Chapter Thirty-Four
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The concert hall is packed. Parents, professors, and modern music legends mingle and sip champagne in the ornate lobby. It’s just like Claudia said. You can tell from the way they scan the program eagerly that these aren’t just parents here to see their kids perform. These are people who care, whose attention means something.
I stick out more than usual. Whatever the dress code is, my drenched black jeans and snow boots aren’t up to it, based on the looks I get as I push through the crowd. They move swiftly out of my way, avoiding the rain dripping from my damp clothes. I keep my hands burrowed in my pockets, fingers closed around the switchblade. Soft music trickles from the main amphitheater, the opening notes of a violinist’s warm-up piece. I follow the same path I’d taken the first time I came here, going down to the practice rooms. Every room is occupied this time. Students pacing around their instruments while dressed in their best blazers and slacks, half of them wearing the same watches and diamonds as the crowd waiting to see them.
Claudia is in the second-to-last room. Unlike the others, she’s using the room for what it was intended for. Same as on the stage, her eyes are closed as she moves in time with the piece—her body more of a vessel for the music than the cello itself. She doesn’t notice when I open the door, or when I step into the room. Only when the door clicks shut does she stop. Her eyes fly open, startled and panicked.
“H-hey,” she says, her voice equal parts nervous and relieved. While she’s turned to set her bow on the music stand next to her, I lock the door and pull the blinds shut.
When I face her, she doesn’t comment on the blinds. All she does is take one step closer, looking as though she’s going to close the distance, when I stop her in her tracks.
“What did you do to her?”
My words knock her back like a shove, her brows furrowing as she gives me a once-over. “W-what?”
She doesn’t ask who.
“What did you do to my sister?” I press. When I step forward, she takes two steps back, almost tripping over her music stand.
Still, she doesn’t ask the question I hoped she would. What sister? If she had, maybe I would’ve been able to convince myself that this was all a misunderstanding. But she doesn’t say anything. The look in her eyes answers for her.
“I don’t …” She doesn’t finish that thought. Either because she can’t think of a lie, or she’s tired of doing it to my face.
“Why do you have this?” I hold up the crumpled postcard, waving it in front of her before throwing it down on the ground between us. “Why were you in Luster?”
“I-I …” Tears stream down Claudia’s cheeks, bringing clumps of mascara with them. Her shoulders tremble as she struggles to choke out an answer, but she can’t get more than a single stuttered sound out. Her eyes fall to her bandaged fingers, and I wonder what else those hands have done. Did she push my sister off that cliff with the same fluid movements she uses to play her cello?
Time slows to a crawl as I reach into my pocket and flick open the switchblade. I press Claudia up against the wall, our bodies pinned together as I hold the edge of the blade to her throat. We’re close enough that the smell of her overwhelms me the same way it did when I kissed her. The sweet scent of apricots turned sour.
“Tell me what you did to her!” I shout, resisting the urge to dig the blade any deeper.
Claudia shakes so hard I’m not sure she’d be standing if I wasn’t holding her up. “I didn’t—”
“What were you doing in Luster, then?!” I cut her off before she can finish. My voice cracks as I shout even louder. I’m so close to the answer, I’m willing to scream myself raw until I get it.
“Trying to help her!” she chokes out around a sob.
Without thinking, my grip loosens. Claudia uses the slack to her advantage, reaching up to grab the arm holding the switchblade.
“Please, I swear, I’ll tell you everything!”
As much as I know I shouldn’t trust her, I came here for answers first. Revenge second. I lower my arm but tighten my grip on the blade. Every part of me is wound tight as a coil waiting to spring, just in case she tries to make a run for it. Or worse.
I step back, giving her space to breathe as she slumps back against the wall. She takes in several ragged, half-sob breaths, holding a hand to her throat.
“You have five minutes.” The words come out as low and biting as the wind. Harsh enough to make Claudia’s glossy eyes go wide with fear.
