by Sarah Lyu
She had terrible nightmares. Sometimes I’d wake up to the sound of desperate whimpers. I always woke her and held her tight until she fell back asleep. “Shhh,” I whispered softly, running my hand over her long dark hair.
Jack and I texted whenever I had a free moment, which wasn’t often in the first week after Elise moved into my house. She knew I had to tell him, that it was too big to keep under wraps since I had to explain why I couldn’t see him. She’d hated the idea of anyone knowing about the abuse she suffered, but now that those closest to her knew, it seemed like she wanted me to tell him, so he’d know what he’d inadvertently done. Jack felt awful, told me it was all his fault. That was also what Elise thought, though she never said it out loud. To her, it was so obvious it didn’t need to be acknowledged. But it wasn’t his fault. I was the one who made the decision to ignore her messages that night. I was the one who failed her.
“I know you came as soon as you could, Remy.” It wasn’t soon enough.
“Don’t blame yourself, it wasn’t your fault.” It was Jack’s fault.
“I know you would’ve been there sooner if you knew.” You only ignored my texts and calls because of Jack.
She didn’t say it out loud but the subtext was there. It reminded me of what she said to me: Love makes you do crazy things. I don’t mean love like ours. I mean infatuation. What we have is true love, the way we feel about each other is real. The way I felt about Christian wasn’t. I was infatuated with him and it made me crazy. It’s the same with Jack. You’ll see. You’re just infatuated with him. One day you’ll do something in the name of love and you’ll regret it.
Maybe she was right, in the end. But the way I felt about Jack wasn’t just infatuation, what we had was real. And it hurt every time I couldn’t answer his calls or texts.
Jack: How is she?
Jack: I know she needs you right now
Jack: But I want you to know I miss you
Jack: Call me when you can?
The only time I could talk to him was when Elise had fallen asleep, but I couldn’t be gone for too long in case she woke up. It was nerve-wracking, and I missed him, but I’d made a promise to be there for her when she needed me and I was going to keep that promise.
“Hey,” I whispered, when I managed to slip away one night.
“Hey,” he said, whispering back, and it felt so good, hearing his voice. We were quiet for a moment, letting the sound of our matching breaths do all the talking.
“Miss you,” he said, breaking the silence.
“Me too,” I admitted after a moment. He asked how Elise was doing, told me how his swim times were coming along, but then I had to go, afraid Elise might need me.
“I feel awful,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I should’ve just believed you when you said she needed you. I—” he broke off, cleared his throat like he was staving off tears. “I’m sorry. Tell her I’m sorry.”
“I have,” I said. “I will. And it wasn’t your fault.” It was mine. “I have to go.”
He paused, his breathing shallow. Finally, he let me go. “See you at school,” he said softly.
“Yeah, see you next week,” I said.
“It’s going to be so weird, being back as a senior again, all my friends gone.”
“You have me,” I said, smiling at the idea of seeing him at school—of being able to see him every day again.
• • •
The night before the first day of school, Elise and I packed our bags and went to bed early. But after Elise fell asleep, I slipped out of bed alone. Something had been bothering me ever since she left the hospital. When we went to the Pink Mansion to pack up her things, I saw her go up into the attic. She said she was looking for a picture of her mother to take with her, but I knew that couldn’t be true. I thought about it on and off all week and finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer.
Most of Elise’s boxes had been put into the guest room for now, and that’s where I started. Quietly, I began sifting through them. It took almost an hour but I finally found what I was looking for: the gun case. Taking a deep breath, I undid the snaps and looked inside.
“No,” I whispered. The bullets were there, the cleaning kit too. But the revolver was missing.
“What are you doing?” Elise asked, and I almost screamed. She was at the door, standing in her tank top and athletic shorts, rubbing her eyes.
There was no point in trying to hide it. I rose slowly, showed her the case. “Where’s the gun?”
“What are you doing looking for it?” she said, snatching the case out of my hands.
“Where is it?”
She didn’t answer.
“You can’t be serious. At least tell me you’re not carrying it everywhere,” I begged.
She remained quiet.
“Please, Elise. Tell me it’s not in your messenger bag, that you’re not bringing it to school tomorrow.”
“No, of course not,” she said. “Don’t be silly. I’ll leave it in the car when I’m at school.”
“You can’t,” I said, panicking. “You can’t bring a gun onto school grounds.” She was smart, I thought. There was no way she’d do it.
“It’s my gun. I can do whatever I want with it. And you know exactly why I have it.” She sat down on the guest bed and seemed very tired.
“But your dad—”
She cut me off with one look.
“Exactly. My dad. What, you think a protective order will actually protect me? It’s nothing but a piece of paper, Remy. He’s out on bail now and I can’t stop him from coming for me if he wanted to.” The fear and anger in her voice stopped me cold. For a long moment, we sat there in silence.
Finally I swallowed. I understood what Elise was saying but I was still terrified. The thought that she’d even think about bringing a gun to school was unimaginable.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not stupid. I’m not bringing it to school, but I need to have it near me, especially when I’m alone.” She placed a light hand on my arm. “I need to be able to protect myself.”
