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But then, they’re close. The three of them aresoclose…
“Bit underwhelming, to be honest. Some dead animals? Usually it’s something more exciting, like a person.”
I swallow, my eyes sliding shut in relief.
“Did you see any dead people, Jessa?”
It’s as though my tongue gets stuck in my throat. I don’t know if it’s from his question or him using my name. I haven’t even looked at Rory yet — I don’t want to — but the more he alludes to that night, the harder it is to resist staring at him.
“I assumed it was symbolism,” I mutter, swinging my bag over my shoulder and removing a bottle of water to drink. If I drink, maybe my ears will pop and I won’t have to listen to Rory anymore.
“Symbolism isboring. I always want the real thing.”
“Well, you know what everyone else now knows, so…” I make my way up the main path to the castle, but Rory reaches out and grabs my wrist.
I stare at him, startled.
He turns my wrist over in his hand, idly gazing at it. “You have such pretty skin.”
It kind of sounds like the thing a serial killer might say, so I tug my hand away from him. But Rory’s grip tightens.
“I told Li off for what she did to you.” He watches me carefully then, his gaze roaming the slashes across my face. Our eyes meet, and I hate it. I hate the feeling of being jolted, of being taken by surprise. There’s the spark of curiosity in his gray eyes that I don’t understand. There’s a softness there that I never expected.
“I want you to dance,” he whispers. My gaze slides down to his pale lips to make sure I’m not hearing things.
“I just did.” I’m indulging him for some reason. I feel lightheaded by being in his presence. With no one else on the Lochkelvin grounds, it’s as though we’re the only two people in this private world.
But his mouth quirks upward. His hand is still lightly stroking my wrist, and I have to deliberately tell myself not to shiver from it.
“I don’t mean now. I mean later. And not to befascisticabout it or anything…” he adds with a roll of his eyes.
He puts his other hand into his blazer pocket and brings out his phone.
I gulp and try to pull away from him again, because I know what’s coming.
His grip becomes painful.
I watch the gentle fall of his soft dark blond hair. I’m so close to him that his paper and ink scent engulfs me, and I hate myself because all I can do is breathe him in deeper. His gray eyes slide up to me, harder now that I’ve tried twice to escape, and he says with all the entitlement of whatever aristocratic upbringing he’s had, “I want you to dance the way you meant to dance here.”
Hereis the video of me at the Greenvale talent contest.
Unlike at Hallowe’en, when he’d teased its existence in front of me, today he presses play.
In a single second, I’m catapulted back to one of the worst moments of my life.
It’s the sound that strikes me first. My mind had removed that particular reality, slowing the cheers and jeers down into a sludge-like white noise. But the video on Rory’s phone isn’t a collective mass, a single streak of sound. There are individual cheers and boos, blaring heckles that I never noticed at the time, or in the several thousand rewatches that have taken place inside my own mind.
I don’t know why I continue to watch, but I do. It’s my own torture from a different angle: the objective one, the third-person one. It’s as though I’m detached from the girl on that stage. But I’m also detachednow. It was months ago, another Jessa ago, the Jessa who hadn’t gone down to the forest and been confronted by the shadows from her nightmares.
The video is scary, and Rory watching it with me is even worse, but there must be some shred of steel in me because I don’t flinch from it.
I look so small. You can barely make me out on the large stage. A banner sayingGreenvale High’s 75th Annual Talent Show!is behind me, with two bunches of colorful balloons tied on either side of it. It hadn’t even taken place at Greenvale — this had been a rented church hall, since Greenvale had been rubble at this point.
The more I watch, the more I notice. The details I’d filtered out. The things I’d been too consumed to care about.
Viewing it back now is like the twist of a kaleidoscope through my memories. Both versions play out in front of me, my memories superimposed onto the raw video footage.
The more I watch, the more I feel the darkness that girl endured on that spotlit stage.
