The Telling (43 page)

“You told me to come. To save you. How could you be that cruel? You knew I'd see you dying. Maggie drove us a mile away and I crawled through the window to escape the car to get back to you.”

He brushes his thumb down my limp arm. He flattens my palm to his chest. The thump is there through his sweatshirt. “I did this for you and me.” He ducks his head. “I am cruel. And I'm going to hell for it. You are my summer. It has been you since we were two stupid kids in a blanket fort. Tell me you don't hate me. Leave with me. You don't care about Gant. Cal doesn't know you. Parker isn't good enough.” He smiles crookedly. “Neither am I, but at least I know it.
I know you.
”

He floats, blown into me with the wind. This is Ben. For a moment, as giant drifts of fog block out everything but the boat, and it's possible to pretend that we are alone in the world, I am only Lana, who is unforgivably in love with a boy who killed for her. I am Lana who loves Ben best, most, always. His hands close on my waist. For once mine aren't awkward and oversize; I place them on his shoulders. My bottom lip fits to his bottom and my top to his.

Little bursts run down my neck to spread through my chest. My hands slip over Ben's arms and skate under his sweatshirt's hem to touch his lower back, and I might as well be hanging upside down doing this; I'm dizzy from the rush of blood. I am a million tiny blazing nerve endings that are not angry with Ben in the slightest. I am everything I should have done six months ago. His mouth on mine
makes me alert, like jumping into the deep, cold water of the sound would. I am fresh and raw and aching and alive, alive, alive.

Then, like the cold, his kiss sets in. The blood pounds in my ears and I hear the warning: this love is dangerous. One of his hands curves around my hip bone and the other moves into my hair and it occurs to me that this isn't my Ben. My Ben told stories and played games; he was compassionate; he could see the good in people.

I come apart from Ben, intent on our summer provisions chest. My hand connects with the flare gun, which is exactly where it always is. I bring it up to his stomach before he reacts. There is nothing but cold air slapping my heated cheeks and our traded inhales and exhales for a long minute. His face hovers so near mine it's impossible to make out more than the light in his eyes. I taste the saltiness of his lips left over on mine.

“Get away from me,” I say.

“Lana.”

“This will absolutely rip into your stomach and the force and heat will probably burn the skin from my hand,” I say. A shudder travels through me. I grit my teeth. “Move away.”

He strides in reverse until he reaches the starboard side of the boat. I expect a scowl, or betrayal, or disappointment to seize his features, twist them until he looks like a monster. Instead he has a dazed, intoxicated smile and he's nodding his head, thumbing his stubbled chin like he's watching fireworks or me making a seventy-six-point Scrabble word.

“There you are,” he whispers. “Lana the brave.” He tilts his head back and laughs full and hard at the clouds coming apart in the sky. “I'm the fucking villain, and heroes kill villains. Isn't that right, sweetheart?” he asks, chin dropping.

There's a sharp twinge and then a pop in my chest. I am a twice-broken heart. Ben did this so I'd be the Lana from his head. She wasn't real, though. The girl who would have killed Becca for the rumors she spread never existed. Neither did the Lana who would hurt Maggie or Ford. Even now, looking on at this wicked and sick boy, I'm leaking love everywhere. It's oozing from my pores and drip-dripping on the deck of the
Mira
. I worry I might slip in it. I love Ben. I loved the trembling Ben who showed up with the tabby cat. I loved the Ben I watched die on the highway. I loved him too much for it to be chipped away by awful deeds.

“Don't think about it,” he says. His eyes travel from the flare gun to my face.

“Leave,” I tell him. “If you ever come back to Gant, if anyone ever spots you, if anyone else gets hurt, if I feel you watching, I will tell the police everything.”

“That won't work, Lan. Are you crazy?” He pounds a fist to his sternum. “I killed three people for you. I'm not going to disappear. Even if I go, I'll come back. I'll try again in six months, and six more after, and again after that. I will find new ways to tell you that you're my summer. And you will change your mind. You won't tell anyone, least of all the police.”

