BETWEEN THE GIRLS
Book Three of The Basin Lake Series
Stephanie Vercier
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
(Part 2)
CHAPTER THREE
(Part 2)
CHAPTER FOUR
(Part 2)
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
(Part 2)
CHAPTER SEVEN
(Part 2)
(Part 3)
CHAPTER EIGHT
(Part 2)
(Part 3)
(Part 4)
(Part 5)
CHAPTER NINE
(Part 2)
CHAPTER TEN
(Part 2)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
(Part 2)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
(Part 2)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
(Part 2)
(Part 3)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
(Part 2)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
(Part 2)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
(Part 2)
CHAPTER NINETEEN
(Part 2)
(Part 3)
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
(Part 2)
(Part 3)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
(Part 2)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
(Part 2)
(Part 3)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
(Part 2)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
(Part 2)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
(Part 2)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
(Part 2)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
(Part 2)
Other Books by Stephanie Vercier
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Between the Girls
A Basin Lake Novel
Copyright © 2017 by Stephanie Vercier
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For my beautiful Mother
CHAPTER ONE
TYLER
Denver, Colorado —Ten Years Ago — August
“It hurts… It really does hurt,” I said, adding that last part on so that my parents knew I wasn’t lying.
Mom and Dad were standing above my bed, but it wasn’t my bed. There was a bright light above me, the kind they had at school, a big lit up rectangle in the ceiling. And the bed I was in had arms on it, like the bed Grandpa was in when he’d had a heart attack last year in the hospital. That’s where I was, in a hospital, maybe even the same one we visited Grandpa at.
“I know it hurts.” Mom was holding my hand and crying. I didn’t like seeing my mom sad, and I wanted to tell her a joke, but I couldn’t think of one just then because I was tired, and my head felt heavy.
“You’re so brave, little buddy,” Dad said, standing big and tall at my side. He brushed the top of my head with his hand. “It’s not going to hurt forever. It’s not—”
I’d never seen my dad cry, but he was, and I could tell he was trying not to, to be strong like he always told me men were supposed to be.
A lady who I didn’t know appeared above me and asked, “How’s he doing?”
Dad turned away, crossed his arms and went over to the window.
“He’s in pain,” Mom said, gripping tight to my hand. “More than a seven-year-old boy should have to handle. Can’t you give him something extra?”
“Can you tell me how bad it is on a scale of one to ten, Tyler?” the lady asked me.
I shook my head. I didn’t know what she meant.
“One means you don’t hurt so bad,” she said in a kind voice. “Five is pretty uncomfortable, and ten is really bad, like you can barely stand it.”
I looked up at Mom.
“How bad?” she asked me.
“I think maybe five.” I wasn’t sure about that, but I didn’t want Dad to think I was a wuss and tell the lady it was maybe really an eight or a nine.
“Okay.” The lady smiled. “I’ll talk to the doctor and see what we can do.”
“Thanks,” Mom told her, sitting down on a chair by the side of the bed and not letting go of my hand.
I was about to ask what I was doing in the hospital and why my head was so foggy, but all of a sudden I was more worried about our neighbor’s pit-bull. “Pepper got out,” I said.
Our street wasn’t so busy, but there was a busier one a few blocks away, and I didn’t want Pepper to get hit because sometimes that happened, and there was nothing worse than seeing a dead dog on the road.
“I know.” Mom’s voice was sharp, like the way it was when she’d get mad at Dad.
“Did Mr. Jeffries put her back in his yard?” Pepper had gotten out before, but with my head all fuzzy, I couldn’t remember if she’d been put back this time. But I really wanted to know because I didn’t think I’d feel any better if I was still worried about her.
Dad came back to my bed and said, “Pepper has been taken care of,” and he sounded really mad, just like Mom.
I didn’t like the way Dad said that because I liked Pepper, even if Mom and Dad said she barked too much. She was outside the chain link fence when I rode by on my scooter today. She looked hungry, and I wanted her to have the rest of my sandwich Mom said I could finish eating outside.
“Pepper bit me, didn’t she?” My head was clearing enough to know maybe that’s why I was hurting so much. Now I could remember her pushing me over too—I didn’t think she was that heavy, but she was—and she was being really mean to me.
Mom nodded and then bent her head down and started crying more.
“She was snarling, and I kept yelling, ‘Pepper, be nice,’ but she wasn’t being nice.” It didn’t make sense because I was always nice to her, not like Heath Larson who thought it was funny to yell at her when we’d walk back from school, just to make her bark.
