The idea that I ever could is completely insane. But maybe no more so than the fact that for a while, I really did try to. “What’s going on? I need to know that you’re okay.”
It suddenly feels like no time has passed, like the last year never even happened.
Delia tips her head to the side, and her expression changes, hardens. “You were fine not knowing for a very long time. Why do you care so much all of a sudden?”
“I wasn’t fine not knowing. I was . . .” But I don’t have an answer for her, not a good one. “I’m so sorry.” I look up at her. Our eyes meet. I feel her understanding everything. The way she always did. I forgot what it was like to be this connected. “Whatever trouble you’re in, let me help you. Please.”
“You sure?” She is trying to hide the hope in her voice. “Once you get involved, once you know what happened, you won’t be able to un-know it, and”—she stares at me then—“you won’t be able to go back. . . .”
“I’m sure,” I say.
Delia’s lips spread into a smile, radiant and beautiful. She turns to the two people still standing behind her. “She’s coming with us,” she says. “You guys can take the masks off now.” The shorter one removes it first and I look at her face—even features, wide eyes, a pixie cut. Beautiful.
“Ashling?”
“Hey, lady,” she says.
“Wait,” I say. “You . . .” Knew all along, were lying, helped her do this, are still her best friend . . .
Ashling inhales slowly. “Of course,” she says. Then slips her arm through Delia’s, pulls her close, and kisses her on the lips. The kiss is much more than friendly. But before I can even process this, I feel a hand on my shoulder.
I turn. The sun is sinking fast, but I can still make out the lines of his face—dark eyebrows, strong nose, wide mouth. He’s around my age, or maybe a couple years older. “Sorry about before.” His voice is soft and low. “I told Ash we could just ask you to get in the van, but she insisted . . .” I look up at Ashling, who shrugs. I turn back to the guy.
“It’s . . .” I don’t know what to say. I’m staring at him. The air is freezing, but my body feels warm. “Fine,” I say.
He leans in close—for a split second it feels like he’s leaning in to kiss me, but instead he whispers into my ear, so quietly that I’m the only one who can even hear him. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”
He is watching me closely. My heart is pounding, pounding.
“I know I’m not leaving her again, ever, no matter what.” For the first time in a long time, I feel completely certain and clear. “That’s enough.”
He steps back. I can’t see his face anymore. “Well, let’s go then,” he says.
He starts walking back toward the van, Ashling and Delia are already there. I hesitate for only a second, then I turn and follow.
Chapter 28
Delia
Fire is hungry. It is a ravenous beast, devours everything in its path. It got inside me, somehow, and it is choking me. Most of the time I can barely breathe.
I don’t remember the last time my insides weren’t vibrating hot and sick. Ashling, the rest of them, they don’t quench it. But now the fire in my gut is shrinking. If I open my mouth, flames won’t leap from my lips. She is here, she is here, she is here. It is a surprise, but also I knew it all along. Deep down, I must have. I know that I did.
Lighting that match felt good. Going to that party. Meeting them, making this plan. It felt in-fucking-credible. But this is different.
I want to spin around laughing, fall over, stand up, do it again. I am a newborn fucking baby now, I’m so fresh and happy. I know that is only part of what is happening; there are layers. This is just one of them. I can’t be the kid, because I’m the damn adult here, so I have to keep my face calm and still. I feel Ashling staring at me, wondering what I’m thinking. So I do what I sometimes do when I feel like she’s trying to climb into my brain and I need to stop her—I turn and I kiss her on the mouth. Her lips are soft and she smells good. She always smells good, that’s the thing about this girl. Even when we haven’t showered for two days, alcohol climbing through her pores, teeth unbrushed. She tries to slip her tongue into my mouth, but I don’t want her to. Not now, at least.
I turn back to see what June’s doing, to make sure June’s still coming. She is hesitating, I can feel it. No one else would notice, but I know her, that’s how I know what it means.
I close my eyes for one moment, fire-bellied entire body vibrating. I can’t bear this.
Please, fucking God, let her come with us, let her come with me. After all this. Please.
I open my eyes. She is walking toward us, toward the van now. And my heart slows down, starts pounding, slows down all over again. The fire fizzles, lets off tendrils of soft gray smoke.
It has begun.
