs stopped kicking. Her arms fell in quiet, graceful arcs. Her fingers unclenched, lying open, a few useless grains of sand dancing in her palm. She floated weightlessly, the sand puffing around her as she landed, a perfect specimen, her eyes focused on the snatch of moonlight above her.
Erica’s killer turned, and when she smiled at Brynna, Brynna realized she was looking into her own face.
•••
Brynna woke up, coughing, clawing at her throat. She was desperate for breath.
“Bryn, Bryn, hon, are you okay?”
Her mother was there in an instant, rushing into Brynna’s room, ready to shake her out of another murky nightmare.
“I’m okay,” Brynna said, sinking deeper into her blankets. “It was just a bad dream.”
Her mother cocked her head and bit hard on the edge of her lip, her eyes going into that pitiful, helpless sheen that Brynna had grown to hate over the last year.
“It’s nothing, Mom, I’m totally fine.” She pasted on her parent-approved, all-is-well smile.
“How about I make you chocolate-chip pancakes? Chocolate is good for everything from bad dreams to your first day at a new school.”
Brynna flopped down on her pillow. “Ugh, there’s not enough chocolate in the world for that.”
Her mother paused in the doorway, silent for a beat. “Bryn, you promised. Dr. Rother said this won’t work unless we all try. Your father and I are trying.”
“I know, Mom,” Brynna said through clenched teeth. “I was just joking.”
Brynna watched as her mother’s eyes studied her for a beat too long. “Five minutes then.”
She waited until her mother’s footsteps faded on the stairs before pulling her clenched fist from under her comforter. She dropped a palm’s worth of hair into the trash.
•••
Brynna clutched her half-damp towel against her chest and frowned into her closet. It was twice as big as the closet in her old house but it was already chock-full, even with three moving boxes—still packed, still sealed up tight—waiting on the floor. Brynna was in no hurry to empty them, whether the items inside had a home or not.
She scanned then pulled out a sweater, her fingers feeling the super-soft weave. Then remembered it was Erica’s. Half of everything in her closet belonged to Eri
ca. The other half belonged to Brynna, but one that didn’t exist anymore—the “before” Brynna. When her mother’s voice called a second time and a third, “honey, come on!” she grabbed a semi-new white hoodie and a pair of skinny jeans that had gone back and forth between her and Erica so many times that she couldn’t remember if they started out as hers or Erica’s.
They’re mine now.
The thought pinged through her head and lodged in her chest before Brynna even knew it happened. Erica was gone; Brynna was alone, spat out to start a new life in some stupid, Podunk town full of cookie-cutter houses and kids who boozed and lounged in old abandoned farmland.
The Lincoln High kids—back when she was one of them—boozed and lounged on the beach.
Brynna salivated and shivered at the same time. She hadn’t taken a drink of alcohol since her parents dragged her here, to Crescent City, and she hadn’t been in the water—showers not withstanding—since she was pulled from the tide at Harding Beach. Even this morning—and every morning since—she had had to take ten deep, steadying breaths the way Dr. Rother had shown her before stepping into the hot shower. She continued the ritual while the water pounded her forehead and scalp, and she pinched her eyes shut against the wispy steam that curled around her and sucked at her breath. Every inch of rising steam was like the fingers of fog that pulled at her that night on the beach…
That night.
She wondered when—if—that night would ever stop being so fresh in her memory.
Brynna started down the stairs, her feet landing on the brand-new super plush carpet on the landing. It had been four weeks since the Chase family moved into the Blackwood Hills Estates—a sterile-looking pop-up neighborhood that consisted of fifty homes all stunning and yet entirely the same. The place was so new that only about a quarter of the houses were populated, and Brynna knew exactly one person in the entire development: a girl named Riley who would be a senior—one year above Brynna—at Hawthorne High that fall. Riley had invited Brynna to the movies two days after the Chase family moved in, but Brynna had declined, citing a “family thing,” which was a total lie.
Brynna’s mother was an artist who was constantly covered in chips of paint, and her father was a salesman who spent most of his time on planes being friendly and charming to people that Brynna didn’t know. All she knew about her father’s clients was that they were high-powered executives who sent expensive bottles of scotch and whiskey during the holidays, signing the cards with a mass-produced stamp.
The only “family thing” she could remember them having was when they all sat in a line on the state therapist’s couch, saying nothing but silently blaming each other for Brynna’s issues.
Before the dare, her parents were talking separation, but if there’s anything that can bring a family together, it’s a Class A Misdemeanor. The move was supposed to be a fresh start for all of them. Brynna was supposed to be better, was supposed to start new without drinking or doing drugs. Her parents would be cheerful and respectful of each other—maybe her father would even tone down his drinking in an effort to be supportive rather than hypocritical, Brynna had thought grimly.
She picked her way down the stairs, careful not to mess up the neat stack of cardboard boxes her mother had flattened, and trudged into the kitchen where her mother was staring at coffee brewing and her father was grabbing his briefcase, a piece of dry toast sticking out of his mouth.
“Have a good first day, Bryn,” he muttered around hunks of bread as he made a beeline for the garage.
“Dad’s going in today?” Brynna asked.
Her mother looked up, almost surprised that Brynna was there. “Oh. Yeah.” She pasted a soccer-mom smile on her face and rubbed her hands together. “Excited? How about I make you those first day of junior year chocolate-chip pancakes?”
