I give him the finger.
“Enough with the theatrics, Ella. Come on; get inside before I drop you. I’m not that strong, you know.”
I leave my finger up and count to sixty. He groans; but hey, I like my theatrics, and there’s no way I’m giving them up for Grenade Boy.
“Ella, I’m not kidding. My arms are killing me right now.”
“Look on the bright side; you’re building up some biceps,” I reply, my tone absolutely flat. But I can hear him breathing heavily and hard.
So over the window sill I go. Tumbling and scraping my stomach on the wood in the process. Beige carpet catches me, cradles me. Dust motes shoot up my nostrils, and I sneeze. Remember that this is Mark’s room I’m breaking into. Mark, who doesn’t understand the meaning of clean.
I get up and shake my head, looking down at what I landed on. A pair of boxers—which would be gross no matter what was on them, but shooting stars, seriously? It’s like he’s out-hippied himself. A plastic bag and a pair of jeans. Thank god I didn’t land on his belt buckle. That would’ve hurt.
“You okay?” Tristan calls.
“Yeah, fine. Where d’you think he’d hide his camera?”
“Shouldn’t we, you know, be a bit quieter? Could be someone in the house.” His voice is quieter, barely audible. As if he’s remembered that he should be sensitive.
I almost snort. This is Mark’s house. “No one’s ever home. Trust me.”
He really does snort.
I don’t waste too much time thinking about Tristan, though. I have to find the camera. The one with the images of me and Amy on it.
I try under the bed first. My fingers swipe through cobwebs and boxers. Yeah, this is gross.
When I speak to Mark again, I’m going to lecture him on flinging his underwear around, while somehow avoiding the fact that I know he does this because I broke into his bedroom.
I should feel guilty, but I don’t. He’s the one who’s been lying to me for more than a month.
“Found it?” Tristan yells.
I shake my head before realizing he can’t see me. “No.”
“Tried the closet?”
I cast a sidelong glance at Mark’s closet. Then I cross over the floor, skipping around and over and onto Mark’s possessions. At one point I step on a skateboard and nearly roll away until I’m horizontal. His room is a fucking health-and-safety hazard.
When I get to the closet, I reach out and trace my fingers over the ebony wood, the shiny silver handle, the poster of some band from the seventies no one’s ever heard of—Mark loves his nostalgia. He sees the seventies as some kind of paradise.
I swallow and turn the handle, wondering what I’ll find inside. The camera? Or something else? They say people keep their skeletons in the closet...
The door swings open, slow and creaky, like the soul of some ghost is rattling around in the wood. Turns out Mark doesn’t keep skeletons in his closet. But he doesn’t keep clothes in there, either. He keeps what looks like a whole bunch of journals.
Except when I flick open one of them, it’s full of photos. Photo albums. Mark keeps hundreds of photo albums. I flip quickly through one of the books. Some photos are of us. Under blue skies with clouds that he’s altered in Photoshop. They look like the inside of an eggshell.
The angles of the shots are interesting—like the one of Amy taken from behind, where she plays on a swing set as if she’s six instead of sixteen. Her long legs fly into the sky, and her dyed-auburn hair flutters away from her face like a kite. The sun kisses her; the trees and sky seem to exist only to frame her.
In the side margins, scrawled in Mark’s untidy handwriting, is one word: Happiness.
Other shots are of landscapes, of skies pressing their orange lips against the ground. Of birds flying in formation. Mark’s draped one of his scarves over the camera lens, and I see the picture through black-and-white checks. His annotation tells me he thinks the arrow of birds is pointing me in the right direction.
He reads nature, the world, like a book. Constructs it with his lens.
I’ve always known that Mark liked to be the one taking photos at parties, but I didn’t know he was this into it. How could I not have noticed that Mark’s a photographer? I guess it’s just like how I missed out on Amy being depressed. I need to pay more attention. Really, truly, open my eyes.
I scan the albums. Some red-bound, others blue or brown, one with a purple background and dancing green aliens. I could spend hours looking through the photographs. But I resist, because I need to find that fucking camera.
