by Tess Sharpe
I press my hand near my heart, like that’ll help it calm down. I can feel the ridges of the scar there, where the surgeons cracked my chest after the crash.
I grab the bear spray from the floor, put it in my purse, and head to the door. By now, Kyle’ll be long gone. Probably off to spread the news that Sophie Winters is back home and crazier than ever.
Someone’s standing at the door when I open it. I almost smack into his chest, my bad leg twists as I step back, and I falter. When a hand reaches out to steady me, I know without looking up who it is.
Dread covers me like a body, hot and heavy and fitting in all the wrong places. I’m not prepared for this. I’ve avoided thinking about this moment for months.
I can’t face him.
But I can’t walk away.
Not again.
“Trev,” I say instead.
Mina’s brother stares back at me, tall and broad and so familiar. I force myself to look into his eyes.
It’s like looking into hers.
8
FOUR MONTHS AGO (SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD)
It’s been four days. It seems longer. Or maybe shorter.
My parents flit around me during the day, quiet, guarded. They’re planning. Preparing to go to war for me. Once my mom realizes I’m not going to tell the police what they want, she goes into lawyer mode. She spends all her time making phone calls, and Dad paces, back and forth, up the stairs, down the hallway, until I’m sure he’s worn a path there.
Mom’s trying to keep me out of juvie. The bottle of Oxy they found in my jacket wasn’t much, but it was enough to get me into plenty of trouble—if Mom didn’t have so many friends in the right places.
She’s going to save me, like she always does.
She doesn’t think she saved me the first time, but she did. She sent me to Macy.
The days aren’t so bad, with the click of Mom’s heels and the thud of Dad’s footsteps. How Dad cracks open my door every time he sees it’s closed, just in case.
The nights are the worst.
Every time I close my eyes, I’m back at Booker’s Point.
So I don’t close my eyes. I stare. I drink coffee. I stay awake.
I can’t keep it up much longer.
I want to use. The constant itch inside me, the voice in my head that whispers “I’ll make it all go away” flirts at the edges of me. There are parts that are starting to prickle, like blood rushing into a foot gone numb.
I ignore it.
I breathe.
Five months. Three weeks. Five days.
Two in the morning, and I’m the only one awake. I fold myself on the bench built into the dining room window, wrapped in a blanket. I watch the yard like I’m waiting for the man in the mask to charge through the gate, ready to finish what he started.
I teeter between hope and terror that he will. A high-wire act where I’m never quite sure if I want to be saved or fall.
I need to make this stop.
A light in the yard distracts me, coming from the rickety tree house nestled in the old oak at the foot of my garden. I head outside, padding across the yard in bare feet. The rope ladder is frayed, and it’s hard to pull myself up with my bad leg, but I manage.
Trev’s sitting there, his back against the wall, knees drawn up. His dark, curly hair’s a mess. There are circles underneath his eyes. He hasn’t been sleeping, either.
Of course he hasn’t.
His fingers trace a spot on the floor over and over. As I climb into the tree house, I see it’s the board where Mina carved her name, entwined with mine.
“The funeral’s on Friday,” he says.
“I know.”
“My mom…” He stops, swallowing hard. His gray eyes—so much like hers that it hurts to look into them, like she’s here, but not—shine with unshed tears. “I had to go to the funeral home by myself. Mom just couldn’t deal. So I sat there and listened to that guy talk about music and flowers and if the casket should be lined in velvet or satin. All I could think about is how Mina’s scared of the dark, and how messed up it is that I’m letting them put her in the ground.” He lets out a tight laugh that’s painful against my ears. “Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard?”
“No.” I grab his hand, holding tight when he tries to pull away. “No, it’s not stupid. Remember that Snoopy night-light she had?”
“You broke it with a soccer ball.” He almost smiles at the memory.
“And you covered for me. She didn’t speak to you for a week, but you never told.”
“Yeah, well, someone had to look out for you.” He stares out the roughly framed window, anywhere but at me. “I keep trying to picture it. How it happened. What it was like. If it was fast. If she was in pain.” He faces me now, an open book of raw emotion, wanting me to bleed all over the pages with him. “Was she?”
“Trev, don’t. Please.” My voice cracks. I want to get out of here. I can’t think about it. I try to tug away, but now it’s him who’s holding on to me.
“I hate you.” It’s almost casual, the way he says it. But the look in his eyes—it turns his words into a tangle of lie and truth, bearing down on me, so familiar. “I hate that you were the one who survived. I hate that I was relieved when I heard you were okay. I just…hate you.”
The bones of my fingers grind underneath the pressure of his hand.
“I hate everything” is all I can say back.
He kisses me. Pulls me forward with a sudden jerk of movement that I’m not prepared for. It’s jarring; our teeth clack together, noses bump, the angle is all wrong. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. This is the only way it could ever be.
I get his shirt off with little difficulty, but mine is more trouble, tangling around my neck as he gets distracted by my bared skin. His hands gentle, soft to the point of reverence, moving over skin and bone and scars, tracing the curve of me.
I let myself be touched. Kissed. Undressed and eased back onto the wooden floor scarred with the remnants of our childhood.
