Selfishly, I wanted to see her, to check on her, to help her, but not if it meant breaking her again.
I trudged through the thick grass on my way back to the creek. My church shoes were getting muddy, but I didn’t give one shit what either of my parents would think about it.
I’d just hit the dirt beach when I caught sight of her long, brown hair. My heart stopped and both lungs seized. I couldn’t see her face, but her slumped shoulders and the soft sound of her cries didn’t give me hope for how she was holding up. She was there though, and that alone made it the most beautiful sight in the world.
Sucking in a deep breath, I shoved my hands into my pockets and walked over to her.
She jumped when I sat beside her on the rock. Nerves rolled in my stomach, but I stuck with the familiar.
“Catch anything good?”
“Shit,” she croaked. Turning her head away, she hurriedly wiped her cheeks, but there was no hiding her puffy eyes. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d be at the funeral.”
I bumped her with my shoulder. “Is it wrong if I’m just happy you were thinking about me at all?”
“Considering my brother is in jail for killing your cousin, I’d say so.” She stood up and dusted off the back of her jeans, ready to bolt.
“Nora, come on. Don’t go. Just talk to me.”
“About what?” She turned around and faced me, crossing her arms over her chest.
Holy shit, I’d thought Nora was all grown up the last time I’d seen her, but now… Jesus, she had to have been a half a foot taller and looked more like a full-fledged woman than the little girl I’d once known. Luckily, I’d done a little growing of my own, so when I stood up and walked over to her, I still had her by a head and shoulders.
“You can talk about anything with me.”
“Mmm,” she hummed, bringing a finger up to tap her bottom lip. “Okay, let’s see, where to start? Ramsey’s gone. Thea is so devastated she hasn’t left her room. I haven’t slept in a week. My house had been egged, the few windows we had left were broken out with firecrackers or bricks, and just last night, our grass was set on fire.”
“What the hell?” I breathed.
“Oh, it gets better. I sometimes turn on the TV. You know, to try to drown out the sound of people driving past our house and screaming that we should all be in jail only to stop in front of Thea’s house and scream what a fucking whore she is. But when I turn on the TV, all I see is some member of your family crying and holding up a picture of a kid who raped me while they preach about what an amazing person he was.”
“Fuck,” I mumbled, reaching out and resting a hand on her hip in a lame attempt to pull her into a hug, as if it could possibly help.
She immediately backed away but kept talking. “And the worst part is, this shit isn’t even limited to your family. Just yesterday, my own father gave an interview to the news detailing all of Ramsey’s violent tendencies and how he’d been expecting him to do something like this for years.” She finished on a boom. “His own son!” She shook her head and drew in a shaky inhale. “So, sure, let’s talk. Which part would you like to discuss first?”
I once again moved in close, stopping only an inch away. “Whatever part I can help with.”
“Help?” She laughed without humor. “You should hate me, Camden.”
“What in the world do I have to hate you for? Because my cousin was a psychopath? Because my family is delusional? Because your dad is a piece of shit who never deserved to be called Dad in the first place? What part of that has anything to do with you?”
“All of it!” she yelled.
“None of it!” I shouted right back. I hated raising my voice at her, but nothing else was getting through. “God, Nora. This isn’t your fault. And I am so damn sorry people are taking this out on you, but they are clueless idiots who have nothing better to do. You have to remember you weren’t the one who killed Josh. You didn’t—”
I had a whole speech prepared in my head that may or may not have ended with me shaking sense into her if need be, but it died on my tongue when she jerked so hard it was as if she’d been shot. All the color drained from her face as she stared through me.
A sick sense of unease took root in my stomach, and I glared back at her. She blinked too many times for it to have been natural. She looked like a robot attempting to fit into society. Blink. Sway. Breathe. But the Nora I knew was lost in her memories.
I was suddenly terrified of what memories those might be.
“Nora,” I prompted, catching her hand. I gave her a tug and she stumbled into me.
Her face collided with my chest, and while her arms hung at her sides, she pressed her body close. “I can’t talk about this.”
Oh, fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, there was a this for her to talk about? I waffled for a minute, simultaneously wanting to know everything and nothing at all because denial was easier.
But it was Nora. She lived a life of secrets, but there was no way she could keep something like this inside without it festering into an infection that would eventually devour her.
Hooking one arm around her hips, I held her tight and glided my other hand into the back of her hair, tucking her face against my chest. “You can talk to me. You can tell me anything.”
“Not this,” she croaked.
“What if I tell you a secret first? Tit for tat?”
She shook her head, her tears soaking my shirt. Every single one of them felt like acid.
“All right, well, I’m gonna try anyway. So, if you feel like talking when I’m done, that’d be cool.” I dipped low, put my lips to her ear, and whispered, “And there’s no making fun of me for this. Got it?”
She didn’t reply, but she shifted deeper into my hold and I took what felt like the risk of a lifetime.
“I met this girl a few summers back. Oh my God, Nora. She was incredible. She had these big, brown eyes and the cutest freckles across her nose. She would scream if a cricket so much as looked in her direction, but I’ll tell you what. That girl was the bravest person I’ve ever met. And I would know, she saved me from quite a few rabid frogs that summer.”