Mark’s closet is pretty wide. I climb inside it. The albums swoosh out around me as I cut a path through them, scattering Mark’s memories so that they’re out of order. Instinct tells me to head for the corner of the closet.
First the left one: nothing but a blue-skyrocket-covered photo album.
Then the right one: something wrapped in a purple scarf.
I pick up the scarf. Mark’s tried to force it into a nice square shape, but slices of paper jut out at odd angles, and I can feel the uneven planes of an object beneath the fabric.
I get out of the closet, sloshing my way through the albums. They fall into one another. Memories colliding like dominos.
I dump the package onto the bed. Untie the corners.
The cloth unfolds like the petals of a flower, and I realize the thin, angular slices jutting out of the fabric are photographs. Developed, waiting to be put into an album. They’re facedown, white backs glistening in the sunshine.
The camera is next to them.
I didn’t think my fingers could move that fast. The camera is in my hands. Pinched between thumb and forefinger. Shiny metal, sliding away beneath my skin, smudged with my sweat. My breaths drip from my mouth like sweat.
“Ella?”
Apparently, Tristan can hear me.
I don’t bother replying.
I push every single button on the camera until it beeps to life. Hope is climbing the staircase of my esophagus. Hope is sitting in my mouth. Hope is fucking asphyxiating me. But when I fumble buttery fingers around, attempting to find the history and see the photos, a message in bright red flashes across the screen:
INSERT MEMORY CARD.
Fuck. Mark.
He’s taken the pictures out. The photos. The memories that are mine.
There’s this shriek of laughter, and it takes a second for me to realize that it came from me. I stuff my fist into my mouth, bite my knuckles. I scream until they’re bloody and raw. The hope that was strangling me dissolves into black ashes. Soot in my mouth.
My eyes find the pile of photos in front of me. I flip them over, and suddenly I feel so light that I could float away. My laugh is heady, spinning around me like a gauzy scarf.
Mark may be able to tell me lies with his sideways words and his sideways smile, but the camera never lies.
I’ve found them.
Pictures of that night.
I flip through them quickly. He’s written on all of them, taken out his grief and anger with permanent marker running across the glossy, compacted colors. On one he’s shredded our faces. On another he’s written FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKWHOOPDEDOO.
With quick fingers, I find the photo I’m looking for: Amy and I, sitting in the grass. He’s drawn wreaths of flowers around our heads, love hearts around our toes. We look like nymphs surrounded by a garden of booze.
Our lips pressed against each other’s.
I drop the photograph, and it floats back onto the purple scarf. My fingers move to my heart, to my throat. He saw. He saw.
His feelings, in that moment, twist through me like a knife. Betrayal, envy, hatred.
“Ella?”
“Yeah—” I run my fingers through my hair. It slips and slides out from between my fingers, refusing to bend to my will. I tilt my head, blowing the hair that’s in my face out of the way. It’s when my head is at that weird angle that I catch the writing in tiny blue pen cut into t
he side of the photo.
Dents, more than writing. A watermark of sorts on the moment Amy shattered.
I bring the photo back to my eyes. Closer, closer, closer. And suddenly the dents aren’t just dents. They’re words that I still can’t make any sense of: THE VIDEO IS WORSE.
What fucking video?
But my mind is already connecting the dots. It’s going into overload.
I sink into my memory, crying quietly, because this time I don’t want to know.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
BROKEN. MY VISION is broken like the bottle. Its shards glitter in the moonlight; I can see the amber whiskey from where I’m standing. I raise my arms above my head. Slippery tiles slide beneath my feet. “Whoa-oh-oh!” My arms windmill.
I’m standing on my roof.
“Careful. You’re drunk.” Petal steadies me. She’s drunk, too. She’s just better at being drunk than I am.
“I’m not as drunk as Amy,” I point out.
Amy’s sitting farther down the roof than the rest of us, muttering to herself. Her drunken words spill into the purple night and land in the weeds of my garden.
