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“You want to stay behind,” Becca says, anger clipping the words.
An answer lodges in my throat.
Because I should. Shouldn’t I? I want my friends to live. My sister. My best friend. How could I choose one of them to leave behind? It has to be me. It should be me. Yet something has changed, and it sends a sick shiver through me. I fight against it, not entirely aware that I am fighting, trying to put the order of myself back the way it should be. “You have to go,” I say, halfway to what I mean. “You know you do. Otherwise this—all of this? It’s for nothing.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“I know you don’t want to hear it. But you know that it’s true.”
“Then you’ve got to come with me.”
I want to protest.They will not die because of me.It should be Anthony and Becca, but I can’t say it.
“I already made my choice,” Becca continues. “In the boat, when you fell... I was reaching for you. It’s you. I choose you.”
And still I say nothing. Instead, I grip her hands tight and shut my eyes. Something passes between us in that moment, a force I cannot describe, and a tension loosens in my chest.
Anthony clears his throat. We look up in the same movement. He’s tucking his phone in his pocket.
“I think it’s obvious what has to happen,” he says. “I’m staying.”
Guilt knifes through me, but he continues before I can say anything to contradict him.
“We don’t have to... Of course you’re going to pick each other. You should. I agree. It’s the right choice. And I’m saving you from making it. I’m volunteering.” His face falls into a smile. “Besides. Maybe if I stick around awhile, some other fool will—will—” He can’t finish. Can’t scrape up enough belief or hope to voice it.
“This isn’t fair,” Becca says. She crosses to him in three quick strides and throws herself into his arms. He wraps her up, and I turn away, walking a few paces to give them one last moment together.
It’s a little while before footsteps approach behind me, and Anthony taps on my shoulder. I turn. Becca is hunched in on herself, staring off into the distance.
“You shouldn’t have to stay,” I say.
“Hey. I can’t let Jeremy go out a hero and upstage me,” Anthony says. “Wherever we go after this, he’d never shut up.” He scrubs his hand over the back of his scalp. “Look, Sara. I know things aren’t great between us right now.”
“You think that matters?” I ask.
“It matters,” he says. “We might not want it to, but it does. We haven’t been talking. We haven’t been friends like we used to be. I wasn’t there for you, and you were, let’s face it, kind of a jerk.”
“Definitely a jerk,” I tell him. He smiles.
“I don’t want you carrying that, when you leave here. Pretend we had the time to work it out. To be friends again, best friends, the way we used to be. Promise?”
My vision blurs with tears. I don’t stop them from falling. He hugs me, and I can’t remember the last time he did that.
“Be strong. Get Becca home. And don’t you ever look back,” he whispers. He breaks away, his own cheeks wet with tears, fear he doesn’t want to show deeply etched in his features. As he pulls away, he slips his phone into my bag.
And then there is nothing but goodbye.
—
We come through the dark. Count the steps in twinned whispers, hands clutched together tightly against the urge for release. We come through the dark, and we leave Anthony behind, and some rewritten part of my soul is triumphant.
I think I understand now what happens next. Better than I did then, at least. Then, I didn’t even think about what I was doing. It was instinct, automatic action, unexamined. We step out of the dark. My hand is still wet with Lucy’s blood—the same blood that stains Becca’s palms and her shirt, one lonely streak marring the hollow of her throat where she swiped her hand unthinkingly. We emerge stumbling, and our hands unlink. The road is already vanishing behind us, and as Becca blinks, sunlight-blind, I vanish, too. I slip away.
I hear voices in the woods—police, searching for Trina. I hope they’ll find Becca. I don’t remember how I get home, but the nextthing I can consciously recall, I am in the bathroom Becca and I have shared all our lives, washing dirt from my feet and blood from my hands. Then I’m crawling under my blankets and lying awake in the early morning light.
The police come to get us not long after. I hear my mother downstairs, her voice rising in shrill disbelief. When she comes up to get me, I pretend to still be half asleep, to not understand what she’s telling me.
Becca is alive. She’s back. But there’s a problem. And they want to know if I’ve seen Trina Jeffries or her brother.
