I’m at the edge of the world looking for my brother.
The wind’s pummeling me, the salty spray nicking my hot face, the ocean below drumming as ferociously in my head as out of it. Steeped in sweat from the sprint up the hill and with the full moon showering down so much light it could be daytime, I look up at Devil’s Drop and Dead Man’s Dive and see that both ledges are deserted. I thank Clark Gable profusely, catch my breath, and then even though she said she had to leave, I text Heather, then Noah again, trying to convince myself he’s come to his senses. I can’t.
I have a bad feeling.
I acted too late.
I turn around and head into the mayhem. In all directions, loud partying brigades from public and private high schools, from Lost Cove U., are gathered around kegs, bonfires, picnic tables, drum circles, car hoods. Every kind of music is blaring out of every kind of car.
Welcome to The Spot on a turbo-moonlit Saturday night.
I recognize no one until I return to the far side of the parking lot and spot Franklyn Fry, resident douchebag of epic proportions, with some older Hideaway surfers, all of them at least a year out of high school by now. Zephyr’s crew. They’re sitting on the flatbed of Franklyn’s truck, illuminated eerily in the headlights like jack-o’-lanterns.
At least Zephyr’s sun-blaze of long straggly surfer hair is nowhere in sight.
I want to get my invisibility sweatshirt and skullcap out of my bag and put them on. But I don’t. I want to believe the red ribbon around my wrist will keep me safe always. But it won’t. I want to play How Would You Rather Die? instead of figuring out how to live. But I can’t. I’m over being a coward. I’m sick of being on pause, of being buried and hidden, of being petrified, in both senses of the word.
I don’t want to imagine meadows, I want to run through them.
I approach the enemy. Franklyn Fry and I have bad blood.
My strategy is to offer no greeting and ask him calmly and politely if he’s seen Noah.
His strategy is to sing the opening lyrics of “Hey Jude”—why didn’t my parents think of this when they named me?—then to eye me slowly, stickily, up and down, down and up, making sure not to miss an inch before pit-spotting at my breasts. Make no mistake, there are advantages to an invisibility uniform. “Slumming it?” he says directly to my chest, then takes a slug of beer, wiping his mouth sloppily with the back of his hand. Noah was right; he looks exactly like a hippopotamus. “Come to apologize? Taken you long enough.”
Apologize? He’s got to be kidding.
“Have you seen my brother?” I repeat, louder this time, articulating every syllable, like he doesn’t speak the language.
“He took off,” a voice says from behind me, immediately silencing all music, all chatter, the wind and the sea. The same parched sandpapery voice that at one time made me melt into my surfboard. Michael Ravens, aka Zephyr, is standing behind me.
At least Noah decided against jumping, I tell myself, and then I turn around.
It’s been a very long time. The taillights from Franklyn’s truck are in Zephyr’s eyes and his hand’s cupped over them like a visor. Good. I don’t want to see his narrow green hawk eyes, see them enough in my mind.
This is what happened right after I lost my virginity to him two years ago: I sat up, pulled my knees to my chest, and gasped at the salty air as quietly as possible. I thought of my mother. Her disappointment blooming inside me like a black flower. Tears burned my eyes. I forbade them to fall and they didn’t. I was caked in sand. Zephyr handed me my bikini bottoms. It occurred to me to shove them down his throat. I saw a used condom dotted with blood splayed on a rock. That’s me, I thought: disgusting. I didn’t even know he’d put it on. I hadn’t even thought about condoms! Everything in my stomach was rising up, but I forbade that too. I put on my bathing suit, tried to hide the shaking as I did. Zephyr smiled at me like everything was fine. Like everything that had just happened was FINE! I smiled back like everything was. Does he know how old I am? I remember thinking. I remember thinking he must’ve forgot.
Franklyn saw Zephyr and me walking up the beach after. It had started to rain softly. I wished I was in my wetsuit, a thousand wetsuits. Zephyr’s arm was a lead weight on my shoulders, pushing me down into the sand. The night before, at the party he took me to, he kept telling everyone what an awesome surfer I was and how I’d been known not to jump but dive off Devil’s Drop. He kept saying I was: such a badass, and I’d felt like one.
That had been less than twenty-four hours earlier.
