The Girl In Between (The Girl In Between Series Book 1)

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  Three days. I’d only been out for three days. I hadn’t missed final exams, or prom. I hadn’t missed seeing Dani swallow her fear, hand gripping Felix’s arm as they stepped onto the dance floor. I hadn’t missed the look on Drew’s face when he saw me in that red dress, alone and in love with someone else.

  It had felt like a flash. One second I was staring at Roman’s picture and the next I was staring at the real thing in my grandparent’s farmhouse. Only it wasn’t. Not yet. I still had to find him.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table, my mom hovering over me with a mouth full of bobby pins. She’d spent an hour curling my hair, painting my nails, pretending like someone might be glancing in my direction the moment I walked inside. Pretending like I wasn’t dying. But as she stood there, pins caught in her smile, I let her. She looked happy and I wanted her to be even if I couldn’t.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon clicking away on my laptop, sifting Roman’s photo through a list of search engines Felix had sent me and scrolling through the results. So far they’d all turned up nothing.

  “You almost ready?” My mom was in the doorway.

  I only had a few more sites to check.

  “Uh, just a minute.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  I felt her over my shoulder and I slammed the laptop closed. “Nothing. I’m ready.”

 

  When you have friends you spend dinner before prom at some expensive restaurant, all of you already buzzed from the ride over in your ghetto-chic party bus complete with stripper poles and light up seats. But when you have no friends, like me, you spend dinner before prom at Nacho’s Tacos with your hyper-emotional mom who is on the verge of tears every time she looks at you and your grandmother who hasn’t eaten anything besides leftovers in four months and has probably absorbed the kind of radiation amounts typical after a trip to Chernobyl.

  So there we were. Stuffed into the only empty booth—me trying to be as inconspicuous as possible while my grandmother asked to speak to the manager because this wasn’t real Mexican food.

  “It’s modern,” my mom tried to tell her.

  “Modern. Well you modern people eat like rabbits. Where’s the meat? My taco’s all lettuce. I can’t eat just lettuce.”

  “Here, you can have some of mine.” I pushed my plate over, staring at my phone in my lap as I tried to connect to the shoddy Wi-Fi in that place. I pulled up another one of Felix’s links, uploaded Roman’s picture, and waited for the results to load.

  “Are you excited?”

  “Huh?”

  My mom waved a hand. “What are you doing over there?”

  “Oh, uh, just texting Dani, sorry.”

  “Well, tell her we said hi.”

  “And tell her she better keep her legs closed tonight,” my grandmother cut in.

  My mom shot her a look. “Mom.”

  My grandmother shook her head, ignoring my mom. “You’ve always been the good one Bryn. But Dani, she’s—”

  “Had a rough couple of years,” my mom said.

  My grandmother nodded slowly. “She has. But that’s no reason to be a hussy.”

  “Jesus, we can’t take you anywhere.”

  “Take me? I would have been fine staying at home eating the leftover lasagna before it goes bad—you two are just so wasteful—but no. You had to take Bryn out to dinner. You had to drag me along. It’s not my fault the girl’s got no friends. Maybe she would if you’d wean her off your goddamn teat.”

  The quiet hit me then. One of those public lulls that sneaks up on you just as something mortifying is happening.

  “She has dementia,” I announced. “Mind your own damn business.”

  The quiet spilled into a few muffled words, then sentences, and then the place was buzzing again. The waiter brought out a complimentary desert. Sick girl: one. Nacho’s Tacos drunk patrons: zero.

  My grandmother said something about me splitting my dress if I took another bite of my fried ice cream but I wasn’t listening. I was still scrolling through matches on my cellphone, each one taking what felt like an infinity to load.

  “So do you have any plans after the prom?” my mom asked.

  “After? Oh no, doubt it. I’ll probably be home by eleven.”

  “Are you sure? No parties or hanging out with Dani and Felix?”

  “I’m sure they’d rather be alone.”

  “Alone?” my grandmother coughed. “Over my dead body.” She looked at me. “No. You watch her.”

  “Bryn can’t babysit her cousin,” my mom said.

  “It’s her responsibility to the family, Elena. Just make sure that girl doesn’t lose her virginity behind the Ihops.”

  “It’s Ihop,” I said. And it’s too late for that.

  “The KFC. The Chicken Filet. I don’t care where she goes. You keep her legs closed.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I’ll do my best.”

