Текст книги "Cam Girl"

Автор книги: Leah Raeder

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

—13—

Peaks Island lay quiet and black on the horizon. Snow drifted from a charcoal sky, a billion tiny stars streaking into the ocean. The spray churning up beneath the prow flayed my skin, sharp as pins and brutally cold, and part of me wanted to drop the oars and hurl myself into the water. Let the salt eat away all the parts of me that could feel, leave my skeleton to grow coral and moss.

The shoreline was encrusted with ice and I ran the boat at it heedlessly, heard the hull screech and tear, a sound like two vehicles meeting, shredding each other. I latched the oars and leaped into the shallows, soaking my legs to the thigh.

Everything in my fucking life came down to that night a year ago. When I lost everything.

And it was all my fault.

I crashed through snow-thick woods, ran skidding over black ice on the road. Up the hill to the lonely house, only to sink to my knees in a snowbank, sucking air. I grasped soft white handfuls of oblivion.

Sharp crystals pierced the snow beneath my face. It took a second to recognize my own tears, freezing.

God, Ellis, why.

Not because of what she was. In my heart, I already knew. Her androgyny. Her name. The way I’d never called her a girl except when I thought of our future, or when I wanted to hurt her. It wasn’t so much a shock as it was stepping back from the painting, seeing all the brushstrokes coalesce into a clear image. But she lied. To the one person on earth she should have told. Manipulated me, deceived me to experiment with her identity without my knowledge or consent, made me vulnerable, took advantage of my naivete. Screwed my head up. Put my heart in danger while she stayed safe behind the keyboard.

That was it. I would have loved her no matter what, including this part of her, if only she’d told me the truth.

I got up. Snow rushed from my clothes, the shedding of some old self.

The house was dark and still, same as yesterday. I stood on the porch for a moment and then tried the door. Unlocked.

“Max,” I called.

My shoes left wet prints, staining this dry, dead place. Everything looked different now. Photos of Skylar in her boy costume, standing on a pier with Max, the two of them hoisting a huge striped bass that licked up the sun. Skylar swinging a bat, smashing a baseball like a pale meteor into the aching blue beyond. Stereotypical boy stuff.

Max had always known her as a son. How do you reconcile losing someone twice—as the person you thought you knew, and the person they really were inside?

I called his name as I moved through the house. Too quiet. I peeked upstairs but there was no one. When I glanced out of Skylar’s bedroom window, I noticed something.

The boat was gone.

I raced downstairs and outside into the falling snow.

The yacht floated in the water off a nearby pier. Max’s Jeep sat parked on gravel. I shouted for him and a frigid gust carried my voice away.

My feet burned as I stumbled down the dock. Not good. Burning was a sign of frostbite.

The closer I got to the boat, the clearer it became:

A shadow perched on the pier, in the snow.

A man.

He sat there in nothing but jeans. Shoulders slumped, not even shivering. Snow flocked the hair on his bare chest.

I stopped a few feet away, wondering if I was hallucinating.

“Max,” I said.

He tipped his head back, drained the last of a whiskey bottle, and pitched it into the ocean.

Shit.

I moved closer, careful not to startle him. “What are you doing out here? You’re going to get hypothermia.”

His breath formed coils of steam that laureled his head. I crouched a few feet off, ignoring the burn in my wet feet, the throb in my bleeding hand. Ice flaked off my jeans.

“I saw the photos. All of them.” My breath touched his face. “Skylar was your daughter.”

At last he looked at me.

“I know about denial,” I said. “I’ve been in denial a long time, too.”

“What do you want?”

“Put a shirt on, for one, before you die.”

He looked back at the water. “I don’t feel anything.”

“That’s not good, Max.”

“It’s what I want.”

I knew that desire well.

“I get it,” I said. “What you were trying to show me about Ellis. All these years I saw it without really seeing it. It was right in front of my face, in my drawings, and I just . . . couldn’t name it. Neither could you. You didn’t out her, even though you were worried she’d hurt me.” And she did. And how could I resent her for that, if being Blue made her happy? My chest ached. “When did you know, with Skylar?”

