IT TAKES ME ANOTHER TEN MINUTES to get out of the car, and even then, only because Charlie comes out of her house and taps on my window. I turn my head slowly toward the sound, my eyes taking in Charlie’s tattered Nirvana T-shirt and concerned face. I’m underwater, drowning in that unspoken word, and I need air.
Unbuckling, I push the door open. Charlie moves out of the way, all grace and indifference.
“Where were you today?” I ask. My feet scrape across the grit of the asphalt and I wince.
Charlie frowns down at my feet. “Where the hell are your shoes?”
“Gee, I guess I left them at home,” I spit back, pushing forward. “Where were you? Were you with her? That girl? Who is she? Where did you meet her?”
Charlie tilts her head, her expression part curiosity and part sadness. “Is that really what you want to talk about right now?”
“Yes.” I slam the car door shut. “Yes. That’s what friends do, right? We talk about our dates and what it felt like to kiss them and how so-and-so made us feel all giddy and how you didn’t even need a drink at that party because Girl was enough of a high for you and oh, isn’t she hot? Wow, so hot. I can’t believe how hot she is. Damn, Charlotte, you’re so lucky—”
Cold sears through my back as Charlie presses me gently against the metal of the car, her hand on my stomach and her eyes glaring into mine. “Stop.”
“Just tell me.”
“I’m going to let this go, because I know you’re upset right now. But just so we’re clear, I don’t owe you an explanation or a story or even one juicy detail. You put this in motion, Mara. I’m only doing what you said we should.”
Her hand drops away and all my cells feel too loose, as though they’re seconds from drifting off in different directions.
“And don’t call me Charlotte,” she adds, taking my hand and pulling me toward her front door.
I let her lead me and I focus on the familiar feel of her hand in mine, all of my molecules slowly coming back together.
Inside Charlie’s house, more familiarity calms my breaths. The faint smell of her dad’s after-shave, the modern furniture, about a million pictures of Charlie as a baby, as a toddler, as a kid, as a tween, and so on. She’s everywhere, her parents’ miracle child after years of fertility treatments.
She drops my hand as we head upstairs. Once in her room, she immediately clicks on some gloomy music via her laptop. She knows I can’t stand the stark silence. I sit on her bed, careful not to disturb her guitar resting on the pillow. A notebook lies open on the plain navy blue comforter, her slanted half-cursive, half-print handwriting spilling over the page.
“Are you writing a new song?” I ask, resisting the urge to pull the notebook closer and devour her words. Charlie’s an incredible songwriter. An incredible singer. An incredible guitar player.
“Yeah.” She flips the notebook closed and places her guitar on the stand in the corner. The rest of her room is pretty messy. Clothes everywhere and posters taped to the wall, showing off singers I know about only because of Charlie. Her knitting supplies are piled into a laundry basket in the corner, needles and half-finished scarves and beanie hats overflowing and dripping onto the floor, yarn hued in mostly blues and silvers, golds and reds—her and my Hogwarts house colors. Her room is a type A personality’s nightmare.
“Have your parents heard it?” I ask.
“Heard what?”
“The song.”
She just stares at me, that crinkle between her eyes that makes me want to smooth my thumb over it. Charlie’s parents send her to the Nicholson County Center at Pebblebrook because she’s been singing—and singing well—since she was five years old. They think she adores arias and big choral pieces meant for giant concert halls. And it’s not that she doesn’t like all that. It’s just that she loves the guitar, a tiny stage, soft lighting on a single stool, a whole lot more.
“I’m sorry,” I say, running my finger over an almost-hole in my jeans.
Charlie lifts her dark eyebrows. “Why?”
“For calling you Charlotte.”
A sigh escapes her throat, and the bed depresses as she sits down next to me. I wait for her hand to reach out and start playing with my hair or to gently squeeze the back of my neck like she’ll sometimes do when she can tell I’m getting worked up. I’d even take a playful shoulder shove. Anything to connect me to her, to feel like us.
But nothing comes. She just sits there, picking at a peeling callus on her middle fingertip.
“Where were you today?” I ask again, and she lifts her dark eyes to mine. “Are you sick? You don’t seem sick.”
“I’m not sick.”
“So you skipped?” Charlie never skips, calls skipping a wasted lie. Her parents are administrators at two different middle schools in the next county over and are nearly impossible to bullshit about school stuff. They wrangle hormonal seventh-graders all day for a reason. Still, Charlie works hard to craft this certain picture of herself when she’s around them, full of half-truths and half smiles. “I lie with loving care,” Charlie joked once when I asked her why she doesn’t tell her parents how much she hates it when they call her Charlotte. Which they always, always do.
“I didn’t skip,” she says. “I was—”
“You weren’t in school. You aren’t sick, so you skipped. Why didn’t—”
“Mara.”
“I don’t get this. Is it because we broke up? I told you why. You agreed that our friendship was more important.”
“I agreed in part.”
“In part is still agreeing.”
“Mara, sit down.”
I hadn’t realized I’d stood up, but I don’t comply and pace across the worn maroon rug spread across the hardwood floor. I need answers. I need this to make sense. I need to somehow hold all of this in my hand and see the whole picture, the what and why and how.
“You were with her, weren’t you? That redhead. Just say it, Charlie.”
She rubs her forehead, then tangles her fingers into her hair. A short lock drops into her eyes and she leaves it there. “I was with Hannah.”
Her voice is soft, as if she’s coaxing a wild animal out of a cave, but it doesn’t matter. The name is still an explosion in my ears.
“Why?” The tiny syllable comes out on a breath and my knees go rubbery. I must be swaying, because Charlie grabs my hand and pulls me back down onto the bed.
