“Can’t we just talk about the woods instead?”
“The fact that you’d rather talk through being attacked again than talk about Mina is exactly why we need to start talking about her,” David says. “It’s okay to start small.”
“I’m…” I stop, because I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. “I haven’t been able to go out to her grave,” I say instead, because it’s the thing that’s been waking me up at night, in between nightmares of hiding in the forest again. “I thought I’d be able to. Go out there, I mean. I thought that after we caught who killed her—if we did—it’d be easier. Like a reward. I know that’s stupid. But it’s what I thought.”
David leans back in his chair, thoughtful.
“I don’t think that’s stupid,” he says. “Why do you think it’s so hard for you to go see Mina’s grave?”
“I just…I miss…” I struggle for strength, for composure, for any control, but I am safe here, and I have to say the words. They need to exist somewhere, because they were never said in the right place at the right time.
“We were in love. Me and Mina. We were in love.”
I lean back on the couch, hugging myself. I meet his eyes, and the approval I find there, the confirmation, makes the tightness in my chest ease.
“I guess that’s why it’s so hard,” I say.
AUGUST
When my dad comes out of the house, he finds me on the deck, curled up in one of the Adirondack chairs. The sun’s setting on my flower beds, and I turn my head toward him, slipping off my sunglasses.
Dad took a few weeks off after I was attacked. And even now, night after night, I hear the rhythmic thumping of the basketball against concrete as he shoots hoops in the driveway while the rest of the world sleeps. Sometimes I sit at the kitchen window and watch him.
Now he sits down in the chair next to me and clears his throat. “Sweetie, I need to tell you something.”
“What happened?” I sit up straighter, because his mouth’s a flat, unhappy line.
“I just got a call. The forensic team finally found Jackie’s body on Rob Hill’s property.” He rubs a hand across his jaw, his stubble almost completely silver now. He’s not sleeping much, and neither am I. Both of us look it.
“Oh,” I say. I don’t know what else to do. It’s weird, but finding Jackie’s body feels like a good thing, because I can’t help but think of Amy, of not knowing. Of not having a grave to visit.
“So that’s it, right?” I ask. “They’ll put him away for good?”
“It’ll be hard for a jury to overlook that kind of evidence.”
I pull my feet up onto the chair, hugging my knees, ignoring the way my bad leg twinges. Sometimes I need to do this, pull into myself, when I think about Coach. When I think about hiding behind that rock, waiting for him to find me. Kill me.
“Sweetie…” Dad begins, but then he doesn’t say anything else, just continues to watch me.
I wait.
“Is there…is there anything you want to talk about?” he asks finally.
I think about it for a second. Telling him. All of it. Me and Mina. Me and Trev. The tangle I found myself in, no way out but drugs, for so long. A part of me wants to. But a bigger part wants to keep it to myself, foster it inside me for a while longer.
“Not right now,” I say.
He nods, takes it as a dismissal, and when he moves to get up, I reach over and grab his hand. I push the words out of my mouth—I have to start somewhere.
“Dad, someday, I’ll tell you everything. All of it. I promise.”
He squeezes my hand, and when he smiles at me, the sadness in his eyes fades a little.
A few weeks later, I stand outside the cemetery gates alone as the funeral procession passes by. I watch from the gates as they bury Jackie, unable to venture inside. In the distance, I can see the group of mourners gathered around the grave. A girl breaks from the crowd at the end.
Amy doesn’t say anything. She walks to the bottom of the hill and faces me, close enough to the fence that I can see her clearly. She presses her hand against her heart and nods her head. A silent thank-you.
I nod back.
SEPTEMBER
“Please tell me your mom’s stopped freaking out about this,” Rachel says, dipping her fries into barbecue sauce. A few drops splatter on the practice test she’s grading.
“Neither of them is really happy about it,” I say. I’ve been shredding my napkin into little pieces, and they flutter across the table when Rachel turns the page. “I may have played the ‘I was attacked by psychos’ card to get them to agree.”
“It’s well earned,” Rachel says. “Twice in one year.”
I grin and lean over the table, trying to see what she’s writing. “How’d I do?”
She scribbles my score on the top of the paper, circling it with a big red heart. “Ninety-five. Congratulations—if this were the actual test, you’d be the proud owner of a GED.”
“Let’s hope I do as well on the real thing,” I say.
“Someone’s ready to get out of here.”
I shrug. “I’m just…I’m over school, you know? I want to move forward, or whatever. I like Portland. I like living with Macy. I’m just lucky she wants me to come back.”
“Well, I’ll miss you. But I think I get it. Plus, now I have an excuse to visit Portland. I am very fond of roses.”
“We can go to the Botanical Garden,” I promise. “And I’ll be back for the trials and stuff.”
I’m not looking forward to testifying, but I know I have to. They need to pay for what they did to Mina. To Jackie.
I rub my knee. When Matt came to see me a few weeks after it happened, I’d tried to apologize to him. He could barely look me in the eye, and we’d both ended up crying. I’d gotten him to wait, called Trev to drive him home, and Matt had gripped his sober chip and my hand like a lifeline until he arrived.
There’s this long road ahead. It’s never-ending, because you don’t get over losing someone. Not completely. Not when she was a part of you. Not when loving her broke you as much as it changed you.
I fear it, that long road, just as Matt must. For months, the urge to use has been buried beneath my need to find Mina’s killer. Now I need to be strong for myself.
“Change is good, right?” I ask Rachel.
“Right,” she agrees.
OCTOBER
Mom and I still don’t talk much—though we never have, so it’s not a big deal. Sometimes we sit together at the kitchen table, her working on legal briefs, me going through seed catalogs for plants suited to Portland’s weather. But it’s always quiet, the flip of pages, the scratch of her pen the only sounds.
One night she folds her hands over her briefcase and waits until I raise my eyes to meet hers, and I know, with more than a little dread, that she’s finally ready to talk.
“I should have stopped and listened to you when you told me you were clean.” It sounds like she’s rehearsed this in the mirror, like she’d written it down and crossed things out, painstakingly trying to get the words right, like it’s a speech instead of a confession.
I’m quiet for a long time. It’s hard to even think about what to say. Her words can’t change what she did; they can’t erase those months I spent trapped at Seaside, forced to figure out how to grieve on my own. But I can’t change that no matter how wrong it was. She did it only because she was trying to save me.
She will always try to save me.
That, more than anything else, is what makes me apologize.
“Look, I get it. I do. I lied and I kept everything from everyone and I just…I wasn’t very good, and I’m sorry—”
“Honey.” Mom’s face, always so composed, crumples, worry lines appearing out of nowhere. “You’ve been through so much.”