Chapter NINETEEN
There was a very small memorial service, one that felt cursory and fake, like people were avoiding talking about what really happened and what really mattered. Em left early. Everything about Chase’s death and its aftermath felt wrong. She skipped the school assembly that had been called at the last minute to talk about students’ emotional reactions to Chase’s fatal fall and Sasha’s suicide attempt. Grief counselors were available through the guidance office to help students process their feelings.
Em knew they were all trying to do the right thing but she couldn’t help feeling like all these adults were just as confused as the kids. She wondered if she should tell someone about Ty, about Chase’s infatuation with her, about the mysterious girl who had appeared in Ascension just before everything started to snowball into chaos. She didn’t know who to tell.
Less than a week into the new year, there was a buzz in the air, and it was a drone of death.
She blamed herself, in part. She knew he’d sounded desperate. She’d known, and she hadn’t done everything she could to
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find him. And now . . . he was gone. She couldn’t stop thinking about that night. What had he been thinking? Since his death, she had replayed his voice mail several times, until hearing his voice started to freak her out and she deleted it impulsively.
Something came up, he had said.
But what?
Since Chase’s death, she had been having nightmares, most of them plotless, full of dark, swirling shapes. But last night, the nightmare had taken form. She was driving on the snowy road, the same one on which she’d encountered Meg, the girl with the scarlet ribbon. She was headed for the Piss Pass, and past it, Chase’s home. She could see him in the distance, at the end of a tunnel of snow and light and tree branches. He was shouting and waving his arms, and she couldn’t understand him. All she knew was that something was desperately wrong, and she needed to fix it. But just as she got close to him, almost close enough to understand, Meg appeared in front of the car, and she had to slam on the brakes. She skidded to a halt, but the brakes locked, and she went sailing into blackness.
She woke up choking back a scream.
Everyone was saying Chase’s death was a suicide—her parents, teachers, everyone at school. And it seemed like that, sure. But something about that night—Meg’s presence in it, specifically—was haunting him.
Em sat now at her kitchen table, absentmindedly stirring some lumpy oatmeal. She definitely wasn’t hungry, but her mom had left her a note on the kitchen table: Please eat something, Em. We love you.
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And as she lifted a spoonful of oatmeal toward her mouth, it hit her. She knew what felt wrong about that night. As Meg’s name kept drumming in her head, she remembered the last time she’d heard the name: When Chase was talking about his new crush object. She had two cousins, he’d said—Meg was one of them, Em remembered. And what was the other one’s name . . . it was at the tip of her tongue . . .
Her spoon clattered to the table as it flashed into her mind.
Ali. The other girl’s name was Ali. She’d met them both: Meg in the snow, and Ali on the train. It wasn’t a coincidence. She was sure of it.
In the cafeteria, at lunchtime, Em sat with a thin turkey sandwich at the table nearest to the garbage bins. The first couple of days back to school, she’d eaten in the library, hiding from Gabby’s hurt stares and trying to focus on her homework. Today, the library was reserved for Mr. Landon’s senior American litera-ture class. He’d stolen her sanctuary. So Em had decided to give the cafeteria a try.
Bad idea. Gabby sat at their usual table, right in the middle of things, conferring with Lauren about a new “suicide-aware-ness club” she wanted to start. Gabby didn’t even look in Em’s direction, and neither did Fiona or Lauren or anyone else in their friend circle; Gabby had made it clear Em was Out. Zach hadn’t come to school in days, but Em realized, with a bit of surprise, that while she wondered how he was coping with the death of his best friend, she didn’t really miss seeing him. The way he’d acted at the Feast didn’t inspire heartbreak. She won-249
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dered, though, if he’d show up to the basketball team’s pep rally, which was coming up in two days. He was one of Ascension’s best players—he had to be there.
Was this what the rest of her high school career was going to be like? No friends, no boyfriend, no idea how to explain anything that happened to her or to the people around her. If only she and JD had the same lunch period. He was in Honors Chem right now.
“I think Singer was gay,” someone said a little too loudly.
Em snapped to attention when she heard Chase’s name. She looked for its source. Two tables over, a bunch of soccer players were hunched toward one another. They had their lunches—
trays full of french fries and meatball subs—spread sloppily in front of them, and they took big bites as they talked, spewing crumbs with abandon. Like everyone else at Ascension, they were trading theories on Chase.
“What, you think he was scared to come out?” This, from a sophomore whose name, Em thought, was Charlie.