I let myself feel it. Allow his skin to sink into mine.
I let myself because this is exactly what I need: this terrible idea, this beautiful, messy distraction.
And if somewhere in the middle both of our faces are wet with tears, it doesn’t matter so much. We’re doing this for all the wrong reasons, anyway.
Later, I stare at his face in the moonlight and wonder if he can tell that I kissed him like I already know the shape of his lips. Like I’ve mapped them in my mind, in another life. Learned them from another person who shared his eyes and nose and mouth, but who is never coming back.
9
NOW (JUNE)
For a long, frozen moment, Trev and I stare at each other. I’m caught in his gaze, hungry for the slightest glimpse of her, even if it’s just similar features in a familiar face.
They always looked so much alike. It wasn’t just their high cheekbones and straight noses, the way their gray eyes tilted up at the edges. It was in the way they smiled when they were trying not to, lopsided. The way they both fiddled with their brown curls when they were anxious, how they couldn’t stop chewing their nails for anything.
Trev is all I have left of her, a handful of echoing characteristics buried underneath what makes him Trev: the honesty and goodness and the way he doesn’t hide things (not like her, not like me).
Mina had loved him so much. They’d been inseparable since their dad died, and when I came along, Trev had stepped aside to make room, though my seven-year-old, only-child self didn’t understand that. Just like I didn’t understand things like daddies dying and the tears Mina would sometimes shed out of nowhere.
When we were little, whenever she cried, I’d give her the purple crayon out of my box so she’d have two, and it made he
r smile through the tears, so I kept doing it. I stole purple crayons from everyone’s crayon boxes until she had a whole collection.
And now Trev stares at me with her eyes like he wants to devour me. His hair’s long, veering into mop territory, and his jaw’s prickled with stubble instead of smooth. I’ve never seen him this scruffy. I can feel the hard edges of calluses on his palm where he’s holding my arm. Rope calluses, from handling the sails. I wonder if that’s where he’s been spending all his time—on his boat, trying to sail away from it all.
He lets go of me, and the feelings battle inside: relief and disappointment wrapped up in a neat, bloodstained bow.
I step out of the doorway into the sunlight, and he backs away like I’m poisonous.
He sticks his hands in the pockets of his shorts, rocks on his heels. Trev is strong and tall in that way you don’t really notice unless he needs to use it. It makes you feel safe, lulled into this sense that nothing bad will happen with him around.
“I didn’t know you were home,” Trev says.
“I just got back.”
“You didn’t come to her funeral.” He tries to make it gentle, not like an accusation, but it hangs between us like one.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not the person you need to apologize to,” Trev says, and waits a beat. “Have you…have you gone to see her?”
I shake my head.
I can’t go out to Mina’s grave. The idea of her in the ground, sealed forever in the dark when she had been all light and sound and spark, horrifies me. When I force myself to think about it, I think she would’ve liked to disappear in flames, the brilliance and warmth all around her.
But she’s in the ground. It’s so wrong, but I can’t change it.
“You should go see her,” Trev says. “Make your peace. She deserves that from you.”
He thinks that talking to a slab of stone will make a difference. That it’ll change something. Trev has faith in things like that, just like Mina had.
I don’t.
The belief in his face makes me wish I could tell him yes, of course I’ll go. I want to be able to do that. Once upon a time I loved him almost as much as I loved her.
But Trev has never come first. He’s always been second, and I can’t change that now or then or ever.
“You think it’s my fault, too.”
Unable to meet my eyes, Trev focuses on the kids playing on the jungle gym a few yards away. “I think you made some big mistakes,” he says, tiptoeing around words like they’re land mines. “And Mina paid for them.”
It hurts more than I expect to hear him confirm it. Nothing like the shallow cuts my parents have left in me. This is a blow to a heart that was never quite his, and I almost crumble beneath his disappointment.
“I hope you’re clean.” He backs away from me like he doesn’t even want to share airspace. “I hope you stay clean. That’s what she’d want for you.”
He’s almost down the walk when I ask; I can’t help myself. “Do you still hate me?”
He turns, and even from this far away, I can see the sadness written on his face. “That’s the problem, Soph. I never could.”
10
THREE AND A HALF YEARS AGO (FOURTEEN YEARS OLD)
The morphine has worn off. The pain is all over, a sharp edge that relentlessly carves through me.
“Push,” I say between cracked lips. I move my hand, the unbroken one, trying to find the button for the morphine drip.
“Here.” Warm fingers close over mine, placing the pump in my palm. I push the button and wait.
Slowly, the pain retreats. For now.
“Your dad went to get coffee,” Trev says. He’s in a chair next to my bed, his hand still covering mine. “Want me to find him?”
I shake my head. “You’re here.” The morphine makes my brain fuzzy. Sometimes I say stupid stuff, I forget things, but I’m almost positive he hasn’t visited before.
“I’m here,” he says.
“Mina?” I breathe.
“She’s at school. I got out early. Wanted to see you.”
