by Sara Wolf
“That’s a great place to start!” she says.
“You want me to like you. You don’t care about who I am; you just want me to like you. But it doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
“What’s going on down here?” Dad asks, coming into view over the stairs. “And why are you using that tone of voice with Kelly, Isis?”
“What tone?” I half laugh, half scoff.
“There it is again. Don’t use that tone with me, I’m your father.”
A hot knot works its way into my throat.
“Sorry,” I mumble. “It’s kind of hard to remember that when you haven’t been around for eight years.”
I slam the door behind me. Gravel crunches under my furious steps. Kelly unwisely gave me free use of her “old” black BMW that’s practically pristine. She has three of them, all in different colors and with different drop-tops and pimped-out tires. I get in and slam the door, starting it and pulling away from the landscaped lawn and palm trees in stately rows. Even the kids’ playhouse out back is made of marble, with its own tiny working fountain. The twins wave at me as I pull out, and I wave back. They’re fine. They’re young and naive, and I can’t fault them for either of those. They’re just kids.
Like I was, once.
This is the lap of luxury, and I’m sitting in it like a whiny kid on a mall Santa.
It takes the entire drive to the beach to calm my raging nerves. I agreed to come for the summer because Dad sounded like he genuinely missed me and wanted to see me off before college, and only because Mom seemed to be doing so much better. Somewhere in the vast and fabulous labyrinth that is my head, a game-show buzzer goes off. Bzzzt! Wrong. Dad just wanted me here because he feels guilty, and he’s trying to make up for a huge amount of lost time. But he can’t. Unlike Mom, he never came back for me.
Kelly hasn’t changed—I have. I can’t stand her anymore. I’m a different person now. Two years ago, when I last visited, I was quiet. I was sad. I didn’t fight or argue. I was in the middle of dealing with Nameless. The last time I came here, it was right before—
I shake my head.
The last time I came here, I was pure. And simple. And clean.
Dad still thinks I’m that little girl of two summers ago, and so he treats me like her. Like I should respect him. Like I should care about what he says.
But I don’t.
Because he left me. Twice.
Can’t ever say that to his face, though. That’d mess up what little family dynamics I have left. Dropping the news I wasn’t going to Stanford didn’t help improve his view of me, either. He’d already gotten a stupid my kid goes to Stanford T-shirt and everything. Who gets those, anyway? Tourists and people with no fashion sense. Dad wouldn’t know fashion if it bit him in his history professor ass, and he was definitely a tourist—staying in my life for only a few weeks at a time.
I heave a sigh and park. Goldfield Beach is tiny, dune grasses swaying between gentle swells of gray sand. The water is choppy and dark today, like a really pissed-off witch is making a brew that doth kill many dudes. It’s the Atlantic—the Atlantic I grew up on in Florida. The smell of salt and sunbaked stones fills my nose. Seagulls politely scream at each other over pieces of crab. The ocean is big and doesn’t really care what tone of voice I use, or whether I go shopping or choose Ohio State over Stanford.
I kick my shoes off and run. Running and I got a divorce after I lost enough weight. But right now, running is the best. Even the BMW’s got Kelly’s stench all over it. Running is the only way I can truly leave the bullshit behind.
Running on the beach is a fun and unique experience. There’s a lot of sand. I trip on a rock and stub my toe so hard I possibly now have weird, deformed hobbit feet. I’m so out of breath I feel like vomiting. A seagull almost poops on my arm.
“It’s okay, buddy!” I shade my eyes and look up at the sky. “Luckily for you, I am both stunningly good-looking and benevolent. I forgive you!”
He drops a fat deuce on my shoulder in gratitude.
I sigh. It could be worse. I could be surrounded by people. On the moon. And one of those people could be Jack Hunter.
My stomach twists like a yoga prodigy. Icicle eyes fill my mind, frost over my heart, and I summon what’s left of my fire to melt them away. Not now.
Never again.