“Yeah, must be. I mean, those pictures of him—the paint and shit? And those poems? Total Brokeback Mountain.” That was stupid Sean Wagner talking. Emily felt her stomach twist in disgust. Why did he even exist? He contributed nothing to the world.
“Shut the hell up, man,” said Nick. “He’s dead. Don’t talk about him that way.”
Em put down her sandwich.
Another one spoke. “Did you hear that he was holding some weird flower when he jumped?”
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Em’s blood went to ice.
“Christ.” The boys all leaned away from one another slightly, as if even talking about flowers made them targets for ridicule.
“Really?”
“Yeah. A crazy red flower. It just goes to show, you don’t know anyone. Chase Singer, man. Who knows what that kid was up to? He had everything going for him . . . and now he’s dead.”
A red flower. A red flower. A red flower. Em fumbled to get the sticky Saran wrap back around her sandwich, trying to tamp down the crazy beating of her heart. The mayo smeared her fingers. She tried to tell herself, frantically, that the flower could mean anything—it could be coincidence; it could be a crazy rumor.
But deep down, she knew. A red flower. Just like the one she’d had pinned to her purse—the one that had appeared out of nowhere in her car the first time she hooked up with Zach; the one that had reappeared even after she’d tossed it onto the train tracks. As with the ribbon, she knew that there must be many red flowers sold throughout Maine. But these were more than just coincidences. She felt it. She needed to figure out what was going on. She stood up unsteadily. She had to get out of here.
Bang. Turning around, she slammed right into someone’s tray. Coca-Cola soaked through her shirt. She looked down at the stain and kept right on walking, fast. Freaked.
She practically ran down the hall, away from the cafeteria 251
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and then out of the building. In the parking lot, she wrapped her scarf more tightly around her neck, trying to figure out what to do. Where could she find answers? And then, as though someone had whispered the idea into her ear, she suddenly knew exactly where to start. She was skipping the rest of school and going to Chase’s house.
No one answered when Em knocked on the door to Chase’s trailer. Not that she expected anyone to be there. JD had told her—JD, who was suddenly more plugged into Ascension’s social network than she was—that right after the small memorial service, Chase’s mom had gone straight to her mother’s house in Bangor, more than two hours away. She was staying there indefinitely.
But Em was easily able to shimmy open a windowpane, reach her gloved hand around toward the lock, and slide open the trailer’s metal door. The door creaked as it swung open, revealing a dim interior.
Em took one step into the trailer, tentatively, calling out again. Just in case. No answer. She stepped inside, closing the door behind her. She uncoiled her scarf. It was surprisingly warm. She took off her gloves one finger at a time, trying to calm herself. The trailer was quiet—and in shambles. Chase’s mom had clearly left in a hurry. There were dishes in the sink, and the food still stuck to them had attracted a small colony of roaches. Em looked away, tears filling her eyes. She was here; she didn’t want to back out now. Paper was strewn on the coffee table next to a pile of crumpled tissues and a bottle of prescrip-252
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tion pills. Mixed among the chaos were bouquets of sympathy flowers, and the air smelled heavy with stuffy sweetness. No bloodred mystery flowers. But grief. Grief everywhere, practically pouring out of the walls and seeping into Em’s skin.
She had been to Chase’s house only once, on the day he fought with Zach, but it wasn’t hard to guess that his bedroom must be down the hall. It wasn’t exactly an expansive space. Em could see a full-sized bed with a floral comforter in the room at the end of the hallway, and next to it was the bathroom. There was only one other door.
In Chase’s bedroom, Patriots posters were taped to the wall and a handful of fake-gold trophies were lined up according to height on the dresser. Neat as a pin—almost eerily so. The weights flush against the wall. The bed made. It was hard to imagine Chase even being able to fit in that twin-sized bed. Em’s gaze fell onto Chase’s playbook, sitting square in the middle of his desk; she was surprised to feel her breath catch, her eyes water again, as she brushed her fingers across its cover. She felt the gravity of death—of sadness—sinking into her bones.
She walked over to the dresser, ran her fingers over the trophies. She inched open the top drawer of the bureau, slamming it shut when it revealed only a pile of plaid boxers. She looked at Chase’s small blue desk and raised her eyebrows when she saw a laptop sitting open on top of it, the screen dark, but the light in the corner blinking. Chase, too, must have left in a hurry. He hadn’t even bothered to turn off his computer.
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she was looking for. Maybe Chase did just jump off the Piss Pass, plain and simple.