“I will. Do you hear me?” I shout. “Whoever you have in your head that could be with you after you killed Becca and . . . and all of them,
I'm not her
.”

One foot shuffles forward. “We are a pair.” Certainty is glimmering in his eyes.

I shake my head hard. “We're not anymore. You're just my dead stepbrother. You have to be my dead stepbrother,” I end, pleading.

He points at the flare gun. “Then do it, because there's nothing beyond this for me. You'll see me again and again, and it will get harder. I know you. I know that I'm your summer too.”

“Stop it.”

“Pull the trigger, Lana.” His whole frame shakes.

My free hand claws at my sweater collar, which is constricting my neck. “No,” I say.

“If I get any closer and you do it, you're right, the heat will burn you. It's going to blow off your hand. Do you understand?” His gaze holds mine steadily. “If I reach you, I am throwing it in the water. I'll know that it's only a matter of
when
you'll come with me.”

“Please stop.”

“Please?” He takes a threatening step closer. “You think I care if you say please?” His eyes go hooded. “Do you know that that's what Becca kept saying? Please . . . please . . . She was whining the whole time, it never even occurred to the idiot to scream.” He makes his voice whiny and high. “
Please,
she begged me.”

My finger compresses. There's a hiss with the release and a rough cry in answer. Ben pitches back. A shower of embers sears the space between us, running from one point to the other, connecting me to the person I love. My nostrils flare with the smell of singed fabric and skin.

I hit the floor at Ben's feet. The flare is a burning orange circle in his abdomen. The sweatshirt around the wound is tattered, its edges blackened so that I can't tell charred skin from fabric. Blood, liquid and black, seeps from the circular wound. Ben stares at me, faraway and detached from the hole in him. The flare is burning, it will burn through him. It will burn through my Ben, and then it will burn the
Mira
.

My throat hurts, and I realize that I've been screaming, “I take it back,” since I pulled the trigger. I sense that I've been thrown in time, to the beginning, to the black, oily highway shining as a river in the headlights, to Ben, injured, dying, taken away from me.

Ben grinds his teeth. His spine sags in a spasm that leaves him seeming diminished. He's slumped to the deck, and his hands close around the rails behind his head. There are two feet between the bottom rail and the boat.

“What are you doing?” I panic. His knuckles flex around the metal. I try to reach for him. I scramble forward and seize his arm. He's already pushing himself over the side, though. Gravity is working against me, and I'm not strong enough to stop it.

On the tail end of his splash, I catch, “Shhh, it's okay.”

I say, “No, no, no,” that one syllable repeated over and over as he begins to convulse, as his mouth expels a glut of blood, as Ben disappears into the sound.

W
e cook dinner on the beach at Shell Shores on Friday, end of the first week of senior year. Josh, Rusty, and Duncan kneel, stoking orange flames that are licking the two-toned sky of late afternoon. They argue over stabbing the hot dogs with sticks or putting them to grill directly on the burning wood. There are other kids scattered up the shore. Their celebrations are giddy over being seniors, top of the school food chain, tempered only by the occasional self-conscious glance thrown the core's way. The others keep apart from us.

The week was full of whispers and stares. Not merely the ones that come with being seen with the core, although there have been those, too. The whole island has heard about Becca hanging from her swing set and institutionalized Fitzgerald Moore. Bits and pieces of my account of Ben's confession to the police have trickled into public ears. Adults go tight-lipped; give their heads a shake that could mean they think I'm crazy or that they don't care to discuss something as unpleasant as the boy who wasn't even from Gant picking off the island's sons and daughters.

A convoy of cheerleaders led by Liddy cornered me at my locker the first day back. They made sad doll eyes as Liddy said in her shrill soprano, “So like, we heard Ben was attacking you and you fought him off. And you had to shoot him or else he was going to strangle you, and we just wanted you to know that we never thought he was all that hot. God, what was his damage?”

Carolynn intervened. Her eyes fixed on Liddy like laser beams, and the cheerleaders retreated. Unfortunately, that trick doesn't work on teachers, or Principal Owen, or the counselor, and the host of other adults who've relayed their sympathies and then kept one uneasy eye on me. No one knows what to believe.