“I always knew.” Muscle twitched in his jaw. “I pushed it away. He asked for dolls and I bought him a baseball glove.”

My mother, buying me dresses instead of paint.

They hadn’t meant to hurt us. They thought we’d get hurt by being our true selves. And they were right, but that didn’t mean we were wrong.

“What finally clicked?” I said.

“I caught him. In makeup. In . . . drag.” Max exhaled through his teeth. “He took pictures, put them online. When I found out I said a lot of things I regret. But he didn’t understand. None of you do. You’re young and think you’re invincible. You don’t realize that you’re branding yourself. Once you show the world you’re different, you can never take it back.”

“I do realize that. That’s why I’ve been terrified of being my real self.” Like Ellis. God, this whole time I’d been so self-righteous, thinking I was the only one struggling with my identity. “But if we’re not true to ourselves, we’ll never be happy.”

“What’s better, being happy or alive?”

“They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“For people like that, they are.”

I reached out and brushed his bicep. His skin was rubbery with cold. “I saw the autopsy. She was on hormone replacement therapy.” I thought of Ellis changing her name as soon as she turned eighteen. “When they start to transition, to become who they feel like inside, it gets better. It’s like pressure letting up. A bomb being defused.”

“I caused that pressure.”

“How?”

Max grimaced. “When he was younger, he asked if he could be a girl when he grew up. And I told him that was wrong. I told him not to think that way. Boys grow up to be men.”

Now he knew better.

Sometimes boys grew up to be women. And girls grew up to be men.

“You still have her boy pictures all over your house,” I said. “Who are those for? You think that’s how she’d want to be remembered?”

“I want to remember him being happy.”

“Max, being her real self made her happy.”

He shook my hand off. Sloppy, uncoordinated. “You want me to put up photos of Skylar? To remember what a failure of a father I was? To remind me why my son committed suicide?”

This is it. This is the moment, Vada. Own it.

I touched him again, firmer. “You’re not the one to blame. If you want to blame someone, it should be me.”

“Why?”

Play the ace.

All the truth in me gathered in my lungs, rose, and let itself loose into the world.

“I lied to the police. I lied to Ellis. I lied to everyone. Even myself.”

My voice was as soft as the snowflakes crashing against our lips and eyelashes. A hundred small impacts of crystallized sky on skin.

“I was driving, Max. And I caused the accident. On purpose.”

The night of the crash, the sky was a clear black salted with stars. Our first winter in Maine. We spent most of it in bed watching Netflix and ravishing takeout seafood and each other. When a college friend invited me to a party down the coast, I spent hours cajoling Ellis.

“Come on, hermit. It’ll be fun.” I pinned her to the mattress and tickled her ribs. “I’ll get drunk and table-dance. Then you can drive me home and tell your Tumblr friends how you saved a damsel from her own distress. Hashtag moral superiority.”

“This is technically coercion,” she gasped, laughing.

I tickled harder. “Tell me when it becomes torture.”

“Vada. I can’t. Breathe.”

I stopped tickling and kissed her. In a second the mood shifted and she pulled me close. One hand slid under my shirt. She raked her nails across my back and arched against me, her leg between mine. It was the kind of kiss that led to coming completely undone. I had to tear my mouth away.

“We could stay in tonight,” she murmured.

Tempting. Ever since we’d come to Maine, we’d been different. More intense. Like new lovers, shyer in some ways but bolder in others, pushing our boundaries farther. We didn’t know anyone here. We could be ourselves, or whoever we wanted to be. Blank canvases.

I pecked her cheek and jumped off the bed. “I’m going stir-crazy. Let’s go out. Just for one night.”

In the car I put on K.Flay and sang along. Ellis breathed on her window, tracing words in the steam. HELP ME. ABDUCTED BY BAD SINGER. Jokingly, I threatened to wreck the car. She rubbed out the words and breathed on the glass again. I YOU.