Chapter 29
June
It is strange how fast everything can change, and then how quickly it can feel like it’s always been that way. I have always been here, in the front seat of this van, Delia pressed up against me. I have always been confused and scared, but also so impossibly happy in a way that there are not even words for. This is all completely insane, but if anyone was going to do this, whatever this even is, it would be Delia. The rules do not apply to her, the human-made ones, the science-made ones.
She turns toward me. “We need to stop and pick something up,” Delia says, “on the way.” Her hand is warm on my arm. “Is that okay, Junie?”
I want to ask, “Stop where? On the way to where?” But I just nod, because it doesn’t matter. I’d go anywhere with her. I know that soon my head will be filled with an infinite number of other questions. For right now all I feel is the buzz of happiness, and the sense of being firmly held, tethered, my empty spaces all filled up.
We aren’t driving for very long before I recognize where we are. The buildings are squat and industrial, flat fields full of nothing. We’re in Macktin, down by the water. We’re heading for Tig’s.
We pull up at the edge of the lot. The guy hops out without a word. Now it’s just the three of us. Delia turns toward me.
“I’d introduce you to my girlfriend, but I guess you’ve already met.” Her tone is light, as though we’ve bumped into each other on any regular day.
“Right . . . ,” I start.
My girlfriend. Delia has never had a girlfriend before, or at least didn’t when I knew her. And she’d never expressed any interest in any girl ever, not even as a friend, except for me. I wonder when things changed, or if she knew all along. Or if there’s just something about this girl in particular.
Delia is watching me, a tiny smirk on her lips, like she knows what I’m thinking.
“Don’t be mad at her, okay? We didn’t know if we could trust you. We needed to make sure you’d be able to . . . keep this secret. And the other ones.”
My stomach tightens. We.
“I get it,” I say. Only, of course I don’t get anything. But suddenly I realize something. I turn to Ashling. “When you said Jeremiah was an idiot because he didn’t realize who else Delia was with . . .” I don’t finish; I don’t need to. The person she was referring to was herself.
Ashling looks up me and tips her head.
“So, what did you think of all of it, anyway? My acting, I mean. Be honest. Believable? Over the top?”
“You’re really good at crying,” I say.
Ashling grins. “It’s my specialty.”
And then we just sit there. There is silence. Awkward. I take a breath. “So, how did you guys meet?” Asking a normal question in such a bizarre situation feels ridiculous.
“At a party,” says Delia.
Ashling points toward Tig’s building. “One of his. I know you maybe didn’t have the best time there, but I swear they’re usually pretty fun.
”
An image flashes in my mind—Tig’s house, the tall girl with the short dark hair, waving at me like she knew me.
“That was you,” I say slowly. And then suddenly I remember something else: when I was asking questions down at the reservoir, a girl started to answer me in a soft southern accent . . . “And at her memorial . . .”
“Yup.” She nods. “Making sure everything went smoothly for my girl here, and that no one got any”—she pauses—“wrong ideas.”
“Does Tig know?” I picture his blank dead eyes, remember his simmering energy.
Delia shakes her head. “Hell no. That guy cannot be trusted for a fucking second.”
“And yet you fucked him,” Ashling says. She’s trying to make a joke, but she sounds jealous.
“So I was close enough to get what I needed,” says Delia. They’ve had this conversation before.
I look at Delia. What did she need from him? Something he sells? Whatever she stole from him? And what was it?
Ashling leans in and kisses Delia again. I see her slide her tongue in between Delia’s lips. I can’t look away. But it isn’t because Ashling is a girl, that’s not what’s remarkable about it. It’s that Ashling loves Delia really and truly. You can tell from the way she is cradling Delia’s head, the way she is smiling behind the kiss. The love is radiating off of her. But Delia . . . I’m not sure she loves Ashling back.
The door opens. They pull apart.
The guy gets back into the car with a brown paper lunch bag in his hand. He tosses it into Delia’s lap without a word.
“Home?” says Ashling.
“Home,” says Delia. And Ashling starts to drive.
The house up ahead is small and modern, glowing warm orange through the big plate-glass windows. Behind it is a flat expanse of earth and a huge gray sky. Ashling turns off the car.
My legs are shaking when I get out. We go inside.