“No, she certainly wasn’t.” Dad’s face got really red, and his eyes scared me a little. “Pepper hurt you, buddy.”
Mom was crying harder.
“She didn’t mean to. She was just mad about something.” I didn’t want Pepper to get in trouble, and I hoped Mr. Jeffries could train her not to bite again. Maybe it would all be okay.
Then the lady from before came back in the room. She was moving fast, and it made me a little dizzy watching her.
“The doctor upped his dose,” she said and then moved over to this machine and started pushing buttons, and I could see a tube going from the machine and right into my arm. “Tyler, you’re probably going to feel sleepy in a few minutes, but it will help with the pain, okay?” Then she smiled—she wasn’t mad or sad like Mom and Dad were.
“When can we talk to the surgeon?” Mom asked her.
“He’ll go over everything tomorrow morning with you and your husband. What’s important now is that it looks like the concussion isn’t serious. Kind of a blessi
ng for him to have been unconscious for most of it.”
“But he couldn’t protect himself because of it either,” Mom told her.
“Do we know—” Dad cleared his throat. “Do we know if they can reconstruct it?”
The lady smiled at me, but I think it was a sad smile, like the one Mom gave Aunt Maureen before she moved to Albuquerque. Then she looked back at Mom and Dad and said, “I think it’s best that Dr. Anderson discuss that particular issue with you in the morning.”
“You want us to go an entire night not knowing if our boy will ever be whole again!” Dad was shouting, using what Mom called an outside voice.
“Brian!” Mom scolded him the way she did me when I ran through the house with muddy shoes or when I’d forget to put the toilet seat down.
“Whole?” I was confused, getting sleepier, the pain in my body starting to get better.
Mom looked down below my stomach and shook her head. “You’ll always be whole to me, Tyler. Always.”
She was crying again, and my eyes felt so heavy, and I just couldn’t keep them open.
CHAPTER TWO
CLAIRE
Basin Lake, Washington — Present Day — September
“I can’t believe my little girl is a senior!” Mom hugs me from behind while I’m sitting at our dining room table, eating the last of my oatmeal and going over the syllabus I printed out for my advanced chemistry class.
“I don’t know what’s not to believe, Mom,” I say with a lighthearted roll of my eyes. “I was a junior last year and a sophomore before that. It’s a natural progression.”
“A progression I’m proud of,” Mom says, squeezing my shoulder before making a beeline for the coffee maker in the kitchen. “You make your teacher mother proud.”
“Why are you proud?” A pitter-patter down the stairs has brought Kate, my younger sister, into the dining room as I continue to bury my head in the syllabus, anxious to start my senior year fully prepared and eager to get through it as quickly as possible.
“Proud of my girls,” Mom nearly sings from the kitchen, already dressed and ready for her first day back teaching this school year.
Mom is still in the kitchen when Kate sits down across from me. I probably wouldn’t have even looked up just then if I hadn’t noticed a dark hue surrounding her.
Tilting my chin up, I at first think she’s wearing a jet-black wig, which I find really perplexing. Then I see the faint stains of dye on her forehead, her pale scalp peeking out from the now dark hair follicles.
“What the hell did you do to your hair?” I can’t help but ask, less shocked now than I would have been a few months ago that she’s chosen to cover up her beautiful blonde hair, but damn if it’s not still jarring.
“Oh, Kate,” Mom says, coming through the kitchen entry and nearly spilling coffee on her skirt.
“What?” Kate pouts her lips, her posture stiff. “Paige dyed her hair all sorts of colors, and you never said anything bad about that.”
“But you aren’t Paige,” I say, not having liked the many colors of the rainbow my big sister used to dye her hair. “And besides, she stopped doing that like four of five years ago.”
“It’s just going to take some getting used to is all,” Mom says, setting her coffee down and putting her hands on Kate’s shoulders. “But if you want to keep it, then we’ll acclimate to it, honey.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” I cast one more disapproving look in my sister’s direction before I return to my syllabus, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of whatever it is she’s trying to evoke in us.
“You’re such a jerk!” Kate yells, pushing her chair out and standing up. “No wonder Paige always hated you… you don’t have any—”
“Any what?” I ask, raising my eyes to her.
“Girls—”
“Compassion… none at all!” And then Kate tears away from the table, her feet pounding up the stairs.
That hurts, but I will myself not to take it personally. Something had changed with Kate at the beginning of the summer, something that had taken my fun loving, happy and adventurous sister and turned her into a moody, sad girl I didn’t recognize.