“O-okay, okay,” she says around deep gulps of breath, her hands trembling as she smooths out the wrinkled front of her dress. I can’t let her keep stalling for time. We may be locked in a soundproofed room, but someone’ll come looking for her soon enough. And I’m not leaving this room without the truth.
Claudia pushes herself off from the wall, having regained some of her balance. When she finally looks me in the eyes, I can see that hers are bloodshot. All the makeup she applied this morning is smeared down her face. Glitter eyeshadow smudged across her cheeks like galaxies.
“Your sister was in trouble,” Claudia pants out.
When she doesn’t continue, I hold up the switchblade in warning. For a flash of a second, I wonder if I could really do it. Shove the blade into the soft flesh of her neck like the thought of kissing her wasn’t the closest thing I’ve felt to hope in years.
I’m the one holding the knife, but she has all the power.
“She was going to win the Hightower Fellowship,” Claudia blurts out, speeding up her story until she’s rattling almost a mile a minute. “She was trying to be humble, but we all knew it. The committee wanted to give it to someone who actually deserved it this year. She’s been at the top of the class since freshman year and no one’s even come close to beating her GPA.”
“Gabe wanted her out of the picture so he could have it,” I finish for her, my theory confirmed when she nods quickly. Rage pulses through me at the memory of how close I was to him last night. How easy it would’ve been to pin him down the way I did with Claudia and press the blade into his gut until he squealed like a pig.
“He made me help him,” Claudia says, tears brimming in her eyes again. “H-he said he had a video of me. When I went to his room to buy the Adderall. And that he’d send it to his dad if I didn’t help him.”
My stomach churns, making my grip on the blade slacken. Hunter’s cameras. The grainy video on the flash drive of Gabe and a girl I could barely make out. There’s no way he could’ve outed Claudia with how shitty the video quality was, but who knows what the dean would be willing to believe. Especially if it meant giving him his scapegoat.
“He said his dad was looking to make an example out of someone, and that person would be me if I didn’t do what he said. All I had to do was get Solina to fail her History midterm.”
“And what?” I snap, waving the blade in her direction. “You killed her because she wouldn’t fail on purpose?”
“N-no!” She holds her arms up in front of her face, not lowering them until the switchblade is safely back at my side. “Gabe gave me some pills before the midterm and told me to convince her to take them. I-I think they were laced with LSD, or something. He said they wouldn’t hurt her, but she’d probably flunk. Or get suspended if they found out she took something.”
The pills beneath Solina’s bed. My breath hitches with anticipation and relief. “But she didn’t take them,” I say, the words not coming out as a question, but as a statement.
Claudia nods. There’s little peace in knowing I was right, that Solina wouldn’t have gambled everything we built for the same type of vice that tore our family apart. But it’s a small comfort. Some parts of Solina didn’t change here.
“Gabe told me I had to think of something else to take her out of the running for the fellowship,” Claudia continues when I don’t reply.
Her words are an ice bath back to reality. “What did you do?” I spit out, every word sharp as the knife in my hand.
The tears trickle slowly this time, her sobs replaced with soft sniffles. “Solina wanted to leave. The last day before break, she told me something happened with Hunter. That he hurt her, and she tried to file a report against him but it wasn’t going anywhere. He assumed one of his exes did it to mess with him, but she had a gut feeling he’d find out the truth. She knew if she came back she’d have to still be with him—that if she broke up with him, he’d know it was her. Because nobody breaks up with him.” She stalls, hands shaking as she looks down at the ground. “She was terrified that he’d do something even worse if he found out it was her. But she didn’t think she could stay home. She said … her sister wouldn’t have let her get away with dropping out.”
That hits harder than any punch or kick ever could. It was bad enough learning Solina didn’t want to be herself here, that she wanted to erase who I was to her. But knowing that the real me, the one who braided her hair before bed and taught her how to ride a bike and spent endless summers looking up at the clouds with her wishing for something different, was someone she was afraid of … It’s like Claudia took the knife and shoved it right through me.
