84
Sasha
Lillian vanished into the party after I tried hopelessly to apologize.
She wasn’t crying.
But she was shaking, edge of hyperventilating, unfocused panic-attack-agitated like some deeper version of how she’d been on the back steps in September.
Quinn started to follow her, and she told him to fuck off.
As if discovering my secret was something he had done to her.
“I’ll go after her,”
I said.
“Let me go after her.”
Cyprus stuck her arm out to block me stepping through the doorway.
“Not a chance. If she doesn’t tear into you, I will. Get your ass home.”
All of this from someone who gave me her earrings and called me babe a couple hours ago.
“Nobody wants you here right now.”
Quinn put a hand on my shoulder.
“I’d listen to Cyprus on this one. This is a lot to process. It’s probably best if you leave.”
I couldn’t tell if they meant leave the party or the city, go back to my apartment or get on a plane and put half a country between me and ever seeing them again.
But I couldn’t leave. Not before I’d had a chance to say goodbye.
As soon as Cyprus and Quinn were out of the room, I went down a different staircase and plunged back into the party. Things were swirling, all the music too loud, impossible to get people to listen to me. I was driven by a desperate focus. Lillian was somewhere here. And she took part of me with her. A type of love that was new to me. If I didn’t find her, it’d just be gone.
The longer I couldn’t find her, the more the other thoughts filtered down and my worry ramped up. There was a clarity in having no more lies to track. I had one job: find Lillian. I’d figure everything else out from there. I kept asking and asking, then I tried to think like Lillian. She seemed absent when she found out. She’d want something to snap her back or blur it out.
And she needed to get away from people.
So down the basement steps. Eventually, I found someone she took a bottle of tequila from. Then the empty bottle in a bathroom he gestured to. Asked how much was left when she grabbed it. He held his finger too far up the side of the bottle. Years with young celebrities being run into the ground meant I knew what that could do to her. But either Lillian didn’t realize or didn’t care, because what she drank was too much.
If she needed to be by herself.
If she was alone, no one would call it in.
I was acting too frantic for anyone to want to point me after Lillian. So I pressed a suspicious amount of cash into the hand of some guy whose eyes flicked toward the stairs when I asked the first time, and he said she headed for the back porch.
When I got there, the door was hanging open, letting snow blow in. Through the frame, I saw her already distant form biking away from the house.
Into the killing cold wearing only her suit jacket and her jeans full of holes. Looking like something the night would eat, the same way I looked standing on the porch calling after her.
Maybe she aimed for home. Maybe she somehow would make it and maybe someone else finished the bottle. Or she was dying alone in the cold and dark. I couldn’t let her slip away inside her worst nightmare.
I could see Cyprus’s grip tighten on her cup as I walked toward her and Quinn in the kitchen.
“Was I not fucking clear? I’ll get TJ to throw you out if I have to.”
“You’ve got to stop asking everyone where Lillian is,”
said Quinn.
“You’re making people nervous.”
I was seconds from having Cyprus’s drink in my face.
“I know you’ve been trying to find her too. You’re too good of friends to let her be by herself right now.”
I told them tequila and bike and killing cold.
“I don’t care how you feel about me or if you never want to speak to me again!”
I managed to say it without a sob breaking from my chest, but my raised voice was drawing attention. I saw Emelia and Margot across the kitchen watching it unfold.
“We’ll deal with it later. Right now, we’ve got to find Lillian. That’s all I care about. I’ll go out by myself if you won’t come.”
Cyprus nodded and slammed back the rest of her drink. Margot said.
“Like hell I’m letting any of you drive.”
So it was Cyprus’s station wagon with Margot at the wheel and me in the passenger seat because I’d seen Lillian leaving. Quinn, Cyprus and Emelia in the back seat. No one was talking to each other.
There was no music on.
Headlights and driving in a grid pattern.
Quinn calling Lillian’s mom.
Though it’s a long way to Lillian’s house in the cold anyway.
No answer, calling Jasper.
Lillian wasn’t home.
There was snow on Lillian when we found her. A dark lump on the sidewalk beside a bike. Crashed or collapsed.
Either way, she was too still and pale.
That’s the moment that’s haunting me. Not Lillian’s shallow, flickering breathing. Not Quinn and Margot rolling her onto her side. Not following the ambulance to the hospital.
It’s before we got out of the car. Because when the headlights first caught her form, she looked like an object, not a soul hanging on.
I’m sitting next to Emelia in the ER waiting room.
On the TV across from us, they keep cycling back to the same picture of Augustus leaving the courthouse with Heather Erin and Jasmine. The sound’s turned off, but it’s clear.
Everything feels clear.
How’s that for timing?
I should have told my friends as soon as we got close. Before I joined Wavelength. Before Lillian and I first kissed. All my reasons and rationalizations, and I left it and left it and left it.
