by Piper Lennox
“Exactly,” I say, surprised. Utterly shocked, in fact. I’ve never had anyone summarize it so accurately.
We walk until we reach a pier, its silhouette like a hole in the view ahead until, inch by inch, it grows close enough to see the details. Colby finds a starfish in the water underneath and shows me where one of the arms is beginning to regenerate. “Slowly,” she adds, setting it down exactly where she found it, “but at least he’s healing.”
“Was your cousin into animals, too?” I ask, crouching in the sand beside her. “I’m sorry, I know you don’t like to talk about her much. It just feels strange to...to have a piece of this person, and get to know someone in her family so well, but without knowing her. But I know that topic’s kind of touchy, with the panic attacks and stuff, so—”
“Eden was definitely not into animals. If it wasn’t a cat, she didn’t go near it.” Colby puts her hand on my knee as we sit, saving me from my own rambling. “And it’s okay. Asking questions about her, I mean.”
I’d asked without thinking, something rare for me, but she doesn’t look annoyed or shaken up by it.
Actually, she looks strangely calm.
“I just realized,” she says slowly, pulling her knees to her chest, resting her arms there, “I haven’t had a single panic attack since the day of Aunt Rochelle’s party.”
“Maybe it gave you some closure, after all.”
She stares at the sand filtering through her fingers, then scoops up another handful. “No...I’m still really messed up about Eden.” This time, when she laughs, it doesn’t ring down the beach. It barely makes a sound at all.
Colby wipes her hand on her leg and locks eyes with me. “It’s because of you. Being around you.... It gives me this feeling like I’ll be okay. Not that everything else will be, because that’s not how life works. I think we both know that pretty well, by now.”
I have to nod at this. We know that fact better than most.
“Ever since Eden died,” she starts, but her voice trips up on itself. I watch a tear skate down her cheekbone and reach to wipe it away, the movement like an instinct I never knew I had. She beats me to it, though. I should have expected as much. Colby Harlowe: brutally honest, fiercely independent.
No, I correct myself. Uniquely honest, in a world where you never can tell who’s bullshitting you or not, or why. Independent, yes, but never fierce. Never to the point of closing herself off from people or keeping them at arm’s length, like me.
“How did she die?” I ask gently. I find her fingers in the sand between us. “I read the articles they ran, about your aunt’s party, where they said she...fell from a balcony?”
Colby nods, comforted, like me, in this small realm of facts. This is the simple part of any story: the narrative. Repetition of X or Y Happened, this person died, this person lived—it numbs you, when you retell it often enough. Even if you only retell it to yourself, over and over, in the years afterwards.
“Yeah,” she whispers. “At her boyfriend’s birthday party. They said she was brain dead as soon as she hit the ground, so she didn’t suffer. I guess that’s one good thing. She wasn’t in pain.”
Instead of lifting her hand, I dig my fingers into the sand below and meet hers in the middle. I squeeze, trapping the grains between our palms, and ask, “Were you there?”
She doesn’t answer right away. I squeeze her hand again and don’t say anything. I simply wait.
Because I know pretty well by now, better than most, it’s the rest of the story that’s hardest. This is the part that never gets easy.
When you’re the person that lived, you don’t have the luxury of facts—of knowing how the rest of your story goes. You replay theirs, endlessly. And when you get to their ending, always the same, you realize yours is supposed to keep going. But you have no idea how.
“I think about it all the time.” Colby stares ahead at the tide. We can barely see it here under the pier, the moonlight blocked, but we hear it roll and retreat with the cadence of a heartbeat through the darkness.
“I could have saved her.” Colby uses her other hand to wipe her face again. “If I just—if I just hadn’t said anything.” She takes a breath, the air shuddering in her chest. I hear it over everything else around us, in that quick silence when the tide shrinks back. “If I’d just kept my mouth shut, for once in my life.”
