I reached forward and cut the deck in half, leaving it for her to deal. I almost expected to feel some sort of magic tingle when I touched them, but it was just like we were playing old maid or go fish.
Tracy lined up six cards in two rows of three. She stared at them for a few minutes, running her fingers along the edges. Her lips were moving, but no sound came out. The bell rang and neither of us moved.
"I don't know what you did," she said finally. "But you have a very guilty conscience." She squinted and rubbed her forehead. "Things were going well for you, but you took advantage of someone, someone vulnerable."
My throat felt parched. I couldn't swallow. She looked up at me. "This isn't me talking here, Nat, okay?"
She cleared her throat. "You're, uh . . . you're running out of people you can trust."
"Well, tell me what to do," I said. "Just look at the cards and tell me how I can fix things. I can still get them back."
Tracy bit her lip. "Some of them are already gone," she said slowly.
"You have to help me, Tracy. I trust you."
She shrugged and shook her head. "I can't tell you anything else, Nat. I only see what's in the cards."
"Read them again," I offered. "Here, I'll cut."
"You know it doesn't work that way."
"I don't," I insisted. "I don't know anything anymore."
"You know how to take drastic measures," she said. "Clearly. You'll figure out what you have to do to get out of this." She cocked her head. "Or else you won't. But I think, this time, you really are on your own."
A car horn beeped outside, and Tracy looked at her watch again.
"Now, I really have to go," she said, standing up. "You of all people know how a man hates to be kept waiting."
I thought about Mike, whom I'd more or less kept waiting all weekend. And now that I was finally ready to turn to him, he was nowhere to be found. I needed to know if I'd really blown it with him after Friday night, but by the time the question formed in my mind, Tracy had already slid open the window and was starting to shimmy out.
"Wait--" I called.
She shimmied step by step down a couple of bricks, lowered her feet, and leaped to the ground one story below, and as she did, her sunglasses slipped down to the tip of her nose. When she glanced up at me, I realized, I had never seen her eyes before. Her irises were a wild smoky purple color, and there was something about them that was almost . . . hazy, like clouds passing over the bay after a storm.
She offered me one final long and exaggerated wink, then snapped the glasses back up over her luminous eyes. A second later, she was slinking through the Cyprus trees toward the street.
A white camper was stalled in the driveway, and she pulled open the door and climbed in. I was fifty feet away and looking through a window that might not have been cleaned in the history of our school, but it was still clear that the camper Tracy climbed into now was the very same camper Slutsky had climbed into at the bar the other night. The trading post for drugs sure got around. My heart plummeted even further at the thought of the rumor mill catching whiff of the fact that I'd had J.B.'s antiseizure pills. I was running out of notches on the paranoia belt, and what was worse, I had finally run out of people to turn to.
There wasn't anyone left to trust, except myself.
CHAPTER Nineteen
SLEEP NO MORE
No trail of bread crumbs or boxers this time, I went to the waterfall alone. The encounter with Tracy in the bathroom this morning had left me paralyzed. Her stormy eyes were haunting me, and my mind couldn't stop running over all the prophecies she'd given. She'd been right about Mike winning Palmetto Prince. She'd been right about revenge being close (though as it turned out, it was J.B. who got revenge and not me). She'd even been right today, that I was absolutely out of options and utterly on my own. The only prediction that hadn't yet come to pass was the mention of "the fall" following the revenge. I still couldn't figure out exactly what that one meant--which was what had led me here tonight.
It was raining again, and the path uphill was muddy and steep. I grabbed at Cyprus branches for support as I climbed and stepped over the Venus flytraps coating the way. I had never been scared to hike alone at night, but I was trembling now.
Maybe it would help to remember that I had nothing left to lose.