“You big softie,” I said, but my pulse skipped. “I heart you, too.”

The house sprawled along the shore, bordered by a cracked stone jetty. We walked the grounds for a while, misty scarves of breath trailing after us. Ellis needed to drink in the quiet as a reservoir for social interaction. My poor introvert. Inside, I introduced her to people from my master’s program. She smiled sweetly, tolerated our long obscure art convos without complaint. She even got into a discussion with some kids about re-creating famous works of art in Minecraft, made my friends laugh by coining the phrase “Yves Klein Blue Screen of Death.” She was charming and adorable and perfect. But when I came back from the bathroom I found her out on the deck, tucked into a fold of shadow, shivering. She stared forlornly at the beating waves.

“What’s wrong?” I touched her shoulder. “Pajarito. You look so blue.”

“Nothing.”

She shrugged me off and took out the vaping pen, which was Ellis-speak for Go away.

Prodding would only raise her hackles higher. I fiddled with the buttons on my coat. The clean air turned a spicy balsam, that forest essence that was so her.

“Please talk to me,” I said finally.

She looked at me askance, struggling not to cry. “Every single person we met, you said, ‘This is my friend, Ellis.’ You introduced me as your friend.”

Fuck. This again.

“You are my friend, Elle.”

“We’re way more than friends.”

“Yeah, but I don’t have a good word for it. It’s complicated. And random strangers don’t need to know our personal business.”

“Just admit you don’t want people to see you that way.”

“What way?”

“With me. As my girlfriend.”

I grabbed the porch railing, glowering into the night. “Because of my internalized homophobia, right? Because I secretly hate the fact that I’m bi. Blah, blah, blah. So not having this argument again.”

“You don’t hate it. But you want guys to see you as available.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“You were flirting with that guy. Nick.”

I rolled my eyes. “God forbid I speak to a man, or I’m suddenly leaving you.”

“Then why? If it’s serious, why don’t you take it seriously? Why don’t you tell people who I really am to you?”

Ellis was too good at pushing my buttons. At getting me to spit out the nasty truth.

“Because who the fuck are you to me? I don’t even know.” The wood creaked under my hands. I could’ve shredded the house into tinder. “I’m not fucking gay, okay? It’s not that simple for me. You know exactly who you are and what you want in life. I don’t.”

“You know why you never tell anyone we’re together?” She looked madder than I’d ever seen her, which was rare enough. “Because it’s temporary for you. You’re just using me till you find your perfect Prince Charming. That’s all I am. Your surrogate boyfriend.”

It hurt. I needed to strike back.

“You’re not much of a boyfriend, are you?” I said.

Ellis set the pen down on the railing. Then she turned and walked back into the house.

“Fuck,” I muttered, picking the pen up. Still warm. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Me and my goddamn mouth.

When I found her inside a while later, she held a red cup and stood in a group, laughing uproariously at a story some girl told with finger puppets.

So it was like that, then. Fine.

I could play Ellis Carraway tonight.

I sulked in a corner, head down over a warm beer, radiating a black cloud of misanthropy. People avoided me. I stared daggers at anyone Ellis paid attention to. When she switched rooms, I followed. How does it feel? I thought. How do you like the jealous, insecure, clingy girlfriend act?

A cute girl started talking to her, and they drifted apart from the others.

My hand tightened on the beer bottle.

It feels like shit, I answered myself. No one should be made to feel this way.

I’d had one sip all night. Couldn’t drink. Something dark and poisonous bubbled in my chest.

The other girl touched Ellis’s arm, smiling.

I was on my feet before I realized it, slinging my arm around my best friend’s shoulders. My smile was hard.

“Hi,” I said loudly to the stranger. “Nice to meet you. I’m Elle’s girlfriend. Life partner. Lover. We haven’t really settled on a word yet, have we, baby?”

The other girl blinked. Ellis turned riot pink.

“Excuse us, please.”

She crossed the house and I followed. Ellis kept moving, making me feel like a hunter giving chase. When we passed an empty bathroom I yanked her inside and slammed the door.