“Because she’s upset and scared and her parents are pretty much smothering her right now and she just wanted to be with someone who wasn’t going to shove more chicken soup down her throat.”
“Why?” I ask again. Charlie still has my hand in hers and I will her not to let go. If she does, surely this time I’ll splinter into pieces.
“Have you been home?” she asks. “Have you talked to your mom? Or . . . or your brother?”
I stare at her, blinking.
“Mara—”
“It’s not true. It can’t be. There has to be some—”
“It’s true, Mara.”
My throat tightens at the soft way she says my name, the vowels almost musical. Part of me realizes she’s trying to keep me calm. Part of me doesn’t care.
“How?” I ask. Tears bloom but don’t fall. “Owen wouldn’t. He would never.”
“I saw Owen at the lake and he was hammered.”
“I know. I saw him too.”
“He was acting like a total dumb-ass with his orchestra friends.”
“That’s what he does at parties, Charlie. It doesn’t mean he—”
“Just let me talk.” She says it gently, reaches out a hand to squeeze my knee. All it does is make me feel wild, but I force my words behind my teeth.
Charlie takes a deep breath. “Hannah wasn’t with him, and when I asked him where she was, he just stared at me and mumbled something about getting another beer. You were nowhere to be found and my phone didn’t have a signal, so Tess and I went looking for Hannah.”
I vaguely register the unfamiliar name. It seems so silly now. “I went home,” I whisper, but I’m not sure Charlie even hears me.
“I found her on the trail,” she goes on, pulling her hand from mine. She takes a few more big breaths, her gaze going hazy. “She was just sitting on a bench at one of those cement overlooks about half a mile from the party, staring at the water. Her dress was all stretched out over her shoulders and I couldn’t get her to talk to me for, like, ten minutes. Finally, she mumbled something I couldn’t make out about Owen, and I half carried her to my car. I was going to take her home, but after I dropped off Tess, Hannah still wouldn’t say anything and she was holding her arm weirdly, like it hurt. I was totally freaking out. I tried calling my parents, but they were at a fundraiser for my dad’s school and weren’t answering so I took her to Memorial. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“And they said she was okay, right? She wasn’t hurt?”
Charlie looks away and presses the heels of both hands into her eyes. “She is hurt, Mara. She has a sprained wrist. Her parents showed up and wanted her to do one of those rape kits, and it was fucking awful. She screamed the entire time. It took hours.”
I flinch at the word. At all the words.
“After that, the hospital called the police.”
“The police?” Every word coming out of Charlie’s mouth seems foreign. Strange and guttural syllables, unfamiliar vocabulary, cryptic context clues. My own voice sounds odd repeating the words, a child trying out a new language she’s not sure she wants to learn.
I squeeze my eyes shut until color spirals out behind my lids. My fingers curl around the comforter, blood pulsing into the tips. The mattress moves as Charlie shifts. Next thing I know, there’s a warm weight on my thighs. I look down to see Charlie kneeling on the floor in front of me, her forearms resting on my legs.
“Talk to me,” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
But I can’t. I need command of that foreign language, words to explain this black thing leaking into my blood. I’m not even sure what it’s made of. I can’t think about Owen. I can’t attach his name to Hannah on a hospital bed, bandages on her wrist, tears on her lovely face.
I can’t. Every name in this horror story is a separate thing, each a disconnected vignette. So I close Owen’s chapter and flip to Hannah’s, to Charlie’s.
My hands find hers resting lightly on my hips and I tangle our fingers together. “I’m so sorry.”
She tilts her head, and her eyes have a rare sheen to them.
“I should’ve been there,” I say. “I should’ve been with you, with Hannah. I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry you had to help her alone.”
“Hey.” She pushes herself to her knees so we’re eye level. She leans into my space, her fingers tightening on mine, our foreheads inches from resting against each other. “This is not your fault. It’s not like any of us had any clue this would happen. Owen is—”
“He’s my brother. He didn’t do this and I’m the one who should’ve been there. Not Tess.”
Charlie frowns and puts some space between us. “Is that what this is about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Tess.”
“No. I’m just saying, I wish I had been there.”
She shakes her head and untangles her hands from mine before pulling herself to her feet. “Well, yeah, I wish a lot of things.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“I’m always a little mad at you, aren’t I?”
I search for a smile on her lips, but it’s not there. They’re pressed into a colorless line. Since the first hour of our meeting freshman year, Charlie’s always considered me adorably infuriating. Every time we argue—over what music we play in the car, what movie to watch, what topping to order on our pizza—she usually relents because I make a point of being a pain in the ass. I’m always a little mad at you has become a theme in our relationship.
But this time there’s no humor in it, no flirty wink, no affectionate grin.
“This isn’t about you and me or Tess or whoever,” she says. “I mean, do you get this? Do you understand what’s happening, Mara?”
I open my mouth to say yes, but I can’t, because I don’t. There’s no way this happened, no way my brother did this. He’s not even capable of it and I can’t understand how anyone could think he is.
“Fuck,” Charlie sighs out, shoving her hands into her hair. “I’m sorry. This is . . . I don’t know what to say.”
I nod and stand up, a helplessness settling on my bones like age. “I guess I should go.”
“Mara—”
But whatever she was about to say, she swallows it. I wait for her to go on, to stop me from leaving, but she doesn’t. At her door, I pause, keeping my eyes fixed on the painted white wood.
“Is Hannah okay?” I ask.
A beat. “No. She’s not.”
We let the question and answer settle between us, the dark and clouded sounds finally giving way to a shimmer of meaning.