It is beautiful here—fresh and new, like a picture you’d see in a design magazine. From the doorway I’m looking directly into the living room and the kitchen. There are light wood walls, a big L-shaped sofa. The back wall is almost all glass, looking out onto grass and trees and a river.
I wonder whose house this is.
They are in motion now, all of them, moving like people who each know their role, their place. Like a family. The guy takes our coats to the closet. Delia goes to the cabinet and gets mugs. “Ev,” Ashling shouts through the doorway into the next room, “we’re back!”
A moment later a guy comes bounding in. “She’s here,” he says. He crosses his arms and looks me up and down. I stare back. He is small—a few inches shorter than I am. He has dark hair, black jeans, and a bright red shirt with a bunch of black zeroes and ones printed on the front. Binary. He has short arms and big hands, like a puppy not done growing yet. There’s a leather bracelet wrapped around one of his wrists. “I’m Evan,” he says. He sticks out his hand, awkward but sweet. I take it. His grip is firm and warm. “I already know all about you.”
I wonder what he knows, exactly. But I guess they must be good things, mostly, because when our eyes meet, his smile splits his face in half.
And then we all just stand there, and no one says anything at all. And I know it must be because of me. If I weren’t here, what would they be talking about? What would they be doing? How does Delia know them? Did they help her do whatever it is she did? I have one million questions, but when I look at Delia, standing off to the side, her face, her smile, the fact that she is on this planet feels like answer enough for now.
She comes over and takes my hand. “We have some catching up to do, I think,” she says. I can feel all of them, the tall guy, Evan, especially Ashling, watching as she leads me out of the room.
We’re in a bedroom now, all whitewashed wood with an enormous platform bed low to the floor, covered in rumpled bedding, soft peach. The room smells like Delia, but someone else, too. Ashling, I guess. There are two water glasses on one side of the bed, a can of Diet Coke on the other. There are jeans and a bra tossed onto the dresser, a pair of gray sneakers next to the door.
I look up. Delia is watching me take it all in.
“So here I am,” Delia says. “Looking pretty good for a dead girl, huh?” She grins.
I try to smile back. This all feels so fragile, my being here, the fact that I’ve been let in at all. I do not want to mess it up, but the questions are bubbling up again.
Delia is still staring at my face. “Go ahead,” she says, “ask. You can.”
I stare back at her. My mouth opens. A single word floats out: “Why?”
Delia nods, then takes a deep breath. “I couldn’t go on living like that,” she says simply.
“Like what?” I am ashamed not to know. If I’d been there for her at all, I already would.
“My stepfather,” she says. My stomach tightens. She always called him other things when she referred to him: William, Willy, Shitbag, Pecker Head. “He . . . wasn’t very nice to my mother. You remember how it was. But it got worse. There were bruises.” Delia grits her teeth. “Things I heard at night. I hated him for doing it to her, and I hated her for letting him.” She shakes her head. “She’s pregnant, you know.”
I raise my hand to my lips. I remember sleeping over, the sounds of them fighting. I remember picking up that stick, the two pink lines. “I thought it was you,” I say.
“What was?” Delia’s voice is slow, confused.
And before I can stop myself, I am telling her. I can’t hold back now. I don’t remember how to. “I . . . snuck into your house looking for answers. I found the test in the garbage. I thought you were pregnant.”
She is smiling ever so slightly. “Did anyone see you?”
I shake my head.
“Good,” she says. “I love you for doing that for me.” And then she looks down. “But the truth isn’t in that house. It never was.” She pauses. “I want to make the pregnancy her excuse, like the hormones made her unable to think clearly, like it’s their fault she didn’t believe me. Only, I don’t think that’s it.”
“Believe you about what?”
She smiles then, wryly. “Remember a million years ago when I used to say I wish he’d rape me so my mother would leave him?” The smile melts away. “I may have slightly overestimated my mother.”
Blood pounds in my eyes. I think I’m going to be sick. “Oh my God.”
