I remember standing in the shower for more than an hour, water scalding hot, scrubbing my hands over and over and over.
I remember lying awake on my bed, playing music from my phone all night long because suddenly the silence of a sleeping house felt like fingers pressing down on the back of my neck.
I remember drifting into an uneasy sleep, Mr. Knoll’s last words a sinister lullaby in my ear.
Chapter Ninteen
I FLOAT THROUGH THE REST OF THE DAY in relative solitude. My mother remains so pissed at me, the we’ll talk about it more later never actually happens. Around noon, she leaves a tray laden with grilled cheese sandwiches on thick sourdough bread and creamy tomato soup outside my door—?my favorite comfort food—?but doesn’t even knock. It’s as though she’s trying to make peace without actually engaging with me, and I leave the food untouched in the hallway, feeding on the stash of Luna bars I keep in my school bag for rehearsal snacks.
Charlie texts me several times, benign inquiries about how I’m doing, all of which I ignore. She eventually stops. I try not to think about what that means or doesn’t mean. I try not to think at all. Alex and I text a little, but it’s about nothing, and the one time he calls, I don’t answer.
There’s a constant dull ache in my bones, a too-sharp brightness to my thoughts. I’m grounded indefinitely, but by the time Friday night arrives, I’m desperate to get out of my house.
Around dinnertime, I’m scheming ways to sneak out when Owen knocks on my door. I know it’s him before he even calls my name, his syncopated-rhythm knock giving him away. I debate ignoring him, diving under my covers and pretending to be asleep, but my light is on and my music is playing and I hear my voice call out “Yeah?” before I can stop it.
He cracks open the door and sticks his head in, making eye contact with me before he steps into the room.
“Mom told me to tell you we’re going out to dinner. Pizza.”
“Oh?” I sit up from where I’m leaning against the headboard, one of the guitar books Charlie gave me open on my lap. I glance around my room, dirty clothes everywhere, wondering what I’ll wear and how I’ll manage to sit through a meal in public without screaming at my entire family. How I’ll pretend everything is fine.
“She left you some of last night’s pasta in the microwave,” he says, and everything goes quiet inside of me.
“Oh,” I breathe out. It’s amazing how quickly reluctance and anger can shift into disappointment and open wounds.
I settle back on the bed, hiding my balled-up fists in my comforter. Owen watches me, his brow wrinkling. He rubs the back of his neck and I keep waiting for him to leave, go have his happy dinner with our adoring parents, but he just stands there, gaze trailing from my darkened window to my eyes, as if he’s trying to place me in the stars and can’t quite picture me there anymore.
I look down at my legs and the pink and purple kiss-print pajama pants I changed into earlier. The emotions warring on his face are too familiar, too close.
“You really don’t believe me, do you?” he asks, so quietly I almost don’t hear it.
My head snaps up. Instinctively, my mouth opens to answer, because I always answer my brother. I’ve never had a reason not to. Before, my voice was always ready to engage with his, thoughts ready to share, ears ready to listen. But now I have no answer for him, no voice. I can’t tell him yes, but I can’t say no, either. I can’t even say I don’t know, because some part of me does know, but it’s stuck, lodged inside the tangle of fears and facts in my head.
When I say nothing, he blinks rapidly and turns his head away, his jaw tightening. “The state attorney called Mom today,” he says. “They’re not pressing charges.” And then he’s gone, my door clicking quietly shut behind him as everything his words imply settles on me like a heavy snow—?beautiful and painfully cold.
There’s a girl inside me, a sister, who wants to leap out of her bed and fly from her room, hurtle herself down the stairs and into her brother’s arms. She wants to cry, tell him everything, let him explain again why charges were even a possibility, because she knows him and she knows there must be some explanation, some way it’s all a misunderstanding.
But there’s another girl inside of me too. Tired. Scared. Lonely. Angry. Devastated. Wounded. She gets up from the bed, but she doesn’t chase after her brother.
She doesn’t have a brother.
She goes to the window and opens it. She hears the garage door rumble up and rumble back down, sees a charcoal-gray car drive away with her family, no doubt ready to celebrate Owen’s freedom. The girl feels a stab of relief at the news too, but it fits all wrong on her skin, like a too-small coat stretched over widening hips. She climbs through the window and sits on the roof, staring at the black expanse above her. She doesn’t look for the twins. Instead, she seeks out Andromeda, a girl made of stars whose mother wouldn’t shut up about her daughter’s beauty, so the daughter was punished. Poseidon secured her against the coastal rocks, leaving her to be ravaged by a monster. Now she lives in the sky, a memorial to the time she spent chained up and nearly sacrificed because of another’s choice, another’s obsession, another’s selfishness.
I blink at the sky, feeling my own skin around my bones again. Andromeda’s hard to find, usually too far south on the horizon to see. But she’s out there somewhere, trapped and alone, awaiting her own release.
Chapter Twenty
THROWING PIECES OF GRAVEL at a second-story window belonging to a family who probably hates me isn’t my best idea, but Hannah isn’t answering my texts and there’s no way in hell I’m ringing the doorbell.
Sheer curtains frame the dimly lit window. I toss up another pebble and it plinks against the glass. A few seconds later, a shadow interrupts the amber light. Hannah’s face appears. She stares down at me, expressionless. I gaze back, but eventually I manage to lift my hand in greeting, curling my