by Kaitlin Ward
To the town of Monroe:
You will always be home.
Also by Kaitlin Ward
Title Page
Dedication
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
GIRL DROWNS IN PASSUMPSIC RIVER.
When I see the headline, I almost drop my phone. It’s a link someone posted on Facebook from the local news.
I tap the screen with shaking fingers and read the article in a rush. A twenty-year-old college sophomore, Maria Lugen. Survived by both parents and a younger brother, Steve, who goes to my high school. Maria had been missing for a month. Her death is currently believed to be an accident. No additional information at this time.
I set down the phone carefully on my bed and go stand in front of the mirror hanging on my closed door. I stare at my reflection until my features start to feel distorted and unreal, like a word you’ve repeated too many times in a row.
Because what happened to that girl—it can’t have been an accident. It’s too much of a coincidence. I move closer to the mirror, stare at myself from only an inch away. My skin is bruised in places, and there’s a cast on my wrist. My head spins if I stand up too fast. Because I hit my head and fell down an embankment, almost into a river. Unlike Maria, I survived.
But I don’t think I was meant to.
* * *
“This seems like a terrible idea, Amelia.” My best friend Skylar’s hands are white-knuckle fists around the steering wheel of her Corolla. “Isn’t it too soon? Won’t it upset you to go back to the spot where you nearly died?”
“I don’t think there’s a too soon for this type of thing.”
“Maybe not, I guess, but remind me again how this is going to help? I still think all this is going to do is upset you, and we should spend our time finding a new spot instead.”
“I don’t want a new spot. I want to have not almost died at the old spot.”
She flinches, and I feel bad. Before returning to school this week, I spent four days recovering at home after three days in the hospital with bruises and breaks and a concussion. That last one is what worried everyone the most, and it’s the thing my family and friends all still worry about. The concussion kept me from remembering exactly what happened when I fell, and it’s left headaches and occasional vertigo in its wake. Sky wants me to focus on letting myself rest and feel better. She’s not wrong, but she doesn’t know everything.
No one knows that I suspect I’m in danger from a source other than my own brain. Not even my best friend.
I glance sidelong at Sky. She’s supermodel tall, and thin as a spike. Her naturally blond hair is dyed a shade of pink that edges just close enough to “the natural spectrum” that our school doesn’t make her change it, and it’s cut into a short, layered bob. Her heart-shaped face is littered with freckles, and right now her jaw is clenched tight enough that I can practically feel her teeth grinding.
“I just need to see it, okay?” I say softly as the river comes into view at the bottom of the long winding drive down to the dam. No one else is here. Late September is not a super popular time for beachgoers. “I want to see if I, like, feel anything. I know how that sounds, but just bear with me.”
Sky parks her car and cuts the ignition. “You know I will.” She opens the door, then pauses with a small smile. “But the second you start using essential oils I’m ordering an intervention.”
I laugh. “Deal.”
We follow the portage trail that winds behind the dam. It’s a collision of natural and unnatural beauty back here: The stark cliff of cement, and the rushing water at its base. The trees and the rocks around its edges, and the mountains in the background. It’s a place I’ve always loved, and I hate that it’s tainted now. I stop walking, press my shins right up against the guardrail. This side of the rail is a paved path, and the other side is a few feet of grass and then a long, steep slope to the water below. The brush is marred with heavy lines of dirt. Bushes have been hacked away, and tree branches have been broken. Some from my fall, some from my rescue.
This is where Sky found me. The last thing I remember is sitting on this guardrail, waiting for her to arrive. She had something to tell me, she’d said. Something important. And this was our spot. The place where we’d always come to swap secrets. My mind is pretty much a blank space after that. I remember the feeling of something pushing my shoulder, but I don’t remember anyone else being near me. Doctors say I must have lost my balance after standing up on the wrong side of the guardrail. Then I fell, tumbling partway down the rocky hill and by sheer, unfathomable luck, I got hung up in a tree and didn’t drop the rest of the way to my death.
