Chapter 2 #4
This was a frequent occurrence. After she disappeared, I began to slot Adeline into every place I supposed she should be—Christmas dinners, homeroom classes, the booth at the back of the diner, the passenger seats of cars I spotted on the highway.
A man loses a leg and wakes in the night to feel it aching. A girl loses her sister and begins to see her everywhere. Even in the faces of strangers.
The girl who wasn’t Adeline stared at me from across the water, frowning, as if she too had mistaken me for someone I wasn’t.
Up close, I saw that her eyes were wide and raw like she’d been crying, but there was a hardness to her expression, the set of her mouth, that made me think otherwise.
Her lashes were wet and long enough to appear tangled.
But her clothes were dry; it was clear she hadn’t been swimming.
I’m not sure why I mistook her for Adeline; there was nothing about her that was even vaguely reminiscent of my sister except for, perhaps, an ephemeral quality that made me feel like, if the light struck her just so, I would be able to stare straight through her.
What I did know, though, was that she was Shiloh, the one the girls had mentioned back at the diner, holding her name in their mouths like a stone they were taking great pains not to swallow.
All the girls were strange and striking in their own ways, but she was the only one who commanded that kind of…
respect without ever saying a word. Whatever this situation was, I knew that she sat close to the heart of it.
“Are you all right?”
I snapped to attention, my trance breaking, gaze shifting from Shiloh to Skye, who lay supine and motionless—her soft white belly exposed—buoyed by the inflatable pizza slice, one leg dangling limply in the water.
She held a Styrofoam cup, the smeared crescent of her lipstick on the rim.
She extended it to me as she drifted nearer, straining a little with the effort of it, her arm stretched stiff, drink sloshing over the rim of the cup and into the pool water below.
“Here,” she said, extending it. “Your lips are blue.”
I took the cup and stared at its contents. The liquid inside it looked a bit like tea.
Skye stared at me, expectant. “Well, go on, then. Drink up. You’ll freeze if you don’t.”
Obediently, I raised the cup, turning it to avoid the bright smear of Skye’s lip print, and took a big sip.
The drink tasted a bit like Red Bull mixed with licorice and bitter ginger, and it burned my throat on the way down.
I swallowed hard, staring at Shiloh above the rim, and Shiloh stared back at me, her gaze alone enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck bristle.
I wasn’t an idiot. I knew myself well enough to identify what I was feeling, even though it had been months since I’d felt it, well before Adeline’s death.
In the wake of that loss, I’d begun to think that maybe grief demanded so much I didn’t have it in me to feel anything else.
Certainly not the pointless intensity of passing crushes or even just the curiosity piqued by someone new and particularly intriguing.
But the girls had proved me wrong, and Shiloh’s presence on the other end of the pool only further confirmed that.
When I met her gaze, I could feel something stirring to life within my chest. If not attraction, then maybe just fear.
Like she knew she had the power to break me if she wanted to and I was worried that I might let her.
Maybe the other girls felt it too. Was that why they said her name with that strange reverence? Even back at the diner, before I’d put a face to her name, I could sense her through them, see the shape of her in the spaces between them.
Skye took the cup out of my hand and downed the last of it in a single swallow. She slid off her pizza slice with a rubbery squelch. The empty cup floated slowly past me, bobbing on the water.
I tried to pass it back to her, but she was gone in pursuit of something I couldn’t see in the far corner of the pool. I watched in horror as she slipped a hand into the scummy filtration system—a decision that seemed about as brave as it was stupid.
“There’s a frog!” Skye fished it out and held its gelatinous body cradled in her cupped hands. When she pressed on its stomach with her finger, the way you would ring a doorbell, a bit of water bubbled from its open mouth. “And it’s dead. Does CPR work on frogs? Do you think it’s too late?”
The mean one who’d answered the door, Riley, rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ, Skye, could you be normal for like two seconds? You should put that thing down before you get some sort of skin disease.”
But the redhead beside her, Chloe, slipped into the water and waded to Skye. She peered down at the frog. “Do you think they have souls?” Chloe’s voice was surprisingly deep, and she had a thick Southern accent that seemed to sand every word she spoke round and smooth.
“Only if they have a sense of self,” said Naomi. She was still sitting on the stairs, serene and watchful. Her long hair formed dark spirals on the surface of the water. “And I think they do.”
“We should give it a proper burial.” Skye waded closer, cradling the frog to her face like she was seriously considering whether or not she should attempt to kiss it back to life. “I have a shoebox we could use. We could set it on fire. You know, the Viking way?”
“I want to go out like that.” Riley leaned back to lie on the concrete. “Me, dead in a canoe filled with gasoline. A tossed match.”
“Can I be the one to toss it?” Skye asked.
“Let’s see how you do with the frog first,” said Riley, and even though she was speaking to Skye, her gaze shifted left to Shiloh sitting on the edge of the pool. “Then we’ll talk.”
“Fair enough.”
Their chatter took on the faraway quality of someone speaking in another room or across the street, and I felt a little ignored.
I did my best to keep up, but the rhythm of their conversation was too fast. I knew they weren’t trying to ice me out the way that Adeline and her friends sometimes did.
It was the opposite with these girls. They just seemed to forget that I hadn’t always been there.
But I noticed they were hyperaware of Shiloh, even though she wasn’t even trying to nod along.
I watched as their gazes shifted toward her after they spoke in anticipation of a response that never came, their every word a test of her approval.
I realized then that Shiloh was to them what Adeline had been to me.
The prime number that remained, whole and indivisible, after all the social arithmetic was finished.
In every group of girls, there’s always that one.
“What about you, Roslyn?” Iona turned to me now, as if she’d only just remembered I was there. “How do you want to go out?”
“Um…dunno. Cremation, I guess? Better for the environment.” It sounded pathetic even to my own ears. I winced, grasped for something cooler. “I’ve heard of these places that’ll break your body down into compost, turn you into a tree. But I think it’s pretty expensive.”
“What about before that?” Riley sat up to look me in the eye. Every time she leveled her gaze at me, I felt like I was failing a test I’d only just realized I was taking.
“Before that?” I asked, confused.
“Like, how do you want to die?” said the redhead, Chloe.
“I mean, does anyone really want to die? When it comes down to it?” I realized then that of course people did.
There was suicide and euthanasia, old widows eager to be reunited with their past loves.
“I mean, obviously I know some people want to, but for the rest of us…I don’t know.
It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you really plan out. It happens the way it happens.”
Riley looked unimpressed.
Skye pulled her gaze off the frog to look up at me. “But if you could choose, how would you want it to go?”
I saw a flash of the plastic playhouse in the middle of the woods. “Filthy rich, eighty years old, and in my sleep, I guess?”
“Boring,” said Riley, and I flushed with embarrassment. Riley, for her part, didn’t seem to notice. She reached out to Shiloh. “Pass me the vape?”
I saw it then, as Shiloh complied, extending her hand to Riley.
A bracelet—high up on her forearm, hidden beneath her sleeve—slid down to her wrist. A chain of pale mismatched river pearls, salvaged from earrings and broken bits of thrift shop jewelry.
I knew because I’d strung it together myself.
It had been a birthday gift for my sister.
Shiloh caught me staring. Her gaze dropped to the bracelet around her wrist, then back up to me. She said something—my name, maybe—but I couldn’t hear her over the rush of blood in my ears.
I drew back toward the stairs, feet scrabbling for purchase on the scummy bottom of the pool. The water, cold to begin with, turned suddenly freezing. “How did you get that? How did you know my sister?”