“It’s not our fault,” she says, like she’s daring me to contradict her. “She’s totally wacked. You know that.”
“I know,” I say. But I get the feeling she’s not even talking to me.
“And I heard her dad’s, like, an alcoholic,” Lindsay presses on, her voice suddenly quick, urgent. “Her whole family’s wacked.”
“Yeah,” I say. For a minute we just stand there in silence. My body feels heavy, useless, the way it sometimes does in nightmares when you have to run but you can’t. After a while something occurs to me and I say, “Was.”
Even though we’ve been standing in silence, Lindsay inhales sharply, as though I’ve interrupted her in the middle of a long speech. “What?”
“She was wacked,” I say. “She’s not anything anymore.”
Lindsay doesn’t respond. I go past her into the dark hallway and find my way to the couch. I settle in under the blankets, and a little while later she comes in and joins me.
Lying there, convinced I won’t be able to sleep, I remember the time in the middle of junior year when Lindsay and I snuck out on a random weeknight—a Tuesday or a Thursday—and drove around because there was nothing else to do. At some point she pulled over abruptly on Fallow Ridge Road and cut the headlights, waiting until another car began to squeeze its way toward us on the single-lane road. Then she roared the engine and blazed the lights to life and began careening straight toward it. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, the headlights growing huge as suns, certain we were going to die, and she was gripping the steering wheel and calling out over my screams, “Don’t worry—they always swerve first.” She was right, too. At the last second the other car jerked abruptly into the ditch.
That’s what I remember just before the dream pulls me under.
In my dream I am falling through darkness.
In my dream I fall forever.
FOUR
Even before I’m awake, the alarm clock is in my hand, and I break from sleep completely at the same moment I hurl the clock against the wall. It lets out a final wail before shattering.
“Whoa,” Lindsay says, when I slide into the car fifteen minutes later. “Is there a job opening in the red-light district I don’t know about?”
“Just drive.” I can barely look at her. Anger is seething through me like liquid. She’s a fraud: the whole world is a fraud, one bright, shiny scam. And somehow I’m the one paying for it. I’m the one who died. I’m the one who’s trapped.
Here’s the thing: it shouldn’t be me. Lindsay’s the one who drives like she’s in the real-life version of Grand Theft Auto. Lindsay’s the one who’s always thinking of ways to punk people or humiliate them, who’s always criticizing everybody. Lindsay’s the one who lied about being friends with Juliet Sykes and then tortured her all those years. I didn’t do anything; I just followed along.
“You’re gonna freeze, you know.” Lindsay chucks her cigarette and rolls up the window.
“Thanks, Mom.” I flip down the mirror to make sure that my lipstick hasn’t smeared. I’ve folded my skirt over a couple of times so it barely covers my ass when I sit down, and I’m wearing five-inch platforms that I bought with Ally as a joke at a store that we’re pretty sure only caters to strippers. I’ve kept the fur-trimmed tank top, but I’ve added a rhinestone necklace, again purchased as a joke one Halloween when we all dressed up as Naughty Nurses. It says SLUT in big, sparkly script.
I don’t care. I’m in the mood to get looked at. I feel like I could do anything right now: punch somebody in the face, rob a bank, get drunk and do something stupid. That’s the only benefit to being dead. No consequences.
Lindsay misses my sarcasm, or ignores it. “I’m surprised your parents even let you out of the house like that.”
“They didn’t.” Another thing making my mood foul is the ten-minute screaming match I had with my mother before storming out of the house. Even when Izzy went to hide in her room and my father threatened to ground me for life (Ha!), the words kept coming. It felt so good to scream, like when you pick a scab and the blood starts flowing again.
You are not walking out that door unless you go upstairs and put on some more clothing. That’s what my mom said. You’ll catch pneumonia. More important, I don’t want people in school getting the wrong impression about you.
And suddenly it had all snapped inside of me, broken and snapped. “You care now?” She jerked back at the sound of my voice like I’d reached out and slapped her. “You want to help now? You want to protect me now?”
What I really wanted to say was, Where were you four days ago? Where were you when my car was spinning off the edge of a road in the middle of the night? Why weren’t you thinking of me? Why weren’t you there? I hate both of my parents right now: for sitting quietly in our house, while out in the darkness my heart was beating away all of the seconds of my life, ticking them off one by one until my time was up; for letting the thread between us stretch so far and so thin that the moment it was severed for good they didn’t even feel it.
At the same time I know that it’s not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.
Your parents are supposed to keep you safe.
“Jesus, what’s your problem?” Lindsay looks at me hard for a second. “You wake up on the wrong side of the bed or something?”