by L. E. Flynn
“What did yours look like?” I sit down at the table beside her. I want to know the truth about “everything that happened.” I want them to stop treating me like a kid.
“I’m not sure your mother would like us having this conversation.” Aunt Leslie grips the edge of the table with fingertips that are turning white. “It’s not very appropriate for someone your age to hear.”
“I’m almost eighteen. Plus, it’ll be our secret. I won’t tell her.”
Aunt Leslie takes a deep breath. “Okay, but don’t go using my name if you put this in your school project. It’s called Anonymous for a reason.” She pauses and I lean into the table.
“I was dating someone who was bad for me, and we were drinking a lot. He had these wild moods. Ups and downs, highs and lows. I guess back then, I thought the highs were worth the lows.” She laughs drily. “We had a couple of huge fights, but we always made up after. Then I found out I was pregnant.”
Now I regret asking, because I know this must end really badly. Aunt Leslie never married or had kids.
“He reacted pretty well when I told him. But he didn’t want to stop drinking. And he didn’t want me to stop drinking either. So I didn’t.” Aunt Leslie reaches for a paper towel to wipe her eyes. “I had a miscarriage, and it was my fault. That’s what made me go to my first meeting and get clean.”
My mouth feels cotton-dry and tears sting my eyes. I reach out for Aunt Leslie’s hand, fighting the urge to tell her everything.
“What happened to your boyfriend? Did he get clean too?”
Aunt Leslie shakes her head and a roller sags off the end of a drooping curl. “He wasn’t ready to try. Eventually, I had to walk away, because he wasn’t ready to save himself. Years later, I found out that he died of a heroin overdose.” She wipes a tear that has slid onto her cheek. “I didn’t want to believe that some people could be lost causes. But they are.”
“How can you tell?” I say quickly. “How can you tell someone is a lost cause?”
“You can’t. That’s the hard part. You can’t make someone else your anchor, otherwise they have the power to sink you.” She blows her nose into the paper towel and stands up. “I probably said too much. But I hope you can use that for your project. Young people need to realize the whole world is in front of them.”
Later, when I’m in the shower, I think about rock bottom and I wonder if Beau has one, if he’ll eventually hit the ground and realize he’s breakable after all. Or if he’s one of those lost causes, the ones who keep falling through layers of the ruin they create.
Maybe it’s not my problem and I should walk away like Aunt Leslie did. I don’t need an anchor, something rooting me in one spot. I’m heavy enough all on my own.
* * *
I get in my car and head to Jasper’s an hour after Aunt Leslie drives away, pulling out of the driveway with a honk of her horn and a promise to visit soon. She tells me to say hello to Sarah and I tell her I will. If I ever see her again, I say under my breath when she’s gone. I’m still working on that.
Jasper is waiting for me on the curb in front of his house, his long legs splayed out. He has earbuds in and his eyes are closed, his fingers tapping his thighs, his mouth moving slightly. It’s not until I pull up right in front of him and block his sun that he finally opens his eyes and sees me there.
“Hey.” He yanks out his earbuds and stands up, brushing invisible dust off his pants before clambering into the car. I don’t know what changed, what shifted so quickly, like a warm breeze that turned into a cold wind. Maybe he’s jealous because somebody else gave me a flower. The thought of a guy being jealous over me shouldn’t make me excited, but maybe I feel the wrong way about a lot of things.
I tell Jasper about Christmas, about the Tofurky and Aunt Leslie and her dog. He tells me that his parents bought him clothes he’ll never wear and a new iPod he’ll never use to replace his beat-up MP3 player.
“Why don’t you want to upgrade?” I ask, turning onto the street behind the graffiti wall.
“Why fix something that isn’t broken?”
I busy myself with finding a parking spot so I have a good reason not to tell him that I hate that saying because it’s not true. If you fix something after it cracks but before it breaks, you put it back together before it has a chance to fall apart.
“We’re here,” I say, putting the car in park. The sun beats down, forming a pool of sunshine in my lap and I’m suddenly terrified, just like I was in Tijuana. Scared of what we won’t find. Scared of what we will.