I left to take a shower, wanting to clear my head. The water ran cold after a while but I stayed, shivering. Elise was so much harder, rougher these days, and I couldn’t blame her for that, but I wasn’t sure what to say to her anymore. Maybe I thought I’d lost the right to challenge her, that I’d lost the right to judge her. So I let it go.
“It’s going to be okay, Remy,” Elise said when we were both back in bed. “You worry too much. Everything’s going to be okay.”
I wanted so badly to believe her.
MONDAY // AUGUST 14 // DAY 339
50.
“Here’s what we’re going to tell everyone,” Elise said to me on the way to school. “We’re going to say that my dad had to move for work but I didn’t want to go and your parents were nice enough to let me stay.”
“Okay?”
“I’m serious, Rem. Now tell me what I just told you.”
I dutifully recited it back to her, and when we split up for class, I texted Jack the story Elise had come up with. We finally met up at lunch, and it was the first time in over a week that I’d seen him.
“Hey,” he said softly when I flew into his embrace. “Missed you.” It felt so good, being in his arms again. But I pulled back quickly, worried Elise might see and get upset. She was the priority right now. Everything else, including our relationship, had to take a back seat to making her happy.
“Missed you too,” I said.
“It’s so weird,” he said when we sat down to wait for the others. “Almost everyone I know is gone.”
“Evan’s still here.”
“That’s also weird. We’ve never been in any classes together and now we’ve got three. I feel so left behind,” he said. “It’s disorienting.”
“It’ll get better.” I held his hand, intertwining our fingers together loosely.
Soon the others showed up, and I introduced Jack to Jae and Julie.
“Where’s Elise?” I asked, looking around the caf.
“Maybe behind the school?” Jae suggested.
“Behind the school?” Jack asked me.
“Come on.” I led us out to look for her and sure enough, there she was, sitting by herself on the curb, looking a little lost.
“Hey,” she said when she noticed us. “Where’s Madi?”
“She graduated, remember?” Julie said, giving her a weird look.
“Oh. Right. Sorry, I’m just tired.”
We all sat down, catching up on what everyone had been up to in the last couple weeks before school started. Elise was uncharacteristically quiet and closed off, her smiles rare and her expression faraway.
“You okay?” I asked Elise when the bell rang.
“Yeah, of course,” she said with a nearly imperceptible nod. Not here. Then, before everyone left for class, she called us all together. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh-oh,” Jae said, “that can be dangerous.”
She smiled. “I think we should quit while we’re ahead.”
“What do you mean?” Evan asked.
“The Deadly Vipers, the pranks. I’m done.” Then she walked away, leaving all of us in shock.
SATURDAY // AUGUST 26 // DAY 351
51.
“I want to pull one more prank,” Elise announced one night, two weeks into the school year. She’d kept her word and didn’t organize any more late-night missions. Everyone was confused, but Elise just said she’d grown bored of them—until now. “One more prank. Just you and me.”
“What? But you said you were done,” I said, instantly filled with dread. I believed her when she announced it on the first day of school.
“With the Deadly Vipers, yes,” she said. “This would be just the two of us, though.” We were in my basement, the TV on in the background.
“When?”
“Tonight,” she said, and for the first time in weeks, I saw her smile, and it was so good seeing even a glimpse of her old self.
“This will be the very last one,” she said, that glint in her eyes. “Promise. After this, I won’t care if we never do another one. I mean it.”
I was apprehensive. She was always talking about delivering justice, righting wrongs. She prided herself on her anger. She carefully nursed it like a small flame within her, never letting it die. And now she was saying she was going to let it go after one more mission? I didn’t know if I could trust her to really leave her anger behind. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to prank my dad.”
“What?” I stared at her, dumbfounded.
“He’s out on bail and back in Chattanooga.” She spoke calmly, like she’d thought all of it through. “He never put our house up for sale. I bet he’s there right now.”
“But—” My eyes searched her face wildly.
“All those times over the summer, I helped get justice for anyone who asked for it. Over the last year, I did it for you, for Jae, for Evan. It’s my turn now. And it’s not even about justice this time. It’s about closure,” she said, her voice emotional and uneven. “I need closure.”
“I don’t know,” I said. It’d been three weeks since she’d been hospitalized. She’d only just started to breathe without any pain. “I think we should just let the police deal with him. I know you’re upset, but—” The thought of going anywhere near him was terrifying.
“No.” She seemed to deflate. “I’m not upset. That’s not why I want to do this.”
“This isn’t a good idea. You’re not thinking straight,” I said. “You don’t really want to do this.” I was pleading with her.
“Yes. I do,” she said. “This is what I need.”
“No,” I said, ready to argue with her. This was a bad idea and I only wanted to protect her. “You’re not yourself, you’re still—”
“Yes, I am.” She released a frustrated sigh, almost a growl. “I feel like myself. This is just who I am.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant there’s nothing wrong with taking some time to recover. We can talk about it when you feel like yourself again.” I thought that if I could delay things long enough, she might change her mind, or her father would be sent to prison after his court date.