My neurologist told me that I probably won’t remember anything new and that the reason I don’t remember my fall isn’t because I’ve buried a traumatic memory but because my concussion means the memory doesn’t even exist. I hate that. The idea that something can happen to you and can be completely ignored by your own brain. I want my neurologist to be wrong, and that’s the main reason I’m here.
Peering down into the abyss below me, I get such an intense wave of vertigo that I have to sit down on the path. I pull off my new lime-green glasses and press one palm into my forehead between my eyebrows until the dizziness passes. I’m on the right side of the guardrail, I remind myself. The safe side.
“You okay?” Sky asks. She crouches beside me, rests a hand on my back.
“I’m fine.” I swallow nausea, unwilling to admit that maybe she was right and this was a bad idea. It’s just a place. I shouldn’t have to feel this way about it. I replace my glasses and stand up, stretching my arms. My left one is heavy, thanks to the cast surrounding my broken wrist. It makes stretching a lot less satisfying.
And then I … feel something. A shadow of a past sensation, like something’s tugging at my throat. My hand flits there, to where my favorite necklace normally would be—a rectangle made out of wood scraps on a thin chain that my dad and brother made together and gave me for Christmas a few years ago—but it’s missing. Along with my glasses, I lost the necklace when I fell. Suddenly, I can recall a tightness against my throat, and then the sensation of absence. I shut my eyes and try to expand that feeling, remember something else. Something real. Nothing else comes, but still, I feel hopeful. Maybe the doctor was wrong, after all. Maybe I will remember what happened.
“You sure you’re all right?” Sky persists.
I open my eyes. “Yeah. I’m just … thinking.”
She perches cautiously on the road side of the guardrail, fingers curled around the metal. It’s really not that close to the edge, I notice. Not close enough for me to have stood up, stumbled, and fallen halfway down the slope, in my opinion.
“Thinking about what?” she asks.
“What was the important thing you were going to tell me that day?” It’s not the first time I’ve asked. She doesn’t seem to want to tell me anymore, but I’m hoping maybe here, she’ll change her mind—it’s the other reason I wanted to come back, and it’s the reason I wanted Sky to come with me. With the water crashing out the back of the dam, sometimes it feels like the sound swallows up your secrets and keeps them safe. That’s why it’s always been our meeting pla
ce.
“It seemed important at the time,” she says. “But now …” A shrug. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But—”
“It’s not relevant, okay?” Her tone is almost snappish, and it stops me from pressing the matter more.
We’ve drifted recently, or so it feels to me. Months ago, maybe sometime in July, I noticed that she was busy more often when I texted her to make plans. I pulled back a little, and I hoped that she would notice, but she didn’t seem to. She is still here when I need her, so sometimes I think it’s all in my head.
But it makes me wonder about her secret. If maybe there’s something she wanted to say—something that was making her distant. And if maybe she decided not to because she feels bad for me after what happened.
I hope that’s not the case, but I get a pit in my stomach when I think about it.
Usually, I would tell her about what I remembered. She might tell me that remembering my necklace snapping means nothing, because that’s Sky: my most pragmatic friend. But she would also listen and she wouldn’t make me feel stupid.
Except now she’s keeping something from me, and it doesn’t put me in much of a sharing mood.
“I don’t think I’m going to remember anything,” I say. “We should just go.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She stands up, biting her lip. “You look disappointed, Amelia. I didn’t want you to be disappointed. That’s why I thought we shouldn’t come.”
“I’m not disappointed.” I fold my arms. “I didn’t have any expectations.”
“Good.” She hugs me. “And now we’ve been here and you’ve seen it, and maybe that’s what you needed to just, like, move forward. Dwelling on what happened isn’t going to make it un-happen, and it’s better if you just don’t think about it too much.”
“I know.” I smile half-heartedly. “You’re right, Sky.”