She half laughed, half cried, so I assumed I was doing something right and kept going.
“It sucked because I’m pretty sure she hated me at first, but I grew on her after a while. I knew she had it rough at home, but whenever she saw me, she’d get this huge smile that didn’t just make me feel like I existed in the world. It made me feel like I existed for her.”
Snaking her arms around my hips, she finally returned my embrace. “Oh, Cam.”
Cam. God, I’d missed her calling me that. It was the obvious abbreviation for my name, but there was something magical about those three letters rolling from her tongue.
I closed my eyes, allowing the sense of belonging I only felt with Nora to envelop me.
Clearing my throat, I kept going. “But then I was a dumbass who got in trouble and had to leave. She hated me when I got back, but she had no idea how I’d spent the whole year loving her.”
Her fingernails dug into my back as she clung to me. “Don’t say that.”
“What do you want me to say then? You want lies? Fine, I haven’t thought about you every day over the last few years. Every time I’ve been in town, I haven’t stood in the woods by your house, waiting for you to come outside just so I could see you. I haven’t been carrying a ten-dollar bill in my wallet for two years now, hoping like hell you memorized my address. And I absolutely did not sit on my front porch every Saturday, waiting for the girl in the tie-dyed tank tops to show up and tell me she loved me too.”
“Stop,” she pleaded, but the words had been set free. There was no calling them back now.
“I’m a Caskey, and I wasn’t honest about that from the start, and I know you can’t look at me without thinking—”
That was all I got out because her head popped up and her lips collided with mine almost painfully. The tears from her cheek
s spread to my face as she opened her mouth, her tongue finding mine, wild and consuming.
It was too many years in the making.
Too much time apart.
Too much heartache and desperation all poured into one frenzied kiss.
I palmed the back of her head and took it deeper, searing need trumping any kind of nerves or insecurity that could have accompanied our first kiss.
She moaned into my mouth and moved her arms up to encircle my neck, holding me so close I almost convinced myself she’d never let go.
But that wouldn’t have been my Nora. It seemed her superpower was the ability to slip through my fingers.
All at once, she released me and backed away. Panting and breathless, I watched a mask slip over her beautiful face. She stood up straight and squared her shoulders, but the trembling of her bruised lips gave her away.
“I did it. I was the one who killed Josh.”
My heart stopped; maybe time did too. I had known that something was off, but there was no preparing for a bomb like that. A dozen questions hung on my tongue, confusion swirled, and my mind struggled to keep up.
And then there was Nora, standing only a few feet away, staring at me—defiant yet still vulnerable—waiting for my reaction.
On the inside, I was devastated. Not because I was mad or angry, but rather, after everything she’d been through now, she had to live with this on her conscience too.
On the outside, I showed her nothing. “Okay.”
“I don’t feel bad about it, Camden.” She lifted her hand to cover her heart. “I can barely breathe knowing that Ramsey’s in prison, but that is the only regret I have. So, yeah. That’s me. Still love me now?”
It required exactly no thought for me to answer. “Yeah. I do.”
She winced, and a cry bubbled from her throat. “Well, you shouldn’t.” Holding my gaze, she backed away. “I love you too, Cam. I love you enough to know you should love somebody better than me.” She touched her lips, but it was the only goodbye I got from Nora Stewart.
“Nora!” I yelled as she took off running—and not into my arms where she should have always been. Deflated and lost, I watched her go.
I could have chased her to the ends of the Earth, but it would have done me no good.
She wasn’t mine to catch.
Yet.
Before heading back to my grandparents’, I swung past her house. Her dad’s truck was out front, so I crawled in through her bedroom window and left the ten-dollar bill on her nightstand. At least I could sleep at night knowing she could always find her way back to me.
Just before I climbed back out, my gaze froze on a framed picture of her with Thea and Ramsey. Thea was on one side, laughing, and her brother was in the middle, his shaggy, brown hair hanging over his forehead, a huge grin splitting his mouth. It was Nora on the other side of him that stole my breath though. She didn’t look much different than she did now, so it must have been taken in the last year or so. Which meant it was after Josh had…
But she was smiling—a real, genuine Nora Stewart masterpiece. The world had beaten her down, but I found immeasurable comfort knowing she was still able to smile—at least she could with the right people.
And with that, I added one last stop to my trip before I went home.
Luckily for me, it was only two doors down.
One of my last memories of my mother was when she took Ramsey and me out on a pond in a tiny boat she’d found on the side of the road. It was my sixth birthday, and we were flat broke, but she wanted to do something special. The only problem was, when we got out into the middle of the pond, we realized the boat was only being kept afloat by a piece of failing duct tape across the bottom.
When water started rushing in and panic overtook us all, my mom and Ramsey frantically tried to plug the hole, while I sat there watching in horror.
It was the craziest thing. We all knew how to swim—Ramsey better than me, but I could doggy paddle back to solid ground without issue.
But we were in a boat.
