Chapter 32 #2
I go out to eat with my family after commencement and my mother talks about moving me back home until I find a job.
I nod along, but I think about Asher. What if I did move out to Colorado with him?
Would he even still want me to? We haven’t spoken in the two weeks since he left.
He could be with Brandy now for all I know.
After a lot of convincing, my mom and Don drop me off at the boys’ house after dinner, where everyone is already outside drinking.
Wes sits on the railing of the porch, and I take a mental note, because this is the last time I’ll ever see it. If senior
year was a book, then this would be the last chapter. This is where the main character would realize that everything she went
through made her better in the end. She would have a job lined up or an internship, and she would walk up onto that porch
and kiss her boyfriend, the one she worked so hard to win over. Her friends would cheer, someone would pop champagne. In a
Netflix series, some indie pop song would play in the background as the camera zooms out away from the house. The credits
would roll.
But instead, Jake throws up in the bushes by the porch.
I sigh, walking past him and up the porch steps. Wes brings me in for a long hug and kisses my cheek. Dani comes out holding
a bottle of champagne. So there’s that at least. She shakes it up and holds it out over the railing.
“To graduation!” Dani yells, more like half slurs, and I know she’s already drunk. She pops the bottle, and it sprays into
the yard. Dani hands it to me and I take a sip. She does too, before pouring some out into the yard. “And one for Annica.”
Maybe she’ll be able to taste it in hell.
I walk inside, looking for Asher. People are all around the living room, jumping on the couches, smoking, spilling champagne
everywhere. He said he’d be here. I walk up the stairs toward his room and stop at the door.
I know my answer.
I open the door, looking at the boxes all over his floor. His bed is gone, his piano is gone. I hear the sink running in the
bathroom and give a sigh of relief knowing he’s here. I take a deep breath, preparing to see him. But before he comes out,
something catches my eye. A half-packed box lies open where his bar cart used to be, and inside is a small brown leather book.
But those are common, right?
I walk over to the box, bending down to get a closer look.
“Sloane?” Asher comes from the bathroom and spots me crouched over the box.
And I don’t have to open it to know what it is. I’ve carried this journal around for four years: I know how the leather cover
feels on my fingertips. The exact weight of it in my bookbag. The way the bottom left corner has started to wear away.
“Sloane, wait.” This time there’s worry in his voice. I untie the side and open it to find Ryan’s eulogy, with the torn-out
page that was once Jonah’s overlapping it. “I can explain.”
My hands shake and my shoulders slump. “Why do you have this?” I look at him now, and Asher is pale under my gaze, likely
deciding if he should lie or tell the truth. “Answer the question.”
“Can we go back to your place and talk about this?”
“Tell me why you have it.” I stand with the journal in hand.
“I didn’t know she was going to kill anyone,” he says quietly, and I almost don’t hear it over the music blaring downstairs.
My breath hitches in my throat at his words, his admission. That he had any part in this. “You knew? You knew this whole time
it was her?”
“You have to understand, everything I did, I did to protect you. She asked me to take the journal, scan the pages, and help her distribute them. She said it was a prank, something to just throw you off. She said she wanted to win that stupid essay competition and she needed you to spiral. And in return she’d talk Wes out of the resort—”
“You let people die, for your resort? Oh my god, Asher.” I put my hand to my mouth, shaking my head in disbelief.
“When she told me she killed Ryan I told her I wasn’t going to help her with whatever this was, and she said if I turned her
in I would go down with her. You have to understand, Sloane, I was going to go to jail with her if I said anything. I was
trying to help you the best I could.”
I suddenly think of how Annica laughed when I mentioned Asher’s name before she died. And how she gave me plot advice for
my story, saying . . . the main character should find out that the character based off Asher had been deceiving her the whole
time.
God, she basically told me.
“Help me? You let me run around for months trying to pin murders on an innocent man! We broke into his car and his house, for nothing! You let people die, over and over again, instead of just going to the police after Ryan!” I feel the panic rising in my
throat as my breathing becomes shallow again. It all makes sense. How much Annica had hated him this year, questioning everything
he ever did or said to me. She thought he would tell me the truth, that he’d turn her in. She never believed for a moment
that he had any feelings toward me, because he never did. He can’t say he loves me because he doesn’t. He just needed to distract
me long enough for him to get off scot-free. I feel myself start to hyperventilate now, the room growing smaller. “I can’t,
I can’t believe this.”
“I didn’t care at the start. I just wanted what she promised me, but I really did fall for you—you have to believe that. I love you, and I’m so sorry.”
I cut him a look, one that makes him shut his mouth.
“I trusted you,” I say. “I trusted both of you.”
“I love you,” he says again, like it’ll take it all away. Like the words will wash it all away. He steps toward me.
I shake my head and back away. “Don’t.” He stops. “I should turn you in. I should call Grange and tell him you helped her.”
“But you won’t,” Asher says. “Because you love me too, I know you do.”
“No,” I say. “No.”
“Yes, you do. And I would spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you if you could forgive me somehow—”
“You were never going to tell me, were you? You were going to whisk me away to Vail and just wait for it to all blow over.”
Again, he doesn’t say anything. I just shake my head at him as tear after tear slips down my cheeks. Genuinely surprised that
I even have any left. “I never want to see you again.” I move past him, still with the journal in hand, and stop. “You know
what, keep this.” I throw the journal at his chest. “I would only fill the remaining pages with your name anyway.”
I leave the house without another word to anyone. I don’t stop when Dani calls after me, or when Wes tries to follow me down
the street while I walk somewhere to call for a ride.
Alone in my apartment I stare at Grange’s number on my phone.
I should call and say Asher was an accessory.
There will be no trial now that Annica is dead.
There would be if I did this. Could I stand up there and condemn him to possible jail time for printing the pages of the journal, for agreeing to initially help her, then standing by while she did it?
Can people even get jail time for that? My thumb hovers over the call button, then away.
He manipulated me, he used me, he lied to me.
I wonder what Ben would do to him if Asher was going to go to prison.
And deep down, in some sick twisted part of me, I can’t hurt him. I can’t do it.
Frustrated, I throw my phone at the wall. It leaves a small hole in the plaster before falling into the suitcase that I had
started to pack. The one I would have taken with me to Colorado.
I let out a frustrated scream, then another, until my throat is raw. Then I lie down in the dark, still in my graduation dress,
and go through the names of the dead again. Jonah, Ryan, Marco, Bryce, Graham. Jonah, Ryan, Marco, Bryce, Graham.
Asher. Asher. Asher.
The following day, I don’t leave my bed. I’m supposed to be packing up my things. Our lease is up at the end of next week.
There’s a small knock on my door before Adrienne opens it. “Hey, were the cookie sheets yours or mine? I don’t remember.”
I lie facing the wall. “Just take them. I don’t care.”
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“No.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
With another person who has lied to me this year? “No.”
“Okay,” she whispers, shutting the door.
My phone buzzes periodically. They’re texts from my family, texts from Dani, texts from Asher.
I shut my phone off.