“Is that supposed to make me feel better? All that does is make me think that one day you’ll forget my name.” I force myself to keep going against the wave of emotion trying to pull me under. “I want to trust you but I’m scared.”
He cranes his neck so that his gaze is locked onto mine. “I’m scared too.” A long pause. When he finally speaks, his voice is low and soft and I can tell that the earlier anger is gone. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just going to wake up one morning and you won’t be in bed with me. You’ll be gone for good.”
“Why would you think that?” I croak.
He lowers his face and rubs his stubbly cheeks between his hands.
Dropping to my knees and placing the water bottle on the edge of the bed, I rake my fingers through his hair and bend his face to mine. The skin of his scalp is smooth and cool beneath my nails. Butterfly wings beat in my chest, sending a ripple of vibrations through my limbs. “Cole, why would you think that?”
His intense green eyes squeeze me. He spreads his hands open in a gesture of frustration. “Because you won’t tell me anything. Because you keep so much inside of you that I’m not sure that I’m imagining that what we have is real or if it’s all in my head.”
As I slide my hand to the back of his neck, the thrum of my heart goes up my throat and falls down to the bottom of my stomach.
Words crowd behind my lips. I’m afraid to speak. Afraid that once the seal is cracked, everything will come pouring out.
I take his right hand in my left one and turn it over so that his palm is facing up. Slowly, so that he knows that I mean it, I trace the words on his skin that I can’t make myself say. He watches me, eyelids lowered in concentration as he follows the outline of each letter. His knee brushes my shoulder and his breath tickles my sweaty skin and sends a wave of goose bumps over my bare arms.
Three simple words.
This is real.
Cole
I end up taking her to the beach after all. It’s dark, so instead of trudging our stuff down to the sand, I park on the side of the road in an empty lot that hugs the coast. I go first and Aimee follows me around to the back of the truck. I shift the cooler out the way and we each take one side of the blanket and lay it out under the watchful night sky.
Scooting until my back is against the cab, I loop my arm under her waist and pull her to me so that I can feel her heart thumping through her skin. I twist her ponytail out of the way and bend down to kiss that space between her neck and her shoulder.
“Don’t,” she says seriously, jerking her chin back. “I’m gross.”
She’s still in just a sports bra and shorts from her run earlier and she’s tangy and warm like the ocean. Grinning mischievously, I kiss her neck again and this time I run my tongue up her neck to her jaw. She swats at my head but she’s laughing.
“I told you that I’m gross!”
“You’re wrong,” I tell her, laughter lifting my chest. “You’re perfect and I want all of you. Even the sweaty parts.”
Aimee
It’s nice like this—lying with Cole in the back of his truck with the sound of waves licking the shore feather-soft in my ears. The moon is a white fingernail clipping at the top of the dark sky. Splinters of pale starlight push their way through a veil of low ash-colored clouds.
I’m not sure how much to tell him and how much to hold back, but I know that I need to let him inside of me and this is the only way that I know how. I’m sick of trying to hold so many pieces together with just my bare hands.
I suck one cheek into my mouth, suddenly worried that the back of Cole’s truck isn’t big enough to contain all that I have to say. “I always think that one day I’ll wake up and I just won’t remember her anymore.”
“Is that what you want?” He asks me.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” I shake my head sharply. Forgetting feels like a lie. “If I think about having her and losing her or not having her at all, I’d still want to have her.”
When I close my eyes, the blood in my body rushes up to the surface of my skin.
Cold water poured in over my flailing arms onto my lap and flowed down the path of my legs. The coppery taste of blood coated my tongue. I sputtered, blinked against the terrible, burbling darkness and the tears. “J-Jilly?” A flash of pain sliced through me from my neck to my shoulder and I screamed—almost choking on the sound of my own fear.
“I promised her that I wouldn’t leave and then I left anyway,” I say gingerly. “I’ve asked myself so many times if I knew… Well, whether or not I knew that she was still breathing. I’ve tried to think back. Did I see her chest moving? If I had known, would I have still left her there? I don’t—Was I just trying to save myself?”
“Maybe you only could save yourself.”
The temperature plunges as memories of the accident—fighting to breathe against the pressure pinning my chest to the seat, the harsh jolt of the impact, the creeping inky water—batter me painfully and swirl behind my eyelids like a galaxy of hazy stars. I squeeze my hands into fists, clear my throat and try to think back. Back to before the grinding of metal on metal, and the faint, metallic smell of blood and salt.
My ear was pressed against the rough fabric of the seat. I burned hot and cold all at once. My legs felt heavy, like they had been weighted down with cement blocks at my ankles. I tried to turn my head but my hair was caught on something. It took me a second to realize that it was the seatbelt. Fumbling, I reached down and dug around for the metal clasp. My stiff fingers clawed at the button, working desperately until one of my nails caught, pulled away from the skin and snapped in one motion.
Jilly? My head swam. I tasted blood in my mouth.
Where was I?
The car.
The water.
The angry groan of metal compressing assaulted my ears. I wrenched my neck forward and pushed through a blinding heat that stabbed at my head when a clump of hair ripped from my scalp.
