I Know You Remember

by Jennifer Donaldson

  She gestures around the playground.

  “What happened to me?” she asks. “You did, Ruthie. You happened. You fucking psycho.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  ZAHRA

  I’VE BEEN RUNNING AWAY from her for so long. Now she stands in front of me, a figure from three long years of nightmares, a stricken look on her face. And it’s just so ridiculous, so absurd, so terrifying, that for a moment I can’t stop laughing.

  But Ruthie—this poor, lost monster, this demon from hell—just looks at me, and her face is so wounded, so shattered, the laughter finally dies in my throat.

  “Why would you say a thing like that?” she whispers.

  * * *

  —

  THAT SUMMER IS NEVER far from my memory.

  “Let’s say the Starmaiden has a—what’s the word? Like, someone she kind of loves and kind of hates?”

  It was August. Ruthie and I were in the woods. At the playground. I sat on one of the wooden platforms on the rotting playscape, the notebook on my lap. Trying to come up with the right word.

  “Nemesis,” Ruthie replied.

  “Thanks,” I said. Ruthie always had the right word. It impressed me no end. I read nonstop but I had a tendency to skim right over things I didn’t know or didn’t care about. I never bothered hunting down a dictionary or even typing a word into my phone; I scanned for what I was interested in. The love, the magic, the friendship, the laughter. The fight. The big win. But Ruthie paid attention to words.

  I’d never known anyone like her before.

  I jotted down the idea in the notebook, my handwriting large and loopy under her all capitals. There’d been rain that week, and the leaves around us were heavy with it, but now the sky was periwinkle blue, the clouds lit pink and gold. A cotton candy sky, a cartoon unicorn sky. The kind of sky that stood over a magical world.

  I was going to be fourteen in a week and a half. Way past cartoon unicorn age; way past the age of playing pretend. And we’d be heading back to school, and I had no idea what our friendship would look like in school—it made me cringe a little to think about it, to imagine, say, Tabitha Morgan’s face if she saw us out here like this. Or even Bailey’s. Either of them would think this was crazy.

  And they’d probably be a little bit right.

  Ruthie was . . . brilliant. Smart, and intense, and determined. And she had the aura of someone who’d seen real pain. I didn’t know the story, and she didn’t talk about it, but it gave everything she said and did a kind of weight.

  But she was also undeniably weird. And it was hard to put your finger on how. It wasn’t anything obvious. She looked normal—she was prettier than she thought she was, even if she dressed a little frumpy. And it wasn’t her obsession with books, or movies, or stories. That was normal fangirl devotion. That was just fun.

  No. It was something else. Something just behind her eyes that stayed untouched by laughter, or emotion. I’d seen it, felt it, and I assumed it was a part of whatever pain she’d been through. It didn’t matter to me. But I wondered what it’d be like when we were in school, surrounded by other people.

  For now, though, we were alone. Ruthie knelt on the ground, hammering another nail into the bookshelf she was building. We’d had the idea to fix the place up a little, and for the past few weeks we’d been smuggling my dad’s tools out here, stealing stray nails and screws and making plans. It was a little goofy—we were too old for a fort, honestly. But it felt exciting to carve out our own little space. To make something.

  “What you doing?”

  My pen froze above the page. I knew that voice. I knew that voice, and I knew what I’d see when I looked up, but I still dreaded it.

  Bailey Sellers stood at the edge of the clearing.

  She stood with her arms folded over her chest. Her hair was the color of a black cherry—she dyed it a week or so ago. It was ratty, and the color uneven. She stepped onto the playground, her body language meek but her chin jutting.

  I glanced over at Ruthie. She’d halted her work, the hammer hanging loose in her hand. She was looking at Bailey with that hard little smirk she got sometimes, usually when she felt insecure.

  Crap.

  Bailey’d always been a “summer friend” more than anything—during the school year we were in different circles, different classes. But we lived a few blocks away from each other, so in the summer we were friends on the merits of proximity. One year we’d spent every afternoon sunning ourselves on my trampoline and reading gossip blogs on our phones. Another, we developed what we thought was the clever trick of buying a ticket to a movie matinee and then sneaking into other movies for the rest of the day. We’d ridden bikes to Goose Lake and watched older kids smoke and flirt. We’d eaten candy until our tongues were patchy and green from the sugar.

