“Is it . . . is it true?” I ask. “Did Owen really try to break up with Hannah? He told me they fought. I mean . . . he said they didn’t, but then he said they did, and I don’t . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Hey, hey, just breathe.” Charlie pulls me back against a wall, forcing me to sit on my butt. She settles on the other side of me, her legs blocking the restroom door. She rubs circles on my back, pulls her hands through my hair before moving to my back again. “Breathe.”
So I do. Over and over, measured and steady, until my fingertips are no longer tingling, until the waves of nausea pass. “Is it true?” I ask again.
“Mara. You know the answer to that.”
“I don’t. Maybe something happened at the party. Something we don’t know about.”
Charlie shifts so she’s facing me. “Owen isn’t telling the truth. How can you not see that? Hannah told me what happened: They were messing around on the trail. It got pretty heavy. She changed her mind. He didn’t let her. End of story.”
“But they’ve . . . they’ve had sex before.”
Charlie doesn’t have to say it for me to hear how ridiculous I sound. How unlike myself. How full of excuses and provisos. But they’re not excuses to me. This is my brother we’re talking about.
“This doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t . . .” This isn’t my brother, I want to say. He would never have hurt Hannah. But that would make Hannah a liar and that’s not her, either. I know her. Sat beside her during Empower meetings, listened to her talk about getting boobs in the fourth grade and how it made her feel self-conscious and foreign in her own body. How the first time she got her period, she figured it out all by herself because her mom hadn’t told her about it yet. I remember nodding in reluctant agreement when she told me to be patient with Greta, even when Greta acted like a power-hungry harpy.
“It’s us against the world, Mara,” Hannah said one time. “If we’re not on each other’s side, who will be?”
“I can’t believe it,” I say to Charlie, locked-up tears strangling my voice. “I physically can’t. How can I believe either one of them? How can I not believe them?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie says softly, her hands on my back stilling. “He’s your brother, I get that. But I . . .” She breathes out heavily, her cinnamon breath fanning into the space between us. “I need you to know that I do believe Hannah. And it sucks. Everything about this is shitty. I mean, I loved Owen too.”
Loved. Past tense. Charlie’s made up her mind, picked a side and marched onward, and I’m still trying to wake up from a nightmare.
“I’ll help you work through this,” she says. “I’ll do whatever I can, Mara. Just . . .”
“Just what?”
“Don’t forget about Hannah. Okay? She’s totally devastated.”
“She loved Owen,” I whisper, and Charlie nods. Her hands slide to the back of my neck, thumb right on a pulse point. I can feel my blood pounding against her skin. Hannah did love my brother. He loved her too.
“I can’t be here today,” I say, moving Charlie’s hands away and pulling myself to my feet.
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know . . . I just can’t.”
“I’ll come with you. I don’t want you to be alone.”
“No. No, I need to be.”
“Mara—”
But I nudge her legs out of the way and open the door. Instantly, I’m swept into a throng of students in the middle of a class change, Hannah’s name a constant whisper in the air.
Chapter Eight
I END UP AT THE CEMETERY on Orange Street. It’s a weird obsession of mine, but I’ve always loved the eerie sort of peace you can find only in graveyards. All the lives already lived, done toiling, hopefully resting. It’s sad and hopeful all at once, and I can spend hours wandering among the century-old tombstones, wondering at the sleepers under my feet. This particular cemetery backs up to the Harpeth River, so it’s never completely quiet, even on a windless day. The sound of the water rolling gently over the rocks is a continual hush in the background.
I drift among the rows of stones, the long grass dying around them as winter gets closer. The air smells like fall and I breathe in the scent of burned leaves and river water—?a rocky, mineral scent. There aren’t many flowers or other tributes adorning the graves, most of the inhabitants having died so long ago they’re barely a memory in the world anymore.
I stop at one ancient stone, the carved writing nearly faded from the surface. Bending down, I find a young girl’s name.
Elizabeth Ruby Duncan
Beloved daughter and brave sister
