by Cyn Balog
My eyes burn from not blinking, so I squeeze them shut, then open them and try to refocus.
THIS ENDS HERE.
It’s a threat.
I say the words over and over again, as the memories threaten to break through the dam and spill everywhere.
No.
Though Kane has the all-American looks, it was Declan who was the golden boy, the do-no-wrong kid who everyone would’ve hated if they didn’t love him so much. Declan was a proud member of the geek club—he knew an unhealthy amount of information about Tolkien and Star Wars, and he rocked the astronomy club. In comparison, Kane never picked up a book, preferred sports, and raised a little hell. The Weeks boys might have been different in many ways, but they shared one attribute: charisma. It was hard not to love them.
I swallow, thinking of the funeral. Of all those cars lined up at the cemetery. Nearly everyone from school came. It was unseasonably warm. After all the snow we’d had that winter, no one had expected rain, so we all stood there, getting soaked without our umbrellas, dress shoes sinking into the patches of snow and mud. Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.
I get why Mrs. Weeks was so perplexed by this picture. Declan was the last person anyone would want to threaten.
My eyes trail back to the Book of a Thousand Selfies, and I find something poking out from the pages. It’s a dried carnation. Attached to it, a message in very familiar handwriting.
D—I love you, you amazing, wonderful, gorgeous, but also completely insane person, you.—H
I’d bought it for him last year. The only carnation I’d ever bought from the Key Club. I’d never written a love note before, never even said those words to another guy. But I didn’t hesitate as I’d filled out the card. I knew he’d send me one too. He’d talked about it. He’d said I’d like the message, so I wasn’t worried about rejection. Everything he did, everything he said, even the way he looked at me over those thick black frames of his, said he loved me.
I doubt so many things in my life. But I never doubted that. Not until…
My carnation for him sat in his homeroom the entire day, unclaimed. A hundred students probably walked by Mrs. Branson’s desk and saw it there.
I’d texted him to see where he was. He never responded. I texted Kane, but Kane hadn’t seen him either. There was a nasty flu going around. I figured he was down and out. Throughout the day, I kept feeling my face to see if it was hot, if I was coming down with the bug too.
We’d had early dismissal that day because of a threatening snowstorm. I claimed Declan’s Valentine and came home in my Jeep, figuring I’d give it to him at home, along with some chicken soup and Nyquil.
It had started snowing. Mr. and Mrs. Weeks had just come home from the Poconos, where they’d gone for a long weekend. They were always doing things like that—acting like newlyweds, and leaving Declan and Kane at home on their own. Mr. Weeks went out to the shed in the back of the property to get more gasoline for his snow blower. The padlock on the barn door, which was usually secure, was hanging by the metal hinge.
He must have done it sometime during the day. Ironically, though no one remembers hearing the shot, we all heard his father’s anguished wail. It was high-pitched and so, so sad.
We all raced through new snow to the backyard and found Mr. Weeks hunched over on his knees outside the shed, face buried in the heels of his hands. Kane tried to go inside, but Mr. Weeks lunged forward and grabbed him around the knees, begging him not to go in. Mrs. Weeks froze beside me, as if she was terrified to know what was in the shed.
My mind didn’t process things right. All I could think, over and over again, was that no one would believe Declan killed himself. That smile wasn’t only for selfies—it was Declan, all the time. He was always trying to pick me up out of the dumps. Hell, he rarely even frowned. The kid smiled in his sleep, for God’s sake.
My mind hasn’t been the same since. Thoughts float in and out at weird times and misshape themselves. Part of it is denial. Part of it is my stay at Shady Harbor. And part of it is just the good old passage of time.
Like, it wasn’t until much, much later, while I was sitting in the art room at Shady Harbor, coloring a picture of a sunset, that it dawned on me that he hadn’t sent me a Valentine. That thought floated into my head sometime in September. He’d said he would, told me he had it all written out, but still, he hadn’t.