Except I don’t think she’s right. I’m not going to be able to stop dwelling on this. When everyone told me that this was an accident, I wanted to believe them. I tried to believe them. But I’ve felt it in my gut this whole time that something else happened. Something much less innocent. It’s based on nothing, really, except that I’m always careful and that something feels off. I told my doctor that the last thing I remember before it all goes blank is a sensation like a hand pushing my shoulder. I don’t remember anyone being there, though, and my doctor dismissed it so fast as concussion-related disorientation that I’ve been too embarrassed to tell anyone since. But the gut feeling remains, and after I saw that news article about Maria Lugen’s death, the feeling has strengthened tenfold.
I don’t want someone to have tried to kill me.
But if they did, I want to know who it was. And why me.
And I want to catch them before they try it again.
School has not been my favorite thing since my brush with death. Maybe it’s a little bit of narcissism, but in the few days I’ve been back I just feel very … watched. It’s not that I was an outcast before, but I was regular. There was no reason for people to talk about me or be interested in me at all, and I didn’t realize how great that anonymity was until I lost it.
I’ve already spent way too long getting ready this morning. Everything takes forever thanks to my dumb broken wrist, but my newfound self-consciousness is also to blame. I tied my chestnut hair into a messy bun that looks like it took three seconds but actually took a half hour to get perfect. I drew green eyeliner across my upper lid and then decided that green eyeliner green glasses green eyes was too much and replaced it with black. I’m not sure how I feel about these new glasses yet. I tried on three lipsticks before deciding to forget about that altogether, and I’m just finishing up my mascara when Mom calls my name from downstairs using her Impatient Voice. I quickly drop the mascara back onto my desk and hurry downstairs, not letting myself stop to analyze my outfit again in the mirror on my door.
Mom’s folded arms await me at the bottom of the stairs, and a plate of heavily syruped, A-shaped pancakes greets me at the kitchen table.
Dad owns a small trucking company, and he also drives one of the trucks himself. He’s home most weekends, but the rest of the time, it’s just Mom; my older brother, Hunter; and me. Soon to be just Mom and me, because Hunter’s a senior this year. Mom does a lot of the management of Dad’s business, keeping track of all his paperwork and his drivers, and she is also better at managing a house than anyone I’ve ever met. My aspirations are different from hers, but if I’m even half as successful as she is when I grow up, I’ll consider myself lucky.
Despite this, the A-shaped pancakes are a bad sign. She usually only whips those out when she thinks I really need them. When I lost my first tooth. The day of my first period. Anytime I’ve broken up with a boyfriend.
Weirdly, I didn’t get them my first morning back home after the accident. Or my first morning back at school. So what does it mean that I’m getting them now?
“Where’s Hunter?” I ask, shoveling pancake into my mouth.
Mom sits on the other side of the table. “He complained about how long you were taking, so I sent him to clean the car while he waited.”
I hide a smile by stuffing another bite of pancake into my mouth. My brother is a complete slob. Serves him right to have to clean.
“Don’t give me that smug look,” says Mom, eyes narrowed. “You’re not much higher on the neatness scale.”
“Excuse me. I am a lot better. Just not compared to you.”
That softens her expression.
“Mom.” I pause, cutting the rest of my pancakes into pieces. “Why the special pancakes?”
She sighs. “Because I noticed you’ve been reading about the girl who drowned and I can tell you’re upset about it, and I want you to stop.”
The bite turns to dust in my mouth. I didn’t realize she had noticed. I’ve been working so hard at pretending nothing’s bothering me, but clearly not hard enough.
“I’ll stop,” I tell her. “It’s just tough to think about, you know? Given that my circumstance was almost …”
“I know.” Mom grabs my empty plate, takes it to the dishwasher. “It’s tragic. Heartbreaking, to think about what that girl’s mom must be going through.” She pauses, and I can tell by the set of her jaw that she’s fighting back tears. “But honey—I just don’t want to see you dwell. Are you sure you don’t want to see Hunter’s therapist?”