A pile of papers sat next to the computer, and Em walked over to leaf through them. A math test, a biology handout, an old pep-rally flyer. Nothing, nothing. As she glanced over each page, she set it off to the side, on top of the laptop keyboard.
Bing! She must have pressed a key hard enough to wake up Chase’s computer from sleep mode. Em went to close the screen, but something caught her eye. Chase’s email was open—but it wasn’t the [email protected] that Em was used to seeing on mass email lists among her friends. This account was registered to AscensionSecretAdmirer, and aside from a few spam messages and newsletter updates, there was only one email address in the “From” column: [email protected]. Sasha B.? There was only one Sasha B. at Ascension—Sasha Bowlder.
Em’s eyebrows knitted together and she took a deep breath.
She tugged her hair back into a ponytail and sat down gingerly, her finger hovering over the mouse. Then she opened the most recent email in the list.
I can’t do this anymore, it read. You can’t give me what I want. I don’t want to get my heart broken and I’m giving up.
It was just one line, in response to a longer message from AscensionSecretAdmirer: Hey sexy, he’d written. Where have u been? I haven’t heard from you in a week. You have a new boyfriend or something? I thought things were cool between us.
Em’s heart sped into her throat as she clicked through the messages, her eyes blurring as she kept them on the glowing screen. She scrolled down to the bottom of the screen, reading 254
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from bottom to top. It was like she was climbing up through threads, picking apart the strands of a secret history.
He’d contacted her for the first time months ago. Said he had a crush on her but couldn’t tell her who he was. She’d been eager—embarrassingly so, even—at first. Up for maintaining the mystery, the charade. The first few emails were light and flirtatious. She’d asked: Do we have any classes together? He’d responded with a wink. That’s for me to know and you to find out, cutie. She’d gone as far as to send him a picture of herself wearing a mask—one of those masquerade-ball ones—and asking him to do the same. He resisted. They’d gravitated toward more serious topics after the first few exchanges. It was almost like they had more in common than Chase let on—to anyone.
You really understand me, Sasha, he’d written. Not like so many of these rich kids around here.
I am one of those rich kids, she’d said. But you see that there’s more to me than that. At the bottom of this email, there was a poem, and Emily recognized its words as one of the ones that had been posted to Ascension’s Facebook page: I know I’m not pretty, I know I’m plain, but you make me feel beautiful because we’re the same. She’d attached a photo to this email, too, an artsy, sepia-toned one of her staring into her computer’s webcam. Her bare shoulders were showing. Emily shivered; Sasha looked so vulnerable.
She confessed how lonely she was, how she didn’t understand why nobody—except Drea—liked her. What scares me, she said, is that if the cool kids wanted to be my friends again, I don’t know if I’d drop Drea.
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You would, Chase responded. That’s just how it works.
After two months of this, the secrecy had started to chafe.
Sasha wanted more. I really want to know who you are. I need to see you. Can we meet? Her tone got more desperate. She told him how she had started working out, hoping to be “hot for you when we finally get together.” Chase had pushed back. What’s the fun of meeting? Then all the mystery will be gone. The next time he’d emailed her, she’d sounded smaller somehow. I’m beginning to wonder if this is all in my head, she said. Then nothing, for a week, except for Chase’s emails to her. Hello? Hey, what happened to you? I’m starting to think you don’t like me any more . . . ;) Then the final email from Sasha, breaking it off. Coldly.
And then her photos and emails had showed up on Facebook. It was Chase. Chase had made Sasha trust him and then violated that trust.
Exactly as Ty had done to him.
Oh my god. Chase had died exactly the way Sasha almost had. The realization tumbled through her brain, pounding and threatening. Her arms tingled and her breath sped up. Chase.
Ty. Sasha. Their fates were almost mirror images. They’d both been exposed, although in different ways. What had Chase said that day in the old gym, the day he died? I’m beginning to think that people really do get what they deserve.
With tears pricking her eyes, Em backed out of Chase’s room and down the hall. She couldn’t get the image of the red flower out of her mind. If karma had come for Chase, she didn’t want to think what it would mean for her.
Fifteen minutes later Em had pulled over on the side of 256
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the road, trying to catch her breath. Her palms were sweating.
She was too scared for tears, too cold to shiver. Weird cousins. Death. Betrayals of trust. Vengeance that seemed perfectly planned. She didn’t know what to think about any of it, but Sasha was the missing link, the first domino, the scream that started the avalanche. None of this freaky stuff had been happening before Sasha’s suicide attempt. The key was with Sasha.
Em was sure of it.
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