Even though it was May, the sky was flat and gray with clouds that raced across the sky, threatening icy rain. The air was foggy and thick, and my mind was much the same.
I was guilty and sick for my jealousy. I had been selfish. The world was bigger than just me. I should have realized that and stayed to myself.
But nothing was worse than the assembly where we all found out. All we’d known were the rumors: that it had something to do with Becca’s whereabouts.
“We should have known she’d wait until the end of the school year. It makes so much sense!” I overheard one girl saying to her friend as they passed by. We all thought she was alive.
We all assumed it was good news.
The noisy talking and laughing ebbed as Professor Crawley took the stage. He cleared his throat and adjusted the microphone. Max squeezed my hand.
“Hello, everyone. I’m sorry to have to call you all here on one of your last nights at Manderley. But…”
Professor Crawley spoke calmly and gently to us. He told us in the only way he must have known how. He gave us the facts.
An initial din quieted to only a few hushed sobs. Everyone listened as Professor Crawley explained, quickly and without gruesome detail, that her body had been found in the water.
I thought back to the recurring dream I’d been having all year long about being whipped around beneath the waves, unable to find air. I knew the feeling well, having grown up next to the beach. You go in the ocean enough and you’ll eventually get caught in a riptide that sends your brain the thought that this time, the water is going to…
Swallow me whole.
I remembered the ghostly Becca I had seen in my dream on the night of the Halloween Ball and how she had asked if I could hear the ocean, and how she told me that no one knew if it had swallowed her whole.
Why had she gone near the water? Had she taken out the boat, like Blake had wondered? If so…did she know she was going to die?
I barely listened as Dr. Morgan took the stage, to urge us all once again to come talk to her. Her small face contorted with worry as she looked out at the auditorium filled with sobbing teenagers. I spotted Johnny along our same row. He looked etched out of marble he was so still. His eyes were fixed on the seat in front of him, but I could tell that he was not really seeing it.
I didn’t find Blake and Cam until the end, and when we did they were as somber as we were. Neither shed a tear, but the shock had clearly affected them.
“Are you okay?” Blake asked, looking to Max after nodding a hello to me.
He hesitated. “Yes, I’m okay.”
Blake nodded and then looked concernedly at him. “If you need anything…”
“I know.” He glanced up at them. “Thanks. I’m going to bed for right now. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
“Dana’s mom is here.”
“What?” I asked.
“Her mom. They told her before us. I guess she wanted to tell Dana herself, but got here too late…”
Max and I both muttered something about that being too bad, and then our conversation wound down to good-nights.
Max walked me up to the girls’ dorms, where we, too, said a quick, polite good-night and then parted ways.
I floated up the stairs in a haze, and then into my room. The door was cracked, so I pushed it open quietly. I was walking to my side of the room when I heard Dana in the bathroom. It was muffled through the door, but I could tell she was weeping. Her sobs were unbridled and deep. It stung my eyes and throat to hear.
“It’s okay, it’s all right. You’re okay.”
The person who must be her mother was speaking in a slow, calm voice.
“I watched her…I watched her on the dock and I didn’t stop her. It’s my fault…”
“No, honey, it’s not. It’s not because of you. It’s not because of anyone. You’re okay.” Her voice was still measured and soothing. I imagined that she was soothing Dana in the way my mother always had me, by running her hands through her hair and wiping tears from her cheeks.
“She was my f-friend! I could have done something. Should have gone after her or…or…” Her voice trembled, and I could hear her trying to catch her breath. “No one was there for her and I should have been! She had enough time out there alone to…to…”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. You did all you could. You are okay.”
Dana broke into tears again. A few seconds later she had caught her breath. “What was the last thought she had? When she…when she woke up that day, she didn’t know it was the last time she ever would. Did she know she was going to die? When did she stop being aware of what was happening? She must have been cold… I can’t…I can’t stop imagining it....”
This time her mother said nothing. I didn’t blame her for being stumped. After all, I had thought the same thoughts, too.
“I want to die!”
There was a twinge in my chest. No, Dana, you don’t want to kill yourself, I thought.
“I know that you feel that way now, but you will change your mind. It’s going to be okay.”
I snuck back out of the room, not wanting them to know that I had been there. It was the last time I’d see Dana until the funeral.
For the next few days, the students that filled the halls of Manderley were in constant funeral march. No one spoke, it seemed, and when they did it was almost always in hushed voices.
The last few lacrosse games we had, we were crushed in. No one could fight hard, playing or cheering. Everyone was lethargic with the loss.
