by Robin Benway
Mariah gulped and nodded. So did I.
“And now …” June’s mouth was trembling a little, and I could tell she was so scared and trying to be brave. “Well, I mean, even though she’s rude and drives me insane and has no fashion sense whatsoever and makes fun of me for every little thing, I still love her. She’s my sister. And I know that she feels the same way about me.
“Some people leave, yeah,” June continued. “And it sucks. But some people don’t leave, and they never will. And sometimes people are there, but you just can’t see them. But they’re still there.”
I couldn’t believe how sincere and strong June sounded. Could. Not. Believe. She was right, too, she was so right. And I suddenly felt terrible for even thinking about running away, for leaving my mom and my sisters. The pain was so fierce that it burned, and I swallowed hard and decided that I wasn’t going to kill June after all.
In fact, I was probably going to hug the crap out of her.
And that’s when I saw that June and Mariah had turned around in their seats and were staring at me.
June’s eyes were huge, absolutely huge in her face, and I glanced down and saw my body. “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”
“Hi,” June said. “How … how did—?”
“What the?” Mariah gasped.
“Is April here, too?” June said, looking confused.
I glanced around. “Does it look like she’s here?”
June cocked her head to the side, frowning. “But I can hear her.” And then her eyes snapped forward, looking out the windshield. “No!” she screamed, and I followed her gaze and saw April standing in the headlights of our oncoming car, her body frozen, Avery and Blake a few feet away, all of us staring at each other in horror. Mariah screamed, trying to slam on the brakes, but it was too late.
“No,” June whispered. “April.”
“Not this girl!” April had shouted the day I almost hit Avery with the car. I could hear her words in my brain, like she was still saying them.
Not this girl.
It probably took less than a second for me to throw myself into the driver’s seat and grab the steering wheel, but it felt like hours, even days. All I could hear was Mariah yelling in my ear, and I hit the brake hard, slamming her foot down along with it. I jerked the wheel to the right, and then there was screeching and screaming and I heard both April and June cry out, “May!” just before everything stopped.
chapter 24
“I couldn’t imagine ever letting them go.” june
For a minute, I thought we were dead. All of us.
And then my head started to hurt, and I realized that if I were dead, I probably wouldn’t have the mother of all headaches.
The air smelled like brakes, the sound of skidding still so sharp in my ears that it made them hurt, too. When I opened my eyes, I saw the dashboard and my sister May leaning over me, her breath hot on my face. She had looked like a freaking warrior when she grabbed the steering wheel, the headlights illuminating her face as she steered the car away from April and Blake and Avery. May still looked that way, wild-eyed and determined.
“Junie?” she was asking. “June? Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, because I was. My head hurt a little, but I hadn’t banged it. My legs were still moving, and whatever we had hit, we hadn’t hit it that hard.
I was okay.
“Where’s April?” I asked suddenly. “Are you okay? Where is she? Where’s Mariah?”
But Mariah had already staggered out of the car in shock, looking at the accident scene, at the crumpled right headlight that resulted when May steered the car into the gravel parking lot and skidded into the wooden fence. Mariah looked fine, too, just shocked.
“April’s okay,” May said to me. “I’m okay, too. Look, she’s over there. She’s fine. She looks as nerdy as ever. C’mon, June, it’s okay now, don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying,” I said automatically, but I was. I just hadn’t realized it until May pointed it out.
I climbed gingerly out of the passenger seat, opening the car door and holding it while May crawled out behind me. The minute she was out, I launched myself at her, flinging my arms around her neck, hanging on so tight that I was afraid I would break her ribs. I thought she would pull away or make some sarcastic comment involving my choice of nightlife excursions, but instead all she did was hug me back, and that’s when I realized that May was crying, too.
I could hear footsteps pounding towards us, crunching through gravel, and I stepped back long enough so that we could grab April and pull her to us. She was sobbing, her tears ragged and panicked as she clutched at us. I hugged my sisters, and they fit against my sides like two jigsaw pieces that would never fit anywhere else. I couldn’t imagine ever letting them go again, like releasing them would be to surrender the best parts of myself.
We stood there for a few minutes, crying over each other as the sirens grew louder in the distance, and I finally looked up long enough to say, “Is anyone … ?”
“No,” April said, hiccuping a little. “No, everyone’s fine. You didn’t hit them. Even the car is okay. It was just a headlight.”
“May grabbed the wheel,” I told her as May nodded. “She wasn’t there and then she was.” I was sobbing again, huge terrible messy tears that were probably creating Dior mascara rivers on my cheeks. “I’m sorry!” I cried. “I should never have gone out with Mariah! I—I didn’t know; I thought it would be okay!”
“No, no,” April said, and even May was shaking her head. We looked at each other, all of us starting to realize what had happened, what had been happening all this time.
“Junie Bee,” May finally said, “I wouldn’t have been in the car if you hadn’t been in it.”
I sniffled and realized what May was saying. “So Mariah would have hit …”
May nodded and wiped her face with her shirt sleeve.
