Reese
After everyone leaves, I open the bedroom door. I come out of the room and stand at the top of the stairs, looking down on
Emily in the kitchen. She stands with her back to me, hunched over and crying, her hands clinging to the edge of the sink
before she lets go, putting her face in her hands.
Slowly, I come down the stairs. I step on a loose floorboard, which squeaks. Emily spins around, startled by the sound. One
hand goes to her heart and the other to her eyes, wiping them to try to hide the fact that she’s crying. There’s an ache in
my throat all of a sudden, because she’s so upset, because I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her cry like this before.
“Reese,” she says, short of breath, her face puffy and red. “You scared me. I didn’t hear you come downstairs. I didn’t know
you were still awake.”
I swallow. “What’s wrong?” I ask, my voice weak.
“Nothing,” she says, turning away from me again, starting to scrub at the dirty dishes in the sink. “I think I just had a
little too much to drink.”
She’s lying. She just doesn’t want to tell me what’s wrong, but I know that it’s because of me, because of what I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. I just . . . I didn’t hear you is all. I thought you’d gone to bed,” she says, thinking the reason I’m apologizing is because I scared her.
“No,” I tell her, reaching the bottom of the stairs, coming closer. “I mean, I’m sorry about what I said before.”
She looks back, waves her hand like I didn’t say that I hated her and wanted her to die, like I said something else, something
less savage. “It’s fine.”
“What did Wyatt want?” I ask, because he was just here, talking to her. I heard his voice. I couldn’t hear what he said, but
it was probably about me, about how I’m a liar.
She turns back around toward the sink, reaching for a towel for her hands. “Medicine. For his allergies.”
“Oh.”
“You were right, by the way,” she tells me.
“About what?”
“About Wyatt. About what he’s been doing.” Her eyes fill with tears again. “I’m sorry I doubted you, Reese. I’m sorry I didn’t
believe you.”
“How do you know?”
“I looked at his phone like you said. He really is a shithead,” she says, and I laugh, because in my whole life I never would
have expected Emily to say something like that. She laughs too, a half laugh, half cry, and then we’re both laughing, and
it feels like the first time in a long time that it’s happened.
I say, “Shhh. We should be quiet. He’ll hear us if we’re not.”
“Don’t worry,” she says, waving me off again, dropping the towel to the counter. “Your brother should be dead asleep by now.
I didn’t have any Benadryl so I slipped him an Ambien instead to help him sleep. I had one left in my pill organizer. I figured
he wouldn’t notice the difference. They’re both pink,” she says, shrugging, and I smile because it feels like a secret between
us, something only she and I know.
“I didn’t mean it,” I say again. “That I hate you. Or that I want you to die. I was just mad. I say things I don’t mean when I’m mad.”
“We all do, honey. It’s human nature.” She reaches out a hand to me and says, “Come here. Let’s sit on the sofa,” and I take
her hand, which feels foreign in mine. It’s been so long since we held hands that I forgot what hers feel like, though they’re
soft, the nails long and clean when I look at them, though as I do, I realize she’s not wearing her wedding ring. “Do you
know why I’m hard on you sometimes?” she asks, sitting beside me so close that we touch.
“Because you love Wyatt and Mae more than me?”
“No,” she says, her face pained. “That’s not true, Reese. I don’t love them more than I love you. I love all three of you
the same,” she says. She holds my eye and says, “It’s because I worry the most about you. You just seem so angry and unhappy
all the time. I hate seeing you like that. I only ever want you to be happy.” She pauses, looking at me, searching my eyes,
and then says, “You remind me of myself when I was your age. You’re in such a rush to grow up, to push the limits, to be twenty-five
and not seventeen. You want time to go faster,” she says, and I look away because it’s true, because she knows me better than
I thought she did. She reaches for my face, turns it so that I’m looking at her, and says, “I was that way too. I couldn’t
wait to be an adult. I rushed things. Your father was the only man I ever dated. I didn’t know anything else. People told
me that I should experience things, like dating other men and living on my own before I got married, but I never did because
I was so afraid of being alone.”
“I didn’t know that,” I tell her.
“I never told you. To be honest, I don’t know that I ever really loved him. I thought I did, but you can’t really know things like that when you’re nineteen. I loved the idea of him. I loved that when I was with him, I wasn’t alone. Not physically anyway.”
“You shouldn’t stay with him if you don’t love him,” I tell her, thinking how she can still be happy. How it’s not too late
for that.
She nods and tells me how she plans to talk to Uncle Elliott in the morning and see if he’ll help her file for divorce. I
should be sad, knowing my parents are getting a divorce. But for whatever reason, it makes me happy, because I want her to
be happy. I want both of them to be happy.
“Are you okay?” she asks, and I say yeah.
“I know being a teenager is hard,” she says. “There are so many emotions, so much angst. Just slow down, Reese. Be happy with
who you are now. Don’t rush things. Be a kid while you can. I promise it will be worth it.”
She asks me about Skylar. I tell her we’re not friends anymore. “I figured as much.”
“How?”
“I saw the necklace of hers, the one you borrowed, in the trash.”
I let her think the necklace really was Skylar’s. Because telling her about Daniel, too, would be too much for one day. Another
day I’ll tell her about him.
She says she’s sorry about what happened with Skylar. “Losing a friend is never easy. Maybe you two will work it out eventually,
but either way, I promise you it will be okay, Reese. It doesn’t feel like it now, but there is a whole life after high school.
One day none of this will matter anymore.”
I believe her. It makes me feel better.
“The best is yet to come,” she promises me as she reaches for me, as she wraps an arm around my shoulder and I lean into her, resting my head on her shoulder, thinking how I haven’t been this close to her in years. Physically. Emotionally.
It’s dark outside now.
The darkness creeps into the cottage through the open windows.
I try not to let the fear in too, knowing most bad things happen after dark.