Nothing is going to shake this loose right now. The thought has wormed its way into his brain and lodged there. I reach forward and hit his hand. “Then I’ll keep you out of trouble. Like you do for me.”
That seems to settle him. He looks across at me, then turns his hand to grasp mine, hard. “Deal.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
From: Cemetery Girl
To: The Dark
Date: Tuesday, October 8 11:19:27 PM
Subject: What happened?
If I upset you, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.
Please don’t stop talking to me.
The morning air bites through my clothes when I cross Rev’s yard into my own. The sun peeks between houses on the street, but frost glitters on the grass, the first hint of winter to come.
It’s before six, so I ease my key into the lock, then put my shoulder against the doorjamb to keep it from creaking too loudly.
I might as well not have bothered. Alan stands in the kitchen, stirring a cup of coffee.
His eyebrows go way up. His eyes flick to the clock above the sink and back to my face. “Where have you been?”
“I crashed at Rev’s.”
“You’ve been gone all night?”
“Yeah.” This conversation sounds like it’s going south in a hurry, so I turn away, heading for the stairs.
Alan dogs me out of the kitchen. “You didn’t tell anyone you were leaving?”
I keep right on walking.
He keeps right on following. “Declan.” He grits out my name. “You stop right there. I want to talk to you.”
I grab the bannister and swing myself onto the staircase—only to stop short when confronted with my mother coming down the stairs.
Now I’m trapped between them.
“Declan,” she says.
For some reason, when I found out she was pregnant, I imagined she’d balloon overnight and start wearing massive, tentlike shirts with lace ties and long skirts. But this morning, she’s in jeans and a pink T-shirt. Her hair is in a ponytail, and her skin is freshly washed.
My hand grips the staircase railing so hard that it’s vibrating under the strain.
I don’t know what to say to her. I swallow. My thoughts ricochet between the need to apologize for so, so much and the need to hear one from her.
My eyes flick over her form again. She’s never been tiny, but she’s not what you’d call fat, either. Mom-shaped, I guess. The shirt is loose, but not ridiculously so. If I hadn’t been arguing with Alan in the ER two nights ago, I wouldn’t believe she’s pregnant.
But as I stand here staring, I notice she’s a little more pale than usual. Instead of straining at the seams of her clothes, the jeans look a little looser than I’m used to.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
She nods. Her mouth opens as if she’s going to say more, but she must change her mind, because nothing comes out.
“What?” I demand, and she shrinks back a little.
Shame coils in my chest. I think of Juliet in the front seat of my car, pressing her back against the door. You’re pretty confrontational.
“He was out all night,” Alan says from behind me. “If you’re not going to do something about this, Abby, then I will.”
“Yeah?” I whirl on him. “And what are you going to do?”
“I can take your car until you learn a little responsibility.”
He will have to knock me unconscious to get the keys. I struggle to keep my voice low and even so that doesn’t become a real possibility. “You are not taking my car.”
His arms are folded across his chest. “And maybe we can disconnect your phone, since you won’t be going anywhere.”
I hit the wall. The light fixture on the ceiling rattles. “I haven’t done anything wrong!”
His eyebrows go up. “You don’t think sneaking out all night is wrong?”
He says it like I was shooting heroin and gambling in South Baltimore. “I was at Rev’s! Ask Geoff and Kristin!”
“You can’t just walk out of here without telling anyone—”
I snort and move to shift past my mother. “Like you give a crap about me anyway.”
She puts a hand on my arm. “Declan. Stop. He’s not taking your car.”
“Why do you always do that?” Alan says sharply. “You keep allowing this to happen, Abby. He needs to learn.”
I ignore him. Her touch steals my strength. I stop on the staircase and look at her. My voice comes out rough and full of gravel. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her eyes widen fractionally—but she doesn’t answer.
“Why do you think?” Alan says, his voice tired. “After what you did at the wedding, you think we wanted to tell you about a baby?”
I jerk back, yanking my arm away from her. Anger constricts my chest, making it hard to breathe. Some small part of me had hoped that maybe this was as much a surprise to them as it was to me, but Alan’s comment proves that the secrecy was very deliberate.
He moves closer to me, and I realize he’s tracking my movement, like I’m a heartbeat away from shoving her down the stairs.
He thinks I’m a risk to my mother. To the baby. To their new attempt at a family.
Who am I kidding? I am.
“That night you were throwing up,” I say to her. “You knew then.”
She doesn’t say anything, but that’s answer enough.
“Replacing Kerry?” I say.
She flinches like I punched her in the gut. Her eyes glisten with sudden tears.
I hate myself right now.
“Maybe you should keep going,” I say, continuing to move past her, finding no resistance now. “Maybe you’ll get a boy next and you can replace me, too.”
A sob breaks free from her chest.
Alan swears. “We should be so lucky.”
His words are delivered with a viciousness that slices right into me. I move back down the steps as if walking underwater. I want to hit him so badly that my hands ache for the contact, but I keep my temper.
