13
The words echo in myhead as I make my way back to the house, pack up the game, and place it on the living room table.
Someone in this house killed Emily.
It feels impossible, but Emily’s death itself feels impossible, and the impossible fact remains: she’s gone. I have forced myself not to think about her death, because the parts I have failed to scrub from my memory are unbearable. But what if in sparing myself the pain of reliving the trauma, I’ve willingly closed my eyes to a crucial detail? I pause by the closed door to Kennedy’s bedroom, a small but beautiful room with a Juliet balcony and scenes from fairy tales carved into the walls. A sense of dread settles over me in the darkness. This is where it happened. Where the fire boxed her in, trapped in the attic, engulfed in flames. There was nothing I could do, and time had run out. Everyone else was already gone. I wasforcedto be the one to leave her behind, because I was the last to give up on her.
I frown.
But my memory begins with me in the bedroom, drowsy and disoriented from smoke inhalation, the fire well underway. The day up to that point is a hazy blur, blotted out with guilt. I’m a useless witness. I don’t know how the fire started. I don’tknow how she got into the attic. I didn’t even know about the gas leak. I’ve been away during what might in a sense be the most crucial year of our lives, when everyone else was sifting through ash and making meaning of things, and settling on the story of what happened in this house. Healing, maybe. I missed all of it. I should start questioning. Because accidents happen, sure.
But Emily was trapped. I wasn’t. Why didn’t any of my friends come back for me?
Kennedy is in bed with the lights out when I get to her parents’ room, a gorgeous master suite overlooking the lake. We usually share a queen bed in her room. Emily used to crowd into the bed with us when we were little, until Kennedy and I started dating the summer after ninth. This year the room will remain empty. I can’t bring myself to sleep in the room where Emily died, and even though itshouldfeel strange to share a bed with Kennedy after a year of being ignored, it doesn’t. This is the way it’s always been, since we were children. There’s a tiny bit of comfort in that. When I enter the master bedroom, I find one side of the bed turned down, duvet cover perfectly aired, sheets folded under in a triangle, smooth as the placid surface of the lake. She’s even laid a little sprig of lavender on the pillow and a sleeping mask on the nightstand, next to a glass of water and a note readingFor your pills.
I strip down to my T-shirt and a pair of boxers and sit at the edge of the bed. I can’t sleep with all of the questions swirling around my head. I want to talk, but I hate to wake her. I won’t learn much with everyone fast asleep, though. I dig through my backpack for my sleeping pills. I’m going to needtwo tonight. I tap them into my palm and knock them back with the glass of water—still ice-cold—and snap the light off.
“Where did you go?”
I turn. My eyes haven’t had a chance to adjust, but I imagine Kennedy looming before me, and I feel her weight shift as she sits up. “Nowhere. Outside. I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was waiting for you.” I hear a clicking noise, like she’s biting her nails. Kennedy doesn’t really have any nails. She’s a biter. “Can I ask you something without you reading into it?”
Probably not. But I desperately want something, anything, to read into. “Of course.”
“Do you really hear voices?”
There it is. “I don’t hearvoices, I heardavoice. Emily’s voice,” I say.
She sighs. “I didn’t.” Her faint outline is beginning to materialize in the darkness. Her shoulders are hunched, and her hair is wound into a bun and pinned atop her head.
“Well, you don’t have the sight, do you?”
She swats my knee. “You know Mrs. Joiner was full of shit.” She pauses. “I know it’s stressful being back here. Just… don’t let it get inside your head.”
“Casualty of having a heart, Kennedy.” I say it a bit more sharply than I mean to. The encounter with Ryan rattled me, and it feels a little like I’m sitting in bed with a stranger. But there’s so much I need to know, and the tarot card pointing to Kennedy is the only clue I have to go on, vague as it is. And I don’t have much time because the pills work fast. I already feel my heart beating slow and steady in my chest, anxiety seeping out of me like poison glistening on my skin. The calm comesquickly, and it brings the strange, the little lights and sounds I know are fragments of dream waiting for the fall. The lucid in-between. Little sparks of waking sleep. I can see Kennedy now in the sliver of moonlight sneaking in through the half-drawn curtains draped over the enormous windows. A radiant halo of light illuminates her, and the image from the tarot card merges with the present, the crown of glass shards glittering like knives. Outside, the full moon sinks into the lake, lighting it up like a radioactive swamp.
“We should talk about last year.” My voice sounds thin and tinny.
Kennedy walks her fingers over the sheets and weaves them through mine. “You disappeared on me.”
Even through the rapidly thickening fog of drowsiness, this gets to me. I can imagine how busy Kennedy was over the past year. Horse shows, ribbons, trophies. Clam bakes with beautiful people in the Hamptons. Visiting Princeton and Yale and Harvard with her parents, wearing cashmere and pearls, a matching mother-and-daughter set. I wonder if she was just the tiniest bit glad not to have me by her side for a year, skewing the picture like a single pulled thread. With my torn jeans and secondhand sweaters, handmade jewelry and untamable hair, I always stuck out with the Hartfords. And that’s before I opened my mouth.
I wonder if she wasn’t a little relieved.
She had to have been.
Because after the fire, Kennedy changed her number.
“I almost didn’t come this weekend,” I say finally.
“Why?”
“You know damn well why. I didn’t disappear; you know exactly where I was. Pathetically waiting for you to write or call or show up. And you never did.”
“I wanted to,” she says in a quiet voice. She strokes my hand, but I withdraw it.
“My parents shipped me off to boarding school again.”