Kiss and Tell

by Jacqueline Green

  Tenley picked up the album. Six dainty letters were painted across its cover. Tenley. “Where did you get this?”

  “It was the strangest thing.” Principal Howard ran a hand through her straight blond hair. Each strand fell right back into place, as if it had never been disturbed. “Do you know about the construction being done over at the lower school?”

  Tenley nodded. She’d seen the mass of construction trucks over at the lower school’s sports field. The grass was being replaced with the same fancy turf the upper school had.

  “The whole field has to be dug up so the turf can be properly installed, and while digging, one of the construction workers found the album. Said it looked as if it had been buried years ago.” She tapped a finger against her desk. “Maybe as part of your eighth-grade time capsule?”

  Tenley shook her head mutely. She didn’t attend Winslow in eighth grade; she was on the other side of the country in Nevada by then. She cradled the album in her hands. She remembered exactly when she’d started taking it to school. It was in the weeks after her dad’s death. She’d taken it to every class with her. Until it went missing.

  “Maybe you left it outside by mistake,” Principal Howard suggested. “And over time it got buried.”

  Tenley stood up abruptly, clutching the album to her chest. Dirt clumped off it, slipping under her fingernails. She would never have been that careless with this album. It had been her most prized possession, filled with her favorite photos of her dad. She mumbled something to Principal Howard—thank you, maybe—but she had no recollection of it as she hurried out to the parking lot.

  She scrambled into her car. Snow painted the windows white, blocking out the world. “The clouds have landed,” her dad used to say after a snowstorm, right before pulling out the family sled. He used to love the first snow of the season. He claimed it was sacrilegious not to sled it. Tenley still remembered the thrill of soaring down a snowy hill, her dad behind her on the sled. The speed would turn her stomach and quicken her pulse, but if she ever got scared, if it ever got to be too much, all she had to do was lean back, and her dad would be there, tall and steady behind her.

  She opened the album. The cover might be dirty, but the pictures inside had been perfectly preserved in their plastic slip covers. Tenley smiled at the first one: a photo of her dad lifting baby-her over his head. As she turned the pages, she grew from a swaddled baby to a teetering toddler to a Winslow lower school student. Her dad’s hair thinned and his midsection thickened, but his smile, so wide and crinkly-eyed, remained the same.

  She paused on a page of terribly taken photos. The first was an off-center shot of her dad smiling on a boat, the second a close-up of his hands on the rudder. A laugh escaped Tenley. She remembered that day so clearly. It was long before her dad got sick. They’d gone out for a sunset boat ride during Fall Festival weekend, just the two of them, and she’d bossily insisted on taking all the photos herself. They’d stayed out on the water for hours, talking and laughing as night fell around them.

  The last few pictures from the boat ride were mostly black, her dad’s face a blur of white in the camera’s flash. She smiled down at the page, wishing so much that she could talk to him now. There was an ache in her throat as she turned the page. Her dad’s face was a little less fuzzy in the next photo. Tenley paused. There was a strange reflection on the water behind her dad. What was that?

  Her eyes skipped to the next photo. In the edge of the frame was a faint image. Tenley frowned. She’d never noticed that before. She flipped on the car’s overhead light to get a better look.

  It was the corner of a life raft. Clinging desperately to the raft was the shadowy figure of a boy. He had white-blond curls that caught the light from the camera’s flash. Wait a minute. Those curls looked familiar. Was that a young Calum?

  Tenley had been in second grade when that photo was taken. Part of the reason she remembered it so clearly was because of the news story that broke later that night. Meryl Bauer had taken a boat out on her own, only to crash into the Phantom Rock and die, becoming the very first Lost Girl. Tenley could still see her dad glued to the TV set, rare tears gathered in his eyes. “That’s awful,” he had whispered, pulling Tenley onto his lap. “And to think we were also out on the ocean tonight.”

  Tenley fiddled absently with the album page. Had she and her dad been out on the water right around the time Meryl died? And if so… could this photo mean Calum had, too? Had Calum been on the boat with Meryl that night? Why had she never heard that before?