“Did he say anything about what this Preacher person looks like?” Jasper says when we’re out of the car. “Do we have anything to go on?”
“No.” I pull my hood over my head and start moving, because he’s standing still.
We squeeze through the hole in the wall and shuffle to the sand. They’re all there, the same guys as last time, as every time. Or maybe they’re different, but they all look the same. Leering eyes and a cloud of pot and sweat and beer. I bite the inside of my cheeks.
I approach one sitting off by himself, leaning with his back against the wall. A cigarette is in his outstretched hand. When he opens his mouth, I can see that he’s missing his front teeth.
“You’re a long way out,” he says, and I don’t know what he means, but it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“I’m looking for someone.” I shove my hands in my hoodie pockets. “A guy named the Preacher.”
The guy throws his head back and laughs. It’s a nasty sound that turns into a nastier-sounding, tobacco-strangled cough.
“Preacher ain’t been around for a long time. Went back to the land of the rich. He was never one of us.” He blows a smoke ring in the air and taps the end of his cigarette with yellowing fingers.
“Do you know where he went?” I ask. “Did he say anything before he left? About a girl?”
He laughs again, but this time it’s more subdued. “We don’t get a lot of girls out this way. Not the kind you leave for anyway.”
My fingers close around my phone. I take it out of my pocket and scroll to a picture of Trixie, one I took of her school photo on the Dead Students Wall the day before Christmas break. I hold it out in front of the guy’s face. “How about her? Do you remember her?”
I watch his eyes. They’re dull, the color of seaweed. I watch for a flicker of recognition, of anything. But his face looks blank. “We don’t get girls like that out this way.” He lets the end of his cigarette drop to the sand and buries the butt with his foot. “You should go home. Kids like you don’t belong here.”
Jasper’s hand grazes my shoulder. “He’s right. We should go.”
But I won’t leave. Not now, not when I was sure there’d be an answer here, even if I have to dig for it.
“What did he look like?” I ask. “The Preacher. Can you describe him?”
The guy closes his eyes. “I didn’t exactly take a picture. Young, like you. Blond hair. Good-looking. He didn’t look like the rest of us. That’s about all I got.”
I flip to a different picture on my phone, one I don’t even know why I took. “Did he look anything like this?”
The guy stares at the screen, plucks my phone out of my hand. Part of me expects him to run off with it and pawn it. But he just studies it intently, his eyebrows pulled in and a big crease in his forehead.
“Yep,” the guy says, handing the phone back to me and going for another cigarette. “That’s him. See, good-looking kid. Not one of us.”
My legs turn into jelly, into something insubstantial, until I wonder how they’re even holding me up.
“That’s impossible,” I say, even though now the guy is staring past me.
“What?” Jasper pulls on my wrist. “What’s impossible?”
I manage a thank-you and let Jasper lead me away, back to the hole we crawled in from. My breath is coming in gasps. “He’s been here all along.” I thrust my phone into Jasper’s hand. “This is our Preacher.�
�
It’s another picture from the Dead Students Wall.
A picture of Toby Hunter.
67
YOU NEVER LEFT without saying goodbye, not until you left for real. I wonder if you and Toby had that in common.
The last time I ever saw Toby Hunter, he was waving goodbye to a group of his friends. I was in the parking lot at school with Alison and Jenny, and we all turned to look at Toby, because there was something about him that made people want to be close. Like a fire pit on a cool summer night, when everybody huddled near the flames to get warm.
But now that I think about it, there was something strange about Toby’s wave. Two fingers pointed toward the sky, his index and middle. A peace sign, almost. Or maybe he was just too lazy to form an actual wave.
Maybe the people who were really closest to Toby never got warm at all.
68
MY HANDS ARE shaking so badly that I make Jasper drive my car back to my house. I let him follow me upstairs to my room because I don’t want to be alone, because then I might be forced to make sense of all this. Of the fact that I not only have some proof that Toby Hunter is still alive, but he could still be here, in Morrison Beach. Which means Trixie could be here too, hiding in plain sight.