But in the end, these people deserved to know. There’s really nothing else to say.
“She doesn’t look happy,”
says Emelia, pointing at Jasmine.
It’s the first time she’s spoken to me in the past two hours. It’s pretty busy at the ER with all the party-night casualties, but there were other seats. She could have sat next to a stranger. Or tried to sit with Quinn and Cyprus in the row across from us, or with Lillian’s mom and Jasper a few seats over. Margot would have stayed all night, but Emelia convinced her to go home an hour ago.
Emelia chose this spot next to me, both of us still in our New Year’s Eve clothes. The sexiness and warmth gone.
We’re cold and washed out underneath the hospital lights.
“It ruined Jasmine’s life,”
I say.
“like flying too close to the sun. That’s how stars work. They’re only bright by having things to burn.”
She doesn’t know Augustus is my brother. I thought the fewer people who knew about me, the fewer melted wings. Now it’s all down in flames anyway.
“They might love each other,”
says Emelia.
“I don’t believe it, but you can’t see into people’s relationships. Either way, I feel like Jasmine didn’t have any choice but to defend him. They probably put her on trial more than him anyway.”
“If she hadn’t been on his side, Augustus and the Channel’s lawyers would have used every ugly way of throwing her under the bus,” I say.
Augustus simply went with the best plan to save himself. His moments of protectiveness and presence aren’t enough to convince me otherwise.
He won.
To some, he looks like the good guy, but goodness isn’t why people walk free. Power is.
“I hope she leaves him,”
says Emelia.
“I bet she’d be the first person to say no to him in years.”
“Sometimes it’s too late to get out. I hope it’s not for her,” I say.
The TV’s shifted away to something else. Quinn’s fallen asleep on Cyprus’s shoulder. She’s alternating between her phone and looking at me. I keep expecting her to show the anger she had at the party, but all I see is worry and confusion and tiredness.
Emelia quietly says.
“I still love Lillian.”
“Me too,” I say.
“Our timing is the worst.”
“Right?”
“If you got here a year earlier, maybe we’re all friends. A year later, Lillian and I are mostly over each other.”
“Is that what you think would have happened?”
Emelia sighs.
“We have different ways of moving on. Mine is more steady, and Lillian’s is more like … cardiograph spikes. I thought breaking up with her meant I wasn’t allowed to love her. But when has anyone ever been right about who we’re allowed to love? So I do love her, just the romance is done. When we broke up, I couldn’t even let myself know that’s what I wanted. But ever since, I’m less anxious. Being with Lillian was mostly amazing and sometimes awful and now that part’s done. We’ll date other people. We’ll move on.”
Unless she’s dead. Or going into a coma she never pulls out of. We don’t talk about it. I don’t think I’d move on from that. It would stick in me until I died, wondering if I had just told Lillian earlier if it would have been a less heavy blow. If she would have rolled with the punch and carried on.
Across the row, Cyprus is watching closely as Emelia and I talk in hushed voices. She reflects the strangeness of it all back to me.
“Is this my fault?”
asks Emelia.
“I could have just kept quiet about the book.”
“That wouldn’t have been fair to expect.”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
She doesn’t sound like she believes me.
“It’s infuriating that she’d write that. Lillian’s kind of an infuriating human.”
Lillian’s my heartbreaker. I’m hers. Her note filled me with the sudden sense of being her second choice. I want to be someone’s love, not an alternative or backup plan. I thought I knew the arc of our story so far, and then all I was certain of was a pressing sadness and a desperation to save what we had.
When Emelia told me to watch out for Lillian’s heart, she meant both ways. Now I’ve been shattered by it and done worse to her.
“She found out something about me too,”
I say.
“I think it tipped her over the edge.”
“Lillian’s always been careening toward one thing or another and never given much thought to why it’s happening or how to stop it. Mostly, things trigger it. They don’t cause it.”
“If it’s not my fault,”
I say.
“it’s not yours either.”
“Thanks.”
Emelia shifts a little, crosses her legs.
“Though it depends what you did.”
“How much do you hate me?”
Emelia seems surprised.
“I don’t hate you. I’m very fucking jealous sometimes. Do you hate me?”
“Not at all. I wish I’d gotten what you had, the growing up together.”
“It’s not like the growing up ends.”
In a place like this, the secret seems smaller. So I tell her what Quinn and Cyprus figured out, what Lillian learned. And when I’m done, she starts laughing. It’s a hospital laugh. Quiet, a little unsteady. Now Cyprus is giving us a really weird look.
“I’m not lying. I can call Isabelle if you want.”
“The pop star going to finish their last year of high school in a nowhere city and making new friends and falling in love.”
Emelia takes a second and composes herself. The laughter snuffed out.
“Other than all the queer shit, it’s exactly like a story the Channel would tell.”
“This part isn’t,”
I say.
“None of those stories end like this.”