“If I had stopped you from going out tonight,” April said, her voice shaking with the idea, “Blake and Avery and Mariah, they would …”
I nodded through my tears, getting a little overwhelmed by everything that had happened. “And if May hadn’t sucked so much at European history, then she wouldn’t have met Henry and he wouldn’t have driven her to the party and … and …”
May laughed a little through her tears. “Thanks, June,” she said. “But I’m passing history now. One more reason to like Henry.”
I looked over April’s shoulder and saw Blake and Mariah standing around each other, not talking but not moving away, either. Mariah was still crying.
But whatever, they were alive.
I reached down and used April’s sleeve to wipe my eyes. She let me. “I thought you would have seen me go to the party,” I sniffled. “I mean, I didn’t want you to, but I thought—”
“I kissed Julian,” April said, and both May and I looked up at her. “I missed seeing you because I was kissing him. Well, I almost kissed him. It was close.”
I sniffled a little. “How close?”
April gave me a wobbly, teary smile. “Let’s just say everything happened exactly as it was supposed to.”
The sirens were only a few blocks away now. April had called 911, I could tell. “I swear,” I said to my sisters, “from now on, I’m not gonna pretend like I know everything just because I can read minds. Those days are over.”
“And I’m not gonna be so crazy protective,” April added, still shuddering a little.
“Yeah, seriously,” May said to her. “That didn’t really work out so well.”
“And you,” I told May. “You don’t get to leave.”
She nodded, but I wasn’t done. “I mean it,” I said. “You have to stay with us.” Just the idea of May not being around made me queasy, and I clung to her elbow. “Like, seriously. We need you.”
“Okay,” she said quietly. “I know. I understand.”
“You were gonna leave?” April asked, looking from me to May. “Are you kidding?”
“Done,” I said, then watched as the red lights came over the hill, just like April had said they would.
chapter 25
“You drove like a bat out of hell.” april
It took three police officers and two paramedics to determine that the fence around the park had taken the brunt of the accident. May had offroaded the Corolla so neatly that if it hadn’t been for the busted headlight, you would think she had meant to park the car like that. The impact was so low that the airbags hadn’t even deployed on the car. (“Does that tin can even have airbags?” May muttered to me, and I had to admit that I didn’t know.)
Blake looked pretty nervous being questioned by the police, but the truth of the matter was, he had just been standing by a fence when a car almost hit him. Being a jerk and cheating on your girlfriend weren’t illegal.
Unfortunately.
Mariah was still a mess, shaking and crying as one of the officers tried to talk to her. He didn’t look too happy with her and I was pretty sure that had something to do with the fact that she was semi-drunk and fifteen years old. “Oh, geez,” June said under her breath. “I should probably … is she gonna be okay?”
I nodded. As far as I could tell, Mariah would be in school next week, looking tired and subdued but still there. There’d be a hearing and fines and I certainly didn’t see a driver’s license any time soon in Mariah’s future. “I think she’s gonna be fine,” I told June. “Not right away, but she will be.”
June walked over to Mariah, put an arm around her shoulders, and started to talk to her. Mariah listened and nodded, and I could sort of hear the conversation. “Trust me,” June said at one point, “the truth is the best way to go. Don’t get me started on this tonight.”
May was standing near the car, talking to another officer. “I don’t know,” she was saying. “I mean, I saw The Fast and the Furious a couple of years ago. That probably helped a little.”
“April!” someone suddenly yelled, and when I looked over, I saw Julian running towards me, his car parked haphazardly down the road. He looked scared and confused as the red lights bounced off his face, just like I had seen. The lights were on June, too, the red glow highlighting her as she looked worriedly towards Mariah.
It was my vision, only now I understood it. Julian was here because of me, not because he wanted to hurt June, but because he cared about me. He was trying to protect me. I walked over to him on legs that felt like Jell-O, and when I got close enough, he reached out and grabbed my arms. “You okay?” he gasped. “I wasn’t sure which way you’d gone! Is everyone all right?”
I nodded and then hung onto his forearms, steadying myself. “You drove like a bat out of hell,” I told him. “Thanks.”
“You ran like a bat out of hell. What happened?”
I gave him a quick rundown, skipping the parts where May had been invisible in the backseat of a car, June had used her mindreading abilities to calm Mariah down, and I had predicted (at least somewhat) the whole thing. I figured what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
“So everyone’s okay?” he asked.
“The right headlight didn’t make it,” I said. “But other than that, yeah. We’re fine.”
“I hope you know that you scared the shit out of me.”
“You and me both,” I replied, and then I wrapped my arms around his waist and held on. “I’m really glad you’re here,” I said into his shirt. “Even if I’m strangling you like a boa constrictor.”
“Strangle away,” he said, patting my back. “I’m not going anywhere.”
After a minute or so, a cop came over to us. I had already talked to another officer, but the story wasn’t that complicated. All I had really done was just stand there. May and June had done the heavy lifting.