“This makes no sense,” Jasper says, sitting at my desk chair, pressing his fingers into his temples. “Toby Hunter’s dead. There’s no way he could have survived. How far out does that pier go, a mile? And how rough is the water? Death would have been imminent.”
I flop down on my bed, burying my face in my pillow. “But we don’t know that,” I say, my voice muffled. “It’s like I’ve been saying, nobody knows that for sure. This could all make sense. Trixie thought Toby was dead too, just like everyone else. Then something happened to make it all change. He must have gone to her and convinced her to disappear too.”
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Trixie changing, morphing into so many different versions of herself that I almost forgot the original. Maybe he was there the whole time, at the beach, watching us on the sand. Or maybe he was on the pier, disguised as a clown juggling balls or a mime with a painted-on smile. He could have crept into Trixie’s house when she was asleep, thrown rocks against her bedroom window, whispered in her ear that she had to leave everything and everyone.
It makes perfect sense and no sense at all. Because if the whole point was to disappear, why would Toby Hunter still be in Morrison Beach?
“Well, even if it’s true, that guy said the Preacher hasn’t been around for a while. So even if he was here, he’s probably long gone by now. Which means she’s gone too.” Jasper tucks his hair behind his ears.
Suddenly, I want to punch a hole through my wall or shred my pillow to pieces. Because if it’s true, if Trixie has been here the whole time, she didn’t trust me enough to let me know she’s alive. I’m just like everyone else to her, someone she could fool, someone who just accepted that she walked into the ocean and drowned herself. She knew I loved Beau and she knew I loved her and she didn’t care about me at all.
“Come here,” I say to Jasper. He looks up with bleak eyes and just stares at me, like he knows I’m crossing a line. Maybe it’s the venom in my voice, the poison inside me that I need to purge. He gets up and walks over slowly, and when he lies down beside me, I roll over so that our lips are touching, then reach for the waistband of his jeans before I can slow down to think about what I’m doing. Jasper makes a little sound, almost like he’s hesitating, but he doesn’t stop me. When my hand is inside his jeans, he plays with the hem of my hoodie and starts tugging it up.
He kisses me harder, his tongue running over the tips of my teeth, tugging my bottom lip gently. He traces the shape of my face with his finger and it feels like he’s drawing a heart. His thumbs are hooked under my jaw and his knuckles graze my cheeks lightly. Then one of his hands slips under my skirt, trailing up the length of my leg, stopping to rest on my thigh.
“Don’t stop,” I whisper, and my desperation embarrasses me almost as much as my traitor body.
“Are you sure?” He leans over me, his breath hot against my face. “Look, I know you’re really upset. I don’t want your first time to be like that.”
I nod and shake my head at the same time. “Yes.” I pull him closer, biting the skin on his neck. “And what makes you so sure it’s my first time?”
He doesn’t take his hands off me. Sadness floods through me, insecurity. Maybe he feels sorry for me and that’s what this will be to him, pity sex. But it doesn’t look like pity in his eyes. More like desire, glassy and black.
I make everything else leave my head. Beau and Trixie, Beau and Trixie and Toby Hunter and college applications and my discarded sewing machine and the homeless people at the beach. Tijuana and whispers and rumors and fake IDs and peace-sign waves. I tell Jasper to open my nightstand, where there’s an unopened box of condoms I got as a joke gift from Jenny and Alison on my sixteenth birthday, and then I squeeze my eyes shut while he’s putting one on. I let him tug my underwear down and watch him as he shrugs out of his pants and shirt, his skin so pale it’s almost translucent. Only his forearms have any color, a slight pinkish barely any darker than the rest of him. He gets back on the bed and hovers on top of me, grazing his eyelashes against my cheek as he lowers himself inside me.
The relief is instant, immediate. I dig my fingertips into his back and force him deeper and rock back and forth under him, breathing hard in his ear. He kisses my lips, my cheeks, my forehead, my hairline, my neck. The headboard hits the wall over and over, making a thumping sound. I moan into his neck and he cries out and collapses on top of me, his chest damp against me.