“Ella,” she says, turning around. “Ella.” She pats the tile next to her, and there’s a clattering noise as it begins to slide away. Amy quickly slides it back into place and laughs. Laughs and laughs.
Someone behind me laughs, too. I turn, and Mark’s there. He’s holding a camera in his hands. “And this,” he whispers in a conspiratorial voice, “is why Ella’s parents are going to murder her when they get back from DC.” He takes a step, and another few tiles slide away, flicking through beams of moonlight before landing in the garden.
“Yeah, well,” Amy says. “I’m going to kill you for kissing Petal, when I’m sober.”
Not drunk enough to forget that, apparently. Her head lolls, and slobber falls out of her mouth.
Mark peers around the camera, eyes flashing a warning as alarming as the red lights on an ambulance. I shoot him a look. “Don’t,” I mouth. “Not now.”
“What are you saying, Ella? What are you hiding from me?” Amy slips her toes over the edge of the roof and dangles them in the crisp night air.
Mark goes off. He doesn’t even take his face out from behind the camera. “Oh, she’s only telling me not to get pissed at you for acting like a self-righteous bitch when I know you kissed Ella barely twenty minutes ago.” His words sting worse than the cold night wind.
Amy is stunned, even in her stupor.
Pet looks from me to Amy and then back again. “Wh-what?” she manages to say.
“You heard me,” Mark roars. “Amy made out with Ella. Amy fucking said that the only reason she was dating me was because she couldn’t have Ella. Ella’s had her heart since forever, apparently.”
I bury my head in my hands. I want them to stop. I want them to stop. I want them to stop.
But the words are spewing out of Mark’s mouth. “Fuck, Amy. Why the fuck couldn’t you tell me that you’re gay? That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
Amy’s crying now. She can’t look at him. And he’s moving over the tiles. They slip away, slide away. Doof, doof, doof. Beating into the grass in time with the rhythm of the music floating up from the party.
Mark stands next to Amy, and now he’s crying, too. He drops a hand onto her shoulder. “Why couldn’t you tell me?” he demands. “I would have loved you, anyway. Best friend, girlfriend, it wouldn’t have fucking mattered. Why did you have to lie?”
I want her to say that she did love him. That she did fall in love with him once upon a time during those ninth-grade days when we were into ice-cream parlors more than drinking parties. I want her to say that she can love me and she can love Mark, because she’s bisexual or something. Because then it wouldn’t matter that she’s always pretended to be straight.
None of us cares about her sexuality. None of us give a flying fuck.
But she thought we would.
I close my eyes. Midnight dew kisses the lids.
Amy speaks. “Because, Mark. Because I was a kid and I was confused and I didn’t know what I was feeling. And I fucking hated it, you know? I fucking hated all of it. My parents kept on telling me I would turn into a guy if I kept getting fat like I did—”
In that moment I want to kill Amy’s parents. I want to kill them for the subtle way their eyes would narrow when they looked over Amy’s figure. The way they’d linger on her belly if they saw even the slightest bit of fat. Amy sucked in her stomach around her parents. She walked like she had a stick up her ass, like she was afraid of breaking whatever peace she’d managed to broker with them.
“My hormones would change and all—” She chokes. Tears flow past her lips and into her mouth, and she swallows. “So I thought, I thought that when I got thin—things would change. Or something. You were going to change me, Mark. You were going to save me.”
His head droops; his curls droop. If I could see his face, I bet even his dimples would be drooping; but he’s turned away. Shoulders heaving. Because he can’t be her savior; he can’t. And that’s when it hits me: She went for him because she wanted me. I was supposed to be her savior.
It makes me feel like a bitter sin, sitting on mold-covered tiles.
“Please,” Amy says. “Please, forgive me...I, you were—You were so beautiful.”
Her sobs choke, choke, choke everything out of my world. For a second that’s the only sound. The stars and moon disappear and the tiles beneath my feet vanish and I’m just floating and that sound is knifing into my back. Pure pain.
