Sloth (9 page)

”I didn’t think you’d come,” she says dully. “I thought you hated me. ”

”Of course I don’t hate you,” he says, his voice too jolly. She winces. He knows he’s trying too hard; he just doesn’t know what he’s trying to do. He pulls a familiar chair up to the bed. He doesn’t take her hand. “Look, things got all screwed up at the end
there, and I
...
we both said a lot of things that . . . you know, we probably shouldn’t have.”

”Mostly
you
said a lot of things,” she reminds him. “I just said I’m sorry. ”

She’d said it over and over again; he hadn’t wanted to listen.

”I know. I know you are,” he tells her. “I get that now. And I forgive you. ”

”Really?” Her eyes widen. She tries to sit up in bed, and her face twists in pain. He touches her shoulder, gently, helping her to lie back. She reaches out, touches his face. “Everything I did, I just did it because—”

”I know.”

The tension disappears from her face. “Then it’s okay,” she murmurs, almost to herself “Then at least something is . . .”

He leans in closer, struggling to hear—and she kisses him.

He jerks away.

He does it without even thinking.

He hasn’t thought any of it through, he realizes now. And now it’s too late.

”What?” There is a new pain on her face. “What is it?”

”Gracie, when I said—I didn’t mean—”

”You said you forgave me, Ad,” she says softly, as if maybe he forgot, and this is all a simple misunderstanding. “So that’s it. We can start again. No more lies, no more—”

”No.” He doesn’t know he’s going to say it before the word pops out, but he means it. “I want us to be friends again, Harper, I really do. But anything else . . . I think we work better, just as friends. When we tried to have more”—When
you
had to have more, he doesn’t say—”things got messy.”

”But it was all a mistake!” she protests, her voice scratchy and weak. “I explained that. I apologized, a million times. And you
just want to go back? Like none of it ever happened? Like you never told me that you—”

”None of it was real.” He tries not to look away. He wants so much to make her smile; but he can’t tell her what she wants to hear. “When we were together, it was all a lie.” The words are harsh, but his voice is gentle. He doesn’t want to hurt her. “Everything you said was based on lies—and everything I said, that was just because I believed them. ”

She sags back against the pillows, her face returning to the dull, expressionless mask she’d worn when he came in.

Stop, he tells himself, horrified. Look what he’s said, what he’s done. He has to fix it—fix
her.

”Gracie, you’re my best friend,” he says, and now he does take her hand. He can feel her pulling away, but he squeezes tighter, and she doesn’t have the strength. “I miss that. I miss
you.
We tried the whole dating thing, and it didn’t work out. It doesn’t matter why, or whose fault it is. It just didn’t. But that doesn’t mean—”

”Get out,” she says flatly.

”What?”

“I don’t need this.”

“I don’t understand,” he says, trying not to.

”You don’t forgive me,” she says bitterly. “You still think I’m not good enough for you, that I’m this manipulative
slut
who can’t be trusted. That’s what you told me, isn’t it? That I’m this terrible person, all rotted on the inside?”

”But I was wrong,” he protests. “I didn’t mean it. ”

”Right. “ Her voice swells, and he realizes that even now, hurt, powerless, confined to a bed, she has power. She is still, after all, Harper Grace. “You meant it. Then. So what’s changed now? You see me lying here and you feel sorry for me? You figure poor
little Harper needs a nice pick-me-up in her bed of pain? And what? I’m supposed to be grateful for your
pity?”
Her voice is shaking, but her eyes are dry. And he knows that she will never let him see her pain.

“It’s not pity,” he argues.

”Yeah, but it’s not—” She stops herself. There is a long silence. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she says finally. “I’m fine. You did your little good deed by coming here, so you can forget your guilty conscience. ”

It would be so easy to fix this, he thinks. All he has to do is take her back, tell her he loves her and he understands everything she did to him. Tell her he’s ready to start over again, that the past doesn’t matter.

But it does matter. A car crash can’t erase anything that happened, or the choices that she made; it doesn’t change the kind of person she is, it doesn’t make it any easier to trust her again.

”You should get some rest,” he says. “We can talk about this tomorrow. I’ll come back and—”

”Don’t. ”

“I want to. ”

“I don’t care. “ She turns her head away from him and closes her eyes. They’re done.

“She’s feeling a lot better,” Miranda said, shrugging. “I’m sure pretty soon everything else will be back to normal. And the two of you . . .”

“I don’t know,” he said dubiously, although he had the same hope. It’s why he kept trying, in hopes that, if nothing else, she’d eventually get tired of pushing him away.

“I could tell her you were asking,” Miranda offered.

“No, don’t bother.” He looked down at his notebook, where a mess of numbers and letters sprinkled the page in
an incomprehensible pattern. “Maybe we should just get back to work.”

After all, nothing in his life made much sense anymore; at least when it came to algebra, there was an answer key in the back of the book.

Beth pressed her foot down on the gas pedal, nudging the car just over the speed limit, and tried not to think about the two meetings she was blowing off or the stack of homework she’d face when she got home again. Today had gone from bad—an encounter with Kane that had rattled her even more than her first ever detention slip— to worse as she’d bombed a pop quiz, forgotten her gym uniform, and almost lost the Spirit Day prizes. She’d found them at the last minute, but had been forced to miss the culminating Spirit Rally in favor of her first detention, where she’d cowered in the back row under the glare of a tall, gaunt boy with pale skin and greasy hair who kept whispering something about how hot she’d look in leather.