I pull the blanket off my head, and my long hair crackles with static. I shine the flashlight on the box Mrs. Weeks gave me, then cringe as I make out one of its components—a slender bud vase from Declan’s junior prom. We’d made “us” official then, though we’d been dancing around the subject for months. Like I said, Declan took his time, which could be excruciating.
I already have a matching vase of my own that I buried in my closet to ward off the memories. I don’t need his too.
I stand up, push the flaps of the box closed, and shove it under my bed. Then I climb under the covers, in a gritty but comforting sea of crumbs, and let the blankets fall on my face, breathing in the warm, stale air. My stomach is already revolting, but I savor the feeling. It’s good to feel something, anything, because it means I’m still here.
Happy Suck Day.
524 Days Before
“You’re the luckiest girl in school,” Luisa said to me, throwing herself on my bed. “Sleeping this close to Kane Weeks every night.”
I stuck out my tongue as though I wanted to vomit as I tried to apply eyeliner to my upper eyelid for the fortieth time.
“Are you crazy, Hail?” She threw a pillow at me. Good thing it missed, or I probably would’ve stabbed my eye with the pencil. “I mean, he’s flawless. He must be some alien being, he’s so perfect.”
“He’s not that perfect,” I mumbled. “He has a birthmark.”
Luisa got this professional cosmetics trunk for her fifteenth birthday, and it was filled with all these goodies. She’d been trying to give me a tutorial on making cat’s eyes. The closest I’d achieved was a raccoon after a hard night of drinking. She rolled over to pick through the trunk and looked up. “No, he doesn’t. Where?”
“On his butt or something. I saw it when we were kids,” I said vaguely. I pulled away from the mirror and blinked. “How’s this?”
She inspected my work and winced. “Uh…”
I swiped the wet washcloth off my dresser and swabbed at my eyes. “This is hopeless.”
“Oh, no it’s not,” she said, batting her cat eyelashes at me and making me rue the day I ever thought I’d be able to do anything half as well as Luisa could. Luisa didn’t need makeup, truthfully. We’d had countless sleepovers, and even after a night when we’d gotten a collective two hours of sleep, she’d wake up ready for a camera. She didn’t get crud in the corners of her eyes or drool on her pillow like I did, and all she had to do was shake her head, and her blond hairs would fall dutifully into place. “So what’s the stepbrother like?”
“His name is Declan. He’s…kind of different.”
She studied me. “Different, meaning hot?”
Well, yes, definitely—but I wasn’t about to admit it. “Kane said that Declan’s father was a mix of, like, six different ethnicities. Hawaiian, Japanese, and…I forget. He was an officer in the navy.”
“Black?” she asked, surprised.
“Maybe. What difference does it make?”
“None. I mean, that’s cool. I can’t wait to meet him. I can’t believe Kane’s dad would just go off and do that,” she said, shaking her head. “No wonder Kane is pissed.”
“He told you?” I asked, confused. Sophomore year had only started a couple days earlier. I didn’t think Kane had had any contact with anyone but me during the summer. I thought I was the one he complained to. The only one. The idea of him confiding in someone else made me a little queasy.
“No. It’s hot gossip, though. Everyon
e knows.” She’d slid into the glitter skirt I’d had to beg my mom for, since it was dangerously short, and a lace camisole that showed off the boobs she’d been growing. I couldn’t wear that camisole unless I wore a shirt over it, because I had nothing to show off, but Luisa, as usual, showed me how my clothes were supposed to look. She whirled in front of the full-length mirror and said, “We should go over there.”
I finished wiping my eyes. We’d been friends since kindergarten, but gradually, I’d been getting the feeling Luisa had just been putting up with me—that she had a much different reason for wanting to spend time at my house. After all, my house wasn’t exactly a wonderland of fun. My parents circled each other like sharks, occasionally going in for bites, and I didn’t have a big-screen TV or a pool or video games.
My house’s one attribute was its proximity to Kane and Declan Weeks, and I guess that was enough.
“It’s nearly eleven. What do you want to do? Pull a Romeo outside his window?”
