She’s sprawled on the right side of her bed, her hair messy and her face peacefully composed.
I let out a soft breath of relief, and she stirs slightly, blinking awake with that mom sixth sense she’s had since I was a little kid.
“Hey, Low,” she murmurs, squinting through the darkness at me. “You okay, sweetie?”
“Yeah.” The word is a little choked, but for this one second, I am okay. Because she’s okay.
She blinks again. “What are you wearing?”
Oh. I look down at the skimpy black dress the guys brought me. It’s still twisted slightly on my body, still riding up too high on my hips.
“It’s a… Halloween costume. I went to a party tonight.”
“Ah.” The word is half sigh as her eyes drift closed again. “I hope you had fun.”
“Yeah,” I lie. “I did.”
Her breathing evens out, and I step carefully across the room, tugging the covers up tighter around her before pressing a kiss to her forehead.
“I love you, Mom.”
“Love… you more… Low.”
When I return to my own bedroom, I turn on all the lights. Then I quickly strip off the dress and toss it in the laundry basket before stepping into the shower. I turn on the water as hot as I can tolerate and stand under it, not even bothering to use soap, just baptizing myself in the spray of scalding water.
When my skin is pink and almost numb again, I finally get out and put on a soft pair of pajamas before crawling into bed.
But I don’t sleep.
17
I spend most of Sunday in bed. I feel hungover, even though I didn’t drink anything last night. My body is exhausted, wrung out, and sore, like I ran a marathon or something, and the shakes return for a while.
My mom insists on taking my temperature, and even though I don’t have one, she hovers anyway, which is how I know I look like shit. I think she worries a little bit every time I get sick that it could be the cancer returning, but she usually hides it pretty well. I tell her I just need sleep though. And it’s true. I do.
I just wish I could get it.
All last night, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, the lights still on around me. I don’t feel ready to face darkness yet, and every time I close my eyes, images flash behind my eyelids that make me feel like I’m going to throw up.
I don’t know where Lincoln is. Or River, Dax, or Chase. I’m assuming the other three left at some point last night, but I’m trying not to think about any of them. It fucks with my emotions too much. I’ve always felt sort of drawn to them, even when they were assholes to me. But now, I feel connected to them in a way I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to undo.
We can’t undo what we did. We can’t unsee what we saw. That bond will always exist between us now, tied up by the secret we’re all keeping.
I hate it.
My homework sits untouched in my backpack, I barely drink, and I don’t eat all day. Mom runs to the store and returns with ginger ale and saltines, but I can’t even stomach those.
As shitty as I feel physically, guilt wracks me for that too. My stomach is in knots, my heart thuds painfully in my chest, and my skin feels alternately chilled and flushed—but I feel all those things because I’m alive. I’m not the one who died last night. I survived.
And I ran. We all did.
On Monday morning, I’m a little delirious from lack of sleep—I did doze off a few times overnight, but every time I did, disjointed dreams assaulted me until my eyes flew open again.
Mom doesn’t want me to go to school, but I insist I can handle it. I need… something normal. I need to verify the world outside still exists, that some things have continued as usual even if nothing about me feels the same.
Lincoln is downstairs waiting for me, and even though I don’t want to ride with him, I don’t have the energy to fight about it. We drive in silence, and I don’t fiddle with the radio dials like I used to. Tension fills the space between us, expanding inside the confines of the car until I swear I can feel it pressing against me like a physical force.
He glances over at me once, and it looks like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t. His hands just tighten on the steering wheel, the muscles in his forearms standing out like ropes.
As soon as we walk inside the large, white front doors of Linwood Academy, I wish I’d followed my mom’s advice and stayed home. I’m not sure who finally did report it to the cops, but Iris’s body was found, and everyone is talking about it.
No one seems to know much, but I hear from several people that she was hit by a drunk driver, so that must be what the cops are assuming.
The cheerleading squad huddles together in the hallway, the younger members sobbing and the older members—people like Savannah—consoling them with quietly shell-shocked expressions. Savannah and Iris had the weirdest on-again, off-again friendship I ever saw, but the redhead has dark circles under her eyes and is more subdued than I’ve ever seen her.
Trent looks… sick.
He looks exactly how I feel—like he wishes he could turn himself inside out somehow, tear the world down and rebuild it into something that makes sense again.
I sit through my first period Poli Sci class, staring at the whiteboard without really seeing it as a fresh wave of doubt cascades through my mind.
Could we have done more? Could we have saved her somehow?
Maybe she wasn’t really dead yet. The man in black seemed satisfied when he checked the body, but maybe he
