FEBRUARY 14
Dara’s Diary Entry
Parker broke up with me today. Again.
Happy fucking Valentine’s Day.
The weird thing is, the whole time he was talking, I kept staring at the burn mark on his shoulder and thinking about the time my freshman year we kept a lighter burning until it was hot and then made twin marks in our skin, swearing we would always be best friends. All of us. The three of us. But Nick wouldn’t do it, not even after we begged her, not even after she took two shots of straight SoCo and almost puked.
I guess there’s a reason people always say she’s the smart one.
A mistake, he called it. A mistake. Like getting the wrong answer on a math test. Like turning left instead of right.
You don’t even really like me. That’s another thing he said. And: We were friends before. Why can’t we be friends again?
Really, Parker? You got a 2300 on the SATs. Figure it out.
We talked for almost two hours. Or I should say: he talked. I don’t even remember half of what he said. That burn kept distracting me, the little half-moon scar, like a smile. And I kept thinking about the shock of pain when the lighter first touched my skin, so hot it almost felt cold at first. Weird how you can confuse two feelings so different. Cold and hot.
Pain and love.
But I guess that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Maybe that’s why I kept thinking about that time with the lighter. Here’s what nobody tells you: 90 percent of the time, when you fall in love, somebody gets burned.
JULY 23
Dara
When I get home from another day of doing absolutely nothing—killing time, riding my bike downtown, flipping through magazines at the CVS and pocketing the occasional lip gloss—I’m surprised to see Ariana standing on the front porch, holding a plastic bag under one arm. She spins around as I bump up onto the lawn with my bike.
“Oh,” she says, as if she wasn’t expecting me. “Hey.”
It’s a little after eight o’clock, and Mom must be home by now. Still, Nick’s bedroom window is the only one lit. Maybe Mom is in the kitchen, sitting in bare feet with her work shoes kicked under the table, eating soup straight from the can, bathed in the blue light of the TV. The search for Madeline Snow has consumed her—has consumed half the state—even though the news is always the same: there is none.
It’s been four days.
I think once again of what Sarah Snow said to me yesterday: The lying is the hardest part.
What did she mean?
I rest my bike on the lawn, not bothering with the kickstand, taking my time and letting Ariana sweat it out while I cross to the porch. I can’t remember the last time she came over. Even though she’s wearing her usual summer outfit, black wedge sneakers and frayed cutoffs so short the pockets stick out, envelope-like, from beneath the hem, plus a vintage T-shirt washed to gray, she looks almost like a stranger. Her hair is gelled into stiff peaks, as if she briefly stuck her head in a tub of Cool Whip.
“What are you doing here?” The question sounds more like an accusation, and Ariana flinches.
“Yeah.” She brings a finger to her lower lip, an echo of an old habit: Ariana sucked her thumb until she was in third grade. “Seeing you at the party reminded me. I have a bunch of stuff for you.” She presses the plastic bag into my hands, looking embarrassed, as if it contains porn or a severed head. “Half of it looks like trash, but I don’t know. There may be something you wanted in there.”
Inside the bag is a jumble of things: scraps of notepaper, cocktail napkins and paper coasters scrawled over with writing, a sparkly pink thong, a half-used tube of lip gloss, one strappy shoe that appears to be broken, a nearly empty bottle of Berry Crème Body Spray. It takes me a minute to recognize everything in the bag as mine—things I must have left at Ariana’s house over the years, things that must have rolled under the front seat of her car.
Suddenly, standing on the porch in front of a dark house with a flimsy plastic grocery bag full of my belongings, I know I’m going to cry. Ariana seems to be waiting for me to say something, but I can’t speak. If I speak, I’ll break.
“All right.” She hugs herself, shrugs. “So . . . I’ll see you around?”
No, I want to say. No. But I let her get halfway across the lawn, halfway back to the maroon Toyota she inherited from her stepbrother, which always smells like her, like clove cigarettes and coconut shampoo. By then my throat feels like it’s being squeezed inside a massive fist, and two words pop out before I can regret them: “What happened?”
