You Were Here

by Cori McCarthy

  Also by Cori McCarthy

  Breaking Sky

  Copyright © 2016 by Cori McCarthy

  Cover and internal design © 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover illustrations by Sonia Liao

  Cover image © Elisabeth Ansley/Trevillion Images

  Internal illustrations by Sonia Liao

  Internal images © Szantai Istvan/Shutterstock; JJ Studio/Shutterstock; Jason Yoder/Shutterstock; Eky Studio/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McCarthy, Cori, author.

  Title: You were here / by Cori McCarthy.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Fire, [2016] | Summary: On

  the anniversary of her daredevil brother’s death, Jaycee attempts to break

  into Jake’s favorite hideout, the petrifying ruins of an insane asylum,

  where her eccentric band of friends challenge her to do the unthinkable:

  reveal the parts of herself that she buried with her brother.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015022867 | (alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Brothers and sisters--Fiction. | Grief--Fiction. |

  Psychiatric hospitals--Fiction. | Friendship--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.M47841233 Yo 2016 | DDC [Fic]--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015022867

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Ridges

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Moonville Tunnel

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Gates of Hell

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  No Man’s Land

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Randall Park Mall

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Geauga Lake

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Back Cover

  This is for

  Matthew Wakefield.

  August 15, 1982 - June 7, 1997

  You were here, Matt.

  I remember.

  ruin

  [roo-in]

  noun

  1. the remains of a man-made structure that has succumbed to decay and abandonment

  2. the god-awful downfall of a person

  The Ridges

  Chapter 1

  Jaycee

  I had been driving all afternoon, trying to get lost.

  The road blurred. My foot was a stone on the gas pedal, and I took the turn too fast. Tires growled and spit gravel, almost sending my car sideways through the Saturday evening traffic.

  I came to a slamming stop in the playground parking lot and pressed my head to the steering wheel, cursing. The pause was short-lived. I tightened my ponytail and got out.

  Trudging toward the swing set, my face burned and my breath stung in my chest. That’s what regret does well and grief does better: rips out your energy and leaves you feeling each and every heartbeat. Plus, well, I’d failed once again. Getting lost in my hometown was turning out to be as easy as disapparating—something I’d once wasted an entire lightning bolt–foreheaded summer attempting.

  I sat hard on the swing. My endeavors to get lost were getting extreme. Just last week, I’d night-trekked into the woods where the cross-country team practices and chugged three inches of rum. I’d left the path behind, only to run into my equidrunk classmates, taking their idiotic dares to make out with a tree and underwear-roll through a patch of poison ivy. I emerged hours later on the road behind the middle school, the same spot where years earlier I used to pump my bike into dirt-sneezing speed, trying to spin out. In short, my earliest attempts at getting lost.

  I itched the length of my arm. The poison ivy welts were starting to fade, even though a few hours earlier, my mom complained about how blotchy I would look in all my graduation pictures. “Photoshop,” I had assured her following the ceremony. “I promise you won’t have to remember me as rashy every time you marvel at my monumentous achievement in surviving standard education.”

  Surviving was the wrong word. My mom started to weep, and I ended up taking a three-hour drive on Easy Death Road. Which is exit 13 off Guilt Highway if you’re curious. And then after all that, I surrendered to a seizure of loneliness and came here to the oddly placed Richland Avenue Park.

  I scuffed my Chucks on the stubbly turf, drawn to the spot beneath the swing set where Jake died. Of course, it wasn’t rubber back then. It had been good, old-fashioned, unforgiving blacktop. My mind hummed, and something inside me screamed Run! as if my worst memories were zombies, and if I were quick enough, I could outstrip them. But I stayed where I was, kicking into gear on the swing instead.

  The sunset was taking forever to get over itself, and I pumped my legs like a ten-year-old. I could have been at any number of graduation parties, sneaking beer into Sprite cans and cheersing the end of high school. But no, I was here. Killing time. Waiting for dark, when I’d break into The Ridges and meet up with Mikivikious for our bizarro anniversary. It had been five years. That’s something special, right? What’s the traditional present for five years? Silverware? A couch? Flat screen?

  The sun’s blaring rays made me squeeze my eyes until the whole universe went orange-red. Killing time.
What an expression. How does one kill time? Anesthesia? Time travel? Lobotomy?

