Tess Sharpe - Far From You

“I’m sorry I’ve been so shitty to you,” Kyle says.

I take a red M&M from his pile. “I’ve been shitty to you, too,” I admit.

For the first time since he came into the room, he looks up, his expression serious and measuring. It makes my mouth go dry.

“What?” I ask, half hoping he’ll break the gaze.

But he doesn’t. “I know I promised I wouldn’t talk about it,” he says. “What she told me, about her, about the two of you. But I’m gonna break that promise, this one time.” He stares me down, and there’s a gentleness in him I’ve never seen before.

“She was in love with you,” he says. “And I don’t think she got to tell you, did she?”

My heart lurches, seizes inside my chest, fluttering to life at the words I’ve always wanted to hear. I shake my head. Tears spill down my cheeks.

“She loved you. She wanted to be with you. That’s why she told me about herself. She said she’d made her choice. It was you. I think it was always you.”

I look away from him, out through the blinds at the lights of town, and he stays quiet, a comforting witness, letting me cry.

Letting me finally let her go.

A YEAR AND A HALF AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

“Watch out!” Mina stomps into the puddle. Muddy water splashes against my back, drenching me.

“Oh my God!” I shriek, spinning around. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

She beams over her shoulder, rain dripping down her forehead. She’s abandoned her umbrella on the sidewalk, and she’s standing smack-dab in the middle of a room-sized puddle. When she tilts her head to the sky, opening her mouth to let in the rain, my stomach swoops. “Come on. Play with me.”

“You are such a brat sometimes,” I tell her, but when she pouts, I grin and kick water her way, wading in after her. In the deepest part of the puddle, the water reaches my ankles. My feet squelch in the mud as we splash each other, helpless with laughter. We fling mud like we’re seven again. I rub it into her hair, and she darts around me like a seal, quick and sleek.

For once, she falls first, right on her ass in the mud, and instead of getting up she holds her hand out, pulling me gently down with her. Just the two of us and the mud and rain, side by side, like we’re supposed to be.

Mina sighs happily, her arm looped in mine. She leans her head against my shoulder.

“You’re crazy. We’re gonna catch pneumonia.”

She squeezes my arm, snuggling closer to me. “Admit it. There’s nowhere else you’d rather be than here with me.”

I close my eyes, let the rain fall on my face, let the weight of her press into me, her warmth seep into my skin. “You got me,” I say.

(NOW) JULY

“How are you feeling today?” David asks.

I bite my lip. “I’m okay.”

“We had a deal, remember?” David says. “It’s been six sessions. It’s time, Sophie.”

“Can’t we just talk about the woods instead?”

“The fact that you’d rather talk through being attacked again than talk about Mina is exactly why we need to start talking about her,” David says. “It’s okay to start small.”

“I’m…” I stop, because I don’t even know how to finish that sentence. “I haven’t been able to go out to her grave,” I say instead, because it’s the thing that’s been waking me up at night, in between nightmares of hiding in the forest again. “I thought I’d be able to. Go out there, I mean. I thought that after we caught who killed her— if we did—it’d be easier. Like a reward. I know that’s stupid. But it’s what I thought.”

David leans back in his chair, thoughtful.

“I don’t think that’s stupid,” he says. “Why do you think it’s so hard for you to go see Mina’s grave?”

“I just…I miss…” I struggle for strength, for composure, for any control, but I am safe here, and I have to say the words. They need to exist somewhere, because they were never said in the right place at the right time.

“We were in love. Me and Mina. We were in love.”

I lean back on the couch, hugging myself. I meet his eyes, and the approval I find there, the confirmation, makes the tightness in my chest ease.

“I guess that’s why it’s so hard,” I say.

AUGUST

When my dad comes out of the house, he finds me on the deck, curled up in one of the Adirondack chairs. The sun’s setting on my flower beds, and I turn my head toward him, slipping off my sunglasses.

Dad took a few weeks off after I was attacked. And even now, night after night, I hear the rhythmic thumping of the basketball against concrete as he shoots hoops in the driveway while the rest of the world sleeps. Sometimes I sit at the kitchen window and watch him.

Now he sits down in the chair next to me and clears his throat. “Sweetie, I need to tell you something.”

“What happened?” I sit up straighter, because his mouth’s a flat, unhappy line.

“I just got a call. The forensic team finally found Jackie’s body on Rob Hill’s property.” He rubs a hand across his jaw, his stubble almost completely silver now. He’s not sleeping much, and neither am I. Both of us look it.

“Oh,” I say. I don’t know what else to do. It’s weird, but finding Jackie’s body feels like a good thing, because I can’t help but think of Amy, of not knowing. Of not having a grave to visit.

“So that’s it, right?” I ask. “They’ll put him away for good?”

“It’ll be hard for a jury to overlook that kind of evidence.”

I pull my feet up onto the chair, hugging my knees, ignoring the way my bad leg twinges. Sometimes I need to do this, pull into myself, when I think about Coach. When I think about hiding behind that rock, waiting for him to find me. Kill me.

“Sweetie…” Dad begins, but then he doesn’t say anything else, just continues to watch me.

I wait.

“Is there…is there anything you want to talk about?” he asks finally.

I think about it for a second. Telling him. All of it. Me and Mina. Me and Trev. The tangle I found myself in, no way out but drugs, for so long. A part of me wants to. But a bigger part wants to keep it to myself, foster it inside me for a while longer.

“Not right now,” I say.

He nods, takes it as a dismissal, and when he moves to get up, I reach over and grab his hand. I push the words out of my mouth—I have to start somewhere.

“Dad, someday, I’ll tell you everything. All of it. I promise.”

He squeezes my hand, and when he smiles at me, the sadness in his eyes fades a little.

A few weeks later, I stand outside the cemetery gates alone as the funeral procession passes by. I watch from the gates as they bury Jackie, unable to venture inside. In the distance, I can see the group of mourners gathered around the grave. A girl breaks from the crowd at the end.

Amy doesn’t say anything. She walks to the bottom of the hill and faces me, close enough to the fence that I can see her clearly. She presses her hand against her heart and nods her head. A silent thank-you.

I nod back.

SEPTEMBER

“Please tell me your mom’s stopped freaking out about this,” Rachel says, dipping her fries into barbecue sauce. A few drops splatter on the practice test she’s grading.

“Neither of them is really happy about it,” I say. I’ve been shredding my napkin into little pieces, and they flutter across the table when Rachel turns the page. “I may have played the ‘I was attacked by psychos’ card to get them to agree.”

“It’s well earned,” Rachel says. “Twice in one year.”

I grin and lean over the table, trying to see what she’s writing. “How’d I do?”