“My dad told me what happened. That a girl, about my age, jumped off the pier and didn’t come back up. He told me that girl did it with a friend but she survived.” Darcy’s eyes flashed with something, and Brynna didn’t know if she should feel relieved that someone knew her secret or terrified that someone was going to call her a murderer.
“I didn’t recognize you at first. You changed your hair color and your cut.” Darcy absently brushed her fingers through her own thin blond hair. “And I knew I recognized you but I just couldn’t place you. Until today.”
Brynna’s saliva soured and she swallowed it down, her stomach feeling hollow from when they pumped it and desperately achy. If she had the strength—and wasn’t hooked up to all the buzzing, beeping machines—she would run out of the room, straight past Darcy and her parents pointing fingers at each other, straight back to the pier at Point Lobos. She would crash into the water and welcome the riptide when its fingers wrapped around her and pulled her under, tumbling her along in a pitch-black abyss.
“You said her name.” Darcy’s eyes looked dreamy. “Erica, right? It was Erica.”
Everything inside of Brynna was pulsing, moving, throbbing. She thought about the tweet, about Erica in the coffeehouse. Could Darcy be responsible?
“You jumped in without a second thought, thinking I was her.”
“I—I—”
“You must have really loved her. Erica.”
“I did. I do. She’s my best friend.”
“So why did you come here?”
Brynna’s blood pressure stared to come down. She started to feel a modicum of calm as Darcy sat in the visitor’s chair by Brynna’s bedside.
Brynna licked her lips, pressing her top teeth against her bottom lip. “My parents wanted me to leave. I got—I was—it was really hard for me after Erica.” Her eyes flicked to Darcy’s, trying to read them, but Darcy’s still held that glossy, dreamy look. “It wasn’t like I wanted to go.”
Darcy dragged her long, elegant fingers up the length of the chair’s armrest, her head cocked as she listened to Brynna.
“It must have been hard for you.”
“Yeah.”
“Leaving her behind like that.”
Brynna’s attention snapped like a broken rubber band. “What did you say?”
“Knock knock!” The overly cheery nurse poked her head through Brynna’s door a millisecond after she knocked. “Visiting hours are over, honey,” she said to Darcy.
Darcy hopped up while Brynna tried to process the last fifteen seconds. “What do you mean by—”
But Darcy had already left with a halfhearted good-bye while the nurse poked around Brynna, trying to fluff up her pillow. When the nurse shut the door, Brynna was left with the faint smell of the miniature rose and Darcy’s last words turning over and over in her mind: “It must have been hard for you…leaving her behind like that.”
???
Four days passed uneventfully, but Brynna still found it hard to breathe. She wanted to think that “Erica” had gotten tired of her or had moved on to someone else, but she couldn’t quite believe that. Her parents were keeping a tight leash on her, dropping her at school, picking her up the minute the bell rang, and surreptitiously sniffing at her hair and clothing for telltale cigarette smoke or general drug odor when they thought she wasn’t paying attention. She had to present her backpack and purse upon coming and going and grit her teeth while her father pawed through it, his own breath a noxious combination of smoky scotch and Crest that she wasn’t supposed to notice.
On the fifth day, Brynna dumped her backpack at the usual checkpoint, but her parents still circled around her like nervous sharks, unsure if they were predator or prey.
“What?” Brynna asked, her head snapping first to her father then her mother.
“Come into the living room, please.” Her mother sounded strangely formal and even seemed to walk with a more careful step. Brynna looked over her shoulder as her father followed behind.
“What’s going on?”
Her mother stepped aside with what would have been a tah-dah! if the item on the table were something that Brynna should have been excited about. But all it did was make her stomach sink and resigned her to knowing that no matter what she did, no matter what was happening, she would always be a drug addict and her parents would never stop second-guessing, never stop wondering how they could have protected her better.
“You’re giving me a drug test?”
Her father edged in front of Brynna and started yanking open the little cardboard box on the kitchen table. He turned and presented her the “sample” cup, and Brynna shrank back, remembering those first humiliating days at Woodbriar Rehabilitation Center.