“Don’t call her that,” Ash shouted, grabbing her arm.
“Get off me.” Celine shook him off hard, her momentum forcing her backward, and as she put a foot behind her, it slid on the bunched-up stair runner, making her slip off the top step.
I saw her arms flail, watched as she tried to save herself by attempting to regain her balance. Her hands reached for the banister but grasped only air. Ash lunged forward but he was too late. Celine let out a piercing shriek before toppling backward, bumping down the steep stairs, two, three at a time, a mass of chocolate locks and tumbling limbs. Her head reached the tiled floor at the bottom first, where it made a loud crack, but instead of getting up as I expected her to, she lay there, legs bent, arms outstretched, immobile and still.
“Celine,” Ash shouted, stumbling down the stairs, repeating her name over and over, his sobs becoming louder and thicker, the desperation in his voice mounting. It was all for nothing. There was no blood, no open wound, but from my vantage point at the top of the stairs I knew she was gone. Her eyes were open and glazed, her neck bent at a strange angle. She’d broken it, simple as that. One second, she was insulting me, and the next, she was dead.
“Call an ambulance,” Ash yelled, and still I didn’t move. “Maya. Call someone, please.”
I looked at his face, filled with remorse and guilt, and realized I felt none of that. Yes, I was afraid, but afraid of us getting caught, of him being taken away from me. My brain knew I should have felt terrible about what had happened, but I held no sorrow for Celine’s death, or how it had occurred. Secretly I was glad, and while that knowledge should have terrified me even more, it didn’t.
I walked to him slowly, put my hand on his back. “It’s too late.”
He let out a loud moan as he put his head to her chest, tried to find her pulse on her neck with his fingers. “I think she’s...oh, Christ...she’s... We have to call the police.”
He was the child now. I had to be the adult and take control. Figure out what was best for both of us, for our family. Brad and Mom wouldn’t be home for hours yet. We had plenty of time. “If we call the police, they’ll send you to prison.”
“They won’t—”
“They will,” I wailed, forcing tears because I couldn’t cry proper ones, not for her. I ran my fingers through my hair, pulling on it like I’d seen people do on TV when they were acting distraught. “We’ll both be locked up.”
“N-no. I won’t let that happen. It was an accident.”
“Do you think they’ll believe that?” I said. “You’ve seen the crime shows. What if there’s a bruise on her arm from where you grabbed her? What if your DNA is under her fingernails? We have to hide her.”
He looked up at me. “We can’t,” he cried. “We can’t!”
“We have to. If we say it’s an accident and they don’t believe us, it’ll be so much worse. And if we tell, it’ll tear us apart. What about Mom? What about Brad? What will they think? We have to hide her, and I’ll cover for you. I promise I’ll do it until the day I die.”
When he looked at me again, I could tell his allegiances had shifted. He was coming back to me where he’d belonged right from the start. I knew it wouldn’t be easy for him to cope, that he’d blame himself for a long, long while. I realized it would take time and patience to put this gorgeous boy back together again. But I also knew I was the only one capable of doing so, the only person in the whole world who understood. As much as it hurt my heart to see him broken, it was what strengthened my resolve. I vowed I’d make his pain go away, that I’d do whatever was necessary to make him happy, no matter what or how long it took. I’d be there for him.
“We can never speak of this again,” he’d said with tears streaming down his face a month after we’d buried Celine on the grounds, when he’d knocked on my bedroom door in the middle of the night because he couldn’t sleep again, the nightmares were too intense. “We’ll protect each other. It’s the only way we’ll get through this. Do you promise me, Maya? Do you?”
As he stared at me now, standing quietly in the garage, I took his hand. “We made a pact that day,” I said. “It bound us together, forever. We pressed her fingers on a notepad to make sure we left her prints, and I wrote a letter for her parents, saying she was running away. Then we sneaked into her house and packed a bag with some of her clothes and favorite things. It wasn’t hard to make everyone believe she’d left, especially when I went to Boston on a school trip and mailed the postcard.”
“Where is she?” Ash said, his voice barely a whisper. “What did we do with her body?”
“She’s not too far from where Mom and Brad are buried. Don’t worry, she wasn’t alone for very long.”
Six months, because that’s when my beautiful mom had died, and if I hadn’t been so distracted by Celine’s incessant pandering toward Ash, I’d have noticed she was sick. Maybe I could’ve saved her. Ash had almost lost it when we’d found out our parents had stated in their wills they wanted to be buried together on the grounds. The guilt of knowing the person whose death we’d covered up would forever lie so close to our beloved parents who were none the wiser almost made him confess everything to the cops. I helped him through that, too.
I never