I’m far away from the car. Its fancy German headlights can’t watch me contemplate life in the incredibly-wistful-yet-also-somehow-sexy manner I am famous for. Infamous for. Am I even gonna be infamous anymore? At East Summit High I left my mark, but at Ohio State I’ll be nothing. I’ll be the gum on a busy New York lady’s shoe. Less than that! I’ll be that one piece of bread no one eats because it only has one open face and is sort of always stale no matter when you buy it!
With everything that happened after Sophia’s death, I hadn’t given myself time to worry about a new school. But now that it’s less than a week away, I’m starting to freak. I’m almost a goddamn college freshman! I’ll have a dorm and a roommate and actual classes where grades actually matter! They’ll define the rest of my career-slash-life-slash future prospects with Tom Hiddleston. I have to start taking things mildly seriously now! Ugh! Just thinking about that word sends shivers down my spine. Serious. Seeeerious. Cereal-ous. Trix are for kids. College is not for kids. College is for grown-ups.
I don’t feel like a grown-up.
I’m more worried about Mom than anything, but she and I planned every-other-weekend visits. Even her therapist says my mom’s doing better, especially since her horrible ex-boyfriend’s imprisonment. I’m glad Leo’s in jail—not just because he threw me against a wall and cracked my head open and nearly killed me–slash–made me temporarily forget Jack, but because bad dudes should be in jail, period.
In the Columbus airport when Mom saw me off, the color in her cheeks was back, and she’d smiled more in a week than I’d seen in my whole life.
Or maybe she was just trying extra hard for me.
I pick up a flat, smooth rock and try to skip it across the water. It drowns instead.
East Summit High School sort of wilted after Sophia died.
Nobody would come out and say that, of course, except me. Queen Bee Avery, the most popular girl in school and my begrudging half friend, came to school less and less, and finally stopped altogether. We learned a few weeks before graduation she was in a psych ward, undergoing intensive therapy. For her, prom was out of the question. The social order of East Summit was thrown in the blender and turned on high—girls scrabbled to fill the void and take the prom queen crown.
Avery showed up to graduation, though, and she walked to the podium when her name was called and got her diploma. She looked pale and haggard, and her parents were in the crowd, giving thin-lipped smiles of dry encouragement. I got the feeling they’d thrown her in the loony bin for show, to get her “better” quickly and without caring about whether or not it was really helping her get better. And then, before any of us could blink, she was whisked away to a private college in Connecticut, instead of UCLA like she’d planned. Even if she was a bitch, I keep hoping she’ll end up all right. Or at least happier. But Sophia was her redemption, her idol, her friend. If I lost all three of those at once, I’d be broken, too.
Wren stared at Sophia’s casket like it was a TV show, something not real. Kayla—my best friend and Wren’s girlfriend—helped him through the worst of it, visiting his house every day and staying with him in the nurses’ office during school when he crumbled. It broke her heart and mine to see Wren so horribly, twistedly sad. Sophia had been his friend when they were younger for so long. I reminded him to eat—brought him burritos and potpies—and when he couldn’t eat, I texted to remind him to sleep. I probably didn’t help much. I probably could have done more. Prom came and went, but none of us attended. We spent it at Sophia’s grave instead, saying good-bye in our own ways.
By graduation, Wren learned to smile again. MIT was still a very r
eal thing for him, and he’d left early in the summer to earn a few extra credits, or to escape Sophia’s death. Both, probably. Kayla was torn up by it, but since she’s going to school in Boston in September anyway, she’s hurting a little less. They’d been growing closer after Sophia’s death. Dunno if they’d done anything serious—Kayla mostly just hugged him. No kissing that I could see, and Kayla refused to dish on what they do in private, more out of respect than embarrassment. She’s grown so much by helping him. She only talks about Vogue once a week now!
I skip another rock. It flies over the waves and jumps twice before sinking.
I’ll miss Kayla. I already do.
The summer was mostly me and her, having last sleepovers and last quiet bottles of wine in cow pastures while looking at stars. We didn’t go to parties. I didn’t feel like it. She hadn’t been friends with Sophia, but it was still a death that affected her closest friends and her boyfriend. We’d promised to text every day. And Instagram. And Snapchat. And Facebook. Basically, we’d made a promise to talk. A lot. We might not see each other so much, but a warm blanket of comfort settles over my heart when I think about her. She has my back. I have her flawless backside.