And it was sinking.
So we stayed, desperately trying to fix the impossible.
After Ramsey went to prison, that was how I lived my life—in a sinking boat of guilt, panic, and overwhelming grief. I could easily escape it if I just told the truth, but I sat there, going through the motions of bailing myself out, all the while praying the rising water would eventually overtake me.
And it wasn’t just me going down in that sinking ship anymore.
Ramsey had been right; Thea did take care of me. Within a matter of weeks of my brother’s arrest and subsequent sentencing, Thea and her dad, Joe Hull, officially moved me in with them. Joe was amazing, kind, and soft spoken—nothing like the man I’d grown up with. My dad took off shortly after, and for once in my life, I had a safe and stable home.
One where I was forced to listen to my best friend cry herself to sleep every night because my brother was in prison—for something I’d done.
The three of us had family dinner together every night. We did homework together, laughed, and cried. Each week, Joe drove us to multiple therapy appointments, waiting outside in the car when he wasn’t in a session himself. I couldn’t tell a shrink the whole truth, so I did a lot of avoiding, pretending, and drowning. The lies were worse than not talking about it at all.
One breath at a time, I kept going.
Each year on the anniversary of Josh’s death, his brother, Jonathan, would host a stupid fundraiser for his anti-bullying charity. For a week, the whole town would wear green—a nod to Josh’s St. Patrick’s Day birthday—and the local newspaper would write a completely biased, utterly trash article about the Caskeys’ devastating loss.
Thea was a beast with how she handled herself and her healing process. During the celebration of Josh’s life, she always found ways to keep it real. Once, she took out an entire billboard and covered it in pictures of the bruises Josh had left on her. It read in three-foot-tall letters: The Real Josh Caskey.
I, on the other hand, had never been brave enough to talk about what Josh had done to me.
Well, at least not with anyone other than Camden.
Camden knew all my truths. He became the safe drawer in my head where I could go to feel free of the secrets and lies.
I’d lie in bed at night, tracing his address in Alberton on the back of our ten-dollar bill, playing out hundreds of scenarios where I got to see him again.
His family wanted to burn me at the stake because I was related to Ramsey, but Camden was such a good guy he probably would have greeted me with a smile and a hug.
That would have been all about me though. The comfort I needed. The sense of belonging I felt when we were together. The warmth only he could provide me.
I was a shell of a girl who had absolutely nothing to offer him—short of maybe shame and heartbreak.
So I stayed away—even when, deep down, I needed him the most.
As the years passed, I wasn’t delusional enough to imagine he was thinking about me. In a way, it made me smile, the idea that he’d moved on and hopefully found a girlfriend who could be who he deserved. After all, we were kids when he’d told me he loved me. Even if I still held on to that moment at the creek like a life raft when I was too exhausted to swim.
Every chance I got, I went to visit Ramsey in prison. He was withering away in that place, and it didn’t help that he’d decided the only way to keep Thea from wasting her life on him was to let her go too. It was insane. She loved him. He loved her. And they couldn’t be together.
It felt like the Stewart curse.
Growing up was hard no matter the circumstances.
But for a girl like me, who had lived through hell and still carried the flames scorching me with every breath I took, the idea of a future bearing the never-ending agony was infinitely harder.
Not long after I graduated high school, the weight of my guilt became more than I could handle.
It took four years of self-loathing
, but I finally convinced myself the world would be a better place without me.
Joe would no longer have to spend his time and money on a kid who never should have been his responsibility to begin with.
If I were dead, maybe Ramsey could tell the truth and have his sentence overturned.
Thea could get her soul mate back and start the life they were always meant to have before I’d stolen it from them.
And Camden, well… If there were even the tiniest part of him that still cared about me, I could free him too.
Honestly, swallowing that bottle of pills was an act of mercy.
Choices. Everyone makes them.
Luckily for me, they weren’t always black and white.
Truth or lie.
Live or die.
Consequences come in all colors.
And this one came in a life-altering shade of Camden Cole blue.
The bright lights nearly blinded me as my lids fluttered open. Disoriented, I struggled to pinpoint where I was and why it felt like I’d been hit by a train.
“Hey, hey, relax. I’m right here,” Joe whispered, his hand slipping into mine.
Everything came back in a rush of snapshots. Joe busting down the bathroom door. The paramedics showing up. Doctors and nurses surrounding me and barking out orders. Boulder after boulder landed on my shoulders and crushed me into the bed.
“Oh, God,” I croaked, rolling to the side.
I’d survived. How? I had no idea. Thea was traveling—her favorite distraction—and Joe had been at work.
But the all-too-familiar agony in my chest didn’t lie.
Joe leaned over my hospital bed and hugged me, his voice husky and filled with emotion as he rumbled, “Jesus, Nora, you scared the hell out of me.”
Another boulder I wasn’t strong enough to carry crashed down on top of me. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” He brought our joined hands to his mouth. “Just promise me you’ll never do that again.”
I couldn’t make that promise, but I was already standing on a mountain of lies. One more couldn’t hurt. “I promise.”
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