23
I floated through the darkness, jostled and jolted, my arms clanking against the cans of paint, my legs still jammed into the plastic chassis of my car.
The time stream sucked at me, pulling and pushing like the tide.
I tried to hold everything steady, to focus, but without any point of reference everything became a soup of fear, anger, and uncertainty.
I didn’t know if it was minutes, hours, or days later when Nicola finally opened her backpack, the zipper parting, the world upending.
I didn’t even have the energy to put my arms up as I fell, hard, onto a quilted blanket, bits of grass and dirt showering down around me.
“I’m sorry,” Nicola said, her voice small as she touched me, gently pulling me out of the car and setting me on my back. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you awake? I’m sorry.”
Her face swam into focus, flushed and freckled, brown eyes watery and red rimmed. She looked like she’d been crying. I didn’t care.
Don’t do that to me again.
“Lucy. I—”
Don’t do that to me again!
“I didn’t have a choice.”
Bull-fucking-shit you didn’t. You don’t get to just shove me into a backpack when—
“He was there, Lu. He was right th—”
I know he was there! Why didn’t you give Krissy your hearing aid?
Nicola looked exhausted. “What do you think would have happened if I had? That she’d have just put it in her ear, heard your little voice, and agreed to help us take down her brother?”
She’s my friend.
“And he’s her brother.”
She wouldn’t—
“She would, Lu. I’m telling you right now, she would stand by him. She’s done it already.”
She would nev—
“No. Lu. Listen. Listen. The police pulled your phone records. Ginger told me they read out the text messages she’d sent you.”
When? I snarled. You said you and Ginger weren’t friends anymore.
“This was back when you first disappeared. Back when everyone was still looking for you.”
Oh, so this town did care once.
“People still care, Lu. I still care.”
No. Fuck you. You didn’t care until you found me. But Krissy will. We’ve been friends since—
“The police pulled your phone records,” she said again, slowly, like she was trying to make me understand something. “They talked to Ginger about her messages, which means they had to have talked to Krissy too. She was your best friend, right? You talked a lot?”
So?
“And you phoned her the night you died. The last phone call your phone ever made was to her. That’s what you told me.”
I talked to Kyle, not her.
“On her phone. No way the police wouldn’t confront her about that.”
Maybe Kyle deleted it from her phone’s logs.
“That would only make the police more suspicious, press her harder. She has to know someone that night answered her phone, someone she trusted to leave it around, someone she was close to.”
What are you getting at? I asked, even though I was pretty damn sure I knew exactly what she was saying.
“Do you think,” she said gently, “there’s a chance that Krissy knows Ky—”
No, I said, jerking my head from side to side, my whole body shaking with rage.
No. Krissy wouldn’t protect him. We’ve been friends since we were six.
We talked on the phone all the time. Sometimes five times a day.
She probably just forgot that we didn’t chat that day.
She probably didn’t think twice about it.
“Didn’t think twice? About the last day her best friend was ever seen?”
She wouldn’t lie for Kyle. She wouldn’t. I’m her fri—
“You’re dead, Lu. You’ve been dead for years. Things have changed. People have changed. Everything has changed. Krissy isn’t going to—”
You didn’t even give her a chance! You just put me in the dark! Don’t ever put me in the dark!
Nicola tossed the empty backpack aside, rubbed her face, and sat down on the bed beside me. “I . . . I’m sorry, Lu. I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay there. I—”
You could’ve given Krissy your—
“No,” she said, quietly this time. “No. That wouldn’t work.
You can’t just hand someone a hearing aid.
That’s weird. And even if it wasn’t, she hates me.
She’s hated me ever since . . . ever since what happened with Kyle happened.
” She raked her hand through her hair, making her mullet stand in a spiky dark crown. “She’s his sister. His sister.”
She’s my friend, I said one more time.
Nicola flopped back on the bed and closed her eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “I know she was.”
Was.
That word smashed around in my head like a panicked bird inside a cage, violent, desperate, and sad.
I hated it. I hated her for saying it. I hated her so much that, for a brief terrible moment, I wanted to hurt her, to scream at her, punch her, kick her, and stab her with my stick arm over and over and over again until she was just like me.
Dead. I wanted her dead.
Except I didn’t really want that. I hated myself for even thinking it. Nicola was the only person I had in the entire world. The one who could hear me . . . but she wasn’t listening. She didn’t understand.