I needed to take stock. The water was already at the bottom of my ribcage. Sucking in a fast breath, I brought my hands to my face to clear my eyes and I twisted to my left. “Jilly?”
The air moves around me as I struggle to sift through the images.
“Just relax,” Cole whispers from beside me. “I’m right here.”
The whirring in my head slows down and I relax my fingers. The images sink in around me, taking me to a place where I want to be.
Now, I can see Jillian smiling like it would go on forever. I remember her diving into the pool in the middle of a rainstorm—all knees and elbows and freckles. Sitting with me under the slide—rough dirt sticking to our thighs while she showed me how I should take a drag off a cigarette. Dancing around her bedroom sophomore year in her favorite purple bra and underwear set. Rolling her eyes at one of Katie McLaughlin’s stupid cheerleading stories. Laughing. She was always laughing.
Blues and blacks shift behind my eyelids and a picture of her the way that she was on that final night rises. Her coppery hair was down around her face and she was wearing ripped jean shorts and worn-in sneakers with no socks.
“We almost didn’t go to the party,” I say tightly. “That afternoon Jillian heard from one of our friends that this guy that she used to see might make an appearance at the party. She didn’t want to deal with him because he’d started to get pushy. He was leaving voicemails, driving by her house at random times… stuff like that. Jillian didn’t want to encourage him.”
“Come on, Aimee! Pretty please…” Jillian stuck out her bottom lip. “We’ll watch a cheesy movie and eat ice cream straight out of the container.”
I wrinkled my nose. “How many times do you think you can fool me with that pout?”
I pause to get my bearings. “I couldn’t even tell you why I wanted to go out so badly, but I did, and I convinced her to go with me.” As the words move off my tongue, the band wound snuggly around my chest loosens. It feels good to speak out loud. “I think it was the first time that I ever had
to talk Jillian into going out. It was always the other way around with us.”
Cole is still holding me. I can feel the steady rise and fall of his chest against my back.
“To be honest, I don’t remember much about the actual party. I know that you don’t want to hear this part, but I was on and off with Brian at the time.” I feel Cole’s body harden, but he stays quiet and lets me continue. He knows that this is my story to tell. “We were never serious or anything like that, but we were in one of our ‘on’ phases so I stuck with him and I just… I lost track of Jillian. How shitty is that?”
A long silence stretches out. I think of Jillian the first time that I saw her—pigtails and round cheeks and huge golden brown eyes like pools of maple syrup. She told me that she liked my lunchbox and asked if I knew anything about roly polies. I didn’t.
I gather air in my lungs and push it out through my nose. “It got late and everyone started passing out or heading home. Brian wanted me to leave my car and let him drive us home. I was stupid drunk at that point so I blew him off.”
“Give them to me,” she said as she took my keys out of my hand and stuffed them in the front pocket of her shorts. “You’re toasted my dear.”
I pursed my lips and cocked one eyebrow. “And you’re not?”
She smiled, pushed her bangs out of her face. “I’m fine.”
“I let her take the keys away from me and I didn’t even think.” I shake my head and feel tears roll down my cheeks to my hair. Cole touches my arm. He gently folds our fingers together and pulls our hands over his heart. “Actually, it’s worse than that. I did think. I just didn’t stop it.”
How can I explain the rest?
How can I describe that it seemed impossible that anything bad could ever happen to Jillian Kearns? If people were colors, the rest of us were greys and greens while she was electric orange. She was a force. A world of promise captured inside of one body. I never—not for a second—considered the possibility of that promise being broken.
She leaned her head back against the headrest and flexed her fingers over the steering wheel. I felt hot. Too hot. Groaning, I propped my leg on the dashboard for balance and opened my window. Moonlight and humid night air rushed in and streamed through my brown hair. My ears were charged and my vision was blurry. I gulped at the oxygen like I couldn’t get enough.
“Are you okay?” She asked, craning her neck to me.
I grunted. A sick feeling churned deep in my gut. “I feel like I’ve been stuffed full of cotton balls.”
Jillian laughed, blinked a few times. “I have no idea what that means but it sounds bad.”
“It is.”
“If you have to puke, just say the word.”
“Will do.” I adjusted the volume on the stereo so that the sound of David Guetta lifted over the uneven howl of the wind. “Hey, did you see that Tam got highlights?”
“Yeah, they looked good with her skin tone.” She glanced over at me. “You should consider it. You could pull a lighter color off.”
“What about you? You’ve been talking about dyeing your hair for years.”
She picked up a lock of hair and scrunched it between her fingers. “I don’t know…”
“I will if you will.” It was our battle cry.
Jillian laughed.
“Let’s do it at the end of the season,” I continued, thinking suddenly of the pool. “That way we don’t have to worry about the chlorine killing the color.”
“Speaking of swimming…” Jillian’s voice dropped and she rubbed at her cheeks. “If I oversleep tomorrow and have to do laps at practice because we’re late then I’m blaming you.”
I closed my eyes against the intense pounding in my head and let myself fall into darkness. “Bring it on,” I whispered.