“What is your problem?” she said.

Tequila, heavy on her breath.

“You are my problem.” I wrapped my hand around her jaw. “What do you want, huh? Want me to go out there and declare it to the whole fucking party? Tell them we sleep in the same bed? That I fuck you in it every night?”

I drove a leg between hers and held her against the door and she gasped, eyelashes fluttering.

“Do I need to fuck you right here?” I growled.

I kept her jaw in my hand. The other unbuttoned her jeans, tugged at the fly. When she fought me off I lurched back.

What the hell were we doing?

I went to the sink, flipped on the cold water. Ellis hurled herself at me.

One hand snared in my hair, twisting. I cried out in pain. Her other palm clapped over my mouth. I stared at her in the mirror, shocked.

“Like this?” she hissed. “Is this what you like? Is this what turns you on?”

Now I fought her. She clung to me, our limbs tangling. We stumbled to the wall. Her eyes were glassy, whether from alcohol or tears I couldn’t tell.

“This is what you want, right, baby? A girl to share your life with, but a guy to fuck you. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if I was a real boy?”

In an acid voice I said, “Sometimes I wish you were.”

We stared at each other with naked resentment. Then she kissed me, meanly, gashing my lip, and slid a hand inside my jeans. A moment later mine was in hers. I’d never hatefucked someone before. I didn’t think I had it in me. But there was no other word for what happened. It was crude and unlovely. Unloving. I came first, white heat knifing savagely up my belly. Then I turned tender like I always did afterward and stroked her cheek, but she grimaced and said, “Harder,” and I tried to oblige. She didn’t come. She pushed me away, cupped cold water to her face. Fumbled her clothes straight and staggered out.

We each had a set of car keys. I caught her before she started the engine.

“Elle, are you crazy? You’re drunk.”

I wrestled her into the passenger seat. When I buckled her in I knelt on the curb, grasping her hands.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know how to handle this. I’ve never really been serious with anyone. Guy or girl. This is a first for me.”

Ellis stared through the windshield, mouth drawn. Tears or water or both ran down her face, silver threads glistening in the starlight.

I kissed her knuckles. “Okay. Let’s just go home.”

Somewhere northwest of us, a girl with hairline fractures in her sternum left another party and got behind the wheel of her Jeep. As I double-checked the seat belt, Skylar tipped her head back, a comet tail of cinnamon whiskey trickling behind the bruises on her throat.

Ellis was eerily quiet as I drove. I glanced at her, my anxiety winding tighter. Fuck, she was crying, and it made me tear up, too. I could never watch her cry.

“This doesn’t work,” she said. “We don’t work. We’re broken.”

“We’re having an off night.”

“Over and over and over.”

I gripped the wheel like a vise. These were the last few minutes my right hand would be strong and whole.

“Please don’t cry,” I said.

Ellis took her phone out. Skylar took another slug.

I pressed the gas, felt the tires spin loosely on ice. Careful. Calm down, Vada.

But the one person who always calmed me down was the one making me unravel.

“We’re not broken, Elle. We’re still figuring stuff out.”

“It’s been four years. How long does it take?”

I never had an answer for that except Not yet. Everything in my life was not yet.

“You’re wrong.” She spoke in a small voice, facing her phone. “I don’t know who I am, but I know what I want. And we don’t want the same thing.”

“What do you want?”

“You. For the rest of my life.”

My palms chafed on the cold leather wheel. I didn’t know how to respond.

I’m not ready, I thought. I love you but I’m not ready for something this intense, this epic. I’m not ready for my life to start. What if I choose wrong? What if I commit to something I’m not serious about? What if I grow restless and unhappy like my father? I’m only twenty-two. Still a kid, really.

Is this my fucking quarter-life crisis?

Ellis tapped her phone.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Buying a plane ticket.”

“What? Where?”

“Chicago.”

Again I pumped the gas before I could stop myself. We slid over the center line, but the highway was deserted. Plenty of time to correct.