Somehow Franklyn knew what we’d done. When we reached him, he took my arm and whispered in my ear so Zephyr couldn’t hear: “Now it’s my turn,” he said. “Then Buzzy, then Mike, then Ryder, right? That’s how it works, just so you know. You don’t think Zeph actually likes you, do you?” That’s exactly what I’d thought. I had to wipe Franklyn’s words off my ear because they were covered in spit, and after I did that, I spun out of his grip, hollering, “No!” finally finding the godforsaken word, way too late, and in front of everyone, I kneed Franklyn Fry in the balls, hard, like Dad taught me in case of an emergency.
Then the mad dash home, with tears biting my cheeks, my skin crawling, my stomach in shambles, heading straight for Mom. I’d made the biggest mistake of my life.
I needed my mother.
I needed my mother.
There’s been an accident, that’s what Dad told me the moment I burst into the house.
There’d been an accident.
That’s when I threw my hands over Noah’s ears.
Dad took them off and held them in his.
So even as the police officer told us these unimaginable, world-breaking things, I was still crawling around in the wrongness of what I’d just done. It was caked along with sand in every pore of my body. The horrible wrong scent of it was still in my hair, on my skin, inside my nose, so every inhalation carried it deeper inside me. For weeks afterward, no matter how many times I showered, no matter how hard I scrubbed, no matter what kind of soap I used—I tried lavender and grapefruit and honeysuckle and rose—I couldn’t get it off me, couldn’t get Zephyr off me. Once, I went to a department store and used every single tester perfume on the counter, but it was still there. It’s always there. It’s still there. The smell of that afternoon with Zephyr, the smell of my mother’s death, one and the same.
Zephyr steps out of the glare of Franklyn’s headlights. This is how I think of him: like his namesake, the raven, a harbinger of death and doom. He’s a human hex, a tall blond column of darkness. Zephyr Ravens is an eclipse.
“So Noah went home?” I ask. “How long ago?”
He shakes his head. “No. Not home. He took off up there, Jude.” He points to the very top of the bluff to a ledge that doesn’t even have a name, because who would dare it? The hang-gliders use it occasionally, but that’s it. It’s too high to jump, probably double Dead Man’s, and below it there’s a shelf that juts out so if you don’t leap far enough and clear it, you slam into that before you ever hit water. I’ve only heard of one kid who’s ever jumped it. He didn’t make it.
My internal organs are failing, falling, one by one.
Zephyr says, “Got a text. They’re playing some drinking game. Loser jumps and apparently your brother’s losing on purpose. I was heading up there to try and stop it.”
Next thing, I’m diving through the crowd, knocking over drinks, people, not caring about anything except getting to the cliff path, the quickest way up the bluff. I hear Grandma’s voice blowing like wind at my back. She’s right behind me on the trail. Branches are cracking, her heavy footsteps hitting the path moments after mine, then I remember she doesn’t have footsteps. I stop and Zephyr barrels into me, grabbing my shoulders so I don’t careen face forward into the ground.
“Jesus,” I say, jumping quickly out of his grip, away from the smell of him, again so close.
“Oh man, sorry.”
“Stop following me, Zephyr. Go back, please.” I sound as desperate as I feel. The last thing I need in this moment is him.
“I’m on this trail every day. I know it so—”
“Like I don’t.”
“You’re going to need help.”
This is true. However, not from him. Anyone but him. Except it’s too late, he’s already brushed past me and is forging ahead into the moonlit dark.
After Mom died, he came over a few times, tried to get me back on my board, but the ocean had dried up as far as I was concerned. He also tried to be with me again in the guise of comforting me. Two words: as if. And not just him. So did Fry and Ryder and Buzzy and the rest of them, but not in the guise of anything except harassment. Incessantly. They’d all become jerks overnight, especially Franklyn, who was pissed and posted obscene things about me on the Hideaway message board and graffitied Slutever Sweetwine in the beach bathroom, rewriting it every time someone—Noah?—crossed it out.
Do you really want to be that girl? Mom had asked me over and over that summer and fall as my skirts got shorter, my heels higher, my lipstick darker, my heart angrier and angrier at her. Do you really want to be that girl? she asked me the night before she died—the last words she ever said to me—when she saw what I was wearing to go to the party with Zephyr (not that she knew I was going to a party with Zephyr).
Then she was dead and I was really and truly that girl.
Zephyr’s setting a fast pace. My breath’s tumbling around in my chest as we climb and climb and climb in silence.
Until he says, “I still got his back like I promised you.”
