The Girl In Between (The Girl In Between Series Book 1)

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  The film tapered off, darkness lingering for just a second before light trickled onto the screen again. I saw me standing on the beach. Young. Maybe ten. I was cradling a football. It disappeared out of frame and then I started running into the water, hurdling over waves as the ball flew through the air. I dove, missed, a wave crashing over my head.

  The screen cut to my mom. She was sitting under an umbrella, eyes hidden behind a pair of large sunglasses, mouth shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat. She was flipping through a magazine, pages fighting the wind. She wasn’t looking at the camera or my dad or me.

  I felt a searing pain in my skull. Light. That damned light was burning me from the inside and then it disappeared. I blinked, eyes adjusting as I watched the tape cut to the faint beam of flashlights. They were racing across stone, fighting our shadows. Another light blinked on, then another—a whole row of them lining a narrow bridge. The camera shook, my dad ducking, me watching from between my fingers as a swarm of bats flew over our heads. A man in cargo shorts pointed out the drawings along the walls—crude stick figures and geometric shapes. Simple. White paint. Like the ones I’d seen when Bryn and I had hidden from the rain.

  The camera zoomed in on my face and the light returned. I doubled over, hands gripping my scalp, the smell of gasoline singing my nose, and then the flash was gone again. I tried to catch my breath. I tried to focus. I looked up and my dad and I were walking along some boardwalk. We played the skeet shooting game and he won me a vintage jersey.

  It cut to me squaring up to bat, missing, squaring up again. I saw us building a fort in our backyard. I saw me eating a thick slice of watermelon, seeds dripping down my chin. I saw my childhood bedroom, sports posters tacked along the walls, my Green Bay Packers bed spread in a clump on the floor.

  I watched a kaleidoscope composition of Christmases and birthdays and New Year’s Eves; trips to the beach; to amusement parks; to the pet store, everything pulsing in and out between bright flashes of light. I watched Sunday mornings in my pajamas, my dad and I spooning Reese’s Puffs out of a popcorn bowl while we watched the pre-game.

  There was another flash, that screaming pain between my ears returning. I smelled something burning. I heard a loud shriek that made my eyes water. I tore at the grass. Waiting to see. Waiting to remember.

  And then I did.

  I sat there, panting, eyes burning. And I remembered.

  My dad liked chocolate milk and so did I. We used to take turns folding laundry during the commercials. He had big feet and I used to try to climb the stairs in his shoes. He only knew how to cook breakfast and on nights when my mom stayed in her room we’d make chocolate chip pancakes and fill the sink with every pan and every dish we had, dirty for no reason, soaking until the next morning when my dad would wake up early, dress shirt rolled to his elbows, to scrub them clean.

  I was an only child and I always would be. An accident that never felt like one because my dad was my best friend. Was. Until…he wasn’t.

  But after sitting on the top of that hill until my legs were numb, I still couldn’t remember what had happened, what had changed. And I still couldn’t remember what my mom looked like when she smiled.

  Chapter 26

  Bryn