Colby
Two Years Earlier
“Miguel is cute. That skater thing going on.” Eden handed me another blue motorcycle. It was my third in an hour, coating my tongue the same color as her tattoo. When I pointed it out to her, she laughed and took a selfie with me, hugging me close with my tongue sticking out as I laughed, too. We sent the photo, those bright and reckless blues, to our mothers in Kona and ignored the calls and angry messages they fired back.
With a long sip and casual scan of the room, I studied Miguel. He was cute, in a grungy way. Not my type at all.
Well. Not my sober type.
“Wave him over.” Eden mixed herself another drink and bumped me with her hip, that trademark wink of hers making me feel as invincible as she looked. It always did. Even when I had plenty of evidence to the contrary. Like the scar in my lip that, no matter how much I drank, would never turn blue.
“He has such shitty music taste,” I grimaced. “It’s worse than Gage’s.”
“Don’t let him hear you,” she hissed, and we erupted into laughter when Gage and Miguel actually looked our way. I pressed my mouth into the cool, bare skin of her shoulder as we ducked into the kitchen.
It was turning out to be a fun party, after all. Eden liked the dress I picked, and—judging by the looks I was getting—plenty of the guys did, too. For the first time since I’d moved out here with her, I felt like I belonged in this place, with these people. I wasn’t just pretending.
It didn’t last.
“You want to see what I got Gage for his birthday?” Eden pulled me back into the hall by my wrist and knocked twice on her bedroom door before entering, not waiting for an answer from whoever was inside.
“Gross, E, it better not be a sex thing.”
“It’s not,” she promised, laughing as she disappeared into the closet.
My brain, fuzzy and probably changing colors itself, registered the group of people on the floor. They were doing coke off a mirror with coffee straws pinched between their fingers. One girl held hers out to me. I shook my head.
I wondered if Eden had noticed. She must have; she wasn’t as drunk as me, and the group wasn’t even trying to hide it.
“Here it is,” she sang, and pulled a shopping bag from the depths of her shoe racks. She set it on the vanity and opened it just enough so I could see: a new leather jacket, perfectly folded.
“Is that real?”
“Of course it’s real! I’m not gonna cheap out on my boyfriend’s birthday, Col. That shitty fake one he’s got is cracking everywhere. I hate it.” She peered into the bag again, then bit her lip. “You think he’ll like it?”
I’d never seen Eden unsure of any choice in her life. Not once. And especially not over something like a boy’s opinion.
But then again, she was always telling me Gage was different. From my point of view, the only difference between him and the roster of guys under her belt was the way he made her act.
“Yeah,” I said quietly, finishing my drink. “He’ll love it.”
She smiled breezily, as though she never doubted this. While she buried the gift back in the closet, I turned to lead the way out. This place felt more suffocating than the crowd in our living room, even with seven bodies versus thirty or more. Every time someone did another line, the snort pierced my eardrums worse than Gage’s shitty music.
I didn’t like the way the air felt. Thicker and charged, as though these people were so different from me, from us, they didn’t even breathe the same way.
But when I looked back, my hand already on the doorknob, Eden wasn’t following me. She took a seat in the circle an
d said, “No, I need a new straw. I’m not sharing with any of you fuckers.”
The group laughed like they were all old friends of hers. Ha, ha, so Eden. I’d never seen them in my life.
I watched, drunker than I realized and suddenly mute, as a guy in a bandanna cut a new straw in half, passed one section to Eden, and marked out two lines on the mirror with a razor.
Her shoulder blades and every node of her spine were visible when she leaned over and took them. My eyes hopped to each bone.
“Okay, okay, I’m done,” Eden announced, begging off when they offered her more. “No, seriously, guys. I already got molly from Troy. I’m good.”
They relented, slapping her hand as she stood and made her way back to me. She turned the knob with my hand still on it, like it wasn’t even there. Like nothing had just happened.