At the top of the path, a hoot owl greeted me, looking like a fat black cat in the spruce tree. I ducked under the low hanging branch and stepped inside the water-carved stone cave. It was the first time I'd ever been to the waterfall without Mike--and the first time I think I ever really saw what it looked like. Every other time we'd come, the destination was just a backdrop for us. Tonight, the alcove felt cramped and dangerous, everything slippery, wet, and cold.
I stood at the ledge, where I used to love to tower over Mike, making him nervous if I got close enough to the edge so that the water ran down my hair. Now when I looked out over the edge, I was overcome by vertigo. I sat back down in the nook to breathe.
I was safe here. I was finally safe and alone. It was a feeling that I planned on getting used to.
I had a plan. I knew what I had to do.
It wouldn't be right to not say good-bye to Mike, though. My heart clenched just thinking about it. How could I face him? And yet, how to express all that we'd done wrong? How to account for where I ended up after tonight? How to caution him on where he should go from here?
As much as you can understand, you will.
--Always, Natalie
No apologies, which were more often unwanted than too little or too late. He would get it from the note I'd left in his locker. If he didn't--
There was his face. He was all over the scrapbook I'd brought with me in my backpack.
I hadn't meant to crack it open here; it was just one of those things I couldn't leave behind. Suddenly, I was poring over our lives together, tearing through the delicate pages, looking for some kind of answer.
We'd grown up in a three-year long embrace, and as careful as I'd been about documenting it, I guess I'd never really taken the time to look through the album after I had put it together. It was funny; most of the pictures had been taken from the same angle, with the camera only ever as far away as one of our arms could reach. It was like we'd been too consumed by each other to let go long enough to ask someone else to take the picture.
I didn't know which one of us had let go first these past weeks. All I knew now was that it was cold here with the steady mist of water fogging up the plastic cover on the album's pages. My fingers trembled, turning blue as I flipped through them. At the back of the book, ten blank pages--bookmarked and reserved for pictures I'd meant to take of us at Palmetto Court on Friday night.
Let them stay blank. At least they'd be purer that way. At least they'd just be little white lies.
Once, in freshman composition class, we did a writing exercise: Pretend your house is burning, and you only have minutes to escape. What five things would you grab on your way out the door?
It's supposed to teach you what you value, what cannot be replaced. It's supposed to suggest that you'd know what mattered to you instantly, in the heat of the moment. I used to wonder what it was about. Why did it take your whole world going up in flames before you got that kind of clarity?
Once, I would have brought my Jessamine, stuffed and wrinkled in the backpack, but things had turned out differently than I expected them to. Where I was going now, there'd be no use for a giant silk flower, dangling ribbons, the rare crown charm.
My hands were shaking. I closed the scrapbook and reached into my bag for the one thing I knew would calm me down.
"Nat, what are you doing?"
It was Mike. He ducked under the tree branch to join me.
"What are you doing?" I said, dropping the backpack.
"You weren't at school; you weren't at home. I started to get a bad feeling,"
Mike's black raincoat was dripping when he took it off and tossed it on the ground. Outside, the
hoot owl flew the coop.
"You shouldn't have come here," I said.
Mike sighed and crossed his arms. He was leaning against the stone slab on the other side of the alcove. He felt too close to me, too stifling, and at the same time, too far away.
"Nat, I got a call today," he said, looking everywhere but at me. "It was from your dad."
"That's impossible," I said, and even then my mind began to race to come up with a quick explanation, a way out. But I was so tired. It was over.
"I'm not mad," Mike said. He sat down next to me and reached for my hand. "It sounds crazy, but a lot of things finally make sense. I even understand why you lied."
I shook my hand away. "You don't know anything about why I did what I did. You don't know anything about me."
"Your dad told me a lot more than you ever would have," he said. "He said he's been trying to reconnect with you."
For a second, I wondered how exactly my dad would have summed up our sordid past. Would he have told Mike about the two years he pretended to go to work every day at the wharf and ended up slumped over at the bar? Or how far he'd come since the day his buddies at the station slapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists? Mike might be a novice when it came to being conned by my father, but I'd believed his apologies and vows to change too many times to walk into one more letdown.