Brynna couldn’t help but smile. Her mother excelled at exactly two things: oil painting and enthusiasm. While she had recently begun some sculpting work, her cooking skills were still limited to Pop Tarts and making reservations.
“Mom…”
“Okay, how about we leave now and let Grinders make you a blueberry muffin and a decent cup of coffee?”
Brynna agreed, even though the thought of a muffin or even a single drop of coffee made her stomach churn. Though the dream still hung at the back of her mind, the anxiety that was thrumming through her was focused on school now—a new school, with new people. She hoped there wouldn’t be old rumors. Brynna’s game plan was to blend into the background as much as possible. She would be an average girl with average grades, and when they called her name at graduation (she wouldn’t be there anyway, having gotten early admissions to Anywhere But Here University), the other students would look around and wonder who she was. She didn’t want to be remembered; she wanted to be anonymous.
•••
Brynna stepped out of the car, finding her footing on the concrete. She vaguely felt her mother pat her back.
“Have a great day, hon.”
Brynna heard the car door slam shut, felt the weight of her backpack pulling against her shoulders. She looked up at Hawthorne High, a sprawling, one-story expanse of too-new stuccoed buildings with flat roofs that sat before her. There was a huge cemented quad where students mingled now, bunched together in clusters on the concrete or sitting back on the perfect rectangles of Crayola-green grass that looked like they were planted for the sole purpose of introducing nature into a concrete world. Two enormous iron gates were held open and pinned back with hulking chains, and Brynna had the fleeting thought: Are the gates meant to keep people in or to keep people out?
She scanned the crowd in front of her—teenagers, just like her in hoodies and jeans, slashed-up T-shirts and jeans, prissy sweaters and jeans—and waited to feel their slicing stares. Their eyes would go big, but they wouldn’t meet hers. She’d see them nudge each other and whisper, her mind racing to put words in their mouths: “She was so normal before the accident.”
“She was the one.”
“She dared Erica, but Erica never came back.”
Everywhere that she went, Brynna knew the accident followed her, branded her, and she would never be the same. She was crazy with grief, with guilt; she was messed up on drugs, on booze; she wasn’t who she used to be: fun-loving, wild. All the judgment and accusation was in their eyes.
But here at her new school, no one was staring.
A few kids glanced up at her or squinted their eyes, doing their best to place her. One or two kind of smiled. Most were so focused on their friends or their notecards that they didn’t even see her at all. It should have been a relief, but Brynna knew better. The dare, the accident, that night, was like a disease that would silently creep into a vein and poison her whole life. She expected it. She deserved it. Erica was dead because of her.
Brynna wasn’t popular-popular back at Lincoln, but she and Erica were well-known. Even more so after that night. After she came back to school, people gave her sympathetic looks, and girls she barely knew linked arms with her, patted her shoulder, and told her how sorry they were. It didn’t take Brynna long to realize they weren’t interested in knowing her—they were interested in other people thinking that they knew her. Headlines popped up in the three-page community newspapers: A Lincoln High Insider Tells All, followed with someone’s supposed firsthand knowledge of how “the survivor” (that’s how they referred to Brynna now, as “the survivor”) was coping. “We eat lunch together every day,” one of the stories went, “and every day, Brynna cries on my shoulder.” The source listed was a girl named Abby Hart, who Brynna was pretty sure was either a transfer student or the head of the People for Puppies Club at Lincoln. Either way, Brynna and the girl had never shared so much as a sandwich, let alone a shoulder-to-shoulder cry.
Being slightly invisible at Hawthorne High was exactly what Brynna wanted.
“Oh my god!”
The
kid that Brynna crashed into was an eyebrow taller than her, with unkempt dark hair expensively cut to look that way. His eyes were a dark brown-black, but his grin was warm. He narrowed his eyes at Brynna, and she immediately felt heat at the back of her neck.
“Sorry, I didn’t see you—” she started.
He shook a finger at her. “I’ve never seen you.”
“What?”
“You’re new, right?” He dashed out a hand. “Evan. Evan Stevens. Don’t call me Even Stevens because it’s already been done circa elementary school through three o’clock on Wednesday.”
Brynna’s eyebrows went up. “What happened at three o’clock on Wednesday?”
“Not important. Who are you now?”
“Uh, Brynna. Brynna Chase.” She looked at Evan’s outstretched hand. He immediately pulled it back.
“Not a shaker? Fine, I respect that. Supergerms and all.”
Evan paused, tapping a finger against his lips as he studied her. Anxiety started to creep up the back of her neck.
“Junior. Sixteen. Doesn’t drive.”
It took Brynna a second to realize that Evan was talking about her. He raised his eyebrows and she stumbled. “Uh, yeah. How did you know that?”
“I’m a genius. And your student ID is sticking out.” He flipped on his heel. “Come with me.”
“Wait. What?”
Evan didn’t answer. He kept walking with the sure step of a popular kid, and Brynna ran to catch up with him.
“Um, where are we going?” she asked once she caught up.
“You need to meet everyone. This way.”
Brynna hung back for a half second, her eyes raking over Evan. He gave her a quick, impatient look, and her mind spun, processing. He didn’t look at her boobs or give her the easy, cocky smile she recognized from guys who wanted to hook up with her. She shrugged and continued following.
Evan wound Brynna around the school to the cafeteria. She paused, grimacing. Evan looked over his shoulder and cocked a brow. “Oh, cafeteria for losers at your old school?” He smiled. “How cliché.”