“There’s something really wrong with her,” I tell Mom, the same thing I’ve been telling her all summer.
“She’s just going through a hard time.” It’s her canned response, shaking her head and sighing afterward.
“About?” I push.
Mom’s eyes widen, and I could swear she’s about to tell me something really big. Then her eyes soften, and all she says is, “I don’t know… a lot of things I suppose. I’ll go up and talk to her. Wait for us?”
“McKenzie is picking me up early,” I say, closing up my syllabus and bringing my empty bowl to the kitchen sink. “So, go and talk to her… spend all the time you want up there.”
“Claire.”
“Really, Mom. You guys don’t want to tell me what’s wrong, so fine.”
I’m being snarky, and I’m already regretting it, but Mom doesn’t argue, just nods at me, and then she’s gone, up the stairs to console Kate about something nobody seems to trust me enough to let me in on.
Even feeling pushed out, I still have to resist the urge to turn around, follow Mom and make another attempt to get through to Kate. She has apparently forgotten I’d always been her protective older sister and is peeved at me for pointing out how uncharacteristic it is for her to dye her hair black. So fine, I head out and try to be quiet, even though Kate storming up the stairs has probably already woken our Grandma up.
Waiting out on the front porch for my best friend, McKenzie, the day hot and sunny like it’s been all summer, like it is every summer here in Basin Lake, I think maybe Mom is right—it is a little hard to believe that I’m a senior, harder to believe we’ve lived here for over ten years and that most of my memories have been formed in this small Eastern Washington town, not in Seattle where we lived until my dad died. He had multiple sclerosis, which they say doesn’t kill you, but the pneumonias he kept getting did. I remember him less and less with each passing year, which sucks because the memories I do have of him are good ones, maybe even great ones, even if most of them include him being in an electric wheelchair or us watching Disney movies in a bed he often couldn’t get out of.
Sometimes, I just wish I could have had more time with him, wish he’d never gotten sick at all. We’d still be in Seattle I suppose, not here in my Grandma’s house at the very end of a dead end street, one we were only meant to live in until Mom got a job and could buy us one of our own. But the house didn’t happen. Mom admitted to us recently that she’d just now paid off the medical bills that had accrued during Dad’s illness, bills that the insurance hadn’t paid. She said it’s the reason we lost our house in Seattle, that they’d taken out an extra mortgage to widen doorways, build ramps, add a lift up the stairs and pay for any extra help Dad had needed with caregivers that the insurance wouldn’t cover.
“We were getting to the point where your dad and I would have had to divorce,” Mom said, tearing up when she told us. “Or figure out some other legal wrangling so he could go on Medicaid and have things paid for that way.”
“What a messed up system,” I’d said in response, only able to imagine what my parents must have felt watching everything they’d worked so hard for vanish because Dad had gotten sick.
That financial crunch—including Grandma’s mortgage that Mom had apparently taken over to assist Grandma with her own medical bills—had been why there hadn’t been much help with college for my older sister, Paige. It’s not like Paige expected it, but when one of her major scholarships fell through, her dream of a going to a four-year college had stalled out.
Things had eventually worked out, though. My older sister is in a great school in North Carolina where she’s able to be with Evan, one of the two boys she grew up with, the one she fell in love with and can now be beyond happy with. And I miss her. I didn’t so much when she was still home, bein
g the big sister that got to do everything first when I wanted that role, but what they say about absence making the heart grow fonder is definitely true.
While I’d butted heads with Paige, there had never been any of that with Kate. So, her of all people telling me I don’t have any compassion for her hurts, maybe even more because I bet she’s upstairs telling Mom how awful I am. If the second story windows were open, as they often are after a summer night of trying to stay cool, maybe I’d overhear. Maybe I’d respond, yell and scream and tell Kate how wrong she is about me and my lack of compassion for her because, even though you aren’t really supposed to love one family member more than another, I do—I love her more than Paige or Mom or Grandma.
I can only hope Kate will remember just how much I care because it’s hard looking forward and imagining a life with only a sliver of her.
TYLER
“Are you excited?” Mom asks me this after I’ve shoveled the last of the scrambled eggs she’d made into my mouth. I didn’t expect her to make breakfast, but she’d insisted.
“Sure… thrilled,” I say, barely looking at her as I down the eggs with the last of the orange juice.
“I know it’s not ideal.” She snatches up my plate and disappears into our huge new open concept kitchen that blends into the living and dining room like one big, open space. “But being the new kid has a certain romantic quality to it, don’t you think?” she calls out.
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