  The last one made me snicker as I stared up at The Ridges, the decrepit Victorian mansion on top of the hill. Until recently, it had been known as the Athens Insane Asylum, but the state had demanded a rebrand when they shut it down, as if a new name could erase a hundred years of inhumane abuse, death, and yes, copious amounts of lobotomies. I should know; I’d tried it once or twice. Not a lobotomy—changing my own name. Anything to escape being the infamous girl who’d had a front-row seat in watching her big brother snap his neck.

  I would rather be known for frenching a tree.

  My feelings flared as I imagined my mom on her way back to her own asylum, Stanwood Behavioral Hospital. She was most likely weeping for Xanax, a wreck because I wrecked her with my sarcasm. And my father was probably holding her hand and saying nice things, because that’s how he dealt with Jake. My dad was a grade A deflector. Everything he said was ripe with the exact same sentiment: So we don’t have a son anymore, but hey, look at our daughter! To be honest, I preferred my mother’s tears.

  I turned to the half-shadowed redbrick towers of The Ridges peeking over the tree line and wondered where I’d left off on my easier thoughts. Oh yeah: lobotomies. The guy who performed them, nicknamed Dr. Lobotomy, traveled from asylum to asylum in the sixties, living out of his lobotomobile—he seriously called it that—while banging out twenty procedures a day. Apparently it only takes a few minutes to destroy someone’s frontal lobe. True story. Google it.

  I kicked harder, faster, higher on the swing, and then turned into a board, locking my elbows and knees. I tracked the blue sky with each swinging pass, waiting for gravity to get predictable. To bring me back to earth.

  When it finally did, I was no longer alone. A kid glared from a few feet away with that dog snarl only middle schoolers possess. Behind him, his buddies hung from the monkey bars, faux whispering. Clearly he’d been sent over. Chosen to poke fun at Jaycee Strangelove.

  Yes, that’s my name. No, you may not make fun of it.

  I stared him down. “You’re too old to be on the playground. Take off before you freak out the little kids,” I said even though I was the only other person there.

  The boy’s hair was unevenly shaved on the sides, and he’d Sharpied rap lyrics up his ropey arms. “I dare you.”

  I exhaled for roughly ten years. “Dare me to do what, Eminem?”

  He pointed to the top of the swing set, smirking.

  “No.”

  “I can do the backflip,” he bragged. “So can two of my friends.”

  I took the bait even though I knew better than to talk about the accident. “Jake could do it too, you snotwad. The flip that killed him was probably his thirtieth.”

  My thoughts went graphic. I couldn’t stop imagining my big brother standing atop the swing set. He wore his cap and gown from graduation and was also half-drunk—a detail the coroner threw in later. Jake’s classmates were cheering him on in a way that made me think he was the coolest human on the planet. I mean, I had only finished seventh grade, so that seemed entirely possible.

  I remembered in slo-mo how he crouched and sprang backward. The flip was so fast that it had turned into one and a half flips, and then…

  “Is it true that his head snapped off?” the Sharpie kid asked.

  I glared.

  “Well? Do the backflip,” he said. “I dare you.”

  I got up and walked away.

  “But you’re supposed to do any dare,” he yelled. “That’s what everyone says.”

  “You’ve got the wrong Strangelove,” I called back. “Jake was the one who did every dare.” I only do the ones that aren’t suicidal, I added in my thoughts. Mostly. I turned to walk backward and spoke my next words loud enough for him and his little thug friends. “Jake’s head didn’t snap off. His neck bent ninety degrees.” I held my arm up, crooked. “Like an elbow.”

  Maybe that would keep them from mimicking the flip that broke Jake. But probably not. More likely, it’d make them even more interested. Middle schoolers make no freakin’ sense.

  I pretended like I was leaving, but I didn’t go anywhere. Instead, I hooked around the small wooded area and back to the playground. To the swing set. Lil Eminem and his posse had bugged off, and I felt myself edging too close to the supermassive black hole inside that Jake had left behind.

  Five years ago. Five. Five.

  I eyed the playground like I might catch a glimpse of his ghost. He would probably be pissed to know that I imagined his spirit in that ridiculous cap and gown. Also barefoot, but then again, he never wore shoes.

  I flipped off my bashed-up Converses and climbed the support beam of the swing set without another thought. The cool metal gripped my palms, and I looped my legs around the top bar and hauled myself into a sitting position. Easier than it looks. I wriggled my butt down the pole.

  The sunset was lapsing into a cherry-stained twilight. A breeze came in from somewhere and set itself against my radical heartbeat. A few dozen people had watched Jake flip; none of them had tried to stop him, least of all me. And now I was alone. No one was going to stop me either. I’m lost without you, Jake, I thought, followed by, What sentimental crap.

