I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED TO FIND, BUT I WENT BACK to the beach. Maybe I thought there’d be a clue. Or maybe I thought the clothes Evie took off before she entered the water would still be there, piled on a piece of driftwood, her phone charged and tucked safely in her pocket. Maybe I thought they would be untouched, unbothered by human hands or the weather, that I could bury my nose in her shirt and still smell her. But every sign of Evie was gone. Someone had probably thrown away her clothes, taken her cash and whatever else they could use out of her wallet, and hacked her phone to sell. The beach was just a beach, covered by rocks and seaweed and what seemed like more garbage than usual.
I found nothing. I am running out of ideas. So now here I am again, waiting for Evie’s sister outside her school, even though she made it clear that she wasn’t interested in seeing me again. But I have to know how Evie’s doing, and after trying the hospital and Cole, this is the only thing I can think of besides going to her house.
“You again?” a sharp voice says behind me, and I turn around to find Jenica.
“How is she?”
Jenica sighs. “You can’t keep doing this.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“You could choose to leave us alone.”
“That’s not an option.”
“You know my parents hate you, right? They’re never going to let you see her.” I open my mouth to protest, but she keeps talking. “They think you got Evie hooked on drugs. They wanted to press charges, but she convinced them not to.”
My heart jumps. Evie was thinking about me. Talking about me. Defending me. I still exist.
“We smoked a little pot, that’s all,” I say, only partly lying. “We drank a little.” She was drunk when I left her that afternoon, but that was all her doing. I left her at home, where she was safe. I didn’t know she would go back to the beach. I didn’t know she’d go swimming.
Jenica blinks and says nothing, and I’m not sure if she believes me, if she’s convinced of my innocence.
“Did you tell her to call me?”
“She couldn’t even if she wanted to. She got sent straight to rehab as soon as she got released from the hospital. The only people she’s allowed to call are my parents.”
“Rehab?” I say. “For smoking pot and drinking?”
Jenica stares at me for a long time and I can’t quite read the look on her face. “You don’t know?” she finally says, and her face softens with a wave of emotion. It could be compassion. It could be pity.
“I don’t know what?”
“Oh, wow.”
“I don’t know what?”
What else didn’t Evie tell me? Is there anything real about the girl I fell in love with?
“She had a ton of opiates in her system when you brought her to the ER,” Jenica says.
“What?” I say. “Opiates? What are you talking about?” I wonder for a moment if we’re talking about the same person, if there’s another Evie who goes to North Berkeley High who has a sister named Jenica.
“She had a problem with pain pills after she got out of the hospital the last time, but we thought she was over it. She promised. God, we were so stupid.”
I’m trying to wrap my head around this timeline. Evie was on pills after she got out of the hospital, before she met me. That means she must have been on pills the whole time we were together.
I cannot feel my body. I am incapable of feeling. If I feel just a little, the floodgates will open and I’ll be destroyed. Did Evie tell me the truth about anything?
“Wow, you really didn’t know,” Jenica says. “I actually feel sorry for you. Well, get in line. Yours is not the first heart she’s broken. You know Evie had a boyfriend when she started seeing you, right? And she was stringing you both along?”
I don’t say anything. My mind is stopped, frozen. It cannot process this nightmare of information.
“His name is Will. They’d been together for two years. He stayed by her side the whole time she had cancer. He came to visit her in the hospital almost every day.” Jenica is agitated, angry. Her voice is shaking. “What’d you do? Get her high? Share some of your drugs with her?”
I don’t want to hear this. I can’t. “I need to talk to her,” I say.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
She’s lying. She has to be lying. “There has to be a way for her to call me.”
“Dude, I’m serious. She doesn’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to you. It’s over. Give up. Leave us alone.”
I grab her arm as she starts walking away. I need something, anything, solid in my hand. “Don’t touch me!” she snaps, and pulls away. I let her go, and I wonder if that’s the last piece of Evie I will ever touch.