  But Bailey wasn’t interested in making things up or indulging flights of fancy at all; she didn’t look for cloud shapes, she didn’t talk in funny voices for her pets, she didn’t make up little stories about the people we saw on the bus or at the mall. She didn’t read. Worse—she acted like I was a freak show when I did those things. Half the stuff I liked she dismissed as “weird.” It didn’t really bother me—I just shrugged it off—but when I met Ruthie, it was an almost shocking relief. All the things I’d done alone suddenly had another person to fan the flames. I didn’t want to stifle them anymore.

  So I’d been neglecting Bailey for the better part of the summer. Dodging her, hiding from her sometimes. Or worse, letting her tag along with me and Ruthie and giving her a kind of patronizing smile whenever she tried to change the subject to one she cared about. Sometimes I felt awful about it; I’d pass by her trailer and see a single light on in her bedroom and wonder what she was doing, if she was okay. I’d see her slinking around the neighborhood alone, looking scruffier by the day.

  Now I quickly slid my notebook under my hoodie. I didn’t want to have to explain that to her.

  But Ruthie, still smirking, stepped over the planks she was working on, toward Bailey.

  “Preparing for the sacrifice,” she said nonchalantly.

  Bailey’s left eyebrow arched up. It was her best fuck-off face; I knew it pretty well. “What?”

  “We’re building an altar,” Ruthie said, gesturing toward the half-made bookshelf. “That’s where we’ll put our offering. It’s the only way to pass into the Darkness.”

  I still hadn’t moved off the playscape. The language was from our stories. In one, a cult of blood mages, driven mad by the constant daylight, was trying to bring about nightfall by sacrificing innocents. It wasn’t even the light that made them unhinged. It was the exhaustion of anticipation—the fact that the sun moved so low on the horizon but never dipped down below it. In the book, Lyr killed their leader, and the Starmaiden banished the rest of them to a system of underground caves to sleep for fifty years.

  Bailey looked at the bookshelf. “Okay. What you gonna sacrifice?”

  She tried so hard to sound game. It made my heart ache. She didn’t care about any of this, but she was so lonely. She was trying. I was about to hop up off the playscape, to pad over on my bare feet and talk to her, when Ruthie grinned cruelly and said, “Oh, don’t worry about that.”

  Then she swung the hammer high overhead.

  Bailey let out a strangled cry, covering her head with her arms, but the hammer stopped a half inch away from her head. I let out my breath all of a sudden.

  There was a long moment when nobody moved. Then Ruthie started laughing. She lowered the hammer, twirling it in her hand, and walked away. Bailey looked up and lowered her arms, her expression changing slowly from terror to rage.

  “Fuck you,” she screamed. Her cheeks were passing quickly through red to purple. I’d seen that before. Bailey was prone to sudden rages. I’d seen her tear a neighbor’s fence down with her bare hands once; I’d seen her throw ro
cks at a girl who’d called her “dirty.”

  “Calm down,” Ruthie said. “It was a joke.”

  “It’s okay, Bailey,” I said. I jumped up from the playscape, thinking I could distract her and defuse the situation. “We’re just fixing the place up. Want to see?”

  Her eyes met mine for just a split second. That’s one of the images that comes back to me a lot. That moment when we looked at each other, and her eyes said, Why? Why are you hanging out with this girl? Why did you leave me behind? For a second it hurt. Then it made me mad. I didn’t deserve a guilt trip. I was allowed to hang out with whoever I wanted. I was allowed to be happy.

  Then she looked around the little clearing. She kicked at a flowerpot we’d placed out there; it fell over but didn’t break, the dirt sliding out.