  “Oh my god.” Tenley bolted upright in her seat. The only witness. It was the note in Sam’s surveillance shed—his reason for dragging Tenley into the game. At the time, Tenley had wondered what she could possibly have witnessed to make Sam hate her so much.

  What if this was it? What if something had happened on the water that night—something Sam didn’t want anyone to know about? If Sam had found out about her photos, he could have stolen her album and buried it: insurance those photos would never get out. But if that were true, why wait so many years to target Tenley personally? And why mention nothing about it when he told her and Emerson about Meryl’s death?

  Tenley slammed the album down in the passenger seat. It didn’t matter. Sam Bauer was in jail. He couldn’t hurt her anymore. She was done with conspiracy theories. She quickly wiped the snow off her car windows and took off for home.

  “Hello?” she called out as she walked into her house. She shook a light layer of snow off her coat. “Anyone home?”

  “Tenley?” It was Sahara’s voice that greeted her. The housekeeper peered out from the kitchen. “Your parents are stuck in traffic, behind an accident. They be home soon.” Tenley smiled as she stuck a bag of popcorn in the microwave. That meant more time alone with Tim.

  She was halfway up the stairs, photo album in one hand and buttery bowl of popcorn in the other, when the house suddenly went dark. Tenley stopped short, nearly missing a stair. A cold trickle of fear worked its way through her. She hugged the popcorn bowl to her chest, refusing to acknowledge it. It was just the storm. There was nothing to be afraid of anymore. “Sahara?” Tenley called out.

  “Electricity went out!” Sahara called back. “I go look at backup generator.”

  Tenley felt her way carefully up to her bedroom. She pushed aside the curtains, letting in the dim afternoon light. Outside, the snow was thickening, and across the street, a power line was down. Tenley circled impatiently as she waited for the generator to turn on. But when Sahara stuck her head into her room a few minutes later, the house was still dark. “Something wrong with generator,” she informed Tenley. “It not turning on.” She handed Tenley a battery-powered flashlight. “Keep this with you.”

  Tenley took the flashlight. She was suddenly very glad not to be home alone. “Thanks, Sahara,” she said softly.

  Sahara gave her a surprised nod. “I be downstairs if you need me.”

  The house felt different without electricity. There was no whirring of computers, no humming of appliances. The silence was so heavy it seemed to take on a sound of its own. At least Tim would be over soon. They might not be able to watch movies without electricity, but she could think of other ways to pass the time.…

  She flopped back on her bed, embracing the cool darkness. Just yesterday, the dark had felt like a threat. But there were no more shadows now, no more beasts lurking in the corners. There never had been. There had only been Sam, and he was gone. She smiled into the darkness. Life was back to normal at last.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Tuesday, 3:45 PM

  Echo Bay was going dark. One by one, lights flickered off along the bay, like reverse fireworks. Pop, blackness, pop, blackness. It gave the shoreline a backward feeling: dark houses against a light sky, a whole world inverted. The streets were slick with snow, keeping the traffic at a crawl. It was leaving Emerson with way too much time to think about what she was planning to do.

  Yesterday, after they’d put the craz
iness of Sunday behind them, she’d spent a long time talking with her parents. It had been a good talk, and Emerson had climbed into bed that night feeling different—as if she’d pushed a button to start over. And she had, in a way. Sam was gone. She was mending her relationship with her parents. Even Marta was back in her life. It was exactly what she’d wished for. Except she couldn’t feel a thing. Because where her heart once was, there was now a gaping hole. And the worst part was, she’d dug it herself.

  Thoughts of Josh had occupied her brain for two days straight now. She’d finally texted him that morning, but she’d never heard back. And why should she? She was the one who’d pushed him away in the first place.

  Now she drummed her fingers impatiently against the steering wheel as the long line of cars inched forward. There was one night she always went back to in her head whenever she thought of Josh. It was in the beginning of their New York summer, not long after they started dating. They’d gone to this hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant, close enough to Little Italy to feel authentic, far enough away to be cheap. They’d sat there for hours nursing gnocchi (her) and spaghetti (him), talking about things that weren’t important enough to remember. Except Josh kept interrupting her, and that she remembered.

