I’ve never gotten stitches before and there’s something about the odd pressure of the needle as it goes in and the pull of my skin as it’s brought together. Mom can’t handle the sight and waits for me in the waiting room. She’s been having a hard time looking me in the eyes since she picked me up from school.
“Explain it to me,” she says on the drive home. I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. “Romy, explain it to me. What was going through your mind that you would do something like that to another girl?”
“No,” I say. “Nothing.”
She pulls into the driveway. I’m out of the New Yorker before the engine is off.
“Romy, wait—”
I cut a straight line for my room because I figure I’ll get sent there anyway, but Todd is in the way and he stops me at the steps. He stares at my forehead like he can’t make the connection that what happened to me is something I made happen because if I made anything clear before I left school, it was that I was nobody’s victim.
“Jesus, kid,” he says softly.
He steps aside and I let myself into the house. By now, my head is starting to feel like it met the sharp edge of an open locker. I hear Mom throw her purse on the floor. I’m halfway up the stairs before she says, “Romy, you stop. Stop right now.”
I do, but I stay pointed in the direction of my bedroom until she tells me to turn around and look at her. I turn around and look at her, them. Because Todd is still there and for once, I wish he was as absent as the man he replaced.
“Explain it to me,” Mom says again. “Because I don’t want to hear about it for the first time in your principal’s office tomorrow when we’re finding out if you’re still welcome at school. You will not do that to me.”
She sounds like someone who’s already lost the war, but just won’t stop fighting in spite of it. And she’s right; I won’t do that to her. I wouldn’t and couldn’t do that to her. Every day, she’s got to be my mother in this town. I don’t need to make that harder than it already is.
“Tina ran her mouth, so I shoved her and the whole thing went from there.”
“Really.” Mom crosses her arms. “That’s all?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not telling me something. This isn’t like you,” she says. I think she’s wrong. It has to be like me, if I did it, otherwise I wouldn’t have. “What did she say to you?”
“Doesn’t matter what she said.”
“Yes, it does. If you don’t tell me, how can I help you?”
“What could you do to help me?”
She looks like I’ve slapped her. The truth is, I don’t really know if she could help me, but I know she really wants to believe she could and I know she wants me to come to her believing it too. My love should be knowing this about her and being able to pretend, but I can’t. I go to my room. No one tells me to. I just go.
a week’s suspension.
I thought there’d be more trouble than that, but since Tina’s the one who left me on the road and the Ortizes know I know it, they don’t demand answers from me, for what I did to their daughter. I wouldn’t have said it anyway, not in front of my mom. I just stare at Tina’s father and I hate him. I wonder if he’s already told the sheriff about this, or if he’s waiting for their next round of golf. Because Tina and I have never conducted ourselves in such an unladylike manner before, Diaz says we’re getting off easier than we would have otherwise. I want to ask her what unladylike means.
We leave the office an awkward fivesome, just before the bell goes. Our parents duck out as soon as it rings, opting to wait in their cars while Tina and I get our homework for the week. She’s immediately flanked by girls who want to know the whole story. I catch Tina’s beginning—She’s a fucking psycho, they won’t do anything—but I don’t hang around for the end.
Teachers are cold to me when they hand me my assignments and I wonder if it’s an honest reaction or one Diaz told them to have. When I reach Ms. Alcott’s room for my English homework, Brock is at her desk. She hands him a pile of papers.
“Give Alek my best. Tell him I hope we see him back here soon.”
“Yeah, I will…” Brock tenses when he sees me. “Thanks, Ms. A.”
He leaves with her smiling sadly after him and the smile disappears when she turns her attention to me. “I have your homework right here…”
“What’s wrong with Alek?” I ask.
She looks at me like I’m an idiot and in this moment, I get the feeling she truly doesn’t like me.
“You can’t imagine the kind of stress Alek is under right now, but I hope it gives you something to think about, Romy. There are people with actual, real troubles out there and—” She grabs a stack of worksheets, and hands them over. “There are people who make trouble for themselves.”
Brock is waiting when I come out. I barely have time to register him before he’s too close. Too, too close.
“You’re telling people I slipped GHB into your drink at Wake Lake?” he asks, and he sounds almost amused, like he’s been so bogged down by the weight of all this Penny stuff, he’s okay with this funny little distraction. “Really?”
“Did you?”
“Why are you asking, if that’s what you’re telling people?”
As much as I want to run, I also want to corner him, want to turn this into a confrontation and scare a confession out of him somehow, but it would never happen, not with Brock. The safest thing my body can do is keep moving.
“I know you had it,” I say. “I heard Sarah and Norah talking about it in the girls’ room—”
“But can you prove that I gave you any?” Anger swells inside me, the kind that made me want to tear Tina apart. “I mean, are you telling me you remember a specific moment where I slipped GHB into your drink? Because if you can’t, Grey, you better shut your fucking mouth.”
“Did you?” I ask again because the only thing I can do is ask. People are looking at us, me and Brock, walking down the hall together. It’s not right. None of it. He must sense it too. He breaks away, innocently holding up his hands.
“Did I?” he asks back.