  “I’m always right here,” I muttered. “How lost is that?”

  Crazy and cursing, I stood up.

  Chapter 2

  Bishop

  Chapter 3

  Natalie

  Natalie could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Really it was the far streetlamp over the Richland Avenue Bridge, but it shone like a beacon. This was the route by which she’d escape town in two short months, heading to Cornell University. In New York. Which blissfully felt like an entirely different country from Athens, Ohio.

  I am Natalie. I can do this.

  It had become a mantra to get her through all this meantime. I can do this. Yes.

  “No,” she told Zach, flicking his hand off her thigh. “I’m driving.” Natalie didn’t glance at his fish pout even though she knew it’d be there. Fishy and cute. Zach was reaching for her a lot these days. It was the beer he’d guzzled at the last party. It was the fact that she was leaving. And it was that All Things Ending feeling leftover from graduation that afternoon. Good thing she didn’t think of it that way—that’d be a mess. She missed the stoplight turning red and had to brake hard before the bridge. Her glasses slipped down her nose.

  “Maybe I should drive,” Bishop said from the backseat. He hadn’t spoken since they got in the car, probably because Zach had spent most of the night making fun of Bishop’s heartbreak. Zach was probably too drunk to feel bad now, but when he woke up tomorrow, she’d remind him, and he’d cry. Zach was a weeper.

  Bishop was not.

  “I’m fine to drive. Are you all right back there?” Natalie eyed him through the rearview mirror, taking in the distance in his brown eyes as he sketched.

  “Many people with holes in their hearts don’t even know it,” Bishop said, his black pen paused over a notebook. “As adults, they have a stroke and die, and then the coroner says, ‘This guy had a big hole in his valves and no one knew. Least of all him.’”

  Zach groaned and threw his head back. “No Marrakesh talk. Not tonight. You promised.”

  “Did I mention Marrakesh?”

  Natalie put a hand on Zach’s arm. “Maybe lay off the Discovery Channel, Bishop.”

  “Small minds,” she heard him mutter. Bishop went back to his drawing. She thought she saw a heart—a literal heart with ventricles and twisted muscle. Bishop had fractured over Marrakesh, a study-abroad student whose name, in Natalie’s opinion, was as overly staged as her behavior. Bishop and Marrakesh had only dated for three months, but the pieces he’d fallen into since she left actually made Natalie doubt the validity of her four-year relationship with Zach. Which didn’t make sense be
cause four years mattered. Didn’t they? They had to.

  The light turned green, and she drove across the bridge.

  “Kolenski has three kegs and his parents are so cool,” Zach slurred. Too much flip cup at the last party. He was close to useless.

  “Sober up or we’re not going to Kolenski’s.” She pushed a Red Bull into his hand. “I’ll get you a calzone at D.P. Dough.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Oh, you really don’t want to start that shit with me.” Natalie eyed him until he relented. Zach snapped the tab and drank most of the narrow can in one go. Then he belched. And laughed. And Natalie had to literally bite her lip from screaming, You’re a boy. I get it.

  She retreated into her Cornell dreams and took the roundabout too fast. Zach pitched against the passenger window. Natalie ignored his dramatics, driving up Richland Avenue and around the park—until something made her freeze. She screamed, “Stop the car!” before she remembered that she was the one driving.

  Natalie spun into the playground parking lot, Zach slamming into her for real this time.

  “What the—” Zach said, but Bishop spoke over him.

  “Jesus Christ, that girl’s going to kill herself!”

  Jaycee balanced precariously on top of the swing set.

  Standing.

  Natalie was out of the car and running. Jaycee’s eyes were closed, her chin tucked. She crouched and sprang backward just as Natalie screamed, “DON’T!”

  Jaycee flew through the air in a lame arc and landed on her back so hard that Natalie heard the air whoosh out of Jaycee’s lungs.

  Then she was still. Dead still.

  Natalie’s memories stabbed, making her imagine the exact grotesque angle of Jake’s neck as he lay in this same spot. She flung herself to her knees, grabbing Jaycee’s shoulders, shaking her and suddenly crying.

  Jaycee’s eyes flew open, and she sucked in a breath. She blinked a few times. “Natalie? Oh God, if you’re here, I must be in hell.”

  Natalie dropped Jaycee on the playground turf, shocked.

  Jaycee laughed. “You know, I don’t think you’re supposed to be so violent with someone who might have a back injury.”