“Everything’s not better. Win’s still dead. Your parents are dead. My mom will be dead in a few weeks, since I don’t have the money to leave her and get a new coven.” She shook the bag; the cheese smeared the plastic. “But you can dance again, if you want. I promise.”
I took a step closer to where she stood near the door to the woodshop. She did not flinch away, just left the plastic bag hanging in the air between us.
I turned from her and stared out the woodshop’s door into the mess of a store as if trying to clear it all away with my mind. Wanting to erase what was right in front of me. Wishing to deny the truth.
Cal was out there.
The person who killed my parents.
There it was: the thing I’d been trying to avoid thinking about. The thing I wished more than anything not to be true, but that Echo had confirmed wholly and completely.
I lost my parents.
It was a long time ago. It was today. It was all the time. I couldn’t escape it. I couldn’t contain it. They’d been taken from me, and I missed them, and the hole in my heart was a fatal wound.
I shuddered and saw that I was holding my sore wrist. For once, I didn’t feel the usual isolated ache. Instead the pain covered all my skin, paper-thin, and sank into muscle and bone and blood.
It didn’t make it any better that the memory of the day they’d died had been removed. In fact, it was worse. Instead of knowing exactly what terrible thing had happened, I imagined a thousand different ways of it happening, each worse than the last. I saw them die over and over, their faces surprised or angry or sad. I wore my headphones or I didn’t. I slowed them down or I didn’t. I cried or I didn’t. In each one, Cal ran from the house and hid. He’d been hiding ever since. Until now.
Now I knew what had really happened.
My last night on earth, a Saturday, began like many others. I picked up Ari and Markos and we went to the beach in my truck. It was raining and tourist season wouldn’t start for another couple of weeks, so we had the place to ourselves.
It had been a bad day. I hadn’t left my room, not even to eat, and so my tongue felt fat and heavy in my mouth, my stomach pinched with hunger, and my mind felt like sludge. Like the wet sand that worked its way between our toes as we picked our way down the shore.
“Remind me why we aren’t at the diner or someone’s clean, dry basement?” Ari asked. Her shirt was wet and sticking to her body in a way I know I should’ve found attractive—Markos took a couple of long looks—but it seemed clinical, like a diagram of a female body in health class.
“I’ve arranged a special treat,” Markos said. “Trust me, you’ll thank me later.”
Ari sighed and swung my arm over her shoulder. Knowing Markos, his surprise could’ve been legitimately great—a BBQ dinner, or a nighttime whale-watching cruise—or it could have been nothing at all, and he wanted to own us for the evening.
It could’ve even been that he wanted to cheer me up.
Ari and Markos riffed back and forth as the sun started to go down. Since it was raining, there was no subtle sunset; it got grayer and grayer until it was black, and Markos flipped on a flashlight.
“It was a dark and stormy night,” he said, pointing the light at his chin.
Ari grabbed it from him. “And a douchebag prowled the beach, slowly drowning his friends to death.”
Ari handed the flashlight to me and I looked into the bulb. It was my turn to continue the scary story, but all I could think to say was the scary truth, so I didn’t say anything. I shone the light at Markos: grinning, confident, reliable Markos, hair blackened by rain and falling into his eyes. Then I shone it at Ari: funny, dedicated, tough Ari, skin even more glowing with rain dripping over it and the flashlight making her squint. I couldn’t see it then, but I see now: they loved me. Wholly, completely. And not like Kara and my mom. Ari and Markos loved me because they chose me. How incredible.
At the time I saw their faces and felt their love like a burden. As if each of them had installed their own iron ring around my heart, and when they wanted to punish me all they had to do was make eye contact and the iron would cinch a little tighter.
So I flipped off the light.
Markos “hey”ed and grabbed it from me in the sudden dark. Dark on the beach, this far out, was different from dark in town. The ocean was pure blackness and suddenly loud, like the light had been keeping it in check and now it could scream. The dunes seemed endless, a desert to cross back to cars and people and life.
“Dude, we need the light,” Markos said, half laughing, as he fiddled with the button. “That’s how she’s going to find us.”
“She?” I said as Markos’s beam hit a girl’s figure not ten feet away. Ari screamed and I grabbed her hand, but not to comfort her—to steady myself. The girl now stepping closer to our small circle was Echo.
“Hey, you’re here,” Markos said. He immediately adopted the tone he took with waiters and cleaning ladies and other service staff: self-important, chummy. “You’ve got it?”