“E,” I called, then again, louder, as she wound her way back into the bodies. She barely looked back, but I knew I had her attention. “What the hell was that? Since when do you do that kind of shit? Don’t you know how dangerous that—”
“Don’t get all Boy Meets World on me tonight, okay?” She stopped at the drink table and folded her arms, finally facing me. “Can’t you just have fun with me? I’m not making you do anything. Come on, we were having fun. Let’s go back to having fun.”
She kept laughing when she said it. Have fun. I’d liked that, too: the easy laughter we passed back and forth all night, the inside jokes we made about everyone around us. The entire party had felt like when we were kids, the good times. I’d vowed to only worry about myself, to loosen up, and here I’d thought it was working. Live and let live.
“I can’t just not say anything about this, though,” I countered. “This is why you’ve lost so much weight, isn’t it?”
“Colby. Stop.”
“No! It’s dangerous and—”
“And not even remotely your business,” she finished, training her bored glare on me.
“It is my business, when it’s something that could seriously hurt you. Just like that thing on your arm—I know Gage did that to you. You can’t lie to me.”
Eden’s eyes burned right through mine. “Shut the fuck up,” she said, teeth gritted.
Slowly, I realized the people around us were quiet. Section by section, the party began to listen.
Eden noticed, too.
If my filter was a little broken while sober, it was nonexistent when drunk. The last drink settled into my bones, and I knew I’d regret my next words in the morning.
I just had no idea how much.
“You always call me ‘jealous’ whenever I say anything about you,” I shouted, my words melting together like wax, “but you know what? I’m not jealous of you. Why would I be? You think I want a boyfriend that hits me and all my bones showing like a fucking skeleton? Huh? You think I’m jealous that you do a bunch of drugs? What happened to wanting to be an actress, E, remember that?”
It was unstoppable, the words spilling over themselves. But it was all true.
Eden still had her acting chops, though. Because instead of looking the least bit bothered by anything I was saying, she just laughed.
“Okay, Colby,” she smirked. Her voice projected strangely, not aimed at me—it was aimed for the back of the room, so everyone could hear. “If you want to get mad because I said you’re too drunk to fuck Miguel tonight—”
“That’s not what you—” I looked at the faces around me, a watercolor of features I didn’t know, but could still decipher. They were judging me. An entire room of them, an army led by my own flesh and blood. “She didn’t.... I’m not drunk.”
I was drunk. And the fact I stumbled and Eden, of all people, caught me, was the worst part of it all. They had no reason to believe me, and every reason to believe her.
“I’m just being honest,” I slurred. Like it mattered.
“Gage?” she called, as I tore away and righted myself. Already, the party was resuming around us, people losing interest.
Gage appeared from God knew where. I stared at the cracks in his shitty fake leather jacket and thought about ruining Eden’s surprise gift for him, right here. She deserved it. But as Eden instructed him to get me to bed—“Maybe with a bucket and some water? She’ll need it”—and he steered me to my room, I forgot about everything but sleep.
“I only had three drinks,” I told him, staring at the class ring wedged onto his middle finger while he opened my door.
“Yeah,” he chuckled, “but Eden made them for you, right? And you know she makes them strong as hell.”
Every sentence Gage ever said to me, few as they were, felt like that thing as a kid when someone sticks their spit-covered finger in your ear. Slimy. Unwanted. Unexpected, which was always the shittiest part. You never saw it coming.
“You think I hit her?”
Answering him would have taken brain cells I didn’t have firing at the moment. The air inside and under my mattress whooshed out like a giant held breath as I fell, face-first, into the bedding.
“You think that’s funny, telling everyone I’m some piece of shit? Putting me on blast in front of all my friends?”
When I sobered up, I’d remember his questions and feel the fear I should have felt then. When every red Solo cup Eden handed me had left my veins, I’d hear Gage’s voice again when I repeated these exact phrases to police and wonder why I just stayed there, face-down in my pillow.
“Fucking answer me, Colby,” he barked. But he kept his voice quiet.
That was Gage’s only fear, I’d realize later. Getting caught.
“What?” I snapped. My breath filled the fabric around my face, hot and reeking of bad fruit.
