Tess Sharpe - Far From You

“Sophie, please,” she says. “Tell me the truth. It’ll be okay. As long as you tell me. I need to know, so I can figure out how to keep you out of trouble. It’ll make you feel better, sweetheart.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Yes, you are,” she says, the ice creeping back into her voice. She draws herself up, standing straight over me. “I won’t let you kill yourself. You’re going to stay clean, even if I have to lock you up.”

She shreds that final thread of naiveté I have. It’s in pieces on the floor, with the rest of my life. My mother tears apart whatever’s left, determined to find the lies, the pills—anything to prove Kyle and the detective right.

She doesn’t find anything. There’s nothing to find.

But it doesn’t matter. Kyle’s words, those pills shoved into my jacket, they’re enough to convince anyone. Even her. Especially her.

Two weeks later, she sends me to Seaside.

NOW (JUNE)

“Seriously, Sophie?” Kyle folds his arms across his massive chest, looking from the bear spray to the door and back again. “You’ve lost it. Put that down; you’re gonna hurt yourself. The ventilation in here sucks.”

He’s probably right. But I keep the can aimed right at him. “You lied to the cops about why Mina and I were at the Point. Innocent people who want their girlfriend’s killer caught don’t do that.”

He gapes at me. “You think I had something to do with it? Are you kidding me? I loved her.” His voice quavers. “Mina’s gone, and it’s your fault. If you weren’t such a junkie, she’d still be alive.”

My fingers tighten around the can. “If you cared about her so much, tell me why you lied.”

Someone bangs on the bathroom door. I flinch, dropping the can. It rolls across the tile floor and Kyle takes advantage of the distraction, jumping for the exit.

“I won’t stop,” I warn him as he fumbles with the lock.

“Screw you, Soph. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

He slams the door shut behind him. I can hear muffled voices on the outside, snatches of a conversation that starts with “Don’t go in there, man” before Kyle’s voice fades.

I press my hand near my heart, like that’ll help it calm down. I can feel the ridges of the scar there, where the surgeons cracked my chest after the crash.

I grab the bear spray from the floor, put it in my purse, and head to the door. By now, Kyle’ll be long gone. Probably off to spread the news that Sophie Winters is back home and crazier than ever.

Someone’s standing at the door when I open it. I almost smack into his chest, my bad leg twists as I step back, and I falter. When a hand reaches out to steady me, I know without looking up who it is.

Dread covers me like a body, hot and heavy and fitting in all the wrong places. I’m not prepared for this. I’ve avoided thinking about this moment for months.

I can’t face him.

But I can’t walk away.

Not again.

“Trev,” I say instead.

Mina’s brother stares back at me, tall and broad and so familiar. I force myself to look into his eyes.

It’s like looking into hers.

FOUR MONTHS AGO (SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD)

It’s been four days. It seems longer. Or maybe shorter.

My parents flit around me during the day, quiet, guarded. They’re planning. Preparing to go to war for me. Once my mom realizes I’m not going to tell the police what they want, she goes into lawyer mode. She spends all her time making phone calls, and Dad paces, back and forth, up the stairs, down the hallway, until I’m sure he’s worn a path there.

Mom’s trying to keep me out of juvie. The bottle of Oxy they found in my jacket wasn’t much, but it was enough to get me into plenty of trouble—if Mom didn’t have so many friends in the right places.

She’s going to save me, like she always does.

She doesn’t think she saved me the first time, but she did. She sent me to Macy.

The days aren’t so bad, with the click of Mom’s heels and the thud of Dad’s footsteps. How Dad cracks open my door every time he sees it’s closed, just in case.

The nights are the worst.

Every time I close my eyes, I’m back at Booker’s Point.

So I don’t close my eyes. I stare. I drink coffee. I stay awake.

I can’t keep it up much longer.

I want to use. The constant itch inside me, the voice in my head that whispers “I’ll make it all go away” flirts at the edges of me. There are parts that are starting to prickle, like blood rushing into a foot gone numb.

I ignore it.

I breathe.

Five months. Three weeks. Five days.

Two in the morning, and I’m the only one awake. I fold myself on the bench built into the dining room window, wrapped in a blanket. I watch the yard like I’m waiting for the man in the mask to charge through the gate, ready to finish what he started.