“I told her I could help her. That she could stay with my mom in Spokane this semester so she could tell you she was still at Kingswood. If she wasn’t here, she wouldn’t get the scholarship, and Gabe would leave both of us alone. She was going to come up a few days before break ended so I could help her get settled.”
The truth about Solina’s “apprenticeship” hits me like a truck. An excuse to get her out of Luster early, safely hidden away in Spokane while Claudia and the rest of Kingswood headed back to campus. All that pride—from me and Tiffany and Dede—wasted on a lie. I push through the hurt to reply, “Then why is she dead?” through gritted teeth.
That breaks Claudia. The quiet sniffles turn into full-body sobs, her entire body shaking as she grabs at her hair like that’ll save her from the truth. “I-I didn’t mean to …”
Fuck this shit. I’m tired of waiting for some goddamn answers.
Pushing Claudia to the ground doesn’t take much effort, but keeping her down does. She wriggles beneath me, screaming and crying like we’re not in a soundproof room designed by millionaires. Her hands reach for my hair when I straddle her waist. Not gentle or tender like yesterday, but rough—pulling and clawing at me to get off her. She’s stronger than I would’ve thought, yanking my head back hard enough to make me yelp. But rage is a stronger motivator than fear.
I pin her arms down with my elbows, leaning in so close to her I can feel my breath hit her tearstained temple. I press the switchblade to her cheek, edging it as close as I dare as I shout in her ear so loud it makes my entire body vibrate.
“What did you do?!”
“It was an accident!” she shouts back.
Her fear is palpable, sticky in the air like humidity as she thrashes against me. The blade nicks the edge of her cheekbone hard enough to break the skin, a drop of blood staining her tears red. She stops squirming, finally realizing what she stands to lose if she tries to get away from me, and keeps talking.
“She called me while I was at a show, crying and saying she wasn’t sure she could do it anymore. I left and drove down as fast as I could to try to convince her, but by the time I got there, she’d already made up her mind. We were in the car driving back. She said she’d told her sister the truth and realized she couldn’t leave. Even if it meant facing Hunter again, she had to finish what she started … because it was what her sister wanted.”
I’m not sure when the dampness on my cheeks became tears instead of rain. Maybe when I walked into the room. Or when I pressed her against the wall. Or when she confessed between sobs that she knew what happened. I only notice when the tears slide off my cheek and onto hers. Dripping like the leaky faucet I could never fix.
“I tried to convince her not to. She stormed out of the car and ran off into this park and I-I begged her not to go back, tried to warn her that something might happen, but all it did was make her angry. Sh-she was s-so angry … a-and I couldn’t tell her the truth. I was so ashamed and so afraid, and I didn’t know what to do because I couldn’t let her go back. Not just because Gabe might hurt her, but because of what would happen to me. They would’ve expelled me. Everything I worked for would’ve been for nothing, and my mom …”
She doesn’t need to finish that thought. I think of that night in the middle of the storm, the way she stiffened when she talked about the sacrifices her mother had made for her to be here.
“I pushed her. I didn’t mean to do it, I swear, but … she was yelling in my face to tell her what was going on, and I couldn’t, a-and I was scared, so I pushed her back a little, and … she slipped on a patch of ice, a-and … she fell over the edge.”
There are things I’ll never be able to understand about my sister. Things I’ll never get to ask her about, and apologies I’ll never get to make. If I’d just held her that day and told her everything would be okay, or asked her what was wrong, I wouldn’t be here.
We’d be sitting on the couch with Tiffany, bitching about how there’s nothing good on TV anymore. She’d follow me to work and sit in her usual booth, ordering Diet Cokes and crust-less sandwiches and promising to pay this time, even though we both know Dede would never charge her. We’d fight. Yell and scream until we lost our voices and Tiffany locked us in separate rooms till we managed to calm down. Some days I’d wish she was back at Kingswood, that she could’ve made things work so we wouldn’t have to rebuild from the ground up.
