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I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but it seems like the moment I shut my eyes, I’m dreaming. I stand on a road—a normal road, white line down the median, asphalt shimmering with heat. I’m walking down the median line, and another girl is walking withme. I’ve never seen her before. She’s my age, with long, dark hair and a tattoo of a feather on the inside of her left wrist. Five crows wheel overhead, calling.
“Is this it?” I ask.
“The road?” she guesses, and smiles. She has a dimple in just one cheek. “No. Justaroad. A safe one, for now.”
“I need to find the other one,” I say.
“Less safe,” she observes. I nod, the whole situation perfectly normal in the way that dreams are. “It’ll find you. As long as you’re all together and you’re looking for it, it’ll be there.”
“You’re sure?” I ask.
“I try not to be sure of too much,” she says. Then she nods ahead. The horizon is growing dark—no, a darkness is growing, swelling, surging over the distant hills, the trees, rushing toward us like a tsunami. She reaches out her hand and I start to reach back.
And then I wake. I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, waiting for my frantic heartbeat to slow down, and then I sit up. I check the time. Barely past ten, but if that’s what’s waiting for me, I’m not going to try to get back to sleep.
I take Becca’s notebook and her old camera and sneak out the back door. It doesn’t take much sneaking—Mom takes sleeping pills most nights. Since Becca.
I’m not sure where I’m going until I’m already walking that direction. There’s a park on Galveston and Grand. A creek runs through the center of it, trees growing along the banks. It’s as far from the wilderness as you can get and keep the green, but to the Wildcats, it has been Narnia and Middle-earth and the Amazon jungle.
We would always meet at the bridge. It’s five feet across, with dull wood planks and handrails that would drive splinters into your palms if you tried to run your hands down them. Becca and I were almost always the first ones to arrive, and we’d sit chucking sticks into the water and watching them rush away from us. I lean on the railing, trying to feel her presence next to me. The way she always stood, elbows on the rail, spinning the ring around her thumb.
I thought that when you lost someone, you lost the details first, but details are what I still have—the crinkle at the corners of her eyes when she made fun of me, the way she’d chew on her thumbnail when she was really focused. It’s the big things that are slipping away. Her face. Her voice. The way it felt to be around her.
Becca was—is—six months older than me. Our parents tried to have a child for five years with no luck, so they went through the long, arduous process of adoption. They had one birth mother change her mind in the delivery room before they adopted Becca, tiny and perfect and theirs.
It was less than a month later that they found out about me. They’d always wanted two kids. They shrugged and laughed and told themselves they wouldn’t treat us any differently. Mostly, they managed it—but you could always sense how hard they were working at it: second-guessing themselves, overcompensating for any hint that they might not be treating Becca the same as me by lavishing her with just a little too much attention and praise to be genuine. Maybe that’s why her relationship with them fell apart so much when she hit high school. Or maybe something else wasat the root of her silences, her strange moods, the way she avoided home whenever she could.
Long before high school, though, I was always chasing after Becca. The week she stood on her own, I started trying to pull myself upright. I walked within a month of her. Anything she touched, I had to have. My first word was my sister’s name, and I’d shriek it at night until my parents put me in her crib to sleep.
I always thought the two of us were the center of gravity around which the rest of the group orbited, but I was wrong. Becca was. She kept us together. She was the one who pulled away from the group first. And after she vanished, we fractured for good.
I lift her camera and snap a photo. The flash goes off. I look at the screen. The water is a confusion of reflected light, the trees indistinct shadows. I’m not nearly the photographer my sister was. Is.
Was.
“Sara?” I’m not completely surprised to hear Anthony’s voice, but I’m not sure I’m happy, either. His footsteps crunch closer, then turn hollow as he steps onto the bridge.
“Hey,” he says. He leans against the guardrail next to me, looking down at the water. The park lights lend just enough illumination to glimmer on the water’s surface, the delicate folds where it runs over the rocks. “I kind of thought you’d be here. Or in the woods.”
“No point going out there yet,” I say. “It won’t be tonight.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s on the anniversary. Wednesday. Two days from thetime the messages were sent is just past midnight, Wednesday morning.”
His hands tighten on the handrail, and the hinge of his jaw flares out as he clenches his teeth. “Yeah. I know.” He glances at me quickly.
“You think I did it,” I say. My voice is flat, but the betrayal slices through me. “You think I sent the message.”
“I don’t think that. Maybe I did for a moment. But only a moment,” he says.
“Everyone else thinks it was me,” I say. I scuff my foot against the bridge, knocking a pebble off into the water with a barely audibleplink. Anthony nudges my shoulder with his, startling me with a moment of friendly intimacy I thought was long behind us.
“Only the idiots,” he assures me.
“You said you thought I’d done it, for a moment.”
“And I was momentarily an idiot,” Anthony says, grinning that grin that is impossible not to echo, for a fleeting second. “Trina doesn’t think so.”
