She snapped her locker shut and spun the dial. “I just don’t.” She slipped away from Lauren and Evan without looking back over her shoulder. She didn’t need to look to know they were staring at her.
Brynna was out past the double doors and had cleared campus in less than fifteen minutes. Hawthorne High was situated on a huge expanse of rolling green hill bisected with paved paths the students were supposed to walk on but never did. There were bald patches of grass, mostly under the craggy cypress trees from years of kids hanging out, and the usual detritus that came from high school: crushed soda cans that never quite made it into recycling, wadded up McDonald’s wrappers under a poster of a fat owl saying “Give a hoot, don’t pollute” that was tacked to a metal trash can. Everything whirled by Brynna. She was walking fast but aimlessly, just needing to move her body—to feel her legs, to propel herself somehow. If she could walk, maybe she could leave everything behind. She crossed campus then turned and started again, walking until her legs ached. Sweat was rimming her hairline and breaking out on her upper lip when her phone rang. She glanced at the number on the screen and caught her breath. Butterflies turned into bat wings and stabbed at her stomach. It wasn’t the phone number that unnerved her—she didn’t recognize that—it was the area code. Six-two-one. Point Lobos.
With a shaking hand, Brynna slid a finger across the screen and pressed the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
There was nothing but static at first, then the high-pitched screech of a girl and a round of far-off laughter.
“Brynna?”
The breathy voice that answered her made Brynna’s stomach drop into her shoes.
“Erica?” Brynna’s voice was pleading. “Erica?”
“Drink this!”
There was a garbled response, and Brynna realized that the people on the phone weren’t talking to her. She heard their indistinct voices and the jostling of the phone as if it was in someone’s pocket. She was about to hang up, to chalk the thing up to a random butt dial, when she heard a voice—distinct, sharp.
“No, no, no, my turn!”
She knew the voice from somewhere—didn’t she?
Laughter. Something popping. Another voice.
“Okay then, go!”
It wasn’t Lauren or Darcy, but she knew that voice too. The first girl laughed then started up again.
“Okay.” A muffled, drunken snicker. “I dare you to take off all your clothes and jump, right now.”
Ice water shot through Brynna’s veins. She wanted to drop the phone, to run. But she was paralyzed, phone pressed to her ear.
“Where? What the hell are you talking about?”
“You. Take off your clothes. Walk your fine little butt to the edge and jump. Come on, Erica…”
The voice belonged to Brynna.
She strained to hear over the thundering sound of her blood as it pulsed in her ears. Every cell in her body was electric, moving so fast that Brynna felt like her skin would explode. Sweat broke out over her upper lip, dampening her palms, and her chest ached, begging her to breathe.
She remembered every second.
In her mind’s eye, she could see pictures of that night, of all of them—Erica, Brynna, Ella, Michael, and Jay, bare feet pressed in the sand as the fire crackled in front of them. Behind them, screams, laughter, and the soft music as the end-of-summer party went on. Erica was winding a stray piece of Lincoln-purple crepe paper around and around her hand. Michael kept hiccupping. Brynna leaned against him, breathing out the saturated sweetness of breath soaked with some kind of punch that made her eyes cross.
“So you want me to get buck naked and jump off the pier? First of all, the water is, like, eight degrees.”
Ella started to crow like a chicken.
“It’s August. The ocean is, like, sixty-eight degrees.”
There was a muffled, masculine voice, and Brynna remembered Michael nuzzling into her neck, saying something disgusting about sixty-nine. Holding the phone against her ear, she shivered and pulled back, thinking of his beer-soaked lips kissing the spot behind her ear. Then, the feeling was warm and sensual; now, just the thought sent ice water down her spine.
“Okay.” Brynna listened to her own voice sounding foreign on the phone. “No nakedness. In your clothes.”
Erica said something muffled, and Brynna’s heart started to speed up as memory filled in the gap.
“Just because you dare people to do stuff doesn’t mean they have to, Bryn. You don’t rule the world.”
She remembered the way she felt then, her body made lithe by the liquor, her skin hot from the fire, from Michael’s body heat.
“Prove it!” Brynna sang back to her friend.
Brynna took a few steps back on the lawn as if the scene was still in front of her. The chill that ran through her was gone, replaced by a searing heat that oozed into every pore of her body. She felt the fist knotting in her chest. She knew what came next.