Becca was dead. We were all about to graduate. A feeling of finality was pushing in everywhere.
For a lot of us, I think it was the first time we’d thought about life or death that way. My grandfather had died when I was too young to understand, but that was it. I might not have known Becca, but it didn’t matter. She was our age and she was no different than us. I might not have stumbled into the ocean if I had been her that night, but maybe I would have. The possibility that it could be any of us at any moment for whatever reason was shaking us all to the core. The mystery around her disappearance had kept these thoughts at bay, that we were seventeen, maybe a little older or a little younger, and we could, all of us, just die like that. We could be as dead as anyone who’d lived to be a hundred or as someone who was given a lethal injection. Our lives could be over at any moment.
We were not invincible.
I think that thought was a new one. We all knew it of course, but we had never really felt it. And as we were all getting ready to end our high school lives and begin our new ones, I realized that these were thoughts worth remembering.
For me, it made me decide that I needed to live. Really live. I could not be afraid or timid; I had to make my life worth living. I couldn’t push anything off. As I realized that, I thought of my friends back home and the college life we’d planned out. We’d be friends forever, we had decided, and college would be no different than high school except we’d be older and freer. Whenever I had thought of a life beyond those friends and the streets I already knew, I had always thought: Later. I’ll tackle the real world later.
Maybe it didn’t have to be later. I remembered my acceptance letters to Florida State and Boston. They had both come on the same day. When I opened the letter from FSU, I had expected to get in. I hoped for an acceptance because it would be embarrassing not to get into the school my friends did. I wanted to be accepted because that was the plan. And when I was, I was happy…but there was something else I had squelched and ignored. I thought of it now, and wondered if that was the part of me who wanted to be pushed from the nest. Maybe what I wanted was a reason to leave the comfort of my plan.
I’d opened the envelope with the big blue letters BU in the left-hand corner, and there was a quiver in my chest as I’d read the words telling me I was accepted. I ignored that feeling, too, it turned out. Here a door had opened right next to the one I planned to walk through, and another, more daring and spontaneous version of myself had strode
through it.
Maybe that’s who I wanted to be now. I’d already taken the first step and left home. Would I regret it if I sank back into an old routine with the same people when I’d already gotten the worst of it over with?
I’d been homesick a lot, but I’d also been okay. It had been a difficult year, but I had lived. I didn’t even have to take a leap into the cold water of newness; all I had to do was keep swimming.
I thought about it all night until I fell asleep. Then suddenly I was swimming.
The water was cold and biting. It was the same old dream, I figured, where I was caught under the waves and couldn’t find the surface. But this time it was different. Two hands grasped me and pulled me up out of the water. I breathed desperately, coughing water from my lungs. When I opened my eyes, it wasn’t a rainy scene on turbulent waters as I had expected. It was that moment right before the sun sets, when all the sky is golden, and the water sparkles invitingly as if it had never done any harm to anyone.
And there was Becca again, as perfect as she had looked the last time we’d met in my dreams.
She smiled at me. “Hello.”
My throat was tight, but this time I could speak. “Becca.”
She considered me for a moment. “I wish I had met you.”
“M-me?”
“Yes, you. You would have been a worthy adversary for me. I think I would have liked you.” She laughed the coquettish laugh I’d always imagined she would have. “You would not have liked me, however.”
She paused and her smile faded. “You are everything I ever wanted or pretended to be.”
My voice was gone from me again, and all I could do was listen.
“I went about it all wrong. I lied and cheated and craved attention, while never seeing why I should deserve it. But you didn’t scratch your way to the top. You lived a year in my shadow, but somehow you still never lost your light. You wondered what was so wrong about you that people wouldn’t want to be around you, but then you realized that you were someone worth knowing, and did not understand why no one else could see that. I was popular and adored for pretending to be a person like you. But I hated myself, and felt ugly and shameful.”
She shook her golden head and looked down at her lap. “Max never wanted me, but I made him stay by making him feel guilty. Johnny never wanted me either, but I appealed to his weaknesses to obtain him. The main weakness being that he’d never felt that he was as good as Max, and I made him feel like he was better. My family wanted me to be more, but all I could do was push them away. You never would have done the things I did. And I’m sorry that you ever had to feel like there was something wrong with you. Believe me, I was the messed-up one.”
“Th-this is all just a dream.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Right.” Her face went very serious, and she kneeled in front of me. “I was never going to change. And I let my own internal misery end my own life and ruin everyone’s around me if they got close enough. Please find Dana. Tell her to step down. Ask her what I ever did to earn her friendship. Tell her she will be okay.”