I separated myself from Julian and leaned against his side, my knees still a little shaky as the cop spoke. “You okay, young lady?” His nametag said Sgt. Beauford. It sounded French. I was sure May liked him already.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I was just standing there. Did anyone get hurt?” I already knew that my sisters were fine, but I sort of hoped that maybe a piece of headlight had hit Blake and given him a Phantom of the Opera-esque scar.
“No, it doesn’t seem like it. The other witnesses”—he pointed at May and June and Mariah and Blake”—said that the driver swerved to avoid the young man and a girl.”
“Yeah, Avery,” I said.
“Can you describe her for me?”
“Yeah, she’s right …” I glanced around but didn’t see her. “I swear, Officer, I didn’t hit my head. She was here. I saw her. She has this black hair and her eyes are sort of—” I widened my eyes, trying to imitate what Avery looked like when she was in the path of an oncoming car, a look that I knew all too well.
He just made a note and nodded. “She may have run off. Don’t worry, we’ll contact the school, get some information on her.”
“Is everyone else all right?” But the truth was, I was only asking to be polite. I already knew it would be okay. There would be no emergency rooms because no one had so much as bumped their heads. People were just shaken up, and Mariah would get busted for a DUI and have to do alcohol counseling and volunteer work. (No disfiguring scar for Blake, either, which was a bummer.) The legal jargon was too tangled up to sort through, and honestly, I didn’t care anymore. My sisters were safe. That’s all that mattered.
After the cop walked away, I turned back to Julian. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he replied, shoving my hair behind my ears.
“We got interrupted earlier tonight.”
Julian might have been blushing, but it was hard to tell under all the flashing red lights. “Oh, really? Which part? Remind me.”
I stood up a little straighter and put my arms around his neck, bringing my face towards his. “This part,” I said. “Ringing any bells?”
“Mmm, almost,” he teased. “Maybe a little closer?”
I smiled against him, our lips finally touching. I’m not Little Miss Experience, but it was good. Waaaaaay better than good. Julian smelled nice, and when he put his hand on my shoulder, he filled my vision as the red lights finally faded away.
chapter 26
“Promise you won’t freak out.” may
We didn’t get home until almost midnight, and by the time we did, all I wanted to do was crawl into bed and fall asleep and wake up sometime around Christmas.
My mom hadn’t stopped hugging us since the minute she showed up at the almost-accident scene. Even now as we walked into the house from the garage, she was hugging April and holding June to her, her face puffy from crying. “Mom, we’re fine,” I said, but all she did was grab me back towards her. It was sort of hard to get through the door like that, but the four of us managed to squeeze through.
I knew June was getting the worst of my mom’s fears, and I finally had to tug June away from her and say, “Go wash your face, that Dior stuff makes you look like a spider,” and she gave me a grateful glance as she disentangled herself and went upstairs.
“Mom, we’re really okay,” April was saying for the millionth time. “Really. We’re fine.”
“I want to throttle that Blake,” my mom muttered. I was starting to think that Blake might be safer in jail than on the street where my mom could get him. “When I think about how he just left June at that party—”
“If it makes you feel better,” I told her, “I can kick him in the nuts for you.”
My mom paused and looked at me. I waited for the inevitable “violence is never the answer” lecture, but all she said was, “How hard?”
I grinned. “So hard. I can even go for—”
“What matters now,” April said, cutting me off before I could tell my mom exactly
what I had wanted to do to Blake, “is that we’re fine. June’s fine, everyone’s okay, and we should probably all go to sleep.”
My mom hugged April extra-tight before kissing the top of her head and letting her go upstairs. I started to follow her, but my mom pulled me back and gripped the top of my arms, holding me out at arm’s length. “May,” she said as her eyes welled up, “why is there a half-packed duffle bag by the front door?”
It seemed like a hundred years ago, but when I looked over, the bag was still there, its trip to Houston suddenly cancelled. “I just …” I started to say. But then my own eyes were getting wet, too, and it kind of hurt to talk. “It was just a bad idea,” I managed to tell my mom. “I just wanted to be somewhere, but now I want to be here. I’m gonna be okay, Mom. It’s getting better. I’m getting better.”
She was still squeezing my arms, almost hurting me, but I didn’t care. It felt real. It reminded me that I was there. “You are very, very important to me,” my mom finally said. “And you are very, very important to your dad and your sisters, too. I know that a lot has happened lately—”
“To put it mildly.”
“—but it doesn’t change how much we care about you and love you. Nothing will ever change that.” She squeezed harder and held my gaze. “Is that clear?”
My throat ached. “I know that,” I said. “I just kind of forgot for a little while.”
She hugged me then, kissing my hair over and over again. “Okay,” she said. “Don’t do it again.”
“I won’t.”
We stood there for a few minutes, hanging on to one another. All this crying was starting to make me feel waterlogged, and if the doorbell hadn’t rung, I probably would have had to wring myself out like a wet towel.