I’ve never liked funerals. And now I like them even less.
I cried. Of course I did.
Jack Hunter, though, didn’t cry at all.
He should have, but he didn’t. He stood in the corner by his mother, who cried enough for the both of them, her black dress and his black suit mingling as she leaned on him to keep standing. His hair had been gelled into perfect place, his face an opaque mask of the darkest ice I’d seen yet, just like his nickname in high school—the Ice Prince. The skin below his eyes was bruised with exhaustion, and his cheekbones seemed somehow sharper. I shivered looking at him. He wasn’t putting on the lifeless, emotionless act anymore. He just was lifeless. He was empty. The spark had been sucked out of his eyes, leaving pale shells behind. His entire body, his entire physical presence, seemed like a shell—an illusion made of mirrors and brittle frost that would shatter at the slightest touch. He was chilling to look at, like something that shouldn’t be still living or still moving. A mannequin. A zombie puppet.
I tried once. To bring him back. At the wake, in the musty-smelling funeral home laden with sorrow-cookies and sad-cakes, I said something about Sophia, how the priest who called her a selfless and beautiful girl didn’t really know her at all. Jack had been holding a cup of water, staring into it as he stood in a corner away from the noise and crying people. He looked up at me, took in my face—red from my own crying—and closed his eyes.
“It’s over,” he said, too calmly.
“What is?” I asked, my stomach roiling. He pushed off the wall and walked away with one last word.
“Everything.”
He stopped coming to school after that. I talked to Principal Evans about it, and he said Jack had dropped out. Harvard hadn’t revoked its early acceptance offer, and Jack could still theoretically go even with straight Fs for his last two quarters. But both of us knew he wasn’t going. He didn’t care anymore.
When April came, at the almost-two-month mark of his absence, I went looking for him. I wanted to look for him before that. Hell, I really wanted to. I fought not to. I thought he needed space; I thought it would help if I stayed away. The last thing that’d help him would be seeing me. Having the crazy girl who was once your nemesis track you down would be stressful for even the most practiced ice prince. Besides, I wouldn’t know how to help. I would just mess things up more. Say the wrong thing. Do the wrong thing. Like I had with Sophia.
But when Mrs. Hunter came to my door one late afternoon, crying and begging for me to find him, I knew I had to start looking. Even though she only knew Jack and I were maybe-friends, maybe-enemies, she was desperate enough to ask every one of his acquaintances for help. None of them could—Wren and Avery were too wrapped up in their own grief.
I was the only one.
I waited until spring break. And then I started chasing a ghost.
Mrs. Hunter gave me the note Jack left—it was simple and written on plain white paper. He said he was leaving, not to call the cops, and that he loved her. Mrs. Hunter had, in her desperation, gotten the bank to hand over his account information. She told me the money for Sophia’s now-pointless surgery had been refunded to him, and he’d then gifted most of it to someone, taking a mere four thousand for himself. Four thousand was enough to live on for a bit, sure. But almost three months was pushing it.
He’d left all his stuff in his room, too. The only thing he took was his father’s cigar box with Sophia’s letters inside. I looked for any sign of him at Tallie’s grave—Tallie, his and Sophia’s daughter who died before she was ever born. Nothing. He wasn’t there. A rose was left on Sophia’s grave, wilted. It had to be weeks old. If he’d come back after that, he would’ve put down a fresh flower.
Then I checked the hospital. The kids I used to hang out with there, Mira and James, said Jack came to see them the day after Sophia’s funeral. He told them he was going away for a long time, and he gave them each a massive brand-new teddy bear as a farewell gift. They’d been Sophia’s friends, but it was more than that. Sophia, before the tumors started transforming her personality, loved them. They were like Tallie to her—the child-Tallie she would never have, and Jack knew that. Jack treated them like that.
I called the Rose Club in a last-ditch attempt to find him. The operator insisted he quit months ago.
