The Dare - Elle Kennedy Page 0,83

just like him.

Then I watched one day from my porch. I watched her getting off the school bus, knocking on her front door. Her dad’s truck was in the driveway and the TV inside so loud the whole neighborhood could hear the sports highlights. She kept knocking, this skinny girl and her backpack. Then trying the window where the bars had been torn off during a break-in and never replaced. And then finally giving up, resigned, and picking another rock from the side of the street that from some decaying part of the neighborhood eventually tumbled its way to her.

Next I watched Kai rolling down the sidewalk on his skateboard. Stopping to talk to her, to taunt her. I watched as he did donuts over her drawings, then pour a soda out on the pictures and flick the bottle cap in her hair. And I got it then, why she threw stuff at us whenever we passed her. She was aiming for Kai.

The next time she sat alone in her driveway, I brought my own rock and joined her. Eventually we left the driveway and explored the world. We watched the highway from a tall tree, counted planes from rooftops. And one day Daisy told me she was leaving. That when the school bus dropped us off, she was just going to walk away and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. You could walk away, too, she’d urged.

She had this magazine picture of Yosemite and got it in her head that she would live there, at a campground or something. Because they’d have everything you’d need and it doesn’t cost anything to camp, right? We talked about it for weeks, making plans. It’s not that I truly wanted to leave, but Daisy needed so much for me to go with her. It was the loneliness she feared the most.

Then she got on the bus one day and she had purple bruises on her arms. She’d been crying and suddenly it wasn’t a game anymore. It wasn’t some story we were writing about a great adventure to pass the time between school and sleep. When the bus pulled up at school, she looked at me, expectant, her backpack hanging heavier on her shoulders than normal. She said, We leave today at lunch? I didn’t know what to say to her, how to not say the wrong thing. So I did something much worse.

I walked away.

I think that was the moment I learned I wasn’t any good for anyone. Sure, I was barely eleven years old, so of course I wasn’t running north with nothing but a backpack and a skateboard. But I’d let Daisy believe in me. I’d let her trust me. Maybe I didn’t understand at the time what was really going on in her house, but on a conceptual level I got the fucking gist and yet I didn’t do anything to help her. I simply became another in a long line of letdowns.

I’ll never forget her eyes. How in them I saw her heart break. I see them still. Now.

My hands shake. Gripping the steering wheel, I barely see the road. It’s like tunnel vision, everything narrow and far away. I’m driving by memory more than sight. A tightness in my chest that’s been building for days now clamps down, climbing my throat. Suddenly it hurts to breathe.

When the phone buzzes in the cup holder, I nearly swerve into oncoming traffic, startled by the sound that feels louder in my head.

I hit the speakerphone button. “Yeah,” I answer, forcing my voice to work. I can’t hear myself. The static in my mind makes me feel like I’m underwater.

“Making sure you’re still coming,” Kai says. There’s noise in the background. Voices and muffled music. He’s already there at the stuffy Boston college bar where we arranged to meet.

“On my way.”

“Tick tock.”

I end the call and toss my phone on the passenger seat. The ache in my chest becomes unbearable, clenching down so hard it feels like I might snap a rib. I cut the wheel and veer onto the shoulder, slamming on the brakes. My throat’s closing as I frantically tear out of layers of clothing until I’m in just a wife-beater and sweating. I lower the windows to fill the Jeep with cool air.

The fuck am I doing?

Head in my hands, I can’t stop seeing her face. The disappointed look in her eyes. Not Daisy, the little girl from my past. But Taylor, the woman of my present.

She expected