It would be nice to say it had all been worth it, that she’d managed to erase some part of her imagined debt to Harper, and she was able to start feeling good about herself again, or at the very least that she could put the day behind her, sleep long and hard, and hope the next day would be better.

But she just felt unsteady. Maybe it was the detention, maybe it was the four cups of coffee she’d downed since morning, maybe it was Kane—her
supplier,
she reminded herself. She tried to shut it out, but the image popped into her mind yet again: the empty box on her nightstand. Kane
was the only one who knew about it—the only one who could ever suspect what she’d done.

And if he hadn’t given her the pills, she reminded herself, none of this would have happened. She hated him— almost as much as she hated herself.

Little wonder that she couldn’t face her meeting, haggling with a bunch of overly enthusiastic volunteers about how to stage the next day’s auction, where to hang the banners, which last-minute details to delegate and which to ditch. It was too depressing, especially since she used to be one of them, trying hard, worrying, taking all that nervous energy left over from waiting for college decisions and funneling it into something productive and mildly entertaining. Now she was just acting the part. And it was getting old.

She couldn’t face going home; the house was always either too full of people, noise, and clutter to think straight, or it was empty and too quiet.

So she’d driven away, following the familiar curves until she reached the spot that guaranteed her a quiet place to think. She felt guilty there, as if she were trespassing, especially in those moments when she was overcome by self-pity—it felt wrong, feeling sorry for herself, there of all places. But she couldn’t help it. And as time passed, it became the only place that could help.

The road curved, and the thin white cross appeared. Beth pulled her car onto the shoulder and parked. She hesitated for a moment, staring through the windshield at the small wooden cross stuck into the brush-covered ground, the withering bunches of flowers gathered around it. It looked almost lonely, dwarfed by the vast emptiness of
the surrounding desert. From this distance she couldn’t see the name scratched into the wood, but she imagined she could. She had traced her fingers over the letters often enough.

Beth didn’t know who had erected the small memorial— Kaia’s father, from the few glimpses she’d gotten before he left town, didn’t seem the type. And there were few other candidates. She got out of the car and walked slowly over to the cross, then sat on the ground in front of it, not caring if she got dirt all over her jeans. She’d brought along her ancient duct-taped-together Discman, and now she switched it on, sliding the headphones over her head and tuning out the world.

The first time she’d come, she had wandered through the brush, looking for signs that something had happened here. And she’d found them—small spots of scorched earth, scratches and gouges in the ground, a smear of rubber on the road, a jagged chunk of metal, twisted and torn beyond recognition. But all of that was gone now; or, at least, Beth no longer had any urge to look. Now she just sat and stared, sometimes at the roughly engraved letters—just
KAIA
, no dates, no messages, no last name— sometimes at the empty road and still scenery, disturbed only by the occasional eighteen-wheeler barreling through, sometimes at the sky. She chose her music at random, though most of the CDs in her collection were weepy women, singer-songwriters warbling about lost love, so there was rarely much surprise. Today, however, she’d popped in an old Green Day album—something Adam had given her in hopes of giving her some kind of music makeover. She’d never really listened to it. But it
was loud and angry, and today, somehow, it worked.

It’s not my fault,
she told herself, trying to dislodge the mountain of guilt. There was no cause and effect. No connection. She’d drugged Harper; Kaia had crashed a car. It was a coincidence, nothing more. A bad driver, speeding down the road, slamming into the BMW, disappearing. It was an accident—-just bad luck.
Not my fault.
Harper was fine. Harper was healthy. Whatever Beth had done, there’d been no permanent consequences.

What happened to Kaia was permanent, but—
not my fault.

She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there when she felt the hand on her shoulder. She tipped her head back and looked up into the deepest brown eyes she’d ever seen. She took in his warm, crooked smile, the tendrils of dark, curly hair that flopped over his eyes, the smudge of grease just above his chin . .. and then it all came together into a familiar face, and she jerked away.

“Hey,” he said, his voice warm and gravelly, as if he’d just rolled out of bed. “Sorry.” He sat down next to her. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t,” Beth said, pulling off her headphones. She couldn’t look at him.

Reed flicked his eyes toward the cross. “I didn’t know anyone else came here,” he said. “Didn’t think anyone cared.” He spoke slowly, pausing between each word as if part of him preferred the silence. “I didn’t know you two were friends.”

Beth couldn’t bring herself to say that they weren’t, that Kaia had zoomed to the top of Beth’s enemies list by sleeping with her boyfriend; she couldn’t admit the hours
she’d spent wishing Kaia Sellers out of existence. But she also didn’t want to lie.

“I’m Reed,” he said, breaking the awkward silence. “Maybe you don’t remember, but we met a while ago, before ...” He reached for her hand and shook it, an oddly formal gesture considering they were sitting across from each other in the dirt on the side of a highway. His hand was warm, his grip tight; she didn’t want to let go.

“I remember.” She’d been upset, and he’d cheered her up, somehow—she couldn’t remember now. Couldn’t even remember what she’d been so upset about. It felt like a different lifetime. “I should go,” she said suddenly, realizing he probably wanted to be alone—she didn’t belong. “Do you want me to—?”

“I should take off,” he said at the same time. They both stopped talking and laughed, then, shooting a guilty glance at the thin, white cross, fell into silence again.