Ben dropped his hands. Its face—her face—was perfect and intact and hard, beautiful in the way people had said Francesca Cillo was beautiful. She loomed larger, and Ben forced himself to still. “My father had nothing to do with this. My father had the right idea, keeping us away from all of you. The minute we let you in you destroyed us.”
Ben struggled to sit up. “You’re right. I was as bad as the rest of them. Please, just let me wake up.” Ben closed his eyes and reopened them. She was still there, an angry shimmer. The air carried a new, sonic buzz, loud and getting louder. It was like the sound of june bugs; impossible in November. Francesca pointed her chin at the frigid water. “Go on. She wants you to find it. She wants you to see the truth.”
The image fragmented into glints, and then there were only the trees that lined the clearing. Ben felt the charge in the air dissipate, and a chill followed. Beyond, a siren rang in the distance. Then the dogs. It would take them exactly twenty-eight minutes to reach the clearing, if they didn’t stop to see the bike, and if they weren’t hauling dredging equipment and diving gear.
Ben stood at the ledge’s tip and looked down into the freezing, molasses-colored water. He was going to have to jump.
Logistics flooded Ben’s mind. According to Kyle, when the girls went missing, the ambulances had come in on the other side of the quarry, the only way passable by emergency vehicles, and the divers, rather than jumping, made their way down to the lowest ledge on the opposite side and basically waded in from the shallows.
He would be jumping right into his rescuers’ arms. Unless he was quick.
His head pounded, blood or panic overloading his brain. The dark quarry water terrified him. But once the police found him—and they would find him—he might never get here again. And not reading Mira’s words was more terrifying than any poison.
Ben emptied his sagging pockets: phone, pills, trowel. He exhaled hard and long, then filled his chest with night air. Flexed and rose up on his toes, and lifted his arms to the sky. Pushed away from the rock. And dove.
Flying through the air, Ben shut his eyes against the g-force rush around him, streaming wet granite veined with glitter. And then he hit the surface like a blade, and his ears fuzzed over in an underwater vacuum-hush. His outstretched hands touched something hard—quarry trash, plant matter, a skeleton—and he pulled away, panicked, arms and legs flailing, pushing his way to the top, where the moon rippled like a beacon. He swam for it.
In an explosion, Ben broke water. The air seared his lungs. For a while, he only bobbed and gulped oxygen. In the distance, he heard a demented ambulance siren, warped by the quarry acoustics or some tweaking of his own inner ear. He swam for the wall, kicking hard, still gasping, his arms pulling him along to the scooped base rock where he had begun his ascent that summer day past Connie to Mira, shame turning into exhilaration with the touch of her falling hair. He boosted himself out of the water and shivered uncontrollably in the hard moonlight. The siren whine again. Ben moved like an animal, on all fours, his nose close to the ground examining every spot of the low landing ledge, for this was the only place left. One rock seemed deliberately placed. He rolled it aside and felt the depression in which it had sat. His fingers grazed something man-made, plastic and paper, and he held the object up to the moonlight. He knew the orange EpiPen was Connie’s before he read the typed prescription that said Connie Villela on the wrap-around label. Covering the prescription was a note secured by a purple ribbon. He sat upright and placed the pen in the middle of his folded legs. He tugged off the ribbon and unfurled the note.
Francesca thought she was touched by God.
But we couldn’t prove it. And because of that, Connie died.
We didn’t plan for Connie’s heart to stop forever. We didn’t plan for our hearts to be broken.
Here’s what we learned: when you touch things, they can break.
MARCH 2016
The sludge of mud and pine needles gave way to baked earth as they entered the clearing where the slope flattened before dropping off. Everyone called it the field, but it looked more like a scorched battleground. Oak saplings stretched a few feet toward the sun, shedding brown leaves in the slight breeze. Patches of shaggy pines grew low, dwarfed by species or conditions or both. The girls paused to rest, smoke blooming from their mouths. Mira smelled moisture locked in rock, and it smelled clean, not like the other smell that sometimes rose from the quarry lake, like rotten eggs, a hot smell that would be yellow, were it visible. Mira wondered if it smelled better because it was nearly spring, and she had never been to the quarry any time but summer, and never alone.
Francesca’s hair had escaped her ponytail and it fell wild across her shoulders. She raised her arms to the sky.
“Do you feel as amazing as I feel?” she called.
Mira opened her mouth to speak, but it was Connie’s voice that came.
“I feel free!” Connie said, twirling, her face turned to the darkening sky. Connie giggled, leaning backward and spinning in circles. Mira turned, realizing Francesca had stepped behind her. She had ditched her coat, and her clavicle rose and fell above the collar of her blouse. “We’ve never come here alone before,” Francesca breathed. “It feels good. Don’t you think so, Mira?”
Mira said nothing.
Francesca stepped closer, the side of her white hand brushing Mira’s cheek. Mira stiffened.
“Keep your faith in me, sister,” she said.
Mira stepped back. A rush of wind tumbled toward them from the city below, and Connie crushed against Mira and giggled while Francesca stood tall, her hair blowing about, framing her face like a dark halo. Francesca feels everything too much, Mira thought, and pulled her own jacket tight around her.
The afternoon grew purple.
“It’s getting late,” Mira whispered. Her voice was hoarse and hot in her throat. No one seemed to hear her, and Mira wondered if she’d said it aloud.
Francesca clapped. “Time to play! Hide-and-go-seek tag. I’m it!”
Mira touched her throat. Her memories of hide-and-go-seek tag involved the neighborhood boys, sweaty and flushed, trying to corner and kiss them. Eventually she and Francesca had refused to play, though Connie was always up for a game. The only boy who hadn’t tried was Ben. He’d found Mira hiding behind the fence door with the black metal latch that, propped open by thick grass, formed a perfect pie wedge in which to hide. Ben had bounded up, thrown the door shut with a click, and crouched, staring at her, panting. He was supposed to yell “It!” Instead, he turned and ran away, toward Piggy wedged beneath the carriage of his Winnebago.
Francesca covered her eyes. “One, two, three, four, five…”
The girls shrieked and ran.
“Mira!” Connie stabbed a finger toward a thatch of pines. “Hide!”
Francesca flicked open one eye. “Nineteen, twenty!”
Mira thought: run. She darted for the scrub and crouched behind its thickest parts, still visible to Francesca. Connie lay on her side behind an oak log.