Chapter Five
FIVE
WHEN THE CEREMONY IS COMPLETE, I make my way back into the living room and collapse onto the couch, my hand still clutching a pilfered rosy-pink flute of champagne.
I smile politely at the guests who make small talk or comment on what was said during the funeral.
Though I try, I can’t stop replaying the events of the day, lingering on the pains of my grief.
I can’t stop stressing over the decision that underlies everything that’s happened since the unsolicited acceptance letter to Black Mountain Academy landed on my desk.
Was the cardinal swooping in from the trees a good sign?
A signal that Gigi will support me from beyond the grave—or tree—no matter what decision I make about BMA?
Or was it a warning? Gigi reminding me that Earnest rots from the inside, and the core of the rot is in the center of the illustrious school.
My chest is tight, and my throat aches under my clenched jaw. I wipe my hands down my thighs as I stand and stretch my arms up and out before ditching my empty glass on a side table and stepping back out into the thick, wet heat.
There’s a reason why Willow Estate has always been my favorite place, and I’m reminded of that as I sweep my gaze across the now-empty yard.
My own Misselthwaite Manor and secret garden, I spent countless summers tucked between the trees with a different set of peculiar boys. Our days shaded by towering oaks with hollows deep enough to nap in and draped with moss like gauzy curtains.
I shake my head to dispel the thoughts of them, but it’s pointless. Every inch of the grounds is overlaid with memories.
In the center of the property is the small birdbath where we rinsed off the dirty, feral kitten we found mewing under the porch steps. It scratched us all to hell, but that didn’t stop Malachi from naming the tiny thing Aslan before putting it in his shirt pocket and bringing him home.
To the left, a collection of handcrafted wind chimes my grandmother made from old sea glass tinkles softly in the breeze, the sounds reminiscent of early morning games of slapjack descending into blows between the boys.
It’s a shame, all these precious memories soured by last summer. Malachi’s face contorted, his eyes alight. Desperate and cruel.
To the right is an old greenhouse that holds the dying herbs and flowers that Gigi used for cooking, and the cuttings she collected for propagation.
Through the panes of the fogged-up windows, my eyes catch on a muddled swirl of black moving across the small building.
My eyebrows pinch together as I stumble through the yard in my heels, their tips sinking into the overgrown grass.
I cross the pebbled path and circle to the back.
There are only two people who would ever feel at home enough on the estate to wander through the outbuildings like this. I speed up, confused. Where’d they go?
Turning, I immediately slam into something solid.
“Oof!” I let out a burst of air, stumbling backward, tripping over my heels as I go careening to the ground. A rough arm stops me. Tight against my waist, tugging until I’m upright again. Until I’m meeting hard, green eyes like jade stones and a jaw that’s tense and twitching at the corner.
For a moment, we just look at each other.
My heart is thundering in my ears, pounding pounding pounding as I search his face.
It’s been a year since I last saw him. The longest we’ve ever gone without speaking.
He looks nearly the same. Full, straight brows pulled low over deep-set, unusual eyes.
Freckles like a burst of fireworks on the Fourth scattered across the surface of his face.
Impossibly he seems even taller than before. A hulking, broad-shouldered boy, Malachi Matsoukas has always been surly and rough around the edges. But somehow in the last year all that roughness has been sandblasted into a marble sheen. The look on his face is unfamiliar and impenetrable.
Kai has never been impenetrable to me.
From the moment we met outside Lee Chapel at four years old, I’ve always been able to wiggle my way beneath all those layers. There’s always been a place for me inside his steel-trap heart.
Until my stupid, careless mouth ruined everything.
“K-Kai—” I stammer, stepping back, realizing he’s wearing a hoodie despite the stifling heat.
The black sleeves are pulled down tight over his hands.
He shoves them into the pockets of his shorts.
His left leg is the golden tan of a long summer on the football field.
His right is sleek chrome and black. Born without half of his right leg, Malachi has had a prosthesis for as long as I’ve known him.
But this new one must have cost him an arm and a leg. Or just a leg, I suppose.
I want to tell him that because before he would have laughed. But it doesn’t look like he’s laughed since I last saw him.
“You—you came…,” I try again, my voice disgustingly watery as I take him in.
Each empty second that passes stokes the flames licking at the base of my throat. I knew I was angry, but I had no idea the depths to which the feeling dwelled. I was unaware of how it had been festering inside me. Waiting for this moment.