I don’t know how long we lie there, hearts beating wildly. But when he finally rolls off me and pulls my duvet over us, I start to feel cold, chilled inside. I almost wonder if he’s asleep, then I hear him whisper in my ear, so quiet I can barely hear.
I can barely hear, but it sounds an awful lot like I love you.
And that’s one lie I won’t tell him.
* * *
Jasper doesn’t leave my house until an hour before Mom is supposed to come home. We stay that way, tangled up in my bed, barely moving. I let myself feel wanted, needed. And when we’re buried in each other, it’s easy to forget about what led us here, who disappeared and brought us together. Who was never here at all.
It’s when he leaves that reality comes crashing back, trampling over the good feelings, squashing and shitting all over the tenuous idea that Jasper and I could be something, that the square could flatten into a line with the two of us at either end. When Mom knocks on my door, I feel detached, like a balloon drifting too fast toward the sky.
“How was the rest of your break?” Mom asks.
“Fine. Boring. I just caught up on reading,” I tell her.
* * *
I’m the first person in astronomy class the next week, the start of second semester. I don’t want to risk seeing Beau when I know something that will shatter him. I think about how he told me that when Toby hides, he doesn’t want to be found. I don’t know how I’m going to tell him what I found at the beach, about the Preacher, that there’s a chance Toby is still in Morrison Beach. I can’t shake the thought that Beau is hanging on by a thread and might fall apart completely if I tell him a hunch that isn’t the truth. So I make a vow to myself that I’ll only tell him if I have proof. If I see Toby myself.
Except, I don’t know how I’m going to do that. Jasper and I didn’t talk about the next step. Maybe there isn’t one. The idea of just giving up and moving on is both a huge relief and the heaviest burden of all.
A hand touches my shoulder while I’m staring at my phone and I whip around, my chair making a scraping sound against the floor. And like some kind of omen, Beau is standing behind me.
“You’re taking astronomy too,” he says. He doesn’t sound mad. He kind of sounds normal, actually, and I let myself think that maybe things have changed, maybe he’s on h
is way up from rock bottom. His hand is still on my shoulder and I try to ignore the heat spreading through me just from that one small touch.
“I have all the credits I need,” I say. “It’s supposed to be a bird course.”
He grins. “Plus, you like the stars, right?”
I nod, and before I can stop myself, I say something that bubbles to my lips. “‘Between two worlds life hovers like a star.’”
As soon as I say it, I want to unsay it. I didn’t even know I remembered that quote but there it was, in my mouth the whole time, waiting to come out. I peek at Beau’s face from under my eyelashes.
It’s like a light is on under his skin. He huffs out a breath. “Lord Byron. You remembered.”
“I remembered.” I suck in my lips, suddenly close to crying.
“I never thanked you,” he says. “For the whole AA thing. For trying, when nobody else would.”
“It was no problem. Whatever.”
He shakes his head. His hair has gotten longer since the last time I saw him. It’s almost down to his shoulders now and the ends are curly. I think about how it would feel to grasp a handful of it.
“I was an asshole. I’m sorry.”
Those two words again, the chorus of Beau’s life. I stare at the floor, at the fossilized wad of gum under my desk. “It’s okay, and it was nothing.”
He sits down at the desk behind me. “It’s not okay, and it was everything.”
I blink back tears as I face the board. The bell rings five seconds later and everyone else files in, including Alison, who gives me a little smile. I spend the class wondering if Beau is staring at the back of my head, if this hope I’m feeling will last or if it will fall into rock bottom and break like everything else.
Our astronomy teacher, Mr. Sweet, writes a formula on the board that I diligently copy into my notebook, all the while wishing there was a kind of formula that would make sense of the jumble in my head and heart. When the bell rings at the end of class, I bolt out of the room so I don’t have to look at Beau and risk seeing a different version of him, the wrecked one. I’m making a beeline for my locker when Alison jogs up beside me, her backpack thumping against her side.