The despair of the memory spills over me—harsh and unsteady and terrible.
“One minute we were on the road talking about swim practice, and the next... we were…” Piercing sounds and turbulent images surge through me.
Tires fighting with asphalt, the impossible crunch of glass, and the rush of salty water coming in through the open window. Jilly slumped unnaturally over the steering wheel—her hair tangled and dark with water and blood, her wrist braced on the dashboard.
I pulled on her shoulder. I tried to get her to move but her body was weighted down with water. I screamed. My neck burned. Blood dripped down my arm.
“Wake up! Please!” I begged. “I’m not going anywhere. I just…” I looked to my right through the dark to where the water was getting higher. “I just need to get help. I promise I’m not leaving you.”
Like static on a TV screen, my mind pushes through the images. What if this is all that I am? Chaos and shadows. Confused memories desperately seeking out the light. What if all the bits of me that meant something good are still trapped in that mangled car? What if I was able to crawl through that window, but I never really got out?
“It took the ambulance seven minutes to reach the site of the accident,” I say. “And by that time it didn’t matter anymore because Jilly was already gone.”
Cole’s voice is earnest, determined to find me over the void stretching underneath my skin. “But you weren’t gone.”
It feels cold, floating inside my own body like this. I turn to him and tell him the truth. “Maybe I was.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Cole
I hold her against me while she tells me what she knows for sure: Jillian Paige Kearns drove a 2009 blue Honda Civic off of Beatty Pass at 1:29 AM. The time can be nailed down precisely because a woman—a forty-one year old grocery store cashier named Angela Sharpe—was on her way home from the night shift and witnessed the entire thing. By the time that Angela reached the scene of the accident, the Honda was almost completely submerged in water. Later, she told police that she helped Aimee—barely conscious and bleeding—climb up the steep bank out of the water but had no idea that there was a second girl trapped in the car.
In a small, steady voice, Aimee strings together a series of memories so painful for her that I can hardly bear to listen. She tells me about the panicked moments after the car slammed through barrier and went off the side of the pass. Then she describes the intensity of the impact and the water and the thick flashes of pain and the blood that burned through her vision.
“I still don’t know exactly why the car swerved off the road that night,” she says. “The police asked me about the details of the accident a hundred different ways but I couldn’t tell them anything that made a difference because I didn’t know. All I could say for certain was that we were listening to music, talking about our hair… I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second and then—like I’d blinked myself into a nightmare—the car was skidding off the bridge into the water.”
“The thing is that it doesn’t really matter if Jillian missed the curve and overcompensated, or if she thought she saw something in the middle of road, because she never should have been driving my car in the first place. If I had kept my keys or let Brian take us home… Every single thing would be different. Jillian would be alive. She’d be at college now and she’d fall in love and she’d travel and she’d get married and have babies. I took that from her. And if I could just do it all over again… I—” Her words break off, collapsing into her mouth.
“You can’t…”
Aimee moves. Her hand comes up to cup my cheek. “She was my best friend, Cole. They did tests after the accident and determined that she’d taken a bunch of pills—Vicodin, Valium—I don’t…” Aimee’s voice teeters and she shakes her head. “I don’t know how she got the pills or why she took them. I had no idea. They told me that after… after the accident they found a stash in her room. She never said anything to me about it and I still can’t understand that. I thought that I knew everything and it turns out that I knew nothing! I-I feel like if I could… I don’t know… If I could understand why she was taking the pills then maybe things would make more sense.”
r /> She keeps going. “You know that they told us that she probably could have lived. I mean, they didn’t say it like that. They just said that the official cause of death was drowning. Drowning. I know what that means. It means that she was alive after the car crashed and I—I left her there, Cole. I saved myself and left her.” She shudders. “Jillian was the best swimmer that I knew and she drowned in the dark all by herself. Every day…” The last word cracks as it leaves her mouth. “Every single day of the rest of my life I have to think about that and wonder if she woke up and knew what was happening to her. I have to wonder if she called my name or cried or tried to save herself, and I…”
“That’s not fair. You can’t blame yourself.” I hesitate. Aimee’s guilt is tangible. It pulses beneath her pale skin and seeps out through every pore on her beautiful body.
“I don’t even remember the lady that found me. The doctors told me that she saved my life and that I was incredibly lucky.” She laughs, but it’s humorless. “Lucky was their word, not mine. They said that if Angela Sharpe hadn’t called for an ambulance then I probably wouldn’t have made it. I was in shock—losing blood from here,” her finger touches her scar, “and my spleen was ruptured. After I was discharged from the hospital, my mom wanted me to meet Angela in person. When I said no, she tried to get me to at least send her a note. I agreed to it but every time I tried to write the words, I couldn’t finish… Do you know why?”
“No.” I squeeze her, not sure that I want to hear the answer.
“Because I didn’t feel lucky at all, Cole. I didn’t want to thank the woman who saved my life because secretly I hated her. I hated her for saving me because I wished that she had just let me die along with Jillian.”
“Is that what happened last summer when you… when you—”
She finishes for me. “When I tried to kill myself?”
I nod into the darkness.