She closes her eyes, and then words tumble out in a rush. “He came into my room to ‘talk’ before Christmas. I thought he was going to give me crap for staying out so late all the time, for worrying my mother.” I feel my stomach in my throat. I am outside of my body now. “He sat down on my bed. He leaned in so close I could smell him. His breath was disgusting, like he drank all the whisky in the world and threw up from it, and then drank it down again. I could see the pores in his nose, tiny hairs growing out of each of them, that’s how close he was. He started saying that he felt bad that the two of us had never really gotten close, but that now with the new baby coming, we were going to be a real family. The craziest part is that at first I actually . . .” She clenches her jaw. “At first I thought he was being kind of weirdly nice. Even though his breath was making me sick and I didn’t want him on my bed, I thought maybe he was coming to try to sort out stuff between us, maybe, suddenly somehow for the first time ever. I don’t even know. But then I started getting a weird feeling in my stomach, like something bad was going to happen. And turns out I was right. . . .”
“No.” I hear the word come out of my mouth in a whisper, a little puff of air that does nothing, means nothing. I am as useful here as a puff of air, that’s how little I can help her now.
“Before I even knew what was happening, he was on top of me. He was so heavy. I tried to push him off and I couldn’t. I couldn’t breathe. I could feel his dick, J.” She inhales deeply. Stead
ies herself. “It was pressing into the side of my leg through his pants. He was breathing heavy in my face, whispering something.” She closes her eyes as she talks, her hands clenched into fists. “He was so heavy, and he started unbuttoning his shirt and pulled my sleep shirt half up. He kept saying, I just want to feel your skin, that’s it, that’s all. And I was trying and trying to push him off, that fat piece of shit . . .” Her face is red. I reach out and grab her hand. She holds mine, squeezes it so tight.
“But I got away. I got a mouth full of his chest and I bit down hard. I can still remember how it tasted, salty like meat. And how it felt, like biting into leather.” She shakes her head. “He groaned when I bit him, Junie. He groaned like he liked it. But I didn’t let go, I held on like a pit bull. I bit until I tasted fucking blood.” She is staring straight at me, her eyes shining. “And that’s when he backed off. He stood up and staggered backward and looked at me, and then, I will never forget this for the rest of my damn life, he smiled like he was flirting with me, like he thought he was being charming. ‘You like it rough?’ he said. ‘Me too. More next time.’ Next time is what he said. And then he left my room.”
I’ve lost the ability to form sentences, to form speech. There’s something hot in my belly, boiling up, about to spill over.
“At first it didn’t even seem real. I was numb, felt nothing at all, but I looked down at my hand and my hand was shaking.”
“Where was your mom?” I finally say. My voice is a whisper.
“She was sleeping. Ever since she got pregnant, she sleeps all the time. I didn’t want to wake her up—I didn’t think she’d believe me anyway. I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do . . . so I got up and I left. I drove and drove alone all night. I slept in my car.”
“D, no,” I say. I want to go back in time and find her, take her out of her car and bring her somewhere safe, keep her with me. To go into her house and fucking kill William.
“I came back in the morning . . . I didn’t know what I was going to say or what I was going to do. I thought about leaving forever, but I didn’t have money and I wasn’t sure where I was going to get any. I thought maybe I’d talk to my mom, so I went back, and get this, the whole house smelled like omelets. Because, hell, you really do learn something new every day, J. And that day I learned that the would-be-rapist shitbag can fluff the fuck out of some eggs.” Delia looks at me and shakes her head. “My mom was sitting at the table, all proud like she’d won the goddamn lottery, because her asshole husband, who literally never once made breakfast for her in the entire time we’ve lived together, had thrown some eggs in a pan. She’s grinning all big and crazy when I come into the house. ‘Look, honey, William is making breakfast, isn’t that nice?’ Her tone is the most pathetic thing you’ve ever heard. It’s like this is the best thing that has happened to her in her entire fucking life. ‘You love omelets,’ she says, and she sounds all hopeful. Like I’m some little kid and she’s going to remind me what I love and then we’re all going to sit down to a family breakfast. I’d been planning to come in right then and tell her what her shitbag husband tried to do to me, but when I saw her sitting there, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought, ‘Okay, let her eat and have this one moment of thinking everything is okay before I tell her that nothing is.’ ” Delia looks up at me. “It’s weird to know you are about to tell someone something that’s going to change everything. I hated it, having that kind of power. I can feel William watching me. He is completely silent, but I can feel his eyes, and I feel like they’re touching me, and I remember the feeling of his dick pressing through his pants and it makes me want to vomit. I don’t know how my mom sat through that breakfast so oblivious, as though it was any regular day.” She breathes deeply. I have no idea how to process this, how I or anyone ever could.