Ariana freezes, one hand in her bag, where she has been rummaging for her keys. She doesn’t turn around right away.
“What happened?” I say again, this time a little louder. “How come you didn’t call? Why didn’t you come by to see if I was okay?”
She does turn around then. I don’t know what I was expecting—pity, maybe?—but I’m totally unprepared for how she looks: like her face is a plaster mold on the verge of collapse. Horribly, the fact that she’s about to cry makes me feel a teensy, tiny bit better.
“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what I could say. I felt—” She breaks off. And suddenly she is crying, in big hiccuping gulps, without bothering to try and conceal it. I’m shocked into silence. I haven’t seen Ariana cry since she was in fifth grade, when we bribed Nick into helping us pierce our ears and Nick was so nervous she slipped and drove the safety pin straight into Ariana’s neck. “I’m so sorry. It was all my fault. I was a terrible friend. Maybe . . . maybe if I’d been better . . .”
All my anger has turned to pity. “Stop,” I say. “Stop. You were a great friend. You are a great friend. Come on,” I say, when she doesn’t stop crying. “It’s all right.” Without knowing it, I’ve crossed the space between us. When I hug her, I can feel her ribs poking into me. She’s so thin she hardly feels real; I think of birds, and hollow bones, and flying away.
“Sorry,” she says again, and pulls back, dragging a hand across her nose. Her eyes are raw-looking, as if she hasn’t slept in days. “I’ve just been kind of fucked-up lately.”
“Join the club,” I say, which at least gets a laugh out of her—the ragged, low-throated laugh Ariana claims to have inherited from her grandfather, a cross-country trucker and lifelong two-packs-a-day smoker.
A pair of headlights sweep around the bend, temporarily blinding. It’s only then I realize how quiet it is outside. Normally, even as dusk falls, there are kids darting across front yards, shouting, playing Wiffle ball, chasing one another in and out of the woods. Not until Cheryl pokes her head out of the passenger-side window and yells, “Yoo-hoo!” do I remember I’m supposed to have dinner with my dad tonight.
Ariana seizes my wrist. “Let’s hang out, okay? Let’s hang out, just you and me. We can go swimming at the Drink or something.”
I make a face. “I’ve had enough of the Drink for a while.” Ariana looks so disappointed I quickly add, “But yeah, sure. Something like that.” Even as I say it, though, I know we won’t. We never used to make plans. Hanging with Ariana was just part of my rhythm, as easy as falling asleep.
It’s like the accident punched a hole straight through my life. Now there’s only Before and After.
Dad taps the horn. He hasn’t turned off the brights yet, and it feels like we’re standing on a movie set. Ariana pivots toward the car, raising a hand to her eyes, but she doesn’t wave. My parents used to love Ariana, but ever since she shaved half her head freshman year and started scamming on tattoo artists to give her piercings for free, they’ve soured on her. It’s a shame, my mom likes to say. She was such a pretty girl.
Now it’s my turn to apologize. “Sorry,” I say. “Dad has custody for dinner, apparently.”
Ariana rolls her eyes. I’m glad she’s stopped crying. She looks more like her old self. “I get it, believe me.” Ariana’s parents got divorced when she was five, and since then she’s had a stepdad and more “uncles” than I can count. “Don’t forget what I said about hanging out, okay? Call me anytime. I mean it.”
She’s trying so hard, I force a smile. “Sure.”
She turns and crosses back to her car, grimacing a little as she passes in front of the glare of my dad’s headlights. I have the desperate urge to run after her, to slide into the front seat and tell her to gun it, to peel off into the darkness, leaving Dad and Cheryl and the patchwork of sleepy houses and empty lawns behind.
“Ari!” I call out. When she looks up, I lift the plastic bag. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” She smiles, just a little, even though she still looks sad. “I always liked it when you called me Ari.”
Then she’s gone.