He sucks his teeth quietly, turning his face away, gaze drifting toward the glowing lights strung around the gazebo.
I wonder if he’s also remembering all those summers past. If he’s remembering us.
“Malachi,” I huff impatiently, sick of waiting for him to acknowledge my existence.
The slightest flinch pinches the corners of his eyes at the sound of his full name on my lips, but then they roll into the back of his head, and his voice is bored as he stares over my shoulder. “Of course I came. Why would I miss it? What kind of person would miss something like this?”
He flicks his gaze to my face, but it leaves just as quickly. As though he can’t stand the sight of me. And it’s true, of course. What kind of person would miss something like this?
Guilt stabs me in the gut.
“Where’s Lucas?” I ask, because this isn’t right, this ill-timed reunion under the worst circumstances, and his cousin isn’t even here to suffer with us.
He shrugs. Like none of this matters.
“Right, about that… Listen, Kai, I’m so sorry about your parents. About Lex—”
“No,” he says, stepping back. “Don’t.”
“What?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” he says gruffly, his eyes pained as he finally looks down at me. “You seem okay.”
I nod, and the lie comes easily.
He shakes his head. “But you can’t stay here. You should go back to Pine Grove. Tonight.”
I draw in a sharp breath. “But…”
I’m helplessly mesmerized by him. By the way the setting sun glows orange pink against his heat-flushed skin.
The way the freckles on his face are like a road map to all our memories.
I could trace them through the woods between our two properties, guide myself along the banks of the creek, between stalks of swaying cattails and sunbathing copperheads.
I could follow them home with my eyes closed.
And yet there is something all wrong here. In the stretch of our shadows against the dirt-caked glass. In the flatness of his expression.
What deity must I make a Faustian bargain with to get my best friend back?
“Gigi’s gone,” he says. “There’s nothing left in Earnest for you now. No reason for you to stick around where you’re not wanted.”
Whatever pathetic, trembling hold I had on my resolve snaps. I don’t think. Not before my palm is connecting with his face, the sound ringing in my ears as I gasp, bringing my stinging hand to my mouth.
“Fuck!” Malachi grunts, turning his back to me and bending at the waist. “Fuck!”
“How fucking dare—I can’t believe—on the day of Gigi’s funeral—” I’m stumbling over my words, my mind roaring a mile a minute.
A buzzing, deep and low, vibrates at the base of my skull.
Tugs in the center of my chest. Burns at the nape of my neck.
The increasingly familiar tingling shooting out from my core like dynamite.
When Malachi finally faces me again, he’s glowering, his countenance twisted into something nasty and dangerous. I want to vomit. Because the desecration of his beauty makes me sick.
“What—”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he yells, and I wince. His eyes don’t soften.
“I—I’m sorry—I don’t know what came over me, I—”
“You’re a monster,” he spits, voice shaking, his fists opening and closing as he glares down at me, teeth bared. “You don’t belong here, Harper. You need to pack your shit and go back home. Get the hell away from me, and get the hell out of Earnest.”
“You don’t get to dictate what I do with my life! Not after last summer. Not after what you did.”
He laughs bitterly. “After what I did? What about what you did?”
I shake my head. I don’t want to think about that. I’ve imagined this moment. Seeing his face again. Hearing his voice.
This is not how it’s supposed to go.
This isn’t us.
I reach for his arm mindlessly, maybe because some part of me is begging. Begging him to forgive me. Begging for none of this to be real. Maybe if I could turn back time to last summer, maybe if I say sorry enough, I can fix us.
“Don’t. Fucking. Touch. Me,” he growls, eyes ablaze with something hungry, something reckless and cruel.
His tongue skates over his teeth, and they glisten with the reflection of the porch light illuminating us in the dusk.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and I reach for him again.
When my fingers brush along the length of his sleeve, he recoils and spins away, yanking his arm from my grasp.
“Sorry?” he says callously, his hands trembling as he curls his fingers around the throat of his hoodie and pulls. The edges of his hair are soaked, and his face is flushed and pinched as if in unimaginable pain. “Sorry doesn’t bring back the dead.”
Ice rushes down my spine at his words. I drop my gaze to the ground, pressing my stinging fingertips to my lips in shame.
If there is anything at all I could say to make things right between us—it dies on my tongue as I watch him turn and run, past the rosebushes and the towering sycamore, into the woods and across the creek, the path between our houses worn away summer after summer.
The farther he gets, the hollower I feel. Like he’s taken a part of me with him.