“What kind of news?” the girl’s eyes flashed with the possibility of gossip.
“That isn’t really any of your business,” I said. I tried to keep from my face the disgust I was feeling. It felt warm and rancid inside of me, but I knew letting it out would only dampen my already slim chances of getting anything of use from the girl.
“Shame. I’m sure I could have helped if I knew what the situation was,” she said teasingly. She had no idea how unattractive she was making herself. She was a girl, she was a human girl, but I could see no humanity inside of her.
“Anne, stop being such a dick,” a timid voice said from the back of the group of girls.
I quickly scanned the other faces until I came across a short girl with muddy brown eyes and freckles that ran across the bridge of her nose and splashed over cheeks. Her face was a little pink, as if she wasn't used to speaking up.
“The girl you’re looking for, Sophie? She doesn’t live here, but that won’t help anyway. She left campus about half an hour ago. She walked past us when we were coming back from the shop. She looked pretty upset and she had purple hair.”
I wanted to feel relieved. I had my first clue. I had a direction to follow. I didn’t feel relieved though. She was still missing. She was still upset. The girl who had crushed me in high school was hurting and I hated that.
“Which shop, were you coming from? Can you point me in the right direction?” I asked the girl who’d been willing to help.
She nodded and then shot a dirty look to the blonde girl. “Sure, come on,” she said, as she started to walk away from the group and towards the gates which led off campus. A little click-clack of snide remarks and giggles started up behind us.
“I’m sorry about them,” she said when we were out of earshot of the group. “They can be real dicks sometimes. I hope you find your friend.”
“Thanks,” I said, as I considered explaining about Sophie and me. Sophie wasn’t my friend. I had no desire for her to be my friend. I just wanted to make sure that she was okay. I wanted to make sure that she knew that I was there if she needed me to be. It wasn’t about friendship. It was about me being a good person and doing the right thing.
The girl stopped at the gates and pointed up the slope which led over to the small town. “We were coming from town, but it looked as though she was turning off towards the beach. I’m pretty sure she took that path over there,” she gestured over to where a street lamp was marking a beaten down grass path.
“I really appreciate your help,” I told her and then I started to jog over to the light.
I could feel the buzz of adrenaline starting to kick in, as my blood pumped faster around my body. It felt good to be moving. It felt good to have a direction to go in. My feet moved away from the hard, smooth road and onto the grassy mound which led down to the beach. My breath was starting to feel tight in my chest, but I pushed myself forward. The girl who had been so easy to spot in our small town was turning out to be an enigma who was hard to track even when I had a guide and a direction to go in.
CHAPTER 8
I found the enigma. I found her looking down on me like a shooting star.
It was nothing like the movies, even though the setting was perfect. A light drizzle had started to fall. The ocean waves were crashing into the cliffs which called for an end to the water's greedy invasion of the land. She was standing on the cliff edge. She was still dressed for her date. The pale moon shone down, revealing the light yellow floaty dress, which should have been caught in the wind and dancing hauntingly around her. Instead, though, it clung to her. The curves of her body had never been so obvious and I’d seen the perfect tanned skin that covered them before.
She was still. Her dress was unmoving in the wind and her hair being weighed down by the rain, which was getting steadily heavier. I tried to call up to her, but my voice got lost in the crashes of the waves. I turned back, so that I could get to a point where I could climb up the cliff face and get to her. I stumbled and fell, as I kept my eyes on her. She was staring out at the ocean. She looked almost peaceful, as the tips of her shoes dangled over the edge.
“Sophie,” my voice was full of panic, but I wasn’t ashamed of that. I could feel her thoughts. I could feel the depression that was clawing at the inside of her and trying to push her over the edge. “Sophie, you need to step away from the edge now,” I told her in an assertive voice.
She turned and tilted her head at me. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I know what happened today,” I told her, because I had no soft way of explaining to her why I was standing in the rain at the edge of a cliff side with her. “My mom called and she told me. I thought you might need someone. I thought you might appreciate talking to someone from home or something.”
“I don’t need you. Just leave me alone.”
“You expect me to walk away and leave you at the edge of a cliff?” I asked in surprise.
“Why wouldn’t you?” she asked with her eyes narrowing. “After everything that I did to you, after all the things that I said, why wouldn’t you turn around and leave me? What makes it your problem to start with in the first place? Just let me do what I have to do.”
She remembered. She remembered who I was and she’d been pretending not to. I wondered why, but I knew it wasn’t the time to ask.
“I’m making it my problem,” I told her sternly. “I’m not going to leave here, unless you’re by my side. Do you understand that?”
“Why? Why are you trying to punish me? I just want this to be over,” tears had started to fall from her eyes. I could see her body shaking as she tried to suppress the deathly shadow of sorrow inside of her.
“I’m part of him you know,” she said. “I’m part of that monster. What if I turn into him? What if I become him? What if I do the things that he’s done? I could end this now. I could make sure that nobody ever gets hurt because of me.”
I stepped forward and put my arms around her shoulders. I felt her body tense up against my touch, but she didn’t push me away, so I didn’t move. “You are not a monster,” I said, because no evil was ever born from being afraid of being evil.
“How can you say that? I tortured you.”
I wasn’t sure what to say at first. I wasn’t sure how I could explain it. “You’ve done a lot of bad things and you’ve done them very well, but look at you. You’re willing to throw yourself off of a cliff to stop yourself from hurting somebody that you don’t even know. I mean, it’s not even a definite. You’re doing it on the small chance that you might hurt somebody. If that isn’t a selfless sacrifice, then I don’t know what is.”
“So, you think I should do it?” she asked, as she drew the wrong conclusion from the point I’d been trying to make. “You think if I do it, then I’ll be forgiven for the fact that my father is a monster?”
Her eyes were big and filled with sadness. It was difficult to look into them. It was difficult to look into the eyes of the girl who’d torn me down to see that there was nothing left in her to tear away, even if I had wanted to.
“That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that if you’re willing to do it, then you’re clearly not a monster like your father. If you’re not a monster, then you have nothing to fear. Even the best people sometimes say things that can hurt others, but that doesn’t make them bad people.”
I pulled slightly at her shoulder with my arm and she stepped away from the edge with me. I slowly took her back further onto safe ground and then relaxed my arm around her but she still didn't pull away. So we stood there in the lessening rain like a memorial to dejection.
Rain became drizzle became mist, and finally we were just a chilly couple under scudding clouds and the moon.
“We should go back to campus before we freeze,” I said when I was sure that she was safe, at least in that moment.
“You can’t tell anybody about this,” she said to me quickly, as her eyes turned up to mine and opened wide. The brigh
t green sparkled against the light of the moon. She pushed herself up onto the tips of her toes and kissed me quickly on the lips. She tasted like whiskey. She tasted like whiskey and rebellion and it wasn’t until she’d pulled away that I realized she’d just made me cheat on my girlfriend.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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ISBN: 9781683681113]
On the Edge Page 3