Thirty
I shouldn’t feel good hearing something like an imminent confession, but it takes a load I wasn’t expecting to lose off my own back. Beck was keeping a secret too. We’re even. We can start over.
“Paisley…” Beck begins. “Paisley was taking this trip really seriously. Or, at least, that’s what she told me. It’s bad. I shouldn’t have not told you. I—”
As I think back to that night at the Mystic Museum, yes, it does make sense that the secret Beck seemed to be holding wasn’t just that Paisley and our friends hadn’t invited me.
Especially knowing Beck now, something as small as that wouldn’t have fazed her, certainly not before she really got to know me.
So, what was she thinking about that night? What still has a grip on her tonight?
“Beck, I don’t care,” I say, leaning into her. “You were just trying to spare my feelings. I’m not mad at you.”
Beck shakes her head. “No, no, that’s not why—I mean, Emma, the night everyone died…wasn’t the first time Paisley came here. That’s what I’m trying to say.”
The feeling drains from my face.
Paisley came to the site early?
Paisley, who doesn’t camp? Who used me to get every detail of the campsite?
“What was she doing out here?” I ask.
“I caught her leaving late that Thursday,” Beck says.
She stares off at the table near where we found Paisley’s phone, as if picturing her sister’s little adventure as she speaks.
“I thought she was going to go sneak out with some boy she was seeing. She said she was going to be gone for a while that night. I made her tell me where she was going and she told me that you guys were all going on a camping trip so she was assigned to go check out the spot early and get things ready. She said she volunteered to do it because Mom would let us skip school whenever we wanted, and she wanted to be nice to you guys. It rubbed me weird especially since this happened right after she threw that trophy at me, but it was also Paisley being nice to you guys, so I went along with it.”
A wave of dizziness hits me. “What’d she do up here alone?”
“I don’t know. She basically went to Kingston, came back at who knows what time in the morning, and slept through half her classes.”
Did all this have to do with what she was doing in the bathroom at Bob’s that night? Was she still scraping off dirt or hiding the fact that she hadn’t slept? Yet Opal and Harlow acted like it was all normal. Were they in on Paisley coming here early?
And what did she plan to do out here?
All this time I thought I had the narrative straight: I planned a trip out to a haunted location for spooky season.
Paisley, Opal, and Harlow decided they didn’t want me on the trip.
They made up a story about the weekly sleepover being canceled so I wouldn’t notice them go on the trip without me.
Paisley replied to my text. They all died.
But no, it turns out I came into the story when it was well underway.
“Do you remember when I told you Paisley sent me a text before this all went down?” I say. “About how I should be happy I wasn’t on the trip because they were all going to die?” I massage my throat. “If she had more planned than we thought, is it possible she really did try to warn me?”
I’ve spent the past several weeks secretly relieved she was dead, when all along she might’ve saved my life on purpose.
Beck reaches over and cups my cheek.
“I don’t know. But I think it’s possible, for what it’s worth.” But why me? “Paisley wasn’t all bad. No one is, are they?”
Her fingers slip away before I can catch them and keep them on my skin.
“How do you mourn human beings?” I mutter. “When you’ll never know how they really felt about you, but what they showed you was mostly awful?”
Beck’s eyes brim with tears. “I don’t know.
But you should know I’m not mad about what you said about Paisley.
You might be right. I have no idea if she’d have investigated my death if things had been reversed.
Nothing that happened to any of them takes away from the pain they caused you.
That doesn’t just stop, and it’s okay to be pissed at them.
I’ve been as angry as you were on that voice note. I get it.”
She shows me Paisley’s call history.
She no longer has an incoming call on that night.
“I deleted the message,” she says. “You didn’t hurt them and I don’t want anyone to think that you did.”
Hot tears pour down my face, but for once it’s not from pain.
Beck really, truly cares about me, doesn’t she? She cares about the real me.
And she’s in so much pain right now. I have to help her.
“You knew Paisley so much more than I ever could’ve pretended I did,” I say. “You could have loved her as a sister and still hated her as a person. You really don’t have to feel so bad about being angry or any negative feelings toward her.”
Beck takes a shaky breath. “The truth is, I could love her or hate her or feel nothing for her, but it doesn’t take away how fucking devastated I am at what my life’s going to have to become now.
I can’t deal with my parents alone. I’ll never be Paisley, and every day I wake up dreading having to see the disappointment in my mom’s eyes when I fail to measure up.