  She reached across the table, patting my face. “Good girl. I told you, you were the good one.”

  “Well, at least try to have a little fun,” my mom added. “Hey.” She waved again. “And don’t be on your cellphone all night. What if someone wants to dance with you and you’re too distracted to notice?”

  “Then it will save them the embarrassment of being turned down.”

  My mom didn’t let up the entire car ride over to the venue. The parking lot was already dark. Thankfully. I’d texted Dani and she and Felix were already inside which meant I had to brave that long walk past the ticket table and the photo set-up completely alone. And in an obnoxiously red dress that suddenly felt too tight.

  I edged in behind a group of four, the girls already wobbling on their stripper heels, as I tried to rub my mom’s lip-gloss off my cheek. I was almost to the door when one of the girls fell, clutching the girl next to her, dragging them both down. Then I felt a hand on my arm and I was stumbling too.

  “Shit,” I said. “Get off.”

  “S-sorry,” the girl slurred.

  I spotted Dani in the doorway and then Felix was pulling me back onto my feet.

  “Nice entrance.”

  “Nice vest.” It was pink. Felix hated pink.

  He gritted his teeth. “She’s been driving me crazy all week. You know she even made me go with her to get her hair done? I sat there for four hours while she—”

  “What about my hair?” Dani asked.

  “It’s gorgeous.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I’m gonna get a drink.”

  “You torturing him?” I asked when Felix was out of earshot.

  “He asked for it.”

  “Felix doesn’t need to be vetted like all of your other boyfriends. We’ve known him since we were like six.”

  “I don’t know, I guess it’s just habit. Plus I like watching him squirm.”

  “Well, you should give him a break.”

  “I’ll think about it. So how was dinner?”

  Our grandmother called you a slut and tasked me with keeping you from losing your virginity behind an Ihop. “Boring. Grandma complained the whole time.”

  “As usual.”

  “Where’d Felix take you?”

  “Some Italian place downtown. It was packed. Uh-oh.”

  I turned, following Dani’s gaze.

  “Incoming.”

  “What?”

  When I turned back she was standing with Felix at the punch bowl. But Dani was wrong. When I finally spotted Drew across the room he was still. Just staring. A group of people walked past him and he was pushed in my direction. I didn’t mean to look him in the eye, to recognize what I saw, but when I did he was walking towards me.

  “You came,” he said.

  “I—”

  “Changed your mind?”

  “Not exactly. It was just kind of a big deal to my mom. You know how she is.”

  I stood there, waiting for him to go away but he didn’t. He looked me over and I crossed my arms, nails digging into my forearms.

  “Yo
u look…”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I’m sorry.” I realized he’d been saying that a lot lately. “Bryn…” The song changed, bass thumping. I saw his lips move and then he leaned in. I braced myself but then he said, “I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry.”

  He looked me in the eye one last time and then he walked away. I just stood there, alone and relieved.

  For six months Drew had been following me around, cornering me, and I kept waiting for him to remind me why I’d said no, for him to grab me, force me, control me the way he used to. But when he didn’t it made me wonder if maybe he had changed, if he’d finally softened the way a man was supposed to when he was in love, if maybe he was growing up. Only it was too late.

  I found a dark corner where the swirling lights over the dance floor didn’t reach. But the room still felt small, everyone writhing in the center of the dance floor, so close I could see their makeup dripping down their faces. There was Candace Johnson tugging at her dress, boobs spilling over the top, and there was Jessica dragging Drew onto the dance floor. She glanced over his shoulder, caught me looking, and smiled.

  I switched to examining the cheap decorations—clear lights flung over the rafters along the ceiling, balloons littering the dance floor and swirling near the sparse refreshments table as people walked back and forth from the punch bowl.

  Everything was purple. Probably Candace Johnson’s idea seeing as her parents paid for almost everything at Imperial High. The shoddy glitter machine was probably her idea too. I could just make out the grating hum of the motor underneath the music, glitter shooting out in a tangled clump every time the song changed.

  There were some of those glowing stars along the DJ booth and I glanced around looking for Dani and Felix. I could just make out a sliver of her face in the middle of the dance floor. She was laughing. So was he. Then Drew was in my line of sight again. I watched his hands slip onto Jessica’s hips, the small of her back, and I thought it would hurt but it didn’t.