But she would be alive. And that’s all that would’ve mattered.
Claudia may have given the shove that knocked her over the edge, but I’m the one who sent her there in the first place. If I’d listened, she would’ve stayed home. Claudia would’ve gone back to Kingswood with her half of the deal completed, and Gabe would have his precious fellowship.
We’d all have our twisted form of happiness.
Beneath me, Claudia starts to fall apart. Her body goes slack, and her voice is barely a whisper. Those wide brown eyes that first drew me to her glaze over as she looks up somewhere past my shoulder.
“I could’ve helped her. When she slipped, she held out her hand and I … I just stood there.”
This time, we break together. All the rage and loneliness and sadness I’ve kept locked up inside of me comes pouring out all at once. Like that day in Charlisa’s office, once the tidal wave comes crashing down, there’s no way to stop it. My body seizes up from the force of it until I’m curling in on myself beside Claudia, sobbing into the sleeve of my damp coat. A thousand different emotions run through me, tearing apart everything they touch until all I can do is go limp and sob and sob and sob.
Because my sister wouldn’t be dead if I had just listened to her.
Because Claudia had to do something unthinkable so she wouldn’t lose everything.
Because the one person I allowed myself to want took away my best friend.
“I-I thought you were her,” she chokes out, wiping at her muddied cheeks and looking down at my bandaged hand. “I thought maybe she was okay after all and she’d forgotten what happened. After that night, when I saw your tattoo and I realized who you were, I tried to stay away, but …”
I kept pulling her back in.
“Why did you save me? That night after the bonfire?” I croak out. “They would’ve expelled me. You both would’ve gotten what you wanted.”
Her body shivers beneath mine, the sobs quieting down to choked breaths. “Because I couldn’t hurt her again.”
My grip goes slack, the blade almost sliding out of my hand. It’d be so easy to lean over and press it to Claudia’s chest, to tear her apart the way she did our family. Make her feel the same pain Solina felt when she fell off the edge of that cliff. Do what I set out to do—make whoever killed my sister pay.
But I can’t. Watching Claudia tremble, her mouth open but no sound escaping, all I can do is wail that much harder. For her, for me, for Solina. Because the world is fucked and we were all dealt a losing hand.
I hate her. I hate that she cared more about herself than saving my sister and that she let some prick like Gabe intimidate her into doing something she’ll never forgive herself for. I hate that she lied right to my face. But I wish I hated her more. I wish I didn’t understand the threat of losing everything you’ve worked for. Or the fear of failure, knowing someone gave up everything just for you to succeed. Didn’t Solina do the same thing? Put herself at risk because she needed to be here? Because if she didn’t, it meant everything I did was for nothing.
Izzy was right, this place rots you from the inside out.
“I’m so sorry,” Claudia chokes out. “So, so sorry.”
Most of all, I hate that it sounds like she means it. All this time I’d pictured someone like Hunter pulling the strings behind the scenes. Someone cruel and uncaring who crushes people under their shoe like bugs. But never someone like her—fragile and broken in all the same places as me. Even now a part of me still wants to hold her, run my fingers through her hair. That’s what I get for wanting something for the first time in years. It’ll always wind up ruined in the end.
But there is someone else. Someone who hurt Solina a different way. Who made her think that her greatest accomplishment was being loved by him. Who made her into a person I didn’t recognize. Who scared her so much she was willing to run away from me. From our family. From the future we’d worked so hard for.
And I’m not done with him yet.
Claudia startles when I pick myself up. I’m unsteady on my feet, sagging against the wall to keep myself upright. My nerve endings are frayed, too damaged to feel anything but numb anymore. Every slow step forward feels heavy as mountains. But I keep going, the way I always have.
“Where are you going?” Claudia calls out.
I don’t answer, and she doesn’t stop me.