I dropped my head to my hands, elbows on my knees, as I took deep breaths.
The way I’d treated Natalie, my best friend in the world, was inexcusable. I knew it. She knew it. What we’d never figured out was how to get past it.
My decision had been to get on my goddamn knees and beg for forgiveness.
Her decision had been to leave me the hell alone and do her best to forget I ever existed.
She didn’t just ignore my texts and calls for a few days. She blocked me so completely I felt erased. I’d resorted to sending letters. They came back unopened labeled return to sender. When I drove up to Baltimore to see her, she wouldn’t let me in. I sat on her porch as a peaceful protest, and she’d threatened to call the police. I thought that was more than a little excessive. But it worked. I left.
When the rest of my family, who’d become her family, too, after the accident, went to visit, she’d banned them from talking about me.
I’d had to spend the past year completely without the person who’d been… well, my person. Since birth, basically.
And now she was back and coming to a family cookout without any warning.
I couldn’t take this kind of emotional roller coaster.
What if I said something stupid and she left again? What if I looked at her funny and she told everyone what I did? They already fully blamed me. They just didn’t know how bad it had been.
I swiped a hand over my face. My breaths were coming in shallow gasps. I wasn’t sure I could handle seeing Nat again.
In short, I was terrified.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Natalie, 14
“Oh my God, look at this,” I squealed, and held up a huge salamander that had been buried in the mud of the creek.
“Jesus, he’s huge. I can’t believe you can just… pick him up like that.” Tim shivered. “I think he’s cool and all, but I don’t want to touch him.”
I cocked an eyebrow and got a smile on my face.
“Nat. No. Please tell me you’re not…” he broke off, turned and ran as I dashed after him with the salamander.
I used to be faster than Tim. Then, as time went on, we sort of equaled out. But now? He was much faster than I was. Over the past year, Tim had grown several inches, gained muscle, and had started looking like a high school kid even though we were still in middle school.
I… hadn’t changed a bit. I was still the same skinny, short, awkward girl I’d always been. Tim was far away from me now, and the salamander wriggled in my hands. I didn’t want to hurt him or cause him to have a heart attack or something, so I hurried back to the creek and put him back where I’d found him. I made sure to cover him back up with the thick, watery mud he liked so his skin wouldn’t dry out in the sun.
“There you go, little guy,” I whispered. I rinsed my hands in the muddy water, getting most of the dirt off until I could get to asink with a bar of soap, and headed back towards the Summers’ house.
Tim Summers had been my best friend since before I could remember. That was partly because our mothers had been best friends growing up here in Indigo Falls, Georgia. That friendship had continued through their entire lives.
The only thing that had ended it, I thought, as I stared up at a thick gray cloud passing over the sun, was my mother’s death. Memories suddenly washed over me; the sounds of metal bending and breaking blending in with my and my mother’s screams, the way my stomach dropped as we went airborne over the guardrail—like we were on a psychotic roller coaster—the rolling and crashing as the car was upended over and over again… and then the absolute stillness as we came to a slow, sickening stop on the forest floor. Then the only sounds had been me crying as I listened to the ever-slowing gasps of my mother as she tried to keep breathing. And then the gasps had stopped, and it was just me, screaming and crying for Mom and knowing, deep down, that I’d never hear her voice again.
“Nat? Baby, are you okay?”
I startled, then smiled at Lynne Summers. She was basically a second mother to me and always had been. “Yes,” I said, but I could tell she’d known what I was thinking about.
“Is your dad still taking you to that therapist in Halliwell, honey?” she asked softly.
I shook my head. “No. He… he said I was fine; that I didn’t need it anymore.”
Her lips thinned and she got a little furrow between her eyebrows. “I don’t think that’s true, do you?”
I looked at her for a moment and started to lie. But she’d always seen through me, just like Mom used to be able to do. “It’s not true,” I agreed. “I need to go, but he doesn’t want totake me.” Halliwell was the next town over, and it was about a twenty-minute drive.
