“Sure,” he said sarcastically. “You’re perfectly sober. Sure.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and I shook off his hand and stood up on my own. I wobbled and tried to hide it. “Are you a friend of Karl’s or something?”
“You asked me that already,” he said.
Wait. I did?
“Tell me again,” I said. “Tell me again you didn’t do anything to her.” I was back in our first conversation, asking after Abby Sinclair, and it took him a few moments to get there himself, even though I was the one who’d so obviously been drinking.
“I didn’t. Do anything. To her,” he said.
We were off to the side of the house, away from the windows, like we meant to sneak over here for a reason. Did I?
Did I find Luke at some point and lead him out here? Did I do anything embarrassing? Did I say something stupid? Did he hurt Abby and all along I didn’t know it? Did anyone see us go out here? How many of those things did I say out loud?
There was a motion sensor and not a regular light, which I didn’t realize until it flicked off and dropped us into darkness. I couldn’t see the puff of breath trailing from his mouth, though I could feel it, since his face was so close to mine. He smelled the way I remember Abby remembering he smelled—or else it was the way he’d smelled when I made that visit to his house weeks before. Her memories were cutting into mine, lifting up out of nowhere and confusing me.
She thought I’d been ignoring her. And maybe I was. It was just that there were so many, and my head had been crowded up with them, like a smoky, dim room at this party, except my head was filled with girls. And also with myself— because I was a girl, too. I was 17 and maybe in danger, just like they were.
A flicker of shadowy movement caused me to look toward the woods.
And there she was, the dark shape of her at least, shaking her head no.
“No?” I said aloud.
Luke said something I didn’t catch, and a voice in my head said, It wasn’t him.
“Are you sure?” I asked to the trees.
Yes, she answered sadly. Not him.
Not him.
She meant he hadn’t hurt her, not that I ever really thought he did—besides how she’d gotten her heart broken. Hearing her made me know they were outside with me now. All of them.
I could see a girl. Then two more girls. Then another. Another. Girls I recognized, and some girls I didn’t.
There were so many girls I had yet to meet.
The lost girls’ eyes glowed, fire-lit, from the sweep of pine trees nearby.
How far were we from where Abby went missing? It was close, I realized.
So close.
If Luke could see them there, he’d be scared the way I should have been scared. I squinted and tried to picture the girls as he would: the one girl with the glittering shards of broken windshield encrusted into her cheeks; the girl with the frost-blue lips; the girl soaked through her clothes, dripping from an absent rain. Then the two girls melded together as if their bodies met in the most intimate tissue-and sinew-filled spaces that Siamese twins share, shoulder muscle growing into lungs and liver, their sides fused hip to hip.
These two girls were motioning to get my attention, waving at me to stop, waving at me to get away from him, to get in my van and get away. I should have listened, but what struck me was how it looked like they had three hands.
Two individual hands of their own, and the third hand, the one they shared, far larger than the other two.
“What are you looking at? What’s over there?” Luke asked.
“Nobody,” I said.