me at my locker the first day back. They made sad doll eyes as Liddy said in her shrill soprano, “So like, we heard Ben was attacking you and you fought him off. And you had to shoot him or else he was going to strangle you, and we just wanted you to know that we never thought he was all that hot. God, what was his damage?”
Carolynn intervened. Her eyes fixed on Liddy like laser beams, and the cheerleaders retreated. Unfortunately, that trick doesn’t work on teachers, or Principal Owen, or the counselor, and the host of other adults who’ve relayed their sympathies and then kept one uneasy eye on me. No one knows what to believe.
Am I the girl with the stepbrother who lost it and tormented our idyllic island over a summer that will be hastily forgotten? Am I the little stepsister who had to lodge a flare in her stepbrother’s abdomen to stop his killing spree? Or am I the troubled and lying victim and witness of a rash of mysterious crimes? At least now, everyone gets the step-thing right.
“Are those tofu?” Carolynn asks as Josh skewers the hot dogs on sticks.
He gives her a goofy smile and answers, “No.”
“Thank God,” Carolynn groans, and reclines on the blanket we’re sharing. She wears oversize sunglasses. They’ve covered her watery eyes for much of the week.
“You want one or two, Car?” Duncan asks. He stays awake at night with Carolynn on the phone. Becca would be happy; Bethany J. is basically blacklisted. Carolynn holds two fingers in the air.
Willa’s reading a book from AP Lit. She rests on one elbow and holds the volume to shade her face. She didn’t skip a beat performing in class. As I stared glassy-eyed out the window in stats, Willa spoke more than the teacher. Good. My best friend deserves her yellow brick road of scholarly accomplishments. She deserves for it to lead to Oz—or Brown.
I stay sitting, just watching the boys. It’s harder than it sounds. It’s hard not curling up and sinking into grief. It helps to remember who I am and who I want to be.
I am Lana McBrook. Not before Lana, that saggy-spined minnow who let the world walk all over her, who was authentically loved by her best friend, Willa Owen, and who Ben McBrook killed three people and faked his own death to change. Not after Lana with her big Josh-loving declarations, beloved stepbrother, and her silly notions about who she had to be.
I am just Lana McBrook, the girl who loved her stepbrother in all the dirty, gross, and wonderful ways; who murdered him with a flare gun when she realized that eventually she would leave with him, she would become a monster to love the one he’d become; who leaped into the icy, black water of the sound to try and save him once she had.
He was gone.
The current was strong, the water deep, and the night dark.
I am Lana who thought she believed in revenge, until I saw what it looked like: Becca hanging from her swing set. And for an awful moment, like a sickness, I felt what it was to be happy for the violence visited upon her. Truthfully, though, I’ve believed in forgiveness since I was a four-year-old whose depressed mom leaped from a terrace. I’d forgiven her right away for leaving me. I’d forgiven Dad for departing in his own way shortly after. I’ve been the forgiving kind before I was old enough to know how hard forgiving can be. Before I understood that there was an alternative.
I am still a sometimes liar. It can’t be helped. I haven’t said aloud that Ben created a villain in Gant to turn me into the girl from our stories. Or that I loved him. Or that he succeeded in jolting me brave. Ben did know what I needed. It worked. It worked. How awful is that?
The police, Sweeny in particular, have wondered at Ben’s motivations. After I was half-drowned from the search, I climbed up the ladder onto the Mira. I called the coast guard and then Sweeny. She was waiting for me at the dock when the coast guard delivered me there. I sat with her on the bank of grass by the parking lot. I shivered under the blankets I’d been given. I told her what Ben had done. I told her that he wanted me to fake my death and disappear with him. I admitted to shooting him