Skylar started the ignition.

“Elle, what the fuck?”

“You don’t want me in your life.”

“Are you nuts? You’re my fucking world.”

She slapped her armrest. “You moved all the way here to get rid of me. You could’ve gone to grad school in Chicago.”

“Stop with the paranoia. They rejected me.”

“Did they, or did you withdraw your app? I don’t believe you. You moved here on purpose. You were hoping I’d stay behind.”

My teeth ground so hard they felt like glass about to snap. No shit, I thought. Your mother promised to take care of you if I left. If I set you free. Let you find your own happiness, instead of always chasing me like a puppy. A puppy I keep kicking because I’m too scared to love it unashamedly.

I didn’t hope you’d stay behind. I just wanted you to be happy. You deserve someone who puts you first.

You deserve someone better than me.

“Coming here was a mistake. And I’m going to fix it.” She tapped her screen decisively. “There. Booked.”

I was doing fifty in a forty zone. The road began to curve. The slightest twitch would send us flying into the other lane.

“Cancel the booking.”

“No. I’m going home.”

“Home is a few miles away. We’ll be there soon. Then we can talk about this.”

“I’m done talking. I’m just done, Vada. With everything. With you.”

Her words slurred. I felt the razor edge of teeth slicing into my lip.

“You’re drunk and being dramatic.”

“So what if I’m drunk? Maybe I have to be drunk to stand up to you. Ever think about that?”

I winced. “What do you want, Elle? What will make you happy? Tell me, and I’ll do it.”

“Take me to the airport.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Then you’ll just keep making me miserable.”

I could have screamed. “God, what do you want from me? I fucking love you. I’m sorry I don’t show it exactly the way you want, but I love you. What more is there?”

“You’re just using me so you don’t get lonely till you find the man of your dreams.”

“Give it a fucking rest. You’re the only one I want. The only one who’s made me feel this way.”

“Liar.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Know why it’s a lie? Because you’d never marry me. Ever. But I’d do it. In a heartbeat.”

Gut punch.

How can you look that far ahead? How can you imagine that, when I can barely see us getting home safe right now?

“This is so unfair, Elle. You can’t judge my love based on some faraway future.”

“You don’t love me the way I love you. And you never will.”

Fifty-five miles per hour.

“So you’re just leaving? Do you know how cruel this is? I’m losing my girlfriend and my best friend.”

“Now you call me that. Because you have nothing left to lose.”

“Fuck you, Ellis.”

“Fuck you, too. And slow down before you kill us. Or just kill us, actually. I don’t care anymore.”

A scream rose inside me. I pressed it back down.

And as I did I pressed the gas pedal, feeling the fuel burn brighter, hotter, tires devouring the road. I clung to the curve. Always in control, even when I was going too fast. Ahead of us the tree line broke and iron struts rose against the night. A bridge.

All this time, Elle had endured my misgivings in her patient, understanding way. The way that sometimes made me see her as a doormat. Not once had she pulled herself out from under my feet like this. And when Ellis Carraway had enough, that was it. She’d cut her parents off cold. She’d left her entire extended family in Chicago, for me.

Now she’d had enough of this. Enough of me controlling our relationship, framing it in my terms. Enough of it being about me and my needs and my hang-ups.

Enough of me, period.

I’d finally pushed too far. She was leaving me all alone in this cold, dark, empty place.

Who the hell was I without her?

No one. A ghost.

If I was already a ghost, then what did it matter if I sped up?

If I smashed this car into pieces.

If I broke us. Like she was breaking my heart right now.

Fifty-six miles per hour.

Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine.

The bridge came up faster than I expected. Night played tricks with distance. I braked. The car fishtailed.

Black ice.

Oh, fuck no.

Steer into a slide, I thought, steer into a slide, but it was too close and we were going too fast and we’d hit the bridge rail before I could straighten out. My first-ever accident. In this strange, lonely state where I lost everything that mattered to me. Where I lost her.