My mother says nothing. If we went at it, she’d cry and wring her hands and beg us to stop—but I have no idea whose side she’d be on.
That’s not true. I know exactly whose side she’d be on. She proved that four years ago, when she let me get behind the wheel. She proved it last May, when she married this guy.
I think of my emails with Juliet, how she made me feel like my life was worthwhile, like I had something to offer. I think of my conversations with Frank and Mrs. Hillard, how, for a few minutes, they made me feel like more than just a loser with a record.
But the reality is here, right here, how two people who should have my back stand here driving me into the ground.
My chest is so tight I don’t think I’ll be able to breathe much longer.
“Give me your keys,” Alan says.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I say again.
“You take every chance you get to do something wrong!” he roars. “You don’t think about anyone but yourself, and when someone does something you don’t like, you do everything you can to destroy it! Why the hell do you think we wouldn’t tell you?”
Everything inside me turns to ice.
Mom pushes past me. She puts a hand on his arm. “Stop. Alan. Please. Stop.”
But her voice isn’t strong. It’s weak, full of tears. She’s not looking at me.
Maybe the tears do the trick, though. Alan swears and turns away, storming into the kitchen.
My body has gone numb. I’m frozen in place. I don’t think I can move.
She turns around to look at me. I’m taller than she is, but now, standing two steps above her, she looks tiny. Microscopic.
I would give anything for her to close that distance. For her to talk to me. I want to fling my car keys and my phone at her feet. Take everything, I want to say. I don’t need any of it. I need you.
But I don’t get the chance. Sh
e turns around and follows Alan into the kitchen.
My legs don’t want to hold me anymore. “I’m sorry,” I yell, and my voice breaks. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I didn’t drive him. I’m sorry I let Kerry go. I’m sorry.”
She doesn’t respond.
She doesn’t come back.
They leave me there on the steps, alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
From: The Dark
To: Cemetery Girl
Date: Wednesday, October 9 07:22:04 AM
Subject: Talking
I don’t know if I can keep doing this. You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know the real me. You only know what I’ve shared, but that’s not the whole story. It’s only a snapshot, just like your photographs. You’ve made a judgment of me based on the little you’ve seen, and I think it’s all wrong.
I’m not a good person, Cemetery Girl. I’m not good at cultivating things, only destroying them.
You don’t need me.
You deserve better.
I quickly close the email and go to the chat list. No green dot—his name has disappeared entirely.
WHAT.
I quickly type an email to him and send it.
The immediate response isn’t what I’m expecting.
This user does not have a Freemail account. Please try again.
WHAT.
My chest is collapsing. He can’t do this. He can’t do this.
And I have no way to find him.
Like an idiot, I try to send him an email again.
Like an idiot, I expect a different response.
This user does not have a Freemail account. Please try again.
“Juliet? Are you okay?”
Mr. Gerardi peers down at me. Mom’s canvas bag with her film camera is lying in a pile beside me, but I’m staring at my phone, trying to remember how to make my heart beat.
“Yeah.” I cough. “Yes. I’m—” I choke and swallow and force my words to work. “I don’t know what I am.”
Keys jingle in his hand, and he reaches to unlock his door. “Do you want to come in? Are you here to work on the yearbook photos?”
“No . . . I . . . no.” I need to get it together. I shove the phone into my pocket. “I wanted to see if I could use the darkroom.”
He looks at the clock and grimaces. “I have a student coming to make up an exam in ten minutes.”
“I know how to do it.”
“I know.” He sighs. “But I’m not allowed to leave students alone with the chemicals.” He glances at the shoulder bag. “Do you want to leave it with me? I could run it through the developer, and you could come back later to make the prints.”
I take a step back as if he were about to grab the bag from me. “No. I need to do it.”
“Okay.” He hesitates, and his expression softens. “Is that your mom’s camera?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to leave her bag here? I could lock it up with my equipment.”
I clutch it to my body. I’ve had it with me all morning, and it’s like I can’t get enough of the smell of the canvas and the hand lotion inside. It’s like holding a piece of my mother.
I shake my head. “No.” My voice is husky. “Thanks. At lunch, maybe?”
He winces. “Faculty meeting. I’m free after the final bell. Do you want to do it then?”
All day. I have to wait all day. I wasn’t prepared for this.
My subconscious whispers that I’ve waited four months; another six hours shouldn’t make a difference. My head bobs up and down.
“But come in for a minute.” Mr. Gerardi flicks the lights. “I ran a few prints of that shot we want to use for the wrap. I wanted to show you.”
The print is on glossy, legal-sized paper. He’s cropped the original photograph for height so it would wrap around a yearbook well, but from what I can tell, he hasn’t done any other editing.
“I know you might want to do some touch-ups, enhance the sky a bit,” he says, “but honestly, I don’t think it needs much. I just needed a mock-up so we could get approval from the vice principal.”