I teeter between hope and terror that he will. A high-wire act where I’m never quite sure if I want to be saved or fall.

I need to make this stop.

A light in the yard distracts me, coming from the rickety tree house nestled in the old oak at the foot of my garden. I head outside, padding across the yard in bare feet. The rope ladder is frayed, and it’s hard to pull myself up with my bad leg, but I manage.

Trev’s sitting there, his back against the wall, knees drawn up. His dark, curly hair’s a mess. There are circles underneath his eyes. He hasn’t been sleeping, either.

Of course he hasn’t.

His fingers trace a spot on the floor over and over. As I climb into the tree house, I see it’s the board where Mina carved her name, entwined with mine.

“The funeral’s on Friday,” he says.

“I know.”

“My mom…” He stops, swallowing hard. His gray eyes—so much like hers that it hurts to look into them, like she’s here, but not—shine with unshed tears. “I had to go to the funeral home by myself. Mom just couldn’t deal. So I sat there and listened to that guy talk about music and flowers and if the casket should be lined in velvet or satin. All I could think about is how Mina’s scared of the dark, and how messed up it is that I’m letting them put her in the ground.” He lets out a tight laugh that’s painful against my ears. “Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard?”

“No.” I grab his hand, holding tight when he tries to pull away. “No, it’s not stupid. Remember that Snoopy night-light she had?”

“You broke it with a soccer ball.” He almost smiles at the memory.

“And you covered for me. She didn’t speak to you for a week, but you never told.”

“Yeah, well, someone had to look out for you.” He stares out the roughly framed window, anywhere but at me. “I keep trying to picture it. How it happened. What it was like. If it was fast. If she was in pain.” He faces me now, an open book of raw emotion, wanting me to bleed all over the pages with him. “Was she?”

“Trev, don’t. Please.” My voice cracks. I want to get out of here. I can’t think about it. I try to tug away, but now it’s him who’s holding on to me.

“I hate you.” It’s almost casual, the way he says it. But the look in his eyes—it turns his words into a tangle of lie and truth, bearing down on me, so familiar. “I hate that you were the one who survived. I hate that I was relieved when I heard you were okay. I just…hate you.”

The bones of my fingers grind underneath the pressure of his hand.

“I hate everything” is all I can say back.

He kisses me. Pulls me forward with a sudden jerk of movement that I’m not prepared for. It’s jarring; our teeth clack together, noses bump, the angle is all wrong. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. This is the only way it could ever be.

I get his shirt off with little difficulty, but mine is more trouble, tangling around my neck as he gets distracted by my bared skin. His hands gentle, soft to the point of reverence, moving over skin and bone and scars, tracing the curve of me.

I let myself be touched. Kissed. Undressed and eased back onto the wooden floor scarred with the remnants of our childhood.

I let myself feel it. Allow his skin to sink into mine.

I let myself because this is exactly what I need: this terrible idea, this beautiful, messy distraction.

And if somewhere in the middle both of our faces are wet with tears, it doesn’t matter so much. We’re doing this for all the wrong reasons, anyway.

Later, I stare at his face in the moonlight and wonder if he can tell that I kissed him like I already know the shape of his lips. Like I’ve mapped them in my mind, in another life. Learned them from another person who shared his eyes and nose and mouth, but who is never coming back.

NOW (JUNE)

For a long, frozen moment, Trev and I stare at each other. I’m caught in his gaze, hungry for the slightest glimpse of her, even if it’s just similar features in a familiar face.

They always looked so much alike. It wasn’t just their high cheekbones and straight noses, the way their gray eyes tilted up at the edges. It was in the way they smiled when they were trying not to, lopsided. The way they both fiddled with their brown curls when they were anxious, how they couldn’t stop chewing their nails for anything.

Trev is all I have left of her, a handful of echoing characteristics buried underneath what makes him Trev: the honesty and goodness and the way he doesn’t hide things (not like her, not like me).

Mina had loved him so much. They’d been inseparable since their dad died, and when I came along, Trev had stepped aside to make room, though my seven-year-old, only-child self didn’t understand that. Just like I didn’t understand things like daddies dying and the tears Mina would sometimes shed out of nowhere.