“I’m sure.” I shoulder my backpack and give her a weak smile. I would love to scrub this entire event from existence, rip open the seams of time and sew them back together without it. But talking isn’t going to help—that’s just not how I’m built. I know the therapist my brother sees once a month is great, but I’m not going to solve how I feel about my near-death experience by telling her about it. In a different scenario, therapy would be the right choice. But in this scenario, I need to take action.
I’m just lost about how to even begin.
Murders aren’t a thing that happens in Maple Hill, New Hampshire, a town of seven hundred residents, most of whom know one another in some way. Crime of any kind, for that matter, barely happens. The larger town of St. Elm, across the river in Vermont and where my high school is located, has more going on. But even there, murders are shocking.
So for me to prove someone tried to hurt me, let alone convince anyone else—or even, really, myself—well. It’s not only going to be an uphill battle.
It’s a cliff.
* * *
St. Elm Academy is a series of buildings laid out on a well-manicured campus, sort of like a miniature college. It’s semiprivate, populated by students from afar whose parents pay for them to live in dorms and by kids like me from the many local small towns that don’t have their own high schools. We don’t have uniforms, but we do have a dress code, and the skirt I wore today is pushing the length limit a little. It’s been on my mind this morning more than I want it to be, especially now as I we
ave through the cafeteria feeling like there is a giant beaming sign over my head flashing dress code violation! I already felt like I had a near-death girl! sign up there, so this is too much.
My high school is not one of those places where sharp lines have been drawn between different groups. Not that there aren’t cliques, because there are always cliques, but there is no harsh social hierarchy based on looks and extracurriculars. Still, some people are more noticeable, more known, than others—for both good and bad reasons. Because of my accident, because of the article in the local newspaper that got shared on social media by practically everyone I’d ever met, I’ve become one of those people. And I don’t like it. I didn’t used to agonize over what I wore or how my makeup looked. I figured if I was going to experiment a little bit to figure out what I like, sometimes my outfits or my makeup just wouldn’t be that good. But now, every time I hear someone whispering, I assume it’s about me. I know most of the time it probably isn’t, but it makes me very aware of my face and my hair and my body. They all think I tripped and fell like some kind of moron, so I want them to see how put together I am. How not accident-prone.
Balancing my tray on my cast, I tug at the bottom of my skirt again. The tray tilts, not enough that it’s going to fall, but a hand reaches out and grabs it. So much for not accident-prone.
“Careful,” says the owner of the hand. And of course, it’s Liam Hawthorne, my brother’s “mortal enemy.” Hunter’s words, not mine.
“I had it,” I say, cheeks burning.
“I’m sure you did.” He lets go of the tray but stands in front of me for a few seconds longer anyway. I raise my eyebrows just slightly, waiting for him to say something else or move out of my way. Finally, he says, “It’s good to see you back, Amelia.”
“I’m sure you were super worried about me.”
For a moment, an expression of hurt flashes across his face, but it’s gone almost before I can register it. “I know we’re not friends,” he says coolly, “but whose fault is that, yours or mine?”
He leaves, and I feel like a jerk.
Liam is very handsome, tall and lanky with dark brown hair, bright blue eyes, and tanned skin. He and Hunter are both seniors, and they’ve led what was once a decidedly mediocre soccer team to the state championship two years in a row. But before high school, Hunter was the star of Maple Hill’s middle school team, and Liam was his rival in Hen Falls. They’ve never been able to move past that old rivalry, at least not off the field. And I’m a loyal sister, so I’m obviously Team Hunter. But as I watch Liam walk away, I think it’s too bad they can’t figure out how to get along. Liam seems like a perfectly nice guy, but he’s guarded and a little isolated. He isn’t enemies with the rest of his team like he’s enemies with Hunter, but they’re not exactly clamoring to hang out with him, either. I’ve never understood it, personally.