“And that’s what I’m telling you,” she said. “I do feel like myself. You know what, this always happens. People like Elise when they meet her.”
I couldn’t understand then, why she was speaking in the third person.
“People think she’s fun and wild and they fall for this—this version of her. And then they see the real her, and well—” She lifted a hand in a half shrug. “Listen, this is who I am. I’m not always fun and wild. Sometimes I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m sick of everything. And maybe that’s who I am, deep down. So go ahead. Abandon me like everyone else has. I won’t fight it. I won’t blame you.” The rawness of her voice was agonizing to hear.
“That’s not true,” I cried. “I love you. I’ll always love you.” It broke my heart seeing her like this. She had once seemed so strong, like nothing could ever take her down, but now I could see she was only human. Vulnerable like the rest of us.
“You love the idea of me, like everyone else.” She started sobbing, burying her face in her hands.
“You know I’m not like everyone else!” It felt like the early days again, us against the world. Elise x Remy. When no one else knew us like we did. When no one was there for us like we were.
She continued to sob and I felt completely helpless, wanting desperately to make her feel better. But what I wanted most of all was to erase all the awful things that’d happened to her.
“I love you,” I said, starting to cry too. “I’ll always love you, and if this is the real you, then I’ll love her too.” Elise needed me, needed this of me. How could I refuse, after everything?
She reached for me and we leaned on each other, sobbing.
“I can’t do this without you. Please, Remy. Please.”
She was the patron saint of the wronged. She was hurting. She was my best friend.
I said yes.
52.
“I just want him to have one bad night.” That’s what Elise had said. “Just one bad night.”
It only takes two hours to drive to Chattanooga from Lyndens Creek, and in the late hours of the night, we were almost completely alone on the road. She had found another box of fireworks when she was clearing out the attic, one we’d missed, and her plan was simple—set off the last of the fireworks outside her old house, and startle him awake with explosions in the sky and the sound of firecrackers by his bedroom window. It had a poetic symmetry with the very first night we met. We began the pranks with a bang and we’d end them with one too, just the two of us.
It was supposed to be harmless. No one would get hurt, least of all Jack.
“Do you want to know what I was thinking that night?” she asked me as we drove north on 75. “That night, I was lying there in the dark after he left, head spinning, barely able to see out of my right eye, every breath excruciating—I was lying there and all I could think was, ‘I hope I die.’ ”
I looked at her sharply, lips parted in shock. “Elise.”
“All I could think was, I hope I die, because then everyone would know what a monster he was. He’d spend the rest of his pitiful life rotting away in some prison like he deserves.
“And everyone would miss me, and talk about how much they loved me and what a good person I was, and how sad—she died so young. That’s what happened at my mother’s funeral. She was a shitty person but everyone cried and talked about her like she was this angel who’d been stolen from us. I couldn’t understand why people act like that at funerals. Don’t speak ill of the dead, all that bullshit. And lying there, wishing I’d die, I understood. Everybody knows funerals aren’t for the dead, that they’re for the people who are left behind. But funerals aren’t just a place for people to mourn or find closure. They’re also a place for people to get a front
-seat preview of their own demise.” She turned to me, our eyes making contact for what felt like a long second before she looked back at the road ahead, hands gripping the wheel tightly. “Funerals remind people that they’ll be dead one day, that everyone dies, and no one wants to be remembered as anything other than a saint. That is why people at funerals collectively rewrite the deceased’s biography.”
I didn’t know what to say. She’d clearly been thinking about this for a while, which was devastating. I didn’t want to think about Elise’s funeral, anyone’s funeral. And if she had died that night, I could never have forgiven myself. I’d been selfish. Elise was there for me at all of my low points—the breakup with Cameron, the battles between my parents—but I wasn’t there when she needed me. I’d been a coward, running away from her when things got hard. The first tears hit my lap before I even realized I was crying. I couldn’t believe I almost lost her. Now when I looked at her beside me, I couldn’t imagine a future without her.
“I’ve always wanted to disappear, you know?” she continued. “Be that girl who disappears to live her life, and everyone wonders what happened to her from time to time. Then one day, they’d see me on TV or read about me and know just how extraordinary I was.” She wanted to be remembered. “Except in this case, they’d wonder what could have happened to me.” Her voice had a dreamlike sheen to it.
My tears had turned into sobs and she glanced over.
“Don’t cry, Remy,” she said. “It’s okay! I didn’t die, obviously. It just really hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and cried harder, unsure if I was apologizing for crying or for not being there when she needed me. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s my fault.”
“What?” I whispered, breathless.
“I should never have left my room when he was like that. He kept pounding on the door, screaming he was going to break it down, and I was so scared. But then it stopped and he left and I thought it was over, that he’d sleep off the rage, or at least that I could sneak out sometime in the night. But he came back to the door an hour later, all apologetic and pleading. I’m sorry, Elise, I didn’t mean what I said. Pathetic and pitiful. He was out there crying and saying how sorry he was for everything. He said he wanted my forgiveness.” I couldn’t picture him like that, groveling. In my mind, he was an unrepentant monster, pure evil.