And that was it. All my leads, suddenly dead. Jack was slipping from my hands like midnight sand.
And then someone named Lily called. She’d overheard the Rose Club operator’s conversation with me. She was a friend of “Jaden,” Jack’s escort persona there, which I insanely doubted because the only friend Jack allows himself to have is his reflection and/or his own massive dumb brain. I let her chat my ear off and agreed to meet her at a café in Columbus.
Lily was blond and beautiful and almost six feet tall. From her expensive purse and perfume, I called her out instantly as an escort. She didn’t deny it, which made me like her more. She wasn’t wasting my precious time as I tried to save Jack.
Save?
I shake my head and watch the salt spray of the ocean douse a rock. “Save” is the wrong word. I can’t think like that. I can’t save myself, let alone another person. But for a while, I wanted to. I really wanted to. Jack, of all people, deserved help. I thought I could help a little. I thought I could do at least that much for him, after everything we’d been through. After what I felt for him.
I laugh and chuck a rock, not bothering to try to skip it.
I was an idiot.
The old Isis wouldn’t have given up when Lily told me Jack came to visit her before he left town. He wouldn’t say where he was going, but he gave her a manila folder and told her if a girl named Isis ever started snooping around at the club, to give it to her. So she did.
“He must really like you,” Lily said, inspecting her nails as I put the folder in my purse.
“Yes, well. Cobras also like mongooses. From afar. On separate sides of electric fences.”
“No, listen”—Lily leans in, one cool hand over mine—“I’ve seen a lot of men, okay? I’ve seen all types of people, too. Jack—Jack is something special. He’ll deny it, but he either cares with his whole heart about someone or not at all. He doesn’t half-ass things. The people he bothered to leave good-bye stuff for—those are the people he cares about in his life. You’re one of them.”
My heart felt like a sumo wrestler had flattened it. I tried to inhale to say something, but every breath stung. I didn’t want to believe her. How could I believe her after he just ran off like that?
Lily took off soon after, leaving me to sneak glances at the envelope.
The old Isis wouldn’t have given up after seeing what was inside.
He didn’t leave me a note or a giant teddy bear. He left me a ticket to Paris, with the words “I’m sorry” scr
ibbled on it in his large, neat handwriting.
My eyes burn now like they did then. He was trying to get rid of me.
No, c’mon Isis, don’t be dramatic. Nothing good happens when people get dramatic. Examples: the Titanic, those rabbits that die when their hearts beat too fast, every episode of Pretty Little Liars ever. Jack may have been heartless, but he was also…? Also what? Also definitely not caring about me. He didn’t even say good-bye in person, and then he sent me a ticket out of the country. He obviously wasn’t in Paris himself, asking me to join him. That idea is almost stupidly romantic. Jack’s a lot of things, but “stupid” and “romantic” are on the rock bottom of his attribute list, along with “nice” and “generally tolerable.”
I told Kayla multiple times that I wanted to backpack through Europe, mostly jokingly. He was nearby to hear it, though. He must’ve seen through the joke and realized I really wanted to. Figures.
I pull the ticket out of my pocket. It’s worn and crumpled, and the plane left six days ago, but I couldn’t throw it away or use it. He must have used Sophia’s surgery money to buy it for me, after all. No way in hell could I ever accept (or reject) something like that. So I just kept it. A braver Isis would’ve used it. A not-guilty Isis would’ve used it.
If I close my eyes now, I can remember when I went into Jack’s room to look for clues as to where he went. The beach fades, and I’m lying on his bed, looking at the ceiling and wondering where he is on this hellacious butthole we call Earth. And if he’s safe. Happy is too much to ask for. But as long as he’s safe, and keeps being safe, one day he can be happy again. Or so I think. I don’t actually know for sure. I’m real arrogant, saying these things like I’m sure of them. I never had anyone I love die. Jack’s had three.
He might never be happy again.
He might be broken forever.
His room fades, and the ocean comes back. The knot in my throat returns with a vengeance.
“I hope you’re safe, you idiot,” I whisper to the waves.