“You’re going hard tonight.” Brent’s voice meanders through my fog. “I like it.”
“I like it,” I repeat, and laugh. I’m fucked up. Too far gone to hide it. I lean against Brent’s chest. He’s so solid and warm. He is comfortable. Brent tilts my chin back toward his to ask me something; and then we are leaning into each other. Kissing. But I’m too drunk to know whether I like it or not.
I pull away. Brent’s eyes hold a look I can’t read.
“Isn’t this funny?” I ask. “We’re kissing. I thought we kissed in high school, and this whole time I haven’t been sure, and we’re kissing now, and I don’t even know whether I made it up.”
“I wanted to. I wanted so badly to kiss you in high school,” Brent whispers. Does this mean he did or he didn’t?
My mind slides to Dave Condor, his mouth hot on my skin…
Dark. Light. Dark. Light.
Becky Sarinelli’s thighs, blazing in the glare of the flash.
The laughter of the crowd in the stands. Her photo fluttering up toward me.
Then:
The faces around the fire are no longer familiar: they are huge, bloated like balloons. Brent’s voice is somewhere in the background, talking incessantly. He won’t be quiet.
I’m sleeping. This is a dream. I lie down, but the ground won’t stop moving. It feels as if I’m on a boat. I try to open my eyes.
“You’re okay,” says Brent’s voice. “You’re okay.” His voice is a separate thing. Listening to it makes me feel tired. And sleepy.
No. Wait. Something is wrong.
I try to sit up. Time is thick and slow, like a clear gel. I wonder if I’ve been drugged, but the idea itself feels unreal, like something I’ve only dreamed. Then I remember: the Valium, and more drinks than I can count. I never even checked to see how much was in each pill.
The beach is empty. The bonfire has vanished. Not burned out—vanished. There is no trace of it on the beach, no mound of charred logs, no smoke.
And then: a scream. I look around. There’s a dark shape on the water. A rowboat. I know that voice.
Kaycee.
I stumble to my feet. My head feels like a bowling ball about to roll off my neck.
She’s under, she’s under.
She won’t stay down.
Flashlight beams crisscross the water and I see Kaycee, her beautiful hair fanned out over the water, her mouth distorted in a scream.
No. Wait. Not Kaycee. Kaycee ran away.
But someone is in the water. A girl. No—more than one girl. One of them is screaming for help…
I try and shout but I can’t. My vision splits and re-forms like a kaleidoscope.
We have to make sure…
She’s not breathing…
We have to make sure she’s not breathing…
Confusion and horror war within me. I sway on my feet. My arms and legs feel leaden. I try and shout but my voice splinters through my skull. I’m on my knees again.
The girl’s screams echo over the reservoir. She’s going to drown.
They’re going to drown her.
Darkness bubbles up around me, and when I open my mouth to scream again, a wet terror rushes into my lungs like water, and pulls me under.
Chapter Fourteen
Sleep is a heavy blanket I peel back slowly, climbing out beneath a suffocating fog. I stay like that for a moment, suspended between sleeping and waking. For a second, I don’t know where I am. Everything is unfamiliar, down to the suitcase spilling its guts in the corner.
I sit up and a raging headache comes to life; my body is stiff, my heart is palpitating, my mouth feels like cotton, and I’m so nauseous I have to close my eyes and wait for the room to stop swinging. I’ve been hungover before but this feels different: like the hangover is everywhere, in my skin, even.
Finally, the world clicks into place: the suitcase is mine, the stained carpet and wobbly furniture redraw themselves into the silhouette of my rental house. Sun slants hard through the windows—it must be ten or later. My feet are killing me; they’re bleeding. I must have cut them on something, maybe gravel or broken glass. Sweeps of red in the sheets show me running in my sleep.
I try to climb back through the hours, retrace my moves, but all I get is a kind of panic that overwhelms my memories. What happened?
Think.
My shirt is wrinkled, and damp, and smells like sweat. My jeans—the same ones I wore last night—pinch in a thousand places and are caked in dirt and sand. My boots are gone. Next to the bed is a pair of dirty pink flats that I don’t recognize.
Think. Breathe. Try to remember.
A jump cut; Brent cradling my foot in his lap, asking if it hurts, and splinters of broken beer bottles glowing emerald in a dying fire.
The beach. The bonfire. Did Brent take me home last night?
A sudden punch of nausea, and I hobble into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet in time, to throw up mostly bile. I feel a little better, but just a little and it’s fleeting. It was the Valium that did it—that, and drinking too quickly, continuing to drink even after things turned watery and warped.
Why did I do that? I’ve never been big on pills, not since a flirtation with Adderall in my first year at CEAW that landed me in therapy and nearly lost me the job. Still, I’ve taken Valium before, but it never worked like it did last night: like a saw to the brain, cutting out everything important.
Why can’t I remember?
Think.
The shower water runs freezing at first while I strip down to my underwear, throwing my dirty clothes in a ball on the floor. I gasp in the cold, and the shock dislodges another memory: Brent’s lips, cold and mossy-tasting, like the reservoir. Shouting.
Hold her down. Hold her down. I’m pinning her wrists…
No. That can’t be right. That’s an old memory—a memory of my father trying to get my mother to swallow the pills she was refusing. Hold her, he told me. Hold her down. I grabbed her wrists and felt all the way down to her bones, as he forced open her jaw, shoved his fingers down her throat so far she couldn’t do anything but swallow.
I scrub hard with soap everywhere—in between my toes, under my fingernails, between my legs. I shampoo my hair, and rinse, and shampoo again.
Still, the anxiety and panic stay.
I turn the water as cold as it will go, close my eyes, and stand shivering as long as I can bear it. Images bob like ice cubes to the surface: the lullaby sway of a boat on the water; someone saying, “You shouldn’t have come,” beer bottles arcing into the water, hurled by hands that belong to no one I can see.
No. Someone is definitely screaming. No. Stop. No.
—
Saturday. One P.M.