“I lied to you,” I say carefully, struggling to hold my voice even. “I wasn’t at a hotel all this time, grieving.”
Fiona seems disappointed in me. “Where were you?” she asks carefully.
“I was looking for my brothers,” I say, and then the floodgates open. I tell her everything: about Kensington Beach, about the waves that flow like clockwork and the sand as soft as flour. I tell her about Jas and dust, and my brothers getting kicked out and leaving to surf Witch Tree, about cliffs and the tiles in the house that never got dirty. I even tell her about the party and the drug so powerful that it made lights bleed and pain a pleasure. I tell her about everything.
Everything but Pete. I don’t make a decision to leave him out, not exactly. But when I tell the story, he just kind of stays out of it. Maybe I’m still too embarrassed that I fell for him when I should have known better.
While I speak Fiona holds my hand, and sometimes she stops to hug me. She nods when she should, her eyes widen when they should, they even brim with tears when I tell her that my brothers were hooked on drugs. When I finish, I say, “I know it sounds crazy. I know I must look crazy.”
Fiona shakes her head warmly. “No,” she says. “It all makes perfect sense.”
I’m so grateful for her understanding that I begin crying again, and Fiona pulls me into a hug.
“You need to get some rest,” she says soothingly. “Lie down. Go to sleep.”
“I need some rest,” I echo, remembering that I was up all night. Fiona pulls the covers up around me like I’m a little kid and closes the door gently behind her.
Before it clicks shut, she says, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
I close my eyes and welcome sleep.
I awake to whispers.
I don’t know who Fiona is talking to, but whoever it is, she’s telling them my story; telling them about Kensington Beach, and dust, and my brothers. I get up and open the door.
Fiona and my parents are standing in the hallway outside.
“Mom, Dad,” I say, and they look at me sharply, sadly, almost guiltily, as though they were doing something to me behind my back. I try to ignore my pounding headache. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away. I thought I could handle it by myself. I was wrong, I know I was wrong. Did you call the police? Tell them to reopen the case? To head to Witch Tree, wherever that is?”
I try to smile, but my parents look so devastated that it’s impossible.
“Wendy,” my father says gently, “your brothers—”
“I know, I know. They’re addicts. It’s bad. But—”
“No,” he says firmly. “No.”
“I didn’t want to believe it at first either.”
“Wendy,” he says again, “your brothers are dead.”
I shake my head; they don’t understand.
“Wendy. Your brothers died months ago. They found their boards up the coast, destroyed.”
I look at Fiona, desperately confused. “I thought you told them—”
“I did, Wendy, I did.”
“But then—”
“Wendy—”
I shake my head. “You didn’t believe me?”
“Wendy,” Fiona says, “it makes perfect sense, like I said. We even called that grief counselor and she agreed. You’re so torn up about the loss of your brothers that your brain constructed this, this…”
She searches for the words. Somewhere in this house, I know, is a pad of paper scrawled with notes they took while talking to the grief counselor.
Finally, she says, “This alternate reality to protect yourself from what really happened.”
“I know what really happened,” I say. My head is pounding so hard that I think I could dance in time to its rhythm.
“You have been taking drugs,” my mother says, thin-lipped. “This is all some kind of psychosis.”
“Is that what you told them?” I ask, turning back to Fiona. “Just because I was gone for a few weeks?”
Fiona shakes her head. “It started before you left. At the bonfire, the night we graduated. Even Dax thought you were acting strange—”
“Well if Dax thought so, it must be true. He knows me so well, after all,” I spit.
Fiona bites her lip and looks at her feet. I turn to face my mother.
“Mom, you have to listen to me—”
She shakes her head. “We’re going home.”
I open my mouth to protest, to insist, to beg. But my mother looks so helpless, so defeated, so empty, that instead I just nod and follow my parents out the door. I even let Fiona hug me goodbye, when what I really want to do is scream at her, maybe even hit her for not believing me, for betraying me.
Nana is waiting at the door, but she doesn’t run to me the way she usually does when I come home. Instead, she backs away from me, wary, like she doesn’t recognize me. Like I’m a stranger. I start crying all over again.
“I know, honey,” my father says, coming up from behind me and putting an arm around my shoulder. “I know.”
My mother carries my duffel bag in from the car—I don’t even remember bringing it with me from Pete’s house, but I must have—unzips it on the kitchen counter, and begins sifting through it like she’s looking for contraband. It takes me a second to realize that she’s looking for drugs.
“Mom,” I say, “there’s nothing bad in there. Just clothes and some extra cash.” She won’t even look at me, just keeps going through my bag.
“Why don’t you go to your room, honey?” my father says finally.
“Am I being punished?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why are you sending me to my room?”
He sighs. “Because that’s what they told us to do. Something about reestablishing authority.”
I shake my head. I wonder if my parents would even have noticed that I was gone if I hadn’t come back in the state I’m in. If I weren’t aching with withdrawal, I think a tiny part of me would be glad that they’re paying attention. Even though they’re wrong—about me, about my brothers, about Kensington—they seem to have begun to come out of the fog they’ve been living in for the last nine months.
“Who told you to do that?”
“The people at the center.”
“What center?”
“It’s for people with problems like yours.”
No one has problems like mine, I think but do not say.
He continues, “Supposed to be the best in the country. They’ll admit you just as soon as a spot opens up.”
As soon as a spot opens up.
He doesn’t offer me any further explanation—will it be days, weeks, months? Will I still be allowed to start college in September? I want to ask, but I can feel my pulse pounding beneath my temples, and I’m pretty sure that if I open my mouth again nothing but sobs will come out.
I have to beg Nana to follow me into my room, and even once inside, she keeps her distance from me. I can’t say I blame her. I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror; I don’t look anything like myself. I can’t say exactly what about me has changed; my hair is the same color, my eyes the same shape. My skin is tanner, I suppose. There’s something else, something deeper that’s changed. I still look like me, but off somehow. Like I’ve aged ten years in a few days.
Or maybe it’s just that I’ve cried so much that my face has been emptied out, dry and salty as a desert.
22
I don’t know how much time goes by before the pain sets in. Something beyond the headache and past the tears, an ache from somewhere deep inside my chest that radiates into my joints so that I can’t turn my neck or grip a pencil. I want to cry out, but I don’t want to make Nana more frightened of me than she already is. And it’s not like I want my parents to come running.