There’s a loud boom from somewhere within the house, and I begin to panic. “Six feet. I’ll carry you. You don’t even have to get up.”
Kennedy coughs and braces herself against the bed to steady herself. “I wouldn’t make it to the ground.”
I get on my hands and knees and begin to pull her toward the balcony, but she’s dead weight and, struggling with every ounce of strength in my body, I still can’t make her move. “The smoke is messing with your head. You don’t remember how fast this place went up before.”
“Chelsea,” she says in the softest voice imaginable. “Youdon’t remember.”
Her hand breaks out of mine, and I crash through the balcony doors. I catch myself on the railing and press my face against the bars to get a breath of untainted air. For one sweet moment I close my eyes and feel a cool lake breeze sweep over my face, breathing life, hope, faith into me. Then I open my eyes and they travel down toward the ground.
It’s the strangest thing.
A body lies there, lifeless, drained. I know she’s dead withjust a glance. The angles of her bones are sharp and unforgiving. It wasn’t necessarily a deadly drop from the balcony, but it was a harsh fall, an unlucky fall. She just didn’t make it. Her neck is twisted in such a way that although her chest is pressed into the grass, her face is wrenched around over her shoulder. Backward. She gazes up, her eyes wide open, fixed at the sky, clear and questioning. Not peaceful. You couldn’t say peaceful or at rest. She looks searching, hopeful, afraid, but determined.
I died determined.
No.
No.
“You have to understand why we can’t leave,” Kennedy says quietly.
“But we did leave. I was at the hospital—”
“After Ryan died,” she says firmly. “For weeks, not a year. Remember—”
“No.” I back away, from the balcony, from Kennedy. I don’t remember. I don’t want to remember.
But she advances toward me, and I push it away, the memory of the hospital, the note, last summer. The fire and the fall. Emily. The stories we told ourselves, dreams in the in-between, blurred into the buried horror of that dark night.
“We saw what we wanted to believe,” Kennedy echoes herself. “We saw ourselves survive.”
“But Emily was the one in the attic.”
Kennedy nods. “She was, the night Ryan died. But not the night of the fire.”
I run to the attic ladder and climb it, and when I reach the top, the whole world falls away. I stare at the figure lyingairless, drowning in smoke, her skin tinged with sky. Kennedy. Lifeless, lost, alone. Gone. I climb back down numbly. “You were the blue lady.”
“You’re the backward girl.” She smiles, her eyes glistening. “Ryan was the dripping man, Mila was the woman on the stairs. Chase… was crushed. I finally understand.”
Fear grips me, and I grasp the ladder for balance. “Is this hell? We killed someone, then woke to our worst nightmares.”
“I don’t think so. We’ve been working through parts of our lives that puzzled or frightened us. Like in dreams. I think those places we thought we went last year were like a smokescreen because none of us were ready to face the truth. That’s what we’ve been doing tonight, isn’t it? The invitation, the game, the boat—all of that came from within. We all betrayed someone in the room. We all kissed a killer. And we all killed a best friend.”
It is true. There was always something worse than each of the places we imagined we were last year, something harder to face.
What we did.
We killed a friend and covered it up. And we’ve been lying to ourselves and everyone else since the day his body was swallowed up by the lake.
“We never left this house, Chelsea.” She holds on to me tightly.
The realization creeps over me slowly, like goose bumps. “It was never rebuilt. We’re just stuck in time.” There’s another explosion, and flames begin to move inside the room. “We have to go.”
“Why? I’ve seen us here since I was a baby,” she says. “You, me, Mila, and Chase. We go on. I don’t know whether it’s a punishment or a gift or a scientific anomaly. But we do go on. We get to watch us grow and fight and fall in love and die, again and again and again. We’ve always been here.”
It isn’t possible. We did those things. That’s our past. The future is nothing. But Kennedy looks so sure. “It’s not a gift. We stole a person’s life. We kept the truth from his parents.”
“And Emily stole ours. We’ll have to carry both of those things with us forever. No more lies.” She sounds relieved, and for the first time since I can remember, she looks like herself again. Her shoulders relax. A calm settles over her. She takes my hand, and I feel warmth, a new warmth I don’t know how to understand. “This is where we belong,” she says. “Where all our best memories are. Every day is summer here. This is our house.” Her hair is brilliant in the glow of the blaze, her eyes feverish, her cheeks flushed. She looks like a goddess.