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

  She flipped me off and kicked it again. The ceramic cracked as she stomped down. Ruthie took a step toward her to grab her, but Bailey slipped quickly away. She looked around the clearing at all the other things we’d done. The doodles along the equipment in multicolored Sharpie. The sheet I’d hung for shade. The little ceramic incense burner in the shape of a cat; the stack of books on the playscape. “Fuck your dumb little clubhouse,” she screeched. She grabbed the edge of the sheet and pulled at it; there was an awful tearing sound. She threw it to one side without even looking at it, ran over to the slide and kicked over the old coffee can that held my nail polish. She punched the slide one, two, three times, denting it more than it already was, leaving her knuckles bloody.

  Ruthie was staggering after her, trying to catch her. I didn’t know what would happen if she did. I had to get there first—I’d calmed Bailey down before. I took a few steps toward her. Then I felt the notebook slipping from under my hoodie, falling down onto the damp gravel below.

  Bailey saw it. She couldn’t have known what it was—we never worked on it in front of her—but she knew I’d been hiding it. She knew it was something secret. So she dove for it. I heard Ruthie give a wordless scream as Bailey grabbed the notebook and started to tear the pages. Somehow the sound of it, the crumple, the rip, was so loud. I grabbed one edge and pulled. “Give it back. Give it back.” But she wrenched it from me, tearing at it wildly, throwing paper every which way. I tried to catch her, but Bailey’d been dodging blows her whole fucking life. All our work, the words that made the Precipice real to us—the magic spell that kept this beautiful, aching, desperate place our own—was being destroyed.

  Then came a sound that drowned out the sound of tearing paper. A sharp, heavy crack. A gargling scream. I watched as Bailey fell to the ground. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. Then I saw Ruthie behind her. Her face twisted with rage. The hammer in her hand. She raised it up high again and brought it down onto the back of Bailey’s head. And then again.

  And then, everything was very, very still.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  NO. NO. NO. I had to stop this. I had to fix this. There had to be a way to fix this. But it took forever for me to move. It took long, long seconds for me to dive toward Ruthie, for me to wrestle the hammer away. How many more blows did she get in while I stood there, gaping? How many minutes did Bailey lose while I begged and pleaded with any higher powers out there to make this be a dream?

  But then I had the hammer, and Ruthie was scrambling around on the ground, picking up the scraps of paper, an awful, long keening sound coming from her throat. And there was something on the hammer and I didn’t want to look at it, so I threw it as far as I could away from me. And Bailey was lying very still. And it wasn’t a dream, and there was no way for me to fix it, and that moment—that moment on the Precipice—is the one that stays with me the most. The moment when the worst had already happened, but when nothing had started yet.

  “She destroyed it. She destroyed it.” Ruthie’s voice barely sounded human. It was a choked, retching snarl and a whine all at once. “Help me!”

  I didn’t make a decision to move. My body went into motion, a runaway horse, wild and spooked. I ran. I ran across the earth, half-blind with terror, careening off trees, stumbling over roots. Breathing so hard I thought I might be drowning. I didn’t know where I was going, or why.

  But then Ruthie’s hand clamped around my wrist and she pulled me so sharply I fell.

  My mouth and nose were full of dirt. My palms burned, the skin skimmed off the surface in the fall. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak. All I knew was that I had to get away. From the park. From her.

  “Where are you going?” Ruthie was kneeling down behind me.

  “Help.” The word was a pathetic gasp from somewhere in the bottom of my lungs. “We . . . have to get help.”

  “No!” Ruthie’s face came close to my ear. I could feel the heat roiling off her. “She’s dead. We killed her and she’s dead and no one’s going to help us.”

  No, no, no, it’s not true, it can’t be true, it’s not . . .

  But she was already pulling me to my feet. I looked at her and she looked at me, and I saw the truth there in the blood flecked across her cheek. I saw it in the fierce gray eyes behind those smudged glasses.

  “She shouldn’t have come here,” Ruthie said. “She should never have followed us.”

  Ruthie was always so good at telling stories. I could already hear that she was telling herself this one.

  “Come on,” she said. “We have to go back. We have to fix it.”

  “No,” I begged. “Ruthie, I can’t, I can’t go back there, I . . .”