And yeah, I could tell her this, right? But I know she isn’t going to hear it.
” I nod, the tears burning in my eyes too.
“She won’t. This is just my life now. Paisley left me with a fucking mess. ”
I take her hand, finally feeling sure that this is the comfort that she wants.
The single lamp in this room shines off her tear trails.
“Hey. It hasn’t even been a year. Everything’s going to be a mess and you have every right to be a mess.
And even if it takes forever, you’ll figure it out.
You’ll find a purpose in this new world.
It’s what our species does, right? We just keep going, even when everything feels so, so changed. ”
Beck swallows. “Thank you for saying that.” She looks away. “Let’s get the phone and pliers back to someone a little more adult than us. I hate this forest.” She laughs weakly. “I actually want to go home to Leslie Van Dutch.”
Truthfully, I really want to go home too. I miss Aemond curling around my side and the sound of my brothers’ loud footsteps and my parents’ voices.
We collect our backpacks but stop short when we reach the balcony on the porch.
It’s pitch-black outside.
It’s pitch-black…and the stars shine in one of the most beautiful, brilliant displays of the galaxy above us I’ve ever seen. It’s enough to take my breath away.
It’s the first time this trip that it truly feels safe enough to admire how gorgeous this place is.
Silence falls over us. We make eye contact.
Giggles burst out of both of us.
I eye the little bench sitting along the porch. “Maybe we can stay the night here.”
“Definitely,” Beck says. “This place could be a vacation rental.”
And for a few minutes, we sit on the bench and take in the stars. We let our nervous systems slow down as much as they can. Beck scoots in close to me, our thighs touching in an easy, familiar warmth. For a moment, everything feels like it might be okay.
“You know,” she says. “Not all the changes were bad.” Her gaze meets mine, flickers down, then back up. “I got to spend more time with you.”
Heat radiates down every vertebra of my neck deep into my spine. “You could’ve done that anyway.”
“Paisley would’ve never let me have access to her friends. I know too much. God forbid I ever tell them the story about when she shit her pants at the Christmas party when she was eleven.”
I fall into a fit of giggles, even if Beck is completely making up an embarrassing story to prove a point. “I think you could’ve found a way.”
Beck shrugs. “What if I’m too cowardly? Would you have ever made a move?”
My heartbeat picks up, but I like the feeling of its march. “Me? Ever think my friend’s cool athlete alt sister would want to spend time with me? Not even in my dreams.”
Beck snorts. “I’m not that cool. I would happily spend the rest of our time together showing you exactly how uncool I am.” She presses her thumb under my jaw. “Now you…I’d love to tell you how cool you are.”
She does that flicker thing with her eyes again.
“What’re you doing?” I whisper.
Beck smirks. “Kissing you, if you want.” She says it in a growl that sends my body aflame. She cocks her head. “Do you?”
I imagine a swell of music as I take Beck’s cheeks between my hands and close the gap between us.
The feeling of her lips against mine is familiar, a sensation put to an image I’ve seen a million times with other faces on screens.
But the way Beck’s whole body shudders in a sigh makes it all real.
I’m kissing Beck Horne. I’m kissing Beck Horne on the porch of a watchtower three stories up in the middle of a death woods, and I haven’t eaten properly in hours, and if we tried to move, we might both collapse due to our overused muscles.
But there’s not enough space here. The ache of my hip bone digging into the wooden bench keeps everything moving.
“Let’s go inside,” I say.
Beck smiles. “Please.”
We leave the porch with a single slam of a door. I fall onto the stiff mattress on the cot as Beck climbs on top of me and lowers herself so her warmth covers mine.
When our lips meet again, it feels like being wrapped in the greatest hug of all time.
I tighten my grip around her back and pull her closer until the hottest parts of my body grind against hers.
An anxious shiver runs through me, telling me to pump the brakes.
That this is my first kiss, that it can’t be more.
Not now. That this isn’t the right time for this.
But as Beck and I hold each other tighter, as the rhythm of her breath and heartbeat fills my ears, fast stops having meaning.
All I know is nothing feels better than Beck enveloping me, that one of the greatest human experiences has to be sharing another person’s heat and touch, having their heart beat against yours.
And when her lips break off from my mouth and kiss along my jaw and down my neck, I discover a new touch I never want to end.
A new feeling with a new person I never, ever want to end.