“What did you see?” she asks in a dull voice.
I step softly into the room. “What didyousee?”
She presses her palms into the cloth, but she doesn’t answer me.
“I don’t have the sight,” I remind her. The words sting my throat, my tongue, my lips.
She slowly peels the washcloth off her face, but her eyes remain closed. “I saw myself.”
“Bullshit.”
Chelsea opens her eyes. Bloodshot, rimmed with red. “When you do a tarot reading, you tell us that we see a reflection of what’s inside us. I think this is the same. We see what we believe. That’s why it doesn’t work for nonbelievers. They don’t expect to see anything, so they don’t.”
No. “He was here.”
“He’s still out there, Em.”
I feel uncertain for a moment. Just a split second. Because she looks like she believes it. “Not like us.”
Chelsea hugs her knees to her chest. “Well, what do we know? Maybe no one ever does leave. Every night we go to sleep and dream. Our minds untangle the parts of our waking lives our brains can’t make sense of. Maybe that’s the part that goes on when we die. Or maybe some people get caught in the transition, like the falling between wake and sleep. The lucid in-between. Maybe they stay forever where—”
“Where they died?”
She’s silent for a moment. “I was going to say where they were happiest. But I do believe he’s still out there, Emily. Wewillsee him again.”
Liar. I turn to leave, and she collapses back onto the bed.
The waiting.
The waiting is the trick.
I waited a year for this moment.
I waited to gather with my friends, murderers all.
The awful thing about waiting is that if you wait too long, you start to disappear.
I thought if I waited long enough, there would be some dramatic moment when one of them would scream, “I can’t take it anymore! I killed Ryan!” A telltale-heart type of revelation. I was almost certain it would be Chelsea. But it never happened. There was just the phantom illness and the vague little hint in the note, and now she’s kind of semi-Chelsea. I still keep thinking if I do or say the right thing to freak her out, I’ll get some kind of confession. Chelsea plays the best innocence game, but she knows.
If she didn’t kill him herself, she watched him die, and she didn’t lift a finger to save him.
I won’t let them do it twice.