  No, that slight twinge in my stomach wasn’t because of Drew or Jessica, or Dani and Felix, or that one weird kid who sat behind me in Stats and always smelled like mayonnaise, or my Freshman algebra teacher whose name I could never remember and who was standing by the exit flirting with my old gym teacher who always called me Stacy.

  It wasn’t Carla Friedman who was kind of my friend until she got a nose job and became a cheerleader. It wasn’t the pretentious tree hugging vegans who shunned me for shaving my legs, or all of the people who’d had classes with me and sat next to me for years and never said a word other than to ask for a pen. In fact it wasn’t the faces I recognized at all. It was the ones I didn’t. It was me standing alone in that dark corner, watching the culmination of four years of trying to skate under the radar finally working.

  And it was me realizing that it was too late to change any of it now. Because sooner or later the thing that came for Eve would come for me too and if she couldn’t survive it, how would I?

  I watched the dance floor until it was a blur. Until I could see tears clinging to my lashes. I wasn’t supposed to care about this stupid fucking prom or these stupid fucking people. I’d spent most of my life hating them, avoiding them, pretending like they didn’t exist. When I was the one who never really existed.

  I pulled out my cell phone. No data. I held it out like a compass, watching the bars blink in and out, following it past the bathrooms and toward the service stairs. I accidentally snuck up on two people making out at the top of the stairwell and they glowered as I told them to get a fucking room. I pushed through the door that led onto the roof and there were a few people near the railing, pouring their drinks over the edge.

  They ignored me as I wandered behind an air vent, the webpage finally loading. I scrolled through the first search results. Nothing. The next page. Then the next. Nothing. Nothing. I jumped to the last link Felix had given me and loaded Roman’s picture. There were fourteen hits. Just fourteen. The page was slow to load, pixels formulating one at a time.

  Come on.

  Load.

  Load.

  I scrolled down. Down. Down. Ticked off the first photo. The second. Third. Fourth. The fifth photo was still loading, the top of the frame dark, the shapes giving way to hands, heads, eyes, a mouth.

  Roman.

  He appeared one centimeter at a time, that same t-shirt clinging to his skin, warped from his sweat. I clicked on the link below the photo and was shot to his profile page.

  Davide Roman Santillo.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  My pulse was in my ears. I leaned against the vent, legs suddenly liquid. The service door slammed closed, someone stepping out onto the roof, and I jumped.

  I typed Roman’s full name into the search engine and there were a few links to his dad’s law practice and his grandfather’s obituary. I clicked on a link to a local news article, his name in the title line.

  Teen struck in head-on collision

  Roman’s picture was juxtaposed with one of the car he’d been driving. Frame twisted like tin foil.

  Seventeen-year-old Roman Santillo was a student at Highland High School and was injured in a one vehicle crash along 92nd street just west of Roselyn avenue. He was found alive but seriously injured at around 1:30 a.m. His vehicle had collided with a tree. The roof of the car was stripped from the vehicle and he was airlifted to Presbyterian hospital where he is still in critical condition.

  I clicked through the other links, all dated a few weeks before Christmas.

  Seventeen-year-old son of local lawyer, Marco Santillo clinging to life at Presbyterian hospital.

  Son of Albuquerque attorney, Marco Santillo, involved in head-on collision over the weekend.

  Local teen spends eighteenth birthday in coma.

  I sunk against the roof, rocks biting into my knees. I clutched the phone, staring at the photo of the car. Of what was left of it. And Roman. What was left of him?

  I shuddered. Silent. I reached for the air vent, gripping the sides, trying to hold it together. I heard footsteps, tried to hold my breath, to swallow the tears. To push everything back down. To bury it before it buried me.

  Roman. He’s…

  I curled into my lap, tears caught between the sequins on my dress. I tried to fill my lungs but they felt small. I felt small. So impossibly small.

  A voice cut through the wind. “Bryn?”

  I didn’t look up. I didn’t move.

  “Bryn.”

  Something slipped over my shoulders, hands gripping my arms. I felt the air spilling from someone’s lips.

  “Bryn. What’s wrong?”

  Wrong. Everything was wrong. Everything was…

  I felt that soft tug. The one I used to fear. The one I used to dread. Sleep. Long. Warm. But this time I wasn’t afraid. This time I was tired. I was so so tired.

  Chapter 31

  Roman