She tapped her blood-red lips with her finger. “Maybe.” Then she looked at herself in the mirror and said, “We look so hot. It’s a shame to waste this.”
Right. I was wearing my pajamas, and my eyes looked like I’d gone ten rounds in a prizefight. She’d done my lips nice, though, and put my hair up in this spunky, curly do on the top of my head. I grabbed my phone. “If you want to see them, I can text Kane.”
“Oh my God, no!” she said, grabbing the phone from me. “That’d be desperate. Let’s… I don’t know. Walk around the court. Like we’re minding our own business. Please.”
“All right.”
So that was how we ended up parading ourselves around and around the cul-de-sac at not quite midnight on a Saturday. Still, it worked. Kane had a radar for girls. After our second time around the circle, he threw open the window in Declan’s room, which was in the front of the house, and said, “You guys out for a stroll?”
I snorted. We were wearing our dress pumps. If that wasn’t desperate, the twelve new blisters crying out for mercy from my toes and heels definitely were. But Luisa had that innocent way about her—even when she was up to no good, she still reeked of sunshine. I yawned, glad that he was finally here. Luisa and Kane could say hey, share a few flirts, and then we could haul ass to bed.
He pushed up the window and slid out on the roof, then climbed down the rain gutter and trellis to the front porch. Luisa watched this feat in amazement. “He’s gonna kill himself.”
“It’s not that hard,” I told her. “I’ve climbed up there a million times.”
Her eyes shifted to me and narrowed a little. This was clearly not news she’d wanted to hear.
“The best view of the fireworks in Trum is from his rooftop,” I added in explanation.
Bounding over to us, Kane said, “What is this? A party I wasn’t invited to?”
Luisa giggled. She could not stop giggling when Kane was concerned. I had to tell her boys like you a hell of a lot more when you pretend they don’t exist. “Oh, you’re definitely invited!” she gushed.
Somehow the decision was made to go to the woods out back, with the ancient broken-down tree house and a fire pit that must’ve been built by the house’s previous occupants. Such a decision was not made with my consent, but by that time, I didn’t even exist to register a vote. Kane and Luisa were already in their own impenetrable, perfect Kane-and-Luisa bubble. So I yawned some more and told her I’d leave the back door unlocked.
She didn’t come back inside until after three. She refused to say much about what they were doing, but she mentioned that Kane’s dad had finally sent Declan to fetch them. “They’re both gorgeous, Hail! Why didn’t you tell me?” she’d said that morning. “You are more than the luckiest girl in school. I’d kill to live where you do.”
Friday, February 15
Morning
As usual, I wake up with a stomachache. That’s what I take to school with me these days, instead of lunch money. That, and a bottle of…water.
Kane meets me at the car as I pile my books into the back seat and set my water bottle in the console. Before I know it, he’s unscrewing the top. He takes a sniff. “Just checking,” he says.
I yank it from him and tighten the lid. “Who are you, my mother?”
“I’m your passenger. And I don’t want you driving if you’ve been hitting the sauce.”
I try to start the Jeep. It stalls a couple times in the cold before roaring to life. Kane doesn’t know me anymore. He likes to think he does, but I have changed. And spending a couple minutes every day in the passenger seat of my Jeep won’t make him a Hailey expert.
Coming back to Deer Hills three months into the school year is hard enough when you don’t have memories of your dead boyfriend haunting you. I’d kept up with schoolwork at the hospital and came back the week of Thanksgiving because Juliet said a short week would make reentry less stressful.
Wrong.
So by the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I’d started self-medicating, taking sips from my mom’s Absolut supply. It worked fine—in fact, too fine. I’d liked how it numbed me so much that I started upping my dose.
And so I got in a little trouble. Okay, more than a little trouble, since it happened twice. The first time, Principal Williams said that because of all I’d endured, he’d let me slide. The second time, he said that because of all I’d endured, he’d let me slide, but there’d better not be a third time, or I’d be welcomed to Suspension City.
There hasn’t been a third time. Yet.