I shook my head, not understanding. Becca grabbed my shoulders and spun me back around. Suddenly I was walking in the darkness, but I couldn’t see where to. Finally my surroundings materialized around me, and I saw that I was on the top floor of the old mansion, where some storage rooms were and I didn’t know what else. I’d never been up here. There was a dim light at the end of the hallway. I blinked, becoming more and more aware as I grew closer. It was a balcony that looked out at the ocean. There was someone there. I blinked again. It was a tall, thin figure standing on a chair, about to step onto the wide ledge of the balcony.
“Dana!” I yelled her name, and it echoed in the hallway. She started, and then righted herself. She wanted to see who I was. Her eyes grew wide.
“Becca?”
She was looking straight into my eyes. Something besides my own volition led me to nod.
“This is a dream, isn’t it?” Dana said it quietly, sounding resigned.
“Yes. Dana, you have to get down from there. You don’t want to do this.”
“I don’t. I know. But it’s going to happen anyway, isn’t it? Why should I live, if it’s just going to be awful like this forever?”
“It won’t be.” The words came from my mouth without my ever thinking them. “You will be okay. I never earned your friendship. You gave it all to me, and I never gave you anything back. You did nothing wrong other than being my friend to begin with. You didn’t have to try and save me. You knew I was screwed up, but you couldn’t stop me from ruining my life. You tried to be nice to me and listen, but it’s not your fault that you couldn’t change me.”
She looked as though she was taking in what my lips were saying.
“It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.” I said the words, and then slipped into dreamless unconsciousness.
I could not remember my dream. But when I awoke, I felt as though a weight had been lifted.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I DON’T THINK I BELIEVED SHE WAS REALLY DEAD until I was at her funeral.
I had spent ten months building up a case against Becca in my mind. I had turned her into my rival. All the while, she’d just been an unseen body being whipped around by currents and undertow.
She was supposed to be the reason for everything that had happened this year. She was supposed to come back. Not that I’d wanted her to. How many times had I wondered what would happen to everyone if she did? I never had a happy answer for that. And that’s a terrible thing to think.
But here she was. Here was everyone else. Here I was. In a church.
I wasn’t being selfish; I knew this wasn’t about me. That was the problem. I had spent a year thinking about this girl, resenting her at times, and that entire time, she’d been just a ghost. She wasn’t even real anymore. She couldn’t fight back. She was innocent. The dead always are. I think it would be hard to stand over a dead body and ever feel like they completely deserved it. Once someone dies…I don’t know, I don’t want to spout off something about how we come into this world the same way we leave it—alone—because I don’t think that’s so.
We come into the world the furthest thing from alone. We come into the world with everyone fawning over us, and helping us. That’s just not how it is when we die. I don’t know what’s different. Maybe it’s the fact that when you look at someone’s dead body you see their entire lives flattened, with an end point. When I was eight, and went to my grandfather’s funeral, I had that realization. I didn’t even know him. But you look at that person…and you see everything they ever felt, thought, cried over, worried over, was thrilled by, and you realize that someday someone will look down at you when your brain is quiet and you’re lying in your last bed. You realize that everything you think and feel now will be encompassed in the hyphen between two years. It’s not even that depressing, it’s just true.
But of course we couldn’t see Becca’s body, thanks to the ravages of the deep waters. She was just the mystery she’d always been and would be to me. She was on the inside of that chestnut box, only inches of wood separating her from us. Her body anyway.
It was colder than it should be in May. Not just for me, but for everyone. Rain was pounding against the tall, stained-glass windows and no doubt reminding everyone grimly of the night she died, almost a year ago. For me it was just a haunting sound track to the dour scene in front of me, and the gruesome one from the past that my subconscious couldn’t help but imagine.
I was out of place. I knew that. Everyone else knew that. I didn’t know Becca Normandy. But I had to come.
I went to the service kind of early, in an effort to not arrive late and have a rerun of my first assembly at Manderley. So from my seat, somewhere in the back left middle, as inconspicuous as possible, I just watched. Her parents were sitting up front, quietly sitting a respectful and quiet distance from each other. Her mother wore a hat with that net down in front of her face like the girls in old movi
es. I could see that she had the same blond hair as her daughter. The neat waves met the shoulders of her black dress. She was still, like her husband. There were a few other people on the same bench that I supposed were the rest of Becca’s family.
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