Only me, I prayed as the railing rushed up. Please, God. Let it hurt only me.

I was saying something—it wasn’t until after that I’d hear the words in my memory, I’m sorry I’m sorry I love you—and then lights flared in the rearview mirror, and a terrible force struck deep inside my bones, and the world broke into a million glittering pieces.

The words hung in the air between us.

I felt so light now. The truth is a heavy thing, and you can’t fight the undertow forever.

Max got to his feet. I tottered backward, slipping in the snow as I stood.

Now he’ll hurt me, I thought. The way I hurt his child.

He still had his boots on, unlaced. He kicked one off and turned around.

“Max,” I said.

He moved down the dock, kicking off the other. I followed.

“Max, wait.”

By the time I realized what was happening and started to run, he’d reached the end of the dock. He dove headfirst into the icy water.

I slid to a halt, barely catching myself from going over, snow geysering beneath my feet. Max thrashed clumsily, more fighting than swimming. White wings of spray beat the surface at each stroke.

“Don’t fucking do this,” I screamed after him.

I dug my phone out, hit 911. Whirled around, peering through the snow. I needed something. Anything.

Orange caught my eye, hanging inside the yacht cabin.

I tore off my coat and pulled a life vest on, then grabbed another. The dispatcher was saying Hello? Nine one one, where is your emergency? in my ear.

“Peaks Island,” I said, running down the boat ramp. “North side. In the water.”

What is the nature of your emergency?

I stopped at the edge of the dock, staring through the snow at the splash and churn in the distance.

“Two people are drowning. Please help us.” I took a deep breath. “I can’t swim.”

I set the phone down on the dock, pulled my boots off, and jumped.

It felt like diving into a pool of live electricity. I kicked to the surface, gasping, clinging to the other vest like a surfboard. My hair lashed across my eyes. The water was so cold it registered only as pain, not chill.

No sign of Max. I kicked in the direction I’d last seen movement.

Why the fuck had I never learned to swim?

In my dreams this past year, I drowned again and again. Always it felt less like falling to the ocean floor than falling in outer space. An abyss that kept expanding the deeper you fell. Dying would be like that, I thought. Like falling asleep without ever reaching the soft floor of your dreams. Just deeper and deeper into a blackness with no saturation point.

A hand crested, slapped the waves, disappeared.

Bastard, I thought. I’m not letting you die.

I kicked furiously, managed to propel myself little by little. Then a wave rose and flung me backward and I wanted to sob. My clothes weighed a thousand pounds. Bones made of lead.

“Max,” I screamed, snowflakes filling my mouth.

My foot kicked something warm.

I kicked again, and it wrapped itself around my leg. Heavy. Pulling me under.

I kicked with the other leg and then he surfaced, spluttering, clinging to me.

“You crazy bastard,” I said. “Put this on.”

We fumbled at the extra vest, both inept. My fingers stuck together as if in mittens. His lips and hands were actually blue. I thought that was a thing in cartoons.

The vest finally slipped over his head but when it did, I couldn’t move. My arms were too heavy. They could only clutch him, my body craving his faint heat. Max held on to me weakly, coughing.

“We’re going to die,” I said. “Of hypothermia.”

“Swim to shore.”

“I can’t swim. This is all I had in me.”

He started laughing, weird, shivering laughs, and wrapped me in his arms.

“Don’t go to sleep,” he said.

“I’m not.”

But my eyelids were heavy, too.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for what I did.”

“Don’t talk. Conserve heat.”

“It’s not even that cold anymore,” I murmured, burrowing into his shoulder.

My skin tingled, almost burning. The water lapping over us was blessedly cool. I thought of Lake Michigan in summer, driving to the Indiana Dunes with Ellis. Watching our city far away across the blue. Tracing pictures in the sand with my finger until the tide rolled in.

That’s all we are, I told her. Here for a moment, then swept away.

It’s sad, she said. Why do we try? Nothing lasts.

But it’s beautiful for a moment. What other reason do you need?