"You don't know my father," I said resolutely. "He's a con artist, Mike."
"He's worried about you," he said. "I guess we have that in common."
I stood up, pacing the small stone ledge. I couldn't believe we were even having this conversation. It was almost a shame that I was never going to see my dad again, that I was never going to have the chance to chew him out for this.
"Mike, you can't just believe everything everyone tells you. He didn't call you because he was worried about me," I said. "My guess is he called when he caught wind of your trust fund."
Mike shook his head. "You're upset," he said. He tried to put his arms around me. "You're just tired and upset."
I pushed him off. "You're unconscious."
Now Mike's face flushed, and he stepped forward, towering over me.
"I'm 'unconscious?' " he asked. "I was the one who wanted to own up to what happened from the beginning. I'm not the one who spent my whole life running away from my past."
"Why should you?" I spit. "You're Mike King. You have no idea what it's like to need to run away."
Speaking of which--
It was time to go. I had wanted to leave Charleston on some sort of a high note. I'd wanted one peaceful parting gesture at the waterfall, but now that Mike had shown up and made that an impossibility, I just wanted to get out as soon as possible. I reached down and picked up my backpack, stuffing the scrapbook inside.
"What's this?" Mike asked, pulling it out of my hands. The album fell open to a picture of the two of us in this very spot at a much more innocent time in our relationship. He looked up me. His eyes started to water. "Why did you bring this here?" he asked. "What else do you have in that bag?"
"Nothing," I muttered. "Just leave me alone."
"Natalie, what's going on?" He grabbed for the backpack at my shoulder, but I kept a firm grip on the straps. After a split second of tug-of-war, I felt the zipper give way. It split down the middle, exposing the gaping insides of the bag like a purple Venus flytrap. About twenty packs of Juicy Fruit ricocheted in all directions, and I gasped as the one thing I really hadn't wanted Mike to see floated through the air and landed at his feet.
He reached down to pick it up. I held my breath. He swallowed hard as his eyes ran over my one-way bus ticket to New York.
His brow furrowed. He looked at his watch and said, "Cutting it a little close to departure time, don't you think?"
"Mike."
I stepped toward him, but he pushed me away. I stumbled backward, up against the wall. His hands felt so rough on my chest.
"Let me guess," he said, with a venom in his voice I'd never heard before. "I don't get it, right? Tortured, complicated Nat and her gullible trust-fund boyfriend. Is that what you think?"
Once, I would have fallen on him and begged for his mouth on mine so we'd stop saying things we didn't mean. The awful thing was, by now, we meant everything we were saying.
"Leave me alone," I said. "Just put my things down and leave me alone."
"No," he folded up the ticket and stuffed it in his pocket. "You think you can just disappear and what we did will disappear, too? I won't let you leave me, Nat. Not with all of this."
"You'll be better off without me," I said, knowing that what I meant was that we'd both be better off. No one would pin this all on Mike alone, and maybe somewhere, far away, there could be a fresh start for me, too. "Give me my ticket," I said, holding out my hand.
"No."
Mike crossed his arms over his chest. I had no other choice. I came at him one last time. And one last time, he shoved me back.
Only this time, he was just forceful enough to make a difference. This time, I didn't stop stumbling backward until there wasn't any more ground to stumble on. My foot clipped over the edge of the waterfall, and Mike and I locked eyes.
We knew. Right then, both of us knew exactly what was going to happen.
His hand reached out for mine. It was too late.
In a way, hadn't it always been too late for Mike and me? Sure, I had tried to make a fresh start when I crossed over to Palmetto, but I guess some pasts are just too powerful. Mine had a way of creeping up on me. I could only fight it for so long before I fell.
When it came, I let it happen. You could say I even welcomed it, falling backward with as much grace as I could muster, through the sheet of ice-cold water, then down with it. Down into the still, black pool below.