“You think it’s funny,” he said again, “telling everyone that shit? Going on about how you think I’m hitting her?”
“I don’t think it.” The fury in my chest was the only thing, in that moment, that felt real. The only thing that would ever remind me it hadn’t been a dream. I turned my head and met his eye, too gone to realize he’d moved from my door to the space beside my bed. “I know it.”
The pulse of the music, once deafening and invasive, halted as Gage brought his hand down to my face in a blow so fast, I heard the crack before I felt any pain. But when I finally did, I knew no one could pick out my scream. The music was still so loud, out there. It was only in here that it seemed to stop.
“You like being honest? Then I guess it’s my turn: you are fucking jealous,” he seethed, climbing onto me. His body felt like a pile of beams had dropped from the sky, jagged and hopelessly immovable, no matter how I shifted. No matter how much I struggled.
I screamed. I would never be able to remember what—if I called for help, for Eden, or just plain screamed, the sound cut short when Gage pushed my face back into the pillow and held it there with one hand.
He’s going to murder me, I thought. With my nerves cauterized from alcohol and adrenaline, my only clue as to what was happening was the fact I could barely breathe. Even in panic, I recognized the chain: there was less air to breath the more the pillow compressed. The pillow compressed more the harder he pushed. He pushed harder the more I fought back.
So I held still.
He let go.
Before I could take the deep, swelling breath my lungs needed, I realized something: he’d probably only released my head from his grasp because he thought I was unconscious. Or dead.
And if he found out otherwise, he’d make sure to get it right.
So I kept my eyes closed. I held every impulse to move, to scream, to fight, and folded them up in my chest, where my lungs burned from the pathetic stream of oxygen I was letting them draw out of the pillow fibers.
I thought it was over. He’d wanted to shut me up, and he had. Now all that was left was to go back to his party and flash his filthy smile until no one remembered my outburst.
His hand skated under the hem of my dress.
No.
He found the elastic of my underwear.
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No, no, no.
The alcohol on his lumbering breath. A sour serum of terror crimping my windpipe shut all over again.
When I felt his fingers on my sex, the pressure beginning, tears surged into my sinuses. Please, no, I begged the universe. I begged fate. I begged God. Whatever power it was that liked to align my life so comically, I prayed it would intervene now to help me, just once.
It wasn’t a bolt of lightning that saved me. It wasn’t a plague, or even a person. It was the phone charger I’d left under my covers.
“Fuck,” Gage muttered, when his knee shifted and the charger dug in. He moved back, just a couple of inches.
Just enough.
I launched myself back, the same spot on my skull where he’d pushed now making impact with his nose. He cursed, the fingers he’d gotten inside tearing free as he fell over the side of the bed.
The party looked entirely different than it had a few minutes ago. Had it been minutes? The time on the clock meant nothing; for all I knew, he’d had me pinned for hours. No one had missed me.
“Eden,” I choked, and a girl with dreadlocks pointed me to the balcony. She stepped back as I passed. Like I was crazy, contagious. All of them were looking at me like that, in fact. I didn’t care anymore.
“Eden,” I said again, much louder, when I reached the sliding glass door.
She was laughing with two of the girls from the coke circle. I stared dumbly at their teeth, seeming to glow in the darkness like we were under a blacklight, and waited until she rolled her gaze to me.
“Go to bed, Colby.”
“I have to talk to you.” Why didn’t she know? How could she not? Already, through a humming pulse that couldn’t possibly be pumping enough blood, I felt the difference.
Before, I’d been wary of Gage. I disliked him. I distrusted him with every fiber of my being. Now, I was afraid of him. I despised him.
How couldn’t Eden, the only person on this earth who knew everything about me, not see this on my face?
She kept talking to her friends, pointedly ignoring me, until I stumbled onto the porch with them and they cut their eyes my way. My legs buckled and shot in directions I didn’t want them to go; I grabbed the railing to steady myself.
