Sunday morning would probably try to push you higher.”
I hear her sigh. Her head bows, shaking. “Jesus. Why are you such a sappy freak?” It isn’t clear if she’s insulting herself or me. Without a word she slips her heels on and walks toward Josh’s deck. Blades of grass stick to her calves like dark slots in her skin. I stay at the edge of the trees. Their branches shiver in the night wind. I don’t budge at the snapping of twigs behind the darkness. In this moment, I’d rather face what’s outside the house than what’s within, like Carolynn. I choose one point in the shadows and I stare it down. That hungry, daring voice in my head, the one with all the questions, urges me to walk into the trees.
For the last month I’ve given in to that voice, mostly. I’m not crazy. The voice is mine. It was with me the day I left my bed for the first time in four weeks to stagger to the lower terrace, where Ben and I used to hang out. I watched the flames in the fire pit after lighting the wood, and I thought, I’ve always wanted to leap the blaze. I wondered if I could do it, so I did. It singed my socks—pink cashmere ones that Dad and Diane gave me for Valentine’s Day. It was thrilling. I was alive. That was the first thing I did in after. My inaugural act as a new girl.
At present that voice quietly urges me forward:
Come prove that you’re as brave as the girl in the stories.
Prove that you still exist.
It begins to sound less like me and more like Ben’s alto. What if all this time, it was him? My toes clench in the grass. I wish I could reach inside my brain and pinch the thought as you would the lit wick of a candle. Snuff it out. When you love someone, love them in your bones and know them until the backs of their hands are as familiar as yours, can they ever be gone? Is Ben all the way gone?
I take a step for the trees. Maggie’s killer is on the loose and maybe he’s concealed by the shadows, staring me down, inviting me forward. Who would I find if I looked?
“Ben?” His name slips out, an arrow aimed at the dark.
There’s laughter from behind me, not from the trees I’m focused on.
“Are you talking to your dead stepbrother?” Ford asks between snide chuckles.
My cheeks burn hot and I’ve scooped up my shoes and am halfway across the lawn by the time I can bear looking up at Ford. He’s a few stairs above the grass on the redwood deck, sneering like I’m a bug under his boat shoe he’s about to squish. “Liddy and Kristie were all, ‘I bet they only let Lana hang with them because they feel sorry for her.’ ” He makes his voice higher than either girl’s is. “And I told them no way Carolynn Winters”—her name’s said with contempt—“let some desperate wannabe join her crew, even for the summer, because that girl doesn’t have a heart.”
I stop short. This is not before. I am not Lana trying to listen to Mrs. Edgemont’s Mary Shelley lecture and refusing to let on that I feel Ford’s breath on my neck. This is not Mr. Gupta’s astronomy; I have more options than transferring out, or pretending I don’t hear Ford’s sniggers each time I speak, or risking making the bullying even worse if I tell Mr. Gupta on him. All those little jabs took divots out of me. They reduced me to easy and frequently picked-on prey. But tonight, I am not afraid of fighting back or making it worse.
I smirk at him like he’s told a joke. “You’re calling me a desperate wannabe? Do you hear yourself, Ford?”
He clears his throat, surprised. “All I’m at is that I was wrong. Pity it is: they must know you’re a desperate bitch who talks to herself when no one’s around. You were just mid-séance.”
I reach the bottom step and am about to jog up them and disappear into the house. It feels like retreating from this spiteful boy. With the woods at my back, the pressure of the breeze in my hair, and whatever presence I sensed in the trees still near, I refuse to.
I place my hands on my hips, channel Carolynn’s glacial stare, and say, “If it had anything to do with pity,