Krissy was my friend. She’d been my friend since we were round-cheeked, knobbly-kneed, and gap-toothed. She’d braided my hair, salted leeches off my legs, and lied to keep me out of trouble, and I’d done all of those things for her too, a hundred times over.
We were friends.
We were the sort of friends that weren’t always kind or careful with each other.
We were raw, unfiltered, sometimes even mean.
All the worst fights I’d ever had I’d had with Krissy.
But despite it, we always wound up back at each other’s sides.
No matter what, we’d always come back together with an “I’m sorry,” an “I love you,” and a “Wanna get donuts?”
That had to mean something. It had to.
I’d told Nicola I didn’t feel pain, but that was a lie. I hurt. I hurt all over. My head pulsed, my eyes ached, and my porcelain felt like it was on fire. I wanted to cry. I needed to cry. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything.
Nothing but get shoved aside the second I was in the way.
Nicola was supposed to be on my side, but she’d stuffed me into her backpack and waited until she was all the way back home before letting me out.
I’d agreed to Plan B. I was following her stupid fucking rules. I thought it was a compromise, an agreement, a fair partnership . . . but she hadn’t even tried to talk to Krissy.
She hadn’t even tried.
I sat up, my insides clenched into an angry lump, my whole body shaking.
Out the window, dogs were barking. One of them sounded almost like Cookie, barks long, loud, and low.
An idea formed. It was a shitty idea, a desperate idea, but it was the only one I had. I needed to talk to Krissy. I needed to explain everything. Plan B wasn’t working, but with her on our side we could change that. We could bring Kyle down, once and for all.
Nicola might not see it now, but she’d understand. She would.
I turned my head bit by bit until I could see Nicola in profile. She was staring upward, her gaze distant, breathing steady. Before I could think about what I was doing, before I could work out any doubts, I leaned back into the time stream.
It buffeted against me, ripped through me, then broke, rapids becoming eddies that swirled outward.
Nicola’s breathing slowed. The sound of the barking dogs grew deeper and longer until it became an eerie unnatural drone. I waited until Nicola looked frozen, until the light bulb overhead began to flicker . . . then I made my move.
I crawled shakily across the mattress and onto the bedside table. It took a few attempts to wedge my stick up into the top drawer and several more attempts to push it open.
Nicola’s spare hearing aid was exactly where she’d said it would be, in the drawer, lying beside a packet of Panadol and an old phone charger. I climbed into the drawer and scooped it clumsily into my arms.
I didn’t know anything about hearing aids, but I could tell it was identical to her other one: a block of peach-colored plastic, a tube designed to hook around the ear, and a speaker encased in a silicone earmold.
Carefully, I brought it to my face, until it was all I could see, and pushed it into the hole where my eye used to be.
It rattled as it slid down the inside of my face, settling into the hollow of my neck. For a split second I felt a surge of panic as something inside me revolted against the idea of anything touching me there, but I fought it back.
I needed to do this.
Carefully, I poked my head up out of the drawer.
Nicola lay where I’d left her, still and staring.
She looked dead.
The elongated bark of the dogs sounded like an earthquake, low, violent, and hungry, reverberating through the air, making my insides squirm and my limbs shake.
The time stream was pulsing against me, trying to push forward faster.
I fought it back as I climbed out of the drawer, kicking it closed behind me.
The urge to cry hadn’t left. It burned my eyes like acid, squeezed my middle like a fist. Half walking, half crawling, I made my way back across the mattress and collapsed in a heap on Nicola’s patchwork quilt.
The moment I did, the time stream tore away from me, too fast to control.
I tried to slow it down, but I couldn’t hold it anymore.
The barking pitched up, morphing from a drone into an alarm, painfully loud, like ripping metal. Nicola’s chest juddered, her breaths coming staccato quick, her head snapping to the side to look at me. Her pupils and lips blurred, the sound of her voice too high, too fast to understand.
But it didn’t matter.
I was done talking to her.
She said something else, another distorted glitch of noise, then jerked upright.
She stood by the bed for a long time, breathing inhumanly fast, eyes aimed toward me, blinking and blinking and blinking.
I started to think she could see the hearing aid hidden inside my head, that she was going to pick me up off the bed, yank it out of my face, and throw me back into her backpack.
Fear lumped up inside me, tangling with my exhaustion.
Nic—