Anyone begins anything with I’m sorry after you’ve told them they didn’t do anything wrong—whatever follows won’t be good. I step back, instinctively distance myself from it.
“I—” He pauses. “I drove down here to see you last night. I was worried and I was … so tired of doing this runaround with you because I felt like we were just getting back to a good place after the search … I came here, but I didn’t have the guts to talk to you and on my way back, I got gas at Grebe Auto. There were a couple kids there, talking about Penny Young and the funeral, and they brought up this ‘wasted search’ on Romy Grey. I told them to go fuck themselves and they told me—”
His voice. His voice is all over me. I want to rip it off my skin. And his face—the shame on Leon’s face for what he’s saying makes me want to rip it off his face and— Stop.
“Romy, they told me.”
They told him.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
He’s so sorry.
I close my eyes.
“But I could see through it, I could see through all the bullshit. I don’t know the details—I don’t need to know them—but the way you were at the search, what you said about everyone here, your dad and how you fell out with Penny—everything just started to click into place…”
Click into place. This is how I make sense to him, when I’m a dead girl. He can’t even believe I’m a liar, the only thing that makes it barely tolerable at school—that they think I’m a liar before they think I’m a dead girl.
“I didn’t mean to find out that way,” he says.
I open my eyes. “But you did.”
“I’m so sorry that happened—”
“Don’t.” My heart thrums, more bruises. I look for exits, but this is my house and he’s standing in front of the door. “Don’t be. Just go.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again and he is. He sounds so sorry that he found out this way, so sorry that he had to tell me he did, sorry that I make more sense to him now. But it’s not enough that he’s sorry because now, when he looks at me— I’ll be her.
“You need to leave,” I say.
“Romy—”
“I don’t want you here if you know.”
He steps back, puts space between us and I swear the space makes every part of me I’m trying to hide more visible. He’s not going. I want him to go.
“Tell me what I can do.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“There has to be—”
“Make me feel like I wasn’t—” I falter and then my voice starts breaking all over the words and I can’t stop it, any of it. “Like you did when you didn’t know. Because I hate her, Leon, and when I was around you, I wasn’t—her. You … stopped. That’s why you were the good part. So if you want to help, pretend you don’t know and we could—”
I can’t finish. It’s too impossible to finish. And I wait for him to speak, all of this washing over him slowly, too slowly.
“You’re right,” he finally says. “I can’t help you if that’s what you need from me. And if I’d known, this whole time, you were using me like that…”
I bring my hand to my forehead and dig my nails into the skin there, hard as I can, because I want to be able to choose what hurts me for once.
“How did you think you would help?” I ask faintly. “Tell me to accept it?”
“I wouldn’t do that. You don’t have to accept it.” He pauses. “But maybe you should hate the people responsible. Because it’s not you.”
“I don’t want you here if you know,” I say again.
He sighs and turns away, his footsteps leading him out and I close my eyes until I hear the screen door whine closed, until I hear the sound of him driving away and the only thing I feel after is her, this slit, this dead girl, trying to burn herself out of me—
“hello?”
I’m on the phone in the kitchen. The man’s voice on the other end of the line is gruff and half-awake. The sound of it sends a surge of adrenaline through me, enough to make me light-headed. For a moment, I forget how to speak.
“Who is this?” He’s more awake now, and still I can’t speak. I pick at one of the phone buttons and accidentally push it in. The tone blares in my ear, in his, and I startle, pull my hand back.
“It’s the girl from the diner,” I manage.
“Who?”
“The one who doesn’t like to talk.”
The longest pause before he laughs. “This a joke?”
“You said you’d tell me how.”
“I’ll be damned. That doesn’t usually work.”
I stare at the phone cord, twirled nervously around my finger. My body tremors, a sick chill up and down my spine like a warning.
“Will you meet me?”
i scrawl a note under the note my mother left me. I keep it as simple as I love you because that’s always there to say. I get my bike from the garage and wheel it over the vines on the walkway, before I throw my leg over its side and push off. The streets are quiet, the pall of Penny’s funeral cast over everything. I feel more relief passing the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING GREBE sign than I ever have before.
The bike ride to Taraldson Road tests me. All the running I haven’t done has made me soft where I should be stronger. I have to break halfway, my calves aching, my stomach churning.
The highway is some kind of nightmare, the way the cars and trucks rush by me. The feel of them, the sound. It hurts. It makes my teeth ache. It starts to rain and I bike so far, I bike through it—I can see the point I’ve left that weather behind me.
It’s forever before I make the turn off the highway onto the dirt road I’m looking for, my road. I drag my feet and come to a stop. I climb off my bike, letting it clatter to its side. I ease myself to the ground, on my back and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe in this air and I wonder what it’s like underwater, wonder again if she was dead before she hit the river or if that happened after. It’s hard to think of what’s left of her in any kind of dark.
I wait, listening.
I wait, tracing letters on my stomach.
I wait.