I didn’t even notice when Max’s arms loosened and my head slipped beneath the surface. It was like going to sleep.

“Vada.”

I stared up through the darkness, at my hair trailing above me in black vines. Cold water weighed on my chest, working steadily at my lips like a kiss, until they parted and let the ocean in. It felt strangely good. Something filling the hollow place inside me.

“Oh my god, she’s alive.”

Then I was rising, being hauled out of the salt and ice, dead fingers dragging below me. I felt the slow toll of my heart like a ferry bell, distantly.

Something pounded on it. Warmth against my mouth. The sear of hot air in my throat.

I vomited seawater, a brackish burn. Voices floated overhead.

“Blankets. Hurry, Brandt!”

“I’m hurrying. Fuck.”

Dimly I sensed hands on my body. Something crinkling, like Christmas wrap. I opened my eyes.

A face above me, blurry. Hair plastered to her forehead, glasses knocked askew. She smoothed a foil blanket over me. Dazedly I pushed her glasses up her nose. She grabbed my hand.

“Hi,” I said.

Her face did that frowning, furrowing thing that meant she was trying not to cry.

“Stay awake, okay, Vada? Please. Stay with me.”

I tried, staring up into the falling snow, but after a while the sky went dark and the snow winked out like stars.

After that there was a long blankness. At times things sketched across the void: neon reflective strips on a paramedic’s coat, a pouch of quicksilver saline hanging above my head. Ellis’s face, mostly. Watching over me. So pretty, the pink lily petals of her mouth moving softly, saying my name. I’d inked them on Blythe’s shoulder a lifetime ago. So she could remember. And I thought, If I die, that’s what they’ll find in me. This face, inked in the surface of every cell.

I woke first this time.

For a moment I thought I was still out in the snow, but the pale haze grew solid and became white walls, chrome rails. Hospital. A tube of warm fluid ran into my wrist. I was wrapped in fleecy quilts. Still shivering.

In a chair beside the bed, my best friend slept hugging a pillow.

I lay there for a while, watching.

In Life Drawing class we’d spent a whole week learning how to use our eyes all over again, like infants. How to trick our brains into actually processing what we saw instead of subbing in symbols and shorthand. Not red-haired girl, but Ellis. Not Ellis but a lopsided grin, freckles like a handful of sand blown across her face, the way she’d squint when she felt some emotion too intensely to handle, as if trying to let less of the world in.

How strange, that I could look at someone every day and every night and not really see them.

I cleared my raw throat, and she stirred.

“Hi,” I whispered.

She smiled uncertainly, came to my bedside.

“How do you feel?”

“Cold.”

Ellis touched my wrist and I reached over and covered her hand with mine. I heard her sigh.

“Do you remember anything?”

“I was in the water. You and Brandt pulled me out.” My chest tightened. “Is Max—?”

“He’s okay. He’s in the ICU. They said he’s fine, but they’re keeping a close eye on him.”

Thank fucking God.

I let go of her and looked toward the windows. Night, snow falling slowly, glittering in the hospital lights like diamond dust.

My truth was out, now.

All of our truths were.

“I’ll give you some privacy,” Ellis said. “I just wanted to be here when you woke up.”

I caught her hand before she turned. “Don’t go.”

Her jaw tensed. She looked at my hand instead of my face.

“You remember that night,” I said. Not a question.

She nodded.

“You know what I did.”

“Yes.”

“Max knows, too. I’m going to jail.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I did it on purpose.” My hand clenched. “I tried to hurt us, Ellis.”

“For a second. And then you tried to stop. It was a mistake. He knows that.”

“I could’ve killed us. I killed Skylar.”

“You stopped Skylar from hurting anyone else. It was an accident. She was trying to kill herself.”

“And I ended up doing it for her.”

“Listen to me.” Ellis worked her hand free and then laced her fingers back through mine. “We couldn’t change what was going to happen that night. She had the gun in the glove box. She knew what she wanted.”

How can you hold my hand right now? “Ellis, I tried to hurt us. You.”