When the sound fades, Amy is standing, teetering on the edge of my rooftop and Mark has taken a few steps back. His face is ghastly, paler than even the moonlight as he stares at her. “No, Amy.” He shakes his head. “Don’t.”
“It isn’t worth it,” Petal calls. “Whatever it is, whatever you’ve lost, it isn’t worth your life.”
But I’ve seen that look on Amy’s face many times before. The way her jaw clenches, the way she looks at the world through lidded eyes. It was the same look she gave us just before we broke into a convenience store at three in the morning. The same look she had on her face when she kissed me.
Talking isn’t going to stop her. Action might.
I get up and slip-slide over the tiles to where Amy’s standing. I lace her fingers through mine, handcuffing her to the roof. There’s no way she’s going anywhere without me now. “Sit down, Amy,” I say. “Sit down.”
I make my voice harder than steel, make my determination match hers, and she starts to sit. She starts to sit. As I go down with her, I notice that the camera is still rolling. Perched higher than all of us on the roof, it takes in our every move.
I’m gasping. Sitting on the floor of Mark’s bedroom. My fingers claw at his white sheets, scrabble through the photos. The sound of fingernails down a chalkboard as I scratch at their glossy surfaces and reveal the matte beneath. Scratched faces, scratched skin.
I can only scratch the surface of the past.
“Ella,” Tristan’s shouting now, pounding the side of Mark’s house. There’s a crash and a clatter as he kicks something—probably one of those stupid metal buckets that Mark leaves outside to catch rainwater. Mark’s into preserving things, into the self-sufficient lifestyle.
My tears come in floods, but I don’t really feel them.
I’m crying because now I know what Mark meant by “the video is worse.” I’m crying because now I know that the gnome wasn’t the only one who saw Amy’s last moments. I’m crying because I finally know where I was when Amy died: I was on the roof, watching her fall.
And now there’s this suspicious voice in my head...
What if it wasn’t a suicide?
God. It may not have been a suicide.
What did we do? What did I see? What images did my mind photograph that night that were so painful they had to be shredded? Forgotten.
“ELLA!”
Tristan’s roar is so loud that it’s almost silen
t.
I seize onto his voice as if it’s a rope swinging down to me in the abyss, an anchor. “Tristan.” My voice is not my own. It’s breathy. It slides up and down, plays a freaking piano scale.
“Tristan,” I say again, my voice sounding slightly more normal. I gather the photos along with my thoughts, wrap them up securely in the purple scarf. “Tristan, stop kicking shit. I’m coming down now.”
There may never be anyone home at Mark’s. But I’m pretty sure if Tristan continues to trash everything in the garden, the neighbors are going to notice something’s up.
Deep breath. Step. Deep breath. Step. Deep breath. Step.
I’m standing at Mark’s window again. I pop my head out, breathe in the air, and then look down. Tristan’s fuming. His head’s going to explode if he gets any redder. And I didn’t think hazel eyes could burn like forest fires—wild, angry flames—but Grenade Boy’s proven me wrong.
“Fuck, Ella. What happened? Did you have another panic attack?”
I don’t want to think this. I don’t want to suspect this. But it’s the only thing I can think of. My mouth dries out, and I swallow hard again and again. I close my eyes against the glare of the sun. But the world beneath my eyelids is orange, too fucking bright.
So I open my eyes. Face Tristan, face my own thoughts.
He looks so confused. The splinters are still breaking away beneath my nails. Everything is falling apart, breaking off. I won’t be surprised if the window frame collapses when I climb through it in a second.
I speak the words that change this from a chase to find out what Amy felt before she died to a chase to find a killer: “I think one of us may have pushed her.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
WIDE EYES. TRISTAN can’t keep his hands still. He runs them through his hair. They fiddle with the buttons on his shirt. He accidentally undoes a few of them. Shit, his chest is toned underneath that shirt.
I feel bad for thinking that at this moment in time. But I’m a horny teenager who’s been lying about having orgies and not actually having any.
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