Once, long before we did what we did, I asked Zephyr to look out for Noah. Hideaway Hill can be very Lord of the Flies and in my seventh-grade mind, Zephyr was like the sheriff, so I asked for his help.
“Got your back too, Jude.”
I ignore this, then can’t. The words come out shrill and accusatory, sharp as darts. “I was too young!”
I think I hear him suck in air, but it’s hard to know because of the waves, loud and relentless, crashing into the rocks, eroding the continent.
As am I, kicking up dirt, kicking the shit out of the continent, driving my feet into the ground with every step. I was in eighth grade, he in eleventh—a whole year older than I even am now. Not that he should treat any girl at any age like that, like a dishrag. And then in the lightning bolt to the head kind of way, it occurs to me that Zephyr Ravens is not a harbinger of anything at all. He’s not bad luck—he’s a terminal burnout dimwit loser asshole, offense intended.
And what we did didn’t cause bad luck either—it caused endless inner-ick and regret and anger and—
I spit on him. Not metaphorically. I hit his jacket, his ass, then bean one right in the back of his mongrel head. That one he feels, but thinks it’s some kind of bug he can shoo off with his hand. I nail him again. He turns around.
“What the—? Are you spitting at me?” he asks, incredulous, his fingers in his hair.
“Don’t do it again,” I say. “To anyone.”
“Jude, I always thought you—”
“I don’t care what you thought then or what you think now,” I say. “Just don’t do it again.”
I blow past him and double our speed. Now I feel like a badass, thank you very much.
Maybe Mom was wrong about that girl after all. Because that girl spits on guys who treat her badly. Maybe it’s that girl who’s been missing. Maybe it’s that girl breaking her way out of that rock at Guillermo’s. Maybe it’s that girl who can see it’s not my fault that a car with my mother in it lost control no matter what I did with this jerkoff beforehand. I didn’t bring the bad luck to us, no matter how much it felt that way. It brought itself. It brings itself.
And maybe it’s that girl who’s now brave enough to admit to Noah what I did.
If he doesn’t die first.
As we get closer to the ledge, I begin to hear something strange. At first I think it’s the wind howling spookily in the trees, then realize it’s a human sound. Singing maybe? Or chanting? A moment later I realize what’s being chanted is my last name and my heart catapults out of my body. I think Zephyr realizes it at the same moment because we’ve both broken into a sprint.
Sweetwine, Sweetwine, Sweetwine.
Please, please, please, I think as we crest the last hill and reach the flat sandy area, where a bunch of people are in a semicircle like they’re at a sporting event. Zephyr and I elbow our way through, parting the curtain of bodies, until we have a front-row seat for the suicidal game that’s being played. On one side of a raging bonfire is a noodly guy with a bottle of tequila in his hand, swaying back and forth like a reed. He’s about twenty feet from the edge of the cliff. On the other side of the fire is Noah, ten feet from the edge, the crowd favorite to end his life. A half-empty bottle is on its side at his feet. He has his arms out like wings and is turning around and around, the wind rippling his clothes, the glow of the fire lighting him up like a phoenix.
I can feel his desire to jump as if it were in my own body.
A kid on a rock nearby shouts, “Okay, Round Five! Let’s roll!” He’s the master of ceremonies, and, it appears, as drunk as the contestants.
“You grab Noah,” Zephyr says, his voice all business now. At least he’s good for something. “I’ll get Jared. They’re so wasted, it’ll be easy.”
“On three,” I say.
We plunge forward, emerging in the center of the circle. From on top of the rock, the announcer slurs, “Hey, there appears to be some kind of interruption in The Death Match.”
My rage is meteoric. “Sorry to ruin the show,” I shout up at him. “But I have a really great idea. Next time why don’t you have your brother jump dead drunk off this cliff instead of mine?” Oh wow. That girl has many uses. I think I underutilized her in the past. I will not make that mistake again.
I grab Noah’s arm, hard, expecting a fight, but he melts into me, saying, “Hey, don’t cry. I wasn’t gonna jump.” Am I crying?
“I don’t believe you,” I say, looking into the open blooming face of the old Noah. So much love is filling my chest, it may explode.
“You’re right,” he laughs, then hiccups. “I’m totally gonna jump. Sorry, Jude.”
In a sudden swift movement that seems impossible considering how drunk he is, he spins out of my arms, casting me backward in slow, torturous motion. “No!” I reach for him as he dashes to the edge, raising his arms again.
It’s the last image I see before my head hits the ground and the crowd collectively gasps.