CHAPTER Twenty
YOUNG IN DEED
Some say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. For me, it was just one moment. Same water, different fall.
I was thirteen years old and about to go skinny-dipping for the very first time.
"Hurry up," Sarah called from the other side of the hemlock patch. "It'll be warmer once we get in the water."
She'd already left her clothes in a heap next to me. I looked down at her flimsy pink bra, her cut-off shorts, the white wifebeater tank top she'd bought in a three pack at the drugstore. I pictured what she must look like on the other side of the bush, naked except for her flip-flops and the shark-tooth necklace she always wore. The tattoo on the small of her back would look bright against her pale skin in the moonlight. She'd be shivering and hugging her arms around her chest. You could hear it in her voice: She couldn't wait to get in the water with the boys.
I was nervous. I didn't know these guys whom she'd met in the movie theater parking lot on the other side of town when she'd been on a date with someone else. The way she told the story, one of them rolled down the window of his red Camero, and she was sliding through it before he even finished suggesting that she ditch her date for someone with a faster ride.
"We're talking about guys from Palmetto," she'd told me later that night on the phone. "They drive fast, they talk fast, and they move fast. They're not like anyone we know."
It wasn't long before she convinced me to go with her to meet them behind one of their houses on the Cove. Whoever it was, it wasn't even his main house, Sarah raved to me; it was an extra weekend house, like something only movie stars had.
We had to hitchhike to get there, our bathing suits and our cuter clothes tucked in a beach bag so no one from our neighborhood would think anything of it if they saw us on the street. It was one thing to sneak out and stay in Cawdor; it was another thing to go over to Palmetto. People might start to imagine that you thought you were above where you came from.
The boys outnumbered us. They were bigger and older, and their bathing suits probably cost twice as much as mine and Sarah's combined. I was embarrassed about my knock-off solid-color one-piece with the racer back that made me look even flatter than I w
as. Sarah saw it in my face.
"I have an idea," she sang.
Twenty minutes later, she was still waiting for me to build up the guts to take off my clothes and meet her on the dock. We were going to stand there for a minute in the moonlight, then dive in--just far enough from the guys that we'd be little more than silhouettes, just long enough that they'd get the gist.
Finally, she brushed back through the hemlock, took a hold of my shirt herself, and yanked it over my head.
"Hey," I teased. "I thought you were into guys."
We were both cracking up as she unzipped my jeans, and I kicked my legs free.
"About effing time," she grinned, sizing me up as I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering. "Hot. Okay, which one of the guys do you want? I'm starting with Tommy."
"Starting with?" I laughed.
"The night is young, honey," she shrugged dramatically. I was starting to understand why my mom and her friends called Sarah's mom a whore, a label that took a lot to earn, especially in the type of trailer park circles Mom ran in. But to me, Sarah's eagerness was a rush. She was the first girl I'd ever seen who actually seemed in control of what she did with her body. If she wanted something, she got it. She was almost like a guy.
I realized she was staring at me, waiting for me to call dibs on which one I wanted first.
"I don't really know any of these guys," I said. "How am I supposed to pick?"
"Good point," she agreed. "Get to know them in the water; it'll be sexier. Flash now, call dibs later, okay?"
I nodded, cracking a grin.
"Stick with me, Tal," she said, leading me outside. "I'll teach you everything you need to know."
I did, and she did. At least for a little while.
As soon as the first guy caught a glimpse of us naked on the dock getting ready to dive in, there was a flurry of splashing as the rest of them all swam out to meet us. Sarah and I held hands, raised them up over our heads, and dove into the water together.
When I came up for air, I was face to face with a blond-headed boy treading water. I hadn't seen him before in the crowd, but without a word, he treaded closer, brushed a hand against my face, and kissed me.
"I'm Justin," he said. "Call me J.B."
"Natalie," I gasped, trying to stay afloat. "Everyone calls me Tal."