  She’d be midsentence, whatever she was saying long since gone to fuzz in her memory, and Josh would suddenly cut in with a “five!” Or an “eight!” Or a “twenty-six!” which was as high as he’d gotten before the restaurant pointedly cleared their table. It had started with some inane joke she’d made at the beginning of the night—you just like dating a model, don’t you?—which had set him off on a mission to prove just how much more he liked about her.

  He’d begun enumerating, listing reasons whenever they popped into his mind. The reasons weren’t boring, either, because Josh didn’t do boring. They were things like: “Number five: The way you say your r’s! It’s almost as if you’re about to roll them, like you’re Spanish. But then you stop just short of it, and it leaves them with this nice, smooth sound. I like that you are an artist of r’s.” Or: “Number eighteen: Your cheese inclinations. It cracks me up that you hate all nice cheeses—you actually spit out that Brie!—but you love things like Cheez-Its and string cheese and spray cheese, which is basically the penny of cheeses.” It went on like that for the whole meal. The waiter kept overhearing and giving them strange looks, and it was completely embarrassing—and one of the best nights of her life.

  At last, traffic cleared and she pulled up to Josh’s rental house. The lights were out—the whole street was dark—but she caught a flicker of movement behind the curtain. He was home. She was surprisingly calm as she climbed the steps to his front door. She’d learned her lesson with the darer. You could try running. You could try hiding. But sometimes all that was left was to fight.

  Josh answered the door wearing flannel pants and an old Mets hoodie. His half Mohawk was rumpled and there was a crease on his cheek. “Emerson? What are you doing here?”

  She strode past him into the house. A quilt hung off the couch and there was an imprint in the pillow, suggesting he’d been lying there recently. The lights were out, but Josh had set up a framework of candles around the room, and they made the whole place glow. “One. I love how rumpled you get when you sleep, because it makes me want to crawl into bed next to you. Two. I love how you say you’re not a dog person but a walrus person, as if that’s even a thing.”

  She hadn’t planned ahead. She hadn’t needed to. She couldn’t name a single state capital and she’d probably fail a test on the presidents, but this she knew.

  She turned around. Josh had closed the door and was now leaning against it, watching her intently. “Three. I love your eyes, how they’re always changing from brown to green and back, as if they’re trying to match your mood. Four. I love the way you speak. Other people just talk, but with you, it’s more like you’re writing out loud. Five. I love your toes, even though they are long enough to be fingers, which, technically, is disgusting. Six. I love that when I think of you, I think of that night and you yelling out numbers in the Italian restaurant, loud enough to make half the place glare at us.”

  “All twenty-six times,” Josh said softly.

  She took a step toward him. Her arms felt awkward hanging at her side when they wanted to be reaching out for him. “You remember.”

  “Number fourteen,” he recited. “I like how you love the smell of parking garages but hate the smell of Starbucks.”

  “Number seven,” she shot back. “I love that you make things happen. You didn’t just want to write a book, you actually wrote a book.”

  “I finished, you know. Last night.” Josh ran a hand through his half Mohawk, making it stick out at all angles.

  “You did?” Emerson knew he’d been struggling with the ending of his book for a while now. It was why he’d come to Echo Bay in the first place, to work through it. Josh went to the kitchen and grabbed a stack of paper off the counter. It was bound together by a thick rubber band. He looked almost shy as he passed it to her. Almost Lost, the top page read. By Joshua Wright. “Josh—” she began.

  “Em—” he said at the same time.

