Later, as the drug’s effects began to fade, Cally climbed onto the narrow redwood railing of the deck. Stood shaking, winged her arms. The rain slowed to a patter along her naked arms, but she didn’t feel the cold. In fact she felt a warmth that radiated from inside, and as her friends cheered and hooted below, she began to walk the rail. On one side was the safety of the deck, and on the other, nothing: canyon that yawned into the black mass of redwood trees, smashed tracks of deer, the creek whispering over stones and dirt and chokes of weeds below. A strange thought took hold: the whole creek was moving, not just the water on top but the water beneath and the fish and the pebbles and sediment and dirt. All of it was moving, all the time, and never stopped. This thought distressed her; she wasn’t sure why. There was something unrelenting, cruel, in the water itself. How it could break a person’s bones, or slide inside and drown the lungs. How soft it sounded. How hard it was.
Cally stood on tiptoe and teetered left and right, shifting her weight, pulling herself up again. To her friends on the deck, it was a game. They believed that she was like them, careless and brave. To her it was a thrill to stare down the canyon, to know that if she were to fall into it, no one would think that she’d jumped. They’d consider it an accident, a tilting of her body into blackness. It was a joy to think of it, a relief to think of it. A relief to think it could all be over in an instant, that she might fly from her guilt and evaporate to nothing, and no one would blame her.
Arms extended, Cally pirouetted on the slick and narrow beam. Across her field of vision swept darkness from the canyon and light from the house. She closed her eyes and listened to the whooping of her friends. Wavered once but held her center. This was it, she felt: the time to let go. She took a breath—air fresh from the rain—and released it. As she began her slow tiptoe across the beam, her mind was very clear. She thought, If I am going to do this, I am going to do it now.
But she was not like him. She was afraid.
Later that night, she heard the sirens shrieking and climbed into the backseat of the first ride heading out: Damon Flintov’s BMW.
Alessandra and Nick Brickston jumped in on either side, and Emma Fleed, eyelids fluttering and skirt askew, lay across their laps as if to sleep.
Ryan Harbinger blasted a rap song in the front seat. He was the only person she truly hated, a brutal force in the universe. It was all that was wrong with the workings of life, that he should be grinning and dancing while she sat there trapped in her misery, while Tristan Bloch’s body lay under the ground. The fact that she had once convinced herself to kiss a person like Ryan now nauseated her, and made her hate him with the fiercer intensity of putrefied lust.
They sped through the canyon. With each curve Cally was thrust from Alessandra’s shoulder to Nick’s. She closed her eyes, pulled her seatbelt down across her chest and buckled it. Moments later they crashed. In the aftermath Cally looked down at Emma Fleed, whose body was twisted at a sickening angle. Emma didn’t move. Dead? Eyes shut, spine twisted. Yes, Cally thought, dead.
When that car hit the redwood, Cally herself should have gone straight through the windshield. She should have been injured even more seriously than Emma was, or killed. Just hours before, on the railing, she’d wanted to die. In the car, she had fastened her seatbelt. Intention was one thing; it was the smallest decisions that made any difference.
—
“Oh my God,” Alessandra told her one day in the fall of senior year, as on the serpentine roots of a redwood tree they sat shoulder to shoulder, sharing lunch (a cup of key lime yogurt, a bag of salted pretzels), “you so need to do this.”
“What is it?” Calista asked.
“Write me a play. For the One-Act Festival.”
“I’m not a writer.”
“That’s negative energy. Totally unproductive. How do you know?”
“I’ve never written anything in my life.”
“Yet.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I need a good part. Otherwise I’ll just get cast as a prostitute again, and I’m so over that. I’m so over the systematic subjugation of women by these chauvinist writer-directors I can’t even tell you.”
“Why don’t you write it yourself?”
Alessandra scooted closer, crossed her slim, bare leg over Calista’s. “Oh, sweet Calista, my darling, my love, the muse doesn’t create. She inspires.”
Calista spent the next few weeks writing. On school days they’d pile into Kai’s old Land Cruiser and drive to the beach, to Sunset Ridge, or to the cemetery in the hills above Mill Valley.