Mandy Hubbard: Ripple

I glance at their table, and my eyes zero in on the one person who isn’t laughing. Cole. His face is completely blank, and he’s sitting there, perfectly still. As always, girls surround him.

I fling open the door and scurry to the bench in the far corner of the courtyard, the one mostly surrounded by shrubs, where they won’t be able to see me from their A-list table in the cafeteria.

Then I pull my legs up on the bench with me and hug my knees. I rest my forehead on them, closing my eyes and taking in deep breaths to steady my aching heart.

I know they all blame me for killing Steven. I know this is my punishment. Just as I know I deserve it. They blame me because they think I should have saved him somehow, stopped the senseless tragedy. If they knew I outright murdered him, I wonder what they’d think, how much worse their taunts would be.

My stomach growls as I sit alone, hoping no one is looking at me but unwilling to glance up to confirm it.

I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting there when a guy clears his throat. I freeze for a second, and then reluctantly uncoil.

Cole stares me straight in the eye. The look he gives me is so different than the ones from the rest of my old friends. His says he doesn’t hate me like they do. He sets the plate down, and I stare at the sandwich.

“It’s not right.”

I swallow. “What?”

“What they do to you.”

I tip my head to the side. “They didn’t do anything. I’m the idiot who tripped.”

“I don’t mean just now. I mean . . . every day.”

“Why do you even care? It’s just the same joke, new year. Nothing I can’t handle.” I jut my chin up.

“Why do you let them do that? Why do you just take it?”

“Because I deserve it.”

He crosses his arms at his chest and looks me dead in the eye. “No one deserves to be treated like dirt.”

I glare at him, wishing he’d leave well enough alone. “Yeah. I do. What happened is my fault, and they know it.”

“You really blame yourself?”

The silence stretches a beat too long. And then, “Yes.”

“Huh.” He sighs but doesn’t seem to know what to say to this. He shifts his weight, glances back at the cafeteria and then at me again. “Well, enjoy your sandwich.”

I want to say something, but there are so many things I want to say that I can’t seem to articulate anything at all. And then, before I’ve even had a chance to get a word out, he’s stepping away from me, leaving me alone with my guilt. I open my mouth to call out to him, but then I just snap it shut.

No friends. That’s my number one rule, the only thing that keeps everyone else safe.

I put my feet back down on the ground and watch him as he crosses the courtyard. A lanky dark-haired girl stops him at the door, giving him a big hug that lingers too long. She says something, and he laughs, and then she walks away, her hips swinging.

He watches her go. I narrow my eyes. He reaches for the door, glancing back at me. He catches me staring and his lips curl into an easy smile.

I look away, down at the sandwich as my stomach growls again. It’s the same turkey-on-wheat that I dropped on the floor, except this one isn’t wrecked and dirt-covered. I glance back at the cafeteria, but, just like I planned, I can’t see their table from this angle.

With a sigh, I pick up the sandwich and take a big bite. I’m so famished that it tastes better than anything I’ve ever had. The sun warms me through my black shirt as I sit there, chewing quietly on the pity gift from Cole.

I hope the weather holds out for another month or two. It rains almost constantly from October to May in Cedar Cove, Oregon. We’re right on the ocean, but the mountains that surround the town trap the clouds right above us.

Then again, when it really pours, there are fewer people up in Tillamook Forest; and I don’t have to worry as much about someone finding my lake. Today, the sun is out, the sky cloudless. We’ll only get a few more weeks of this weather, and then fall will be here, announced by all the leaves turning vibrant shades of crimson and gold, the same as our school colors. By the time football season is half over, it’ll barely be forty degrees out, even by midday. I hate the winters, when dusk begins to fall just a couple of hours after school lets out.

And I dread the dusk. The second the moon rises in the night sky, begins its pull on the tides, I’m drawn to the water. In the summer, I only need to swim seven or eight hours per night, but in the winter, when the nights seem to stretch on forever, it’s closer to twelve.

I take another bite of the sandwich, staring at the ground.

Nine hours to go, and it’s back to the lake.

An hour before dusk, I enter Seaside Cemetery, right on time—thirty minutes before dusk, just like always. The cemetery is on a rolling hilltop ten minutes south of Cedar Cove, not far from the bluffs. The sweeping, beautiful million-dollar views of the Pacific stretch out below me.

I walk down the winding concrete pathways, past the big, soonto-be bare weeping willow, and to the fourth grave after the tree. Steven’s. Once there, I drop to my knees next to the stone, between the body of Steven Goode and his neighbor’s, a guy named Mathew Pearson. A guy who’d been blessed with sixty-two years on this earth, more than three times as many as Steven had.

I turn around and lie back on the grass, staring toward the cloudless September sky. As the pinks and oranges of sunset begin to seep into the sky, I can’t help but think about what dusk means. If Steven were lying on top of the grass, instead of six feet under, he’d be right next to me. We could spend the next half-hour touching shoulders, intertwining our fingers. The chill of the grass would disappear under the warmth of his smile.

Instead, he’s cold and dead, buried beneath the ground in a beautiful mahogany coffin that cost his mother eight thousand dollars.

“Hey, Steven,” I say. I dig into my pocket and produce a tiny Hot Wheels Chevelle. It’s electric blue, like his was. “I found this at a toy store the other day.” I hold it up to the sky, as if he’ll be able to see it from wherever it is his soul resides.

“I know it’s not the same thing. I mean, you can’t drive it or anything. But it made me think of you, so . . .” I bought one for you and kept one for me.

My voice trails off, and I drop my arm back to my side. “The guy who bought your car lives in town, you know. I see him sometimes. He’s, like, fifty. I bet he has no idea how hard you worked to restore it. Stinks that you can’t be the one to enjoy it.”

My voice cracks and catches in my throat. This is the only time of day I let my guard down. I’m not sure why I come up here every day, as if I’ll find the answers, as if he’ll tell me he doesn’t blame me for what happened. But somehow talking to him takes a tiny piece of the guilt away. It’s just a little ice chip of a huge iceberg, but it’s something.

I swallow as the first tear brims and rolls across my temple. As my vision swims with tears, it makes the darkening sky look like the ocean, like rippling, shimmering water.

And suddenly, I’m there again, standing on the dark beach with Steven.

I giggle when he slips his arms around my waist, nervous. We’ve been dancing around this for weeks. I’ve been too afraid to ask him what he was waiting for. Too afraid I was wrong.

But tonight everything is different. Tonight we stopped dancing.

I watch the water roll in to shore, Steven behind me, his lips brushing across the crook of my neck. There’s something in the air tonight, something electric that seems to be setting me on fire. It’s a humid latesummer night, the dark clouds threatening rain that never seems to come. All they do is blot out the moon and the stars and make it hard to see more than a dozen yards ahead.