Until last year, I hadn’t so much as looked at a teacher the wrong way. I was the good girl: Student Council representative, Key Club president, girlfriend to the esteemed Declan Weeks. Now, I’m none of those things.
Not a single one.
Instead I’m a Cheez-It chomping, vodka-guzzling loner.
I think of when I was younger. I wanted a talent so bad it about killed me. Everyone had one, but me? Nothing. When I’d confessed this to Declan, he’d said my thing was being me, and being his. He’d told me that if I could juggle knives or sing beautifully or whatever, I wouldn’t be his Hailey. At the time, I’d melted.
Now, I’m no one.
I look over at Kane. If they took before and after pictures of us, mine would be a total one-eighty. His, mirror images. It’s so mystifying that I forget to upshift to third as we pull onto the main road.
“Whoa, babe,” Kane says, nearly putting his hand on mine as I struggle with the clutch. Then he thinks better of it and pulls away. He studies me. “If Williams sees you’re drunk—”
“I’m not!” I shout at him, then lean forward and breathe heavily in his face. “Happy?”
“Minty fresh. But, you know, vodka is odorless.”
“No, it’s not.”
We pull into the senior parking lot, where Luisa is waiting by my usual space. Before, she used to wait at the front of the bus line for me. Now, when Kane hops out of the car, she hooks an arm through his and starts to pull him toward the front of the school before I can gather my stuff out of the back seat.
It’s Kane who hangs back. He grins at me. “See you, Hail.”
Luisa looks back at the Jeep and seems surprised to see me there. “Hey, Hail.” Then she tilts Kane’s chin toward her, her eyes begging so he has no choice but to kiss her. He must’ve done something for her last night, judging from the way she can’t keep her hands off him. I don’t want to think of what.
He probably flashed that smile of his. The kid is lethal that way.
But the two of them together? Super lethal. Pale people can go one of two ways: either veiny, uncooked chicken flesh or perfect, porcelain china doll. Luisa’s the latter—skin so white and milky, with pale, barely-there eyelashes and hair. She’s not the type to suffer sunburns. Luisa is too prepared for that. Plus, she’s brilliant—straight As, ever since elementary school. She’s the person y
ou’d hate if she didn’t have an innocent, sweet, soft way of talking and look like a freaking angel placed directly on this earth by the hand of God. Our falling-out—or drifting apart, whatever it was—would never be attributed to her. It’s all on me, the girl who lost her boyfriend and, subsequently, her mind.
I never knew what people meant when they said a thing was “greater than the sum of one’s parts.” But that’s Luisa and Kane. Enviable on their own, but as a couple, they rule.
I have no choice but to trail behind them like the court jester. I think about how Luisa used to always sleep over at my house when we were younger. Most of the time, we’d talk and giggle about boys, wondering what two specific boys were up to across the street. I never slept over at her house, even though she had a much ritzier home with an in-ground pool. There was something more exciting about being so close to two gorgeous brothers. As we got older, the four of us would light fires in the old fire pit and hang out in the woods behind the cul-de-sac on warm summer nights. I’d almost think Luisa was using me if I hadn’t known her well before boys became interesting.
I shiver and blame the chill on this bleak, seemingly endless winter.
When we get to the school, Kane holds the door open for me. As I pass through, I think about the picture Declan’s mother gave me. THIS ENDS HERE. I’m about to tell him about it when he whispers, “Take it easy, okay, Hail?” and then he sweeps Luisa back into his arms.
Take it easy. The way he says it is not a casual send-off. It’s full of caution and worry. Because it’s par for the course for me to take everything hard.
At my locker, I see Javier and Nina. Javier is my locker neighbor, and you’ll rarely see Javier without Nina. They’re the last third of our sextet. Javier transferred to Deer Hills from Spain during the middle of his sophomore year and barely spoke English, so Kane was elected to help him around school. Since Javier and Declan were the only new kids at Deer Hills, they quickly became friends. Nina was always Luisa’s friend because they live in the same neighborhood and went to dance class together.
