“What do you think you’d do?” she asked. “At school?”
“I can’t imagine it. Like I hear people saying stuff about getting back to normal, but I don’t have a normal. Or whatever my normal was blew up and got decimated into tiny pieces. So.”
Avery’s ball leaped over the canyon, practically shimmering from the lights lighting the course, but then it hit the rock border of the hole too hard and bounced back. “No, no, no,” she said. “Slow down.”
And off toward Frozen Slushy Falls the black ball went.
Lucas gave chase, but it was too fast—gone, bouncing down the rocky falls and landing in the pool below with a ploop.
“Black ball, I hardly knew ye,” she said.
Lucas laughed and said, “You’re funny.”
“It’s a coping mechanism,” she said.
“Does it work?”
“Most of the time, yeah.” She nudged him. “You should try it.”
They stood there—the air still dense with heat—and she thought to say, “I broke up with my boyfriend yesterday.”
He looked up, nodded. “Didn’t know you had one.”
She’d been leaning on a fence and now pushed off. “Well, now I don’t.”
She nodded toward the front desk. “So do I go get another ball or not?”
“Do you have anything better to do?”
Nothing she could think of that she could tell him.
“Friend” is a horrible cover story.
She beat him in the end.
By a lot.
Scarlett
They had wanted to spend the afternoon on the beach. It was what you did when you lived in a beach town and had nothing else to do. And it was a decent way to kill time while waiting for a body to be identified.
But they had had to go shopping first.
For swimsuits.
Scarlett had stood in the fitting room, staring at her body for a long minute in between two suits she was trying on.
She still felt like a stranger to herself in some ways.
These are my hands.
These are my breasts.
My breasts are sore.
After she picked a suit—simple, navy—she went back out to pay. Kristen had chosen a black bikini and on their way out of the store, Scarlett said, “Have you gotten your period?”
Kristen had grabbed her breasts. “No, but I feel like it’s coming.”
“Me, too.”
So they’d gone to a drugstore, and after that they were hungry, so they’d eaten—late—and then they’d gone back to Scarlett’s house and found one of the old Leaving movies on some cable channel and couldn’t resist. It was as bad as Tammy had said.
Finally, pretty confident they hadn’t spent their lives in underground bunkers controlled by a madman with a tattooed face, they changed into their new suits and hit the beach. It was pretty much evening.
Kristen had brought magazines, so Scarlett had gone back up to the house for a book—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
But in the end, she didn’t feel like reading.
She felt like staring at the water.
She still hadn’t seen a dolphin, and it was starting to annoy her.
Kristen said, “I think I had a breakthrough with the hypnotist last night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I haven’t known how to bring it up all day. But we were talking about emotions. Could I remember a moment when I was feeling sad? Or afraid? Could I describe where I was and who I was with when I was feeling each of those things?”
“Okay,” Scarlett said.
“I talked about you.”
“When you were feeling which emotion?”
“Betrayed. Sad.”
/
/
/
/
“Are you in love with Lucas?” Scarlett asked, not feeling too worried about the answer one way or the other.
Just wanting facts.
“I highly doubt it,” Kristen said.
“I think I am.” Felt weird to say it. “Or was.” More accurate. “Do you think it’s possible we were in some kind of . . .”
Kristen snorted. “Love triangle?”
“I guess?”
Scarlett said, “Do you not like me because maybe I was with him when you wanted to be?”
“Maybe.”
She had the initials carved into the pier.
And the guard’s memory of her and Lucas.
But anyone could have carved those; the guard could be wrong.
What actual proof did she have that they’d been together in ways they weren’t all together?
“This might sound weird,” she said, “but do you skip the bottom step when you’re going down a set of stairs?”
“I don’t think so,” Kristen said. “Why are you asking me that?”
“I think he and I used to sneak out or something. We both keep skipping a last step. Like maybe there was a noisy staircase where we were or something? I don’t know.”
“I heard about your penny, and someone recognized you?” Kristen flipped a page in the magazine she wasn’t really reading.
“It was a crazy feeling.” Everything about the guard’s face—his stained teeth, his unruly brows—was now etched in her mind. She’d felt the spark of a new, amazing feeling when his eyes showed recognition of who she actually was. She was not just some missing child, newly returned, not some walking headline.