I stare down at the photograph. He’s right—it doesn’t need much. The sky is a vivid blue, with sparse clouds. Sunlight beams in from the left. Declan and Rev are visible with enough detail to see the expressions on their faces, though their clothes are turned dark by the light behind them. On the opposite side, the cheerleaders are a bright contrast in red and white, hair and skirts flaring dramatically. It’s a great shot.
I want to feel pride, but compared with the horrifying shots Rowan, Brandon, and I were scanning through last night, this photograph is worthless.
Mr. Gerardi’s eyes search my face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I hand it back to him.
“You can keep that. I made a few.”
“Oh. Okay.” I don’t know if I want to, but I roll it into a tube and put it in the side pocket of my backpack. I’m so off balance today, waiting to see what happens when the world stops spinning so wildly.
A hand knocks on the door frame, and a girl I don’t know is standing there. She must be the other student he’s expecting. I duck out of the room.
As soon as I’m down the hallway a bit, I fish the phone out of my pocket again. The Dark’s name is still missing, and another email comes back unread. Why would he do this? What happened? What changed?
I go back and read through our stored chats.
I read them a second time.
I realize he never directly answered my question.
I need to find Declan Murphy.
We don’t have any classes together, so I don’t find him until lunch. He’s sitting at the back of the cafeteria at the exact same table where I found him yesterday, and Rev has a near-identical spread of plastic containers.
After yesterday, brazen Juliet is gone, and I hover by their table like a nervous groupie.
Rev glances my way first. Today’s sweatshirt is a very dark rust color, and the hood is larger, shadowing his face.
“Hey,” he says.
Declan barely spares me a glance. He stabs his fork into a piece of cucumber. “Want to scream at me some more?”
I swallow. I didn’t expect this kind of reaction. I don’t know why not—he’s right. I did go postal yesterday. For some reason I thought I’d walk up and he’d say, “Oh. Hey. You figured me out. Sorry I deleted my secret email account.”
Instead, he bites the cucumber off the fork and glares at me. “So far we’ve covered drunk and murderer. Any other accusations you want to throw my way?”
Rev glances across at him but doesn’t say anything. I can’t tell if they’re still fighting, or if the atmosphere is only tense because I’ve showed up.
The strap of my mother’s bag is thick and damp under my sweating fingers. “I didn’t call you a murderer.”
“Close enough.”
This isn’t going anything like what I expected. “Could you please stop being such a jerk and talk to me?”
“Why?” He stands up from the table and approaches me. “What do you want to talk about, Juliet?”
He looks so predatory. The moments of vulnerability I’ve glimpsed in the past are locked down, nowhere to be found. This is the Declan Murphy everyone sees.
“What do you want?” he says.
I want to know if you’re The Dark.
But I can’t say it. I don’t want to know, not right now. I can’t bare myself in front of this Declan, especially if I’m wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I say softly.
He leans in, his expression incredulous. “What?”
“I said I’m sorry.” I study him. His eyes are dark, like he didn’t sleep much last night, and his skin is rough with stubble. He never bothered to find a razor this morning. A small part of me wants to touch him, to put a hand against his cheek and feel his warmth—or share my own. I shift closer. “I’m sorry for what I said.”
<
br /> His walls don’t crack. “What do you want from me?”
“What?”
“I said, what do you want from me? Your car runs. You don’t need me. What are you even doing here? Slumming it with the rejects?”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“I think it’s exactly what you’re doing.”
“Dec.” Rev’s quiet voice speaks from behind him. “Don’t take it out on her.”
Declan stares down at me, his breathing a little quick. I stare back at him. Despite all the anger, the aggression, electricity sparks between us. Once again, I wish so badly for him to be The Dark—but at the same time, the thought terrifies me. My hand almost aches to touch his, as if skin against skin will somehow solve the mystery.
“Here,” I say quietly. “I brought you something.”
He blinks. That throws him.
I pull the rolled photograph out of my backpack and hold it out.
He unrolls it, and blue sky on paper stretches between us. Declan is very still, his eyes on the photograph.
After a minute, he lets go, and it furls back into my hand. “If Rev wants it there, it’s fine.”
“Do you want it there?”
“I’m done with lunch.” He grabs his backpack and walks away.
I follow him. “Please stop. Please talk to me. I need . . . I need—” My voice breaks. Tears fill my eyes, and I’m not ready for all this emotion.
I need you.
But I can’t say that. I’m not even entirely sure it’s him I need or if it’s someone else.
He’s not completely heartless. He stops. Turns. Looks at me. For the first time today, his eyes are heavy with feeling. I remember the same expression on his face when he held the weighted punching bag. You’re exactly as strong as I thought you were.
I would give anything for him to touch me right now.
He doesn’t. “I’m sorry, too,” he whispers.
Then he turns around and walks out of the cafeteria, leaving me alone in the middle of a swarm of students.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
INBOX: CEMETERY GIRL
No new messages
Every time I tell myself I’m not going to check my phone again, I do anyway. Not being able to email him is causing me physical pain. I grieved my mother’s death, but this is a different kind of loss. A deliberate removal. I’ve reread his final email until I could recite it by heart.