I watched, waiting for their embrace to end, willing it to be over. They were only friends. He’d said so. But Ash put his index finger under Celine’s chin, gently tilting her head toward his. I gasped when their lips touched, stood frozen to the spot when her arms went around his neck, and his hands traveled underneath the back of her shirt. My head spun, turning my vision blurry as Celine took Ash’s hand and led him inside the house. I wasn’t a stupid little kid. I knew exactly what they were doing. There were no other cars in the driveway, which meant her parents weren’t home—no surprise there, apparently they’d left Celine, Keenan and Fiona alone for weekends ever since the latter two turned double digits—but it didn’t seem as if the twins were home, either. I couldn’t stand the thought of Celine and Ash being together, doing that. If he fell in love with her, he’d never hang out with me again.
I waited for a while, hoping I was wrong, and Ash hadn’t lied when he’d said they weren’t a couple, and they’d soon come back outside. When another few minutes passed and they still hadn’t shown, I grabbed the biggest rock I could find, crept as close to the house as I dared, and hurled the thing straight through the window.
I ran, jumped on my bicycle and pedaled home, where I locked myself in my bedroom, refusing to come out until it was time to get the school bus the next morning. Ash didn’t sit with me that day, or the one after, and I suspected he knew who’d launched a rock at his girlfriend’s house, but I never admitted it.
It wasn’t long after that the whispers started at school. Ash and I had had a falling-out, a “lover’s quarrel.” People stared at me when I walked down the hallway, laughing and cupping their hands to each other’s ears as they quietly but not nearly discreetly enough talked about me. I’d ignored the name-calling, freak and weirdo were nothing new, but then my notebook had fallen out of my bag and brotherfucker had been added to the ever-growing list, filling me with so much shame I’d wished myself dead. Back then I hadn’t told Ash about my new nickname for months, and now that he was home again and couldn’t remember any of it, I certainly wasn’t about to bring it up.
He looked at me as we sat at the kitchen table, his expectant expression transforming to frustration. How long had I silently reminisced? I gave him some succinct details about Celine, just enough of the truth to satiate his curiosity, finishing with, “You were close. Boyfriend and girlfriend for a while but a little before your seventeenth birthday, she left.”
“Where did she go?”
I closed my eyes for a moment, told Ash how I remembered the sharp knock on the door one morning. It had come a few months after the rock-meets-window incident. Mom had answered and Celine’s mother, smelling of stale booze and cigarettes, ranted and raved about how Celine had left a note, saying she was running away. After Mom assured her Celine wasn’t at our house, and Ash was working, she’d left, but the next evening the cops showed up.
“They asked all of us questions about Celine,” I said. “And they spent ages asking you when you’d last seen her, and where you’d been.”
“They think I had something to do with her leaving?” he said.
“Not really. With the note she left about running away, and when you told them her father beat her, and Keenan and Fiona confirmed it, things changed.”
“How?”
“Her parents had to accept the truth. She ran away because of them. Her father was an alcoholic, a heavy-handed prick, and her mom had done nothing to stop him. She was usually too off her face to try.”
“Did Celine come back? Did they find her?” Ash asked, and I shook my head. “And Keenan still thinks I had something to do with her going away after all this time? Why?”
“Because he’s an asshole and you shouldn’t listen to him. It took him a while to stop throwing accusations around, then he left town for a few years and when he came back we thought he’d accepted you had nothing to do with Celine leaving, but then Kate...”
Ash looked at me. “Who is she?”
I got up, walked over to the drawer with the photo albums, where I pulled out a bundle of loose pictures, and flicked through them until I found what I needed, pictures that always surprised me because Kate looked so much like Celine, and with their dark hair and big eyes, they both resembled me, too. I set the photos on the table, slid them toward Ash with my index finger. “This is Celine, and this was Kate.”
He was about to touch the photographs but retracted his hand as if the pictures had the potential to scorch him. “Was? What do you mean?”
“Kate was your girlfriend, and she...she died. Almost two and a half years ago, a couple of months before you left town.”
“Kate’s dead?” Ash’s eyes went wide, and he jumped up, running his hands through his hair. “For Christ’s sake, why do all the people around me keep dying? What the hell happened to her?” When I remained silent, he asked again, louder, urging and insisting I tell him because he needed to know, he wanted the truth.
I blew the air from my lungs in a shaky stream as I worked up the nerve, my insides feeling as if they were on fire, burning me from the inside out. “She had an accident by the cliffs on the path behind the house.”
“This house?”
“Yes. She was an avid runner, come rain, shine or snow. She even got me to join her, would you believe?” I knew I was babbling and forced myself to get to the point. “It was a few