  She shook her head. “Me first.” She ran her finger along the edge of the pages. Her skin was clammy all of a sudden. “Here it is, Josh: I really messed up.” She looked up again, meeting his eyes. They looked golden in the low, flickering candlelight. “I messed up in New York, and I can give you a dozen psychoanalytical reasons why—I didn’t believe I was good enough for you; I was terrified you’d end things, so I self-sabotaged it instead; my confidence was at an all-time low living with all those models—the list goes on, but none of that matters. What matters is that I did it, and I lied to you, and every time I think about how much I hurt you, I feel like I’m breaking in half.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes, but she didn’t look away. Josh’s face was twisted in a familiar look of concentration. He was listening. The rest came out in a long rush. “I don’t think I can ever tell you how sorry I am. All I know is I can’t lose you. Things don’t feel right without you. I don’t feel right without you. I know I don’t deserve you after what I did. I probably never deserved you. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m in love with you, Josh. Forget twenty-six reasons; I could give you a thousand reasons why.”

  She cut off abruptly. She’d said it. She could feel her pulse thrumming in her neck as she waited for his reply.

  There was a long pause. Emotions flitted across Josh’s face, too quick for her to decipher. “Let’s sit,” he said finally. The couch was a small two-seater, and his knee brushed against hers as they sat down. It was nothing, a throwaway movement, but, still, it made hope swell inside her. “You really did mess up, Em,” Josh said with a sigh.

  “I know.” Her eyes couldn’t contain the tears anymore. They slid silently down her cheeks as she looked over at him. “I’d do anything to change it. But I can’t. All I can do is tell you that it changed me. I’ll never be that girl again. I’ll never make that kind of mistake again. What you saw at the Bones wasn’t that, I swear. It was a stupid dare, that’s all. You have to believe me.”

  He was quiet again, watching her. “Turn the page,” he said. She gave him a questioning look, and he nodded down at the manuscript, which she now had clutched in a death grip. Emerson slid the rubber band off the stack of pages. The cover came away in her hand. The next page had a single line of type on it.

  For Emerson, the girl I never want to lose again.

  “Logic keeps telling me to walk away.” Josh shook his head. “But the thing is, I’m really freaking sick of missing you, Em.”

  Hope swelled higher, cresting in her chest. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that against all better judgment”—he reached out and took her hand—“I love you.”

  The moment came at Emerson in flashes. The candles painting shadows across the ceiling. The snowflakes being born into the world, sparkling and new as they touched d
own outside. Josh’s hand warm against hers, and those three words, burning straight to her heart.

  “I love you, too.” It felt different to say this time, knowing the words were returned. Like shadows materializing, stepping into the light.

  She wrapped her hand behind his head and drew him to her, so close that his face became just peaks and valleys. And then there was no space between them at all. He laid her back on the couch, and his warmth enveloped her, shuttered out the storm.

  It took her a minute to hear her phone. The ringing worked its way between them, until, finally, reluctantly, she pulled away. “I should get that.”

  Away from Josh, the air was cold. Already the temperature in the house was dropping. “Is it your parents?” Josh asked. “I’m impressed you still have reception at all.”

  Emerson extracted her phone from her purse. She didn’t recognize the number on the screen. Or, she realized, the phone’s background photo of a glittering, turquoise pool. “Crap,” she muttered.

  “What’s wrong?” Josh asked from the couch.

  “My friend Tenley and I must have accidentally swapped phones at lunch.” The unfamiliar number kept ringing. She pressed the phone to her ear. “Tenley’s phone,” she answered.

  The phone crackled loudly. “Tenley?” The voice on the other end was fuzzy and a little distant. Reception cut out, then returned. “It’s Joe Bakersfield.”

  “This is actually Emerson,” she replied, but a burst of static cut her off, and Joey didn’t seem to hear her.

  “I hope it’s okay I got your number from Winslow’s phone book,” Joey continued. His voice was threaded through with static.

  “I’m not—” Emerson tried again, but Joey was still talking.

  “I thought you might want to hear this. Remember how you said that Calum helped out with some big senior prank when he went to Danford? Well, I asked around and there are no senior pranks here. Here’s the weird thing, though. Someone did put strawberry jelly in a showerhead two years ago, but not as part of some big, organized prank. It was just put in one showerhead—in this girl’s room who was like deathly allergic to strawberries. Jenny Hearst. She was hospitalized because of it.”