Am I the girl with the stepbrother who lost it and tormented our idyllic island over a summer that will be hastily forgotten? Am I the little stepsister who had to lodge a flare in her stepbrother's abdomen to stop his killing spree? Or am I the
troubled
and lying victim and witness of a rash of mysterious crimes? At least now, everyone gets the step-thing right.

“Are those tofu?” Carolynn asks as Josh skewers the hot dogs on sticks.

He gives her a goofy smile and answers, “No.”

“Thank God,” Carolynn groans, and reclines on the blanket we're sharing. She wears oversize sunglasses. They've covered her watery eyes for much of the week.

“You want one or two, Car?” Duncan asks. He stays awake at night with Carolynn on the phone. Becca would be happy; Bethany J. is basically blacklisted. Carolynn holds two fingers in the air.

Willa's reading a book from AP Lit. She rests on one elbow and
holds the volume to shade her face. She didn't skip a beat performing in class. As I stared glassy-eyed out the window in stats, Willa spoke more than the teacher. Good. My best friend deserves her yellow brick road of scholarly accomplishments. She deserves for it to lead to Oz—or Brown.

I stay sitting, just watching the boys. It's harder than it sounds. It's hard not curling up and sinking into grief. It helps to remember who I am and who I want to be.

I am Lana McBrook. Not
before Lana
, that saggy-spined minnow who let the world walk all over her, who was authentically loved by her best friend, Willa Owen, and who Ben McBrook killed three people and faked his own death to change. Not
after Lana
with her big Josh-loving declarations, beloved stepbrother, and her silly notions about who she had to be.

I am
just Lana McBrook
, the girl who loved her stepbrother in all the dirty, gross, and wonderful ways; who murdered him with a flare gun when she realized that eventually she would leave with him, she would become a monster to love the one he'd become; who leaped into the icy, black water of the sound to try and save him once she had.

He was gone.

The current was strong, the water deep, and the night dark.

I am Lana who thought she believed in revenge, until I saw what it looked like: Becca hanging from her swing set. And for an awful moment, like a sickness, I felt what it was to be happy for the violence visited upon her. Truthfully, though, I've believed in forgiveness since I was a four-year-old whose depressed mom leaped from a terrace. I'd forgiven her right away for leaving me. I'd forgiven Dad for departing
in his own way shortly after. I've been the forgiving kind before I was old enough to know how hard forgiving can be. Before I understood that there was an alternative.

I am still a sometimes liar. It can't be helped. I haven't said aloud that Ben created a villain in Gant to turn me into the girl from our stories. Or that I loved him. Or that he succeeded in jolting me brave. Ben did know what I needed. It worked.
It worked.
How awful is that?

The police, Sweeny in particular, have wondered at Ben's motivations. After I was half-drowned from the search, I climbed up the ladder onto the
Mira
. I called the coast guard and then Sweeny. She was waiting for me at the dock when the coast guard delivered me there. I sat with her on the bank of grass by the parking lot. I shivered under the blankets I'd been given. I told her what Ben had done. I told her that he wanted me to fake my death and disappear with him. I admitted to shooting him with the flare gun.

Sweeny held my hand as Ward lingered behind us, pretending not to listen, but training an ear in our direction. Self-defense, she proclaimed it quickly. I had no choice, she assured me. Ward looked less convinced, but he nodded anyway.

Ward had been suspicious of me at the start. Back in Seattle he'd spent just as much time ruminating over the details of Ben's killing as Sweeny had. Neither of them was as startled to hear the truth as I thought they'd be. They'd sensed something wasn't stacking up. It's why they'd continued asking me if I was protecting someone else.

The police called Dad and he showed up, frantic and frightened. After we got home, he spent most of that night on the phone with Diane. Dad believed me without hesitation; no matter how fantastic
my story. Diane hasn't returned from Calm Coast, although this time, I don't blame her. We would all rather not know that Ben was responsible. I would rather miss Ben without the guilt weighting me from the inside out. I would rather not replay the night on the highway, searching for cracks, indications that it was a ruse.