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“You talked to her about it?”
He shrugs. “She’s worried about you.”
“So you mean you talked to each other aboutme,” I say.
Anthony makes a frustrated sound. He turns to face me, but I stay stubbornly put, looking straight out at the water. “Come on, Sara. We’d have talked to you if you’d say more than three words to any of us.”
“What, it’s all my fault?” I ask, turning my head to glare at him.
“We all loved Becca,” he says.Some of us more than others, I don’t tell him, because I’m not supposed to know.
“It doesn’t matter,” I whisper. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“No. It doesn’t,” Anthony says. “Because whatever happened then, I’m here for you now. I don’t know if this is a prank or a trap or if there’s really something hiding out in the woods, but I’m not letting you go alone.”
I stare at him. I feel off balance, like I’ve lurched forward and haven’t gotten my feet under me. For a moment, my body pulses with gratitude and relief—he’s doing this for me, he’s still my friend, he still cares. And then I draw back, feral anger scrabbling up my spine.
“You’re notlettingme?” I repeat.
“I mean I’m going with you,” he says. “I’ll be your partner, like the thing said.”
“I didn’t ask you to go with me,” I say.
“But you are going.”
“Of course.”
He nods, like this settles things. “Then I’m going with you.”
“You’re just assuming that I don’t have anyone else? That I want you to come with me?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Really? Let’s look.” I pull my phone out of my pocket, open up the messages. Scroll back and back and back, until I find the thread with Anthony’s name on it.
The most recent message is months old. It’s a birthday cake emoji. The one before that is nearly a year old.You ok?it reads.
I hold it out to him. “Two messages in a year. My sister vanishes and you don’t even bother to text.”
He grabs my phone from my hand. I squawk, but he turns hisshoulder to keep me from grabbing it back and taps the screen a few times. Pulls up Trina’s messages.
All of Trina’s messages. Once a month or so now, links to interesting news stories, funny pictures. Before that, a sparse series of texts telling me that she was around, when I was ready. And around the time that Becca disappeared? Dozens of messages. Maybe hundreds. Telling me she was worried about me. Sending me stupid memes to distract me. Asking me to come hang out. Complaining about her jackass stepfather, our homework, the weather. I answered maybe a half dozen times. Never more than a few words.
He switches to Mel’s messages. Mel didn’t say as much. She gave up earlier. But they’re there. I’d never answered Trina because her kindness hurt too much. I’d never answered Mel because she wanted to be there as my friend, and I’d stopped being able to pretend that was all I wanted, too. And so I’d let both of them—all of them—slip into absence and disconnection.
Anthony hands my phone back to me. I cradle it, thumbing the screen off, and look away from him. “You never answered their texts. So I figured there wasn’t any point trying. Which is why I came over. Your mom always told me you were sick.”
I was sick. Sick with dread and with sorrow, curled on my bed with a fist against my stomach and nausea making me shudder. I survived the next few weeks and months in a haze. If my mom hadn’t been reminding me to eat and shower and go to school, I would have just stayed in bed. Waiting for Becca to come home.
“I didn’t want to respond to ‘you ok’ when you hadn’t evenbothered to sit by me at lunch for a year,” I snap. “Look, I get it. We were friends when we were kids. High school’s different. You’ve got new friends, and you don’t need a weird loser hanging around.”
“You’re not weird.”
“You’re in the minority with that opinion.”
“Oh, come on, Sara. You can’t blame people for thinking it. You barely talk to anyone anymore. You don’t wear anything but black. Everyone knows that you go out in the woods by yourself all the time, and you’re obsessed with the whole Lucy Gallows thing.”
“I don’t care what anyone thinks about how I dress. And I only care about Lucy Gallows because Becca did. She was looking for her.”