“You okay?” I ask. There’s a fading bruise on his temple. He’s sitting in a weird position, his leg straightened out like it’s in a cast. But I can’t prop myself up enough to see how bad he’s hurt. Mina has a cast on her arm, I remember suddenly. The nurses and my mom had to force her to leave last night; she hadn’t wanted to go.
“I’m fine.” He strokes my fingers. They’re pretty much the only part of me that isn’t bruised or broken or stitched together.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Sophie, I’m so sorry.”
He buries his face in the sheets next to me, and I don’t have the strength to lift my hand to touch him.
“’S’okay,” I whisper. My eyes droop as the morphine kicks in further. “Not your fault.”
Later, they’ll tell me that it was his fault. That he ran a stop sign and we got T-boned by an SUV going twenty above the speed limit. The doctors will explain that I flatlined on the operating table for almost two minutes before they got my heart started again. That my right leg was crushed and I now have titanium rods screwed into what little bone remains. That I’ll have to spend almost a year walking with a cane. That I’ll have months of physical therapy, handfuls of pills I have to take. That I’ll have a permanent limp, and my back will cause me problems for the rest of my life.
Later, I’ll finally have enough and cross that line. I’ll crush up four pills and snort them with a straw, floating away in the temporary numbness.
But right now, I don’t know about what’s ahead for us, him and me and Mina. So I try to comfort him. I fight against the numbness instead of drowning myself in it. And he says my name, over and over, begging for the forgiveness I’ve already given.
11
NOW (JUNE)
My mom’s car is in the driveway when I get home. As soon as I open the door, I hear heels, brisk and sharp against the floor.
She’s immaculate, her straight blond hair in a slick bun. She probably came straight from court; she hasn’t even unbuttoned her blazer. ��Are you all right? Where have you been?” she asks, but doesn’t pause for me to answer. “I’ve been worried. Macy said she dropped you off two hours ago.”
I set my bag onto the table in the foyer. “I left you a note in the kitchen.”
Mom looks over her shoulder, wilting a little when she sees the notebook paper I’d torn off. “I didn’t see it,” she says. “I wish you would’ve called. I didn’t know where you were.”
“I’m sorry.” I move toward the stairs.
“Wait a moment, Sophie Grace.”
I freeze, because the second Mom gets formal, it means trouble. I turn around, schooling my face into a disinterested mask. “Yes?”
“Where have you been?”
“I just went for a walk.”
“You can’t leave whenever you like.”
“Are you putting me under house arrest?” I ask.
Mom’s chin tilts up; she’s ready for war. “It’s my job to make sure you don’t fall back into bad habits like before. If I have to restrict you to the house to do that, I will. I refuse to let you relapse again.”
I close my eyes, breathing deeply. It’s hard to control the anger that spikes inside me. I want to break through the ice-queen parts of her, shatter her like she’s shattered me.
“I’m not a kid. And unless you plan on staying home from work, you can’t stop me. If it’d make you feel better, I can call you to check in every few hours.”
Mom’s mouth flattens into a thin slash of pearly-pink lipstick. “You don’t get to make the rules, Sophie. Your previous behavior will no longer be tolerated. If you step one toe out of line, I’ll send you back to Seaside. I swear I will.”
I’ve prepared myself for these threats. I’ve tried to examine every angle Mom might come at me from, because it’s the only way to stay a step ahead of her.
“In a few months, you won’t be able to do that,” I say. “As soon as I turn eighteen, you can’t make any medical decisions for me. No matter what you think I did.”
“As long as you live under my roof, you’ll follow my rules, eighteen or not,” Mom says.
“You try to send me back to Seaside, and I’ll leave,” I say. “I’ll walk out that door and never come back.”
“Don’t threaten me.”
“It’s not a threat. It’s the truth.” I look away from her, from the way her hands are shaking, like she’s torn between holding and hurting me. “I’m tired. I’m going up to my room.”
She doesn’t try to stop me this time.
I haven’t been allowed a lock on my door since forever, so I shove my desk chair against it. I can hear Mom climb the stairs and start to run a bath.
I shove all the clothes off my bed, taking off the sheets and blankets and pillows, too. It takes me three tries to flip the mattress, both my legs shaking at the effort. Panting, I finally succeed, my back protesting all the way. I step over the pile of sheets and blankets and pull a notebook from my bag. There are loose pages stuck between the bound ones, and I shake them out on top of the mattress before going over and grabbing tape and markers from my desk.
It takes only a few minutes. I don’t have much to go on—yet. But by the time I’m done, the underside of my mattress has been turned into a makeshift evidence board. Mina’s junior-year picture is taped underneath a scrap of paper labeled VICTIM, and the only picture I have of Kyle is taped under SUSPECT. The picture’s an old one from the Freshman Fling when all our friends went together. Mina and Amber and I are crowded to the side, laughing as Kyle and Adam are caught midshove and Cody looks on disapprovingly. We look young, happy. I look happy. That girl in the picture has no idea that her entire life’s gonna get trashed in a few months. I circle Kyle with my Sharpie before moving on. To the side of the picture, I tape my list, the number one question: WHAT STORY WAS MINA WORKING ON?