  She shook me by the arm. Her fingers were strong, her nails jagged where she bit them. “We have to hide it,” she hissed.

  And I didn’t know what else to do. Because I was afraid of Ruthie. But also—oh, God, it hurts to even think about—I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t want to have to tell what had happened.

  So I followed her.

  The playscape came back into view. It looked like a cardboard cutout of itself, like an ugly, flimsy model. It wasn’t a magical place anymore. It looked like a gallows in the dim sunlight. Bailey—her body—was where we left it, unmoving. I didn’t think I could stand to look. Except then Ruthie was dragging me over, and I collapsed by the crumpled little form, and I put my hand on her motionless back.

  “I was supposed to be her friend,” I gasped, staring down at her. “I . . . I can’t . . .”

  “We’ll hide it,” Ruthie said. Voice deadly calm. “We’ve got to.”

  We had a lot of tools. Hammers, screwdrivers, shovels. We started to dig. Under the remnants of playground gravel the earth was hard-packed. It took a long time, and by the time it was wide and deep enough we were working in the flashlight of her phone because the sun had disappeared entirely, and my arms were weak and limp, and my body was exhausted from crying. It was cold. My arms were covered in gooseflesh; it was almost the end of summer.

  Ruthie went toward the body, but before she got there, I said, “No!” She turned her head to look at me, and her expression was like the moon, pale and blank and white. I went over to Bailey and tried to pick her up. She was tiny for her age, but still too heavy for me to lift alone. I ended up half carrying, half rolling her into the hole.

  Before we started to shovel dirt over the top of her, I got one glimpse of her face. Her eyes were open, staring up at the star-scattered sky. I had a vision that was so strong for a moment I thought it might really be happening—of me climbing into the grave, lying on top of her, putting my head on her shoulder. Of me closing her eyes, closing my eyes. Of the dirt falling down on both of us, taking us both to darkness.

  But I didn’t climb in, though for a long time I would wish I had. I picked up a handful of dirt and dropped it onto her.

  “We don’t tell anyone,” Ruthie said. “Not a word.”

  “Her mom . . .” I whispered.

  Ruthie’s fingers dug into my arm
.

  “Starmaiden,” she hissed. “The secret must be kept. Remember what happens to oathbreakers. Remember when King Lorcan betrayed the Precipice to the Elodea?”

  The threat wasn’t even thinly veiled. She was talking about a scene in the book—oh my god, that fucking book, it seemed so stupid now—where the king destroyed a magical seal that protected his city from the creeping evil force we’d called the Elodea. He did it because the Elodea promised to spare his family. But Lyr had fought her way through his entire palace guard and killed him. She’d killed him on his throne, and then killed his wife, too, for talking him into it. It’d been a dark scene, even for Ruthie.

  A dark scene. But not just a scene. Not just a book. Not anymore. Because Ruthie would kill. Had killed. And she’d do it again, if I didn’t do what she wanted.

  I was so bone-tired. It already felt like a bad dream, like it hadn’t really happened. Like there’d never been a Bailey in the first place—we’d imagined her and written an awful story.

  “Zahra?” she asked. There was a warning note to her voice, almost singsong. “Are you on my side here?”

  The sky was going pale along the mountains. The sun would be up soon. We had to get out of there.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I NEVER MEANT TO hurt so many people.

  First Bailey, obviously. Bailey, who I still see when I close my eyes. Sometimes I see her alive, her hopeful, pugnacious little chin jutting forward fiercely. Other times . . . I see what we did to her. Her blood, spattering the slide, soaking into the dirt.

  But then, a few weeks ago, I got that text from Ruthie announcing that she was coming back, and everyone else—everyone I love—got pulled in, too.

  I’d been so grateful when she moved to Portland, just a few days after Bailey’s death. I knew nothing would ever be all right again, even then—but at least Ruthie would be far, far away. At least she wouldn’t be able to hurt me, or my family. But soon she was texting me, sending these chatty little messages as if we’d been in the middle of casual conversation when her mom had just happened to take her to Oregon.