When I get in the car with my loaded-down book bag, I’m shaking. I want to bite my fist. I try to keep it all off my face as Mom says, “You’re going to call Tracey tonight and you’re going to tell her you’re not going to be at work until next week—”
“What?” I blink. “I can’t—”
“I don’t think suspension from that place,” Mom says, nodding at the building, “is going to drive home the point that what you did, Romy, was wrong. You don’t get to stay home all day and then go to work and see Leon. What about that is a punishment?”
Hearing his name is a painful reminder of what I still have to fix. I don’t know how I’m going to do that because when I play the search over in my head, I don’t know what I could have done differently.
“What am I going to tell Tracey when she asks why I can’t come in for a week?”
“You’ll have to figure it out.”
“And if I lose my job?”
Mom sighs. “If I really thought you’d lose your job, do you think I’d make you do it? Last night, I told Tracey you got into some trouble at school, that you got hurt. She’s waiting for your call.”
“You tell her I started it?”
“Obviously not.”
At home, I call Tracey from my bedroom and tell her I need time off and she makes her voice nice for me, loses that managerial edge that keeps everyone in line. Holly will cover my shifts. It’s fine. It’s totally fine. It takes me the afternoon to knock out my homework, penciling answers I have no confidence of being right but I’m confident I don’t care if they’re wrong. When Mom goes to her cleaning job, Todd puts dinner in my hands. He sits at the table, flipping through an old paperback while I chop up potatoes and onions and cut the skin off some chicken legs. It’s sort of peaceful.
“You start a fight with Tina Ortiz because you’re upset about something else?” he asks casually, turning
a page.
Was sort of peaceful.
“What?”
He tilts his head back to look at me. “You heard me.”
“Did I start a fight with a girl because I’m upset about something else?” I repeat and he nods. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
He cracks the spine of the book and sets it on the table. “You’re telling me you never been mad or upset over one thing and took it out on another person?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do.” He pauses. “You know, you can tell us what’s going on. There’s no one you have to keep it a secret from.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say again. He sighs heavily. I wait until the oven beeps and then I put the chicken in and time it.
“Take that out when it’s ready,” I tell him. “I’m not hungry.”
* * *
i wake up on my bed on top of the covers.
I feel like it should be morning, a new day, and I guess it is. When I check the time it’s three a.m. I don’t remember setting out to sleep, but it must have pulled me under.
I stare out the window. The street is so quiet. Lights off in every house I can see from here, all the people inside with their eyes shut. It’s an hour before the first signs of life—a car headed down a road that’s not this one—reach my ears. It’s a few minutes more before there’s another: a thin whine floating in through my open window, familiar but out of place this late. The screen door. I peer into the darkness, trying to figure out whether it’s someone coming or going and then I hear a soft cough.
Mom.
I expect to see her move from the steps to the sidewalk, from the sidewalk to the New Yorker because maybe we’re alike that way. Maybe sometimes she just has to get in a car and go too. She never materializes, though, and the telltale whine of the screen door never sounds again, so she’s just out there, alone. I don’t want to join her but I think I have to. It’s kind of like stumbling upon the scene of an accident. Once you’ve looked, you’re part of it.
Especially if you walk away.
I climb out of bed and tiptoe into the hall. Their bedroom door is open a crack. The sound of Todd’s snoring drifts out. I creep down the stairs, to the open front door. I look out, past the porch, to where my mother is sitting on the steps, her head resting against her knees, and in that moment I’m struck by how young she is. I forget. Todd too. My father, even.
Sometimes, I feel like we all have so many lifetimes to go.
I step into the dry night air. Mom straightens, looks at me like she knew I was going to show. I sit beside her. She puts her arm around me.
“Dinner was good. I saved you a plate. Tried to wake you up but you were pretty out. You told me—” I hear the smile in her voice. “‘Watch their feathers.’ Thought I’d let you sleep.”
I do that sometimes, when I’m really tired. I only let a small part of myself awake and talk nonsense until whoever wants me up leaves me alone. I could hold an entire conversation as long as it doesn’t have to make any sense. Once I told her this isn’t ours. Another time, the glass won’t break. Mom revisits these moments sometimes, like they’re such great memories. She runs her fingers along the outside of the bandage on my forehead and asks me how it feels. I shrug and tell her, okay. After a while, there’s the sound of another car rushing the pavement. This one’s headed our way.
“Blue Ford,” she says. It makes me ache. It’s a game we used to play, all of us. Her, me, my dad. Only on his good days. Guess the car and color by sound. Since my dad spent all his time around cars, he never seemed to miss the make—but color was anyone’s game.
“Purple Honda,” I say.
We’re both wrong. A black Chevy goes by.
“I know why you started that fight.”
It’s slow going over me, what she’s said. She knows. What does she think she knows? I stare at the walkway, those vines visible, even in this dark, imagining different possibilities. She knows about the photos? The words on my stomach? No—she can’t know anything.
“That’s because I told you why I started the fight.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Look, do we have to do this now? I—”
“Yes, we do. I don’t push you to talk because I don’t feel like I have a right after everything that happened—” She pauses. “I’ve been waiting for you to tell me why you started that fight with Tina but I know you won’t. But I know why, Romy—I’ve known.”
I close my eyes briefly. “Then why?”
“Kellan Turner’s coming back.”
All I feel is the shock of it and then the pain, and then all I can think is doesn’t she know a name can be as good as a declaration of war? That I can say anything I want to her now, no matter how cruel it is to get myself—back.
Coming back.
“That’s what happened,” she says. “Isn’t it? Tina said something about it to you.”
Poison. It’s traveling my veins, turning my blood into something too sick to name. It works its way through me, finds my heart and then—every vital part of me turns off.
“You knew.” The words find their way off my dead tongue, slow and stupid, thick like syrup. I feel something new pulling me under now but nothing so merciful as sleep. I struggle against it, fight to stay here even though this is no longer any place I want to be either. “You knew?”
“Todd heard about it from Andrew Ryan on Monday. I wanted to tell you before the search, but it didn’t seem like the time—and then I wanted to tell you on Tuesday, but—” Maybe you could take the night off and we could have some mother-daughter time. Oh. “I just couldn’t figure out how to break it to you. But I knew there was one way I didn’t want you to find out and you did.” She exhales. “That’s what Tina said, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s not back yet,” she says and only the smallest part of me gives in to the relief of that, just the smallest part. “Monday—is what Todd heard. That was the soonest he could get time off from his job—” A job. A job. This little fact lights on me in a way I don’t want it to. I don’t want to know anything about him. “He’s here for Alek, so I get the sense he’ll be keeping a low profile, but … Romy, you don’t have to be brave all the time, you know? You should talk to me.”
I wait until another car moves down the road, its headlights in the distance. I let myself see them and nothing else.
“Black Chevy,” I say because maybe it’s come around again.
“Uh—no,” Mom says. “No, no, I think it’s a…”
Her voice breaks.
She never finishes.
Inside, in my room, I write my name on my lips over and over, but I don’t feel right, I don’t feel like myself. All those parts of me turned off. I don’t want to be a dead girl. I don’t want to be a dead girl. I need to come back. I pick up my phone and text Leon.
IT’S ME, I tell him but what I mean is please.
running seems more important now.
Running is the only thing I want to do. I leave in the morning and I run through Grebe until I can’t anymore, until I almost have to crawl my way home. I want to learn how to pace myself in a way that means I’ll never have to stop.
When I wake in the mornings, I’m so stiff I can barely move. I take showers hot enough to burn past skin to relax muscles. I eat breakfast because I don’t want my body to cannibalize itself. I don’t want to be weak. I don’t want to be sick. I just want to be fast.
By the weekend, the air is changing. Today, I wake up and the sky is a sick green-gray. It might actually rain, like the Grebe News said, or maybe it’s just being a tease. I lace my running shoes, tell Mom I’ll be home later. I walk until the house is out of sight and when it is, I start at a light jog, like this is my dirty little secret. I get the feel of myself before I circle the back streets and make my way out of town.
Coming back.
I interrupt that stray, unwelcome thought by focusin
g on putting Grebe behind me and by the time I’m at its edges, I feel the first tentative drops of rain.
The sky is darker now, promising a storm.
I reach the highway. I don’t know where I’m headed. Ibis is closest, but there’s nothing for me there. I keep to the shoulder and the rain falls with a little more certainty. I glance down the ditch, at all the overgrown grass and garbage in it, and think of my classmates searching for Penny and I think as long as no one finds her, she gets to be alive.
That’s the thought that breaks the sky.
It’s like the rain has been up there, accumulating for ages, getting heavier, too heavy, and now it’s all coming down at once. It drenches me, plastering my hair to my face and my clothes to my skin. A semi goes speeding past and the sound of it makes my ears hurt. All of its wheels splash road water on me but I don’t care. I push on until I reach Slab Road, a dirt road just off the highway. Mud road, now. My feet slop against the ground. Eventually, through a curtain of rain, I see a shape on the horizon. Something’s not right. I squint, trying to make it out.
It’s an accident.
An SUV in the ditch. All the way in. Tipped forward, its grille pressed against the earth. I double over and clutch my stomach with one arm, trying to pull air into my lungs while I reach for my phone with the other.
I stumble forward until it’s clearer, what I’m looking at.
An Escalade EXT.
There’s only one of those in Grebe.
I’m immediately set on going back the way I’ve come, leaving this here for someone else to find but—I stare at the wreck. I can’t tell if it’s the kind of accident that would hurt someone bad or just badly enough.
I don’t have to help, just because I want to look.
My legs are numb, but I force them to take me to the car, to Alek. I get a good look at the wide gap between the back tires and the road and it’s going to really take something to pull this out. My eyes drift down to where the vehicle’s weight is pushing the front of it farther into the grass, the ground.
The driver’s side door is flung wide open.
I inch down the embankment. My running shoes barely grip the grass. I fall into the car and my fingers slip over its wet exterior. I peer in the driver’s side. Keys in the ignition, but the engine’s off. Cell phone on the floor—his. I pick it up, check his call history, see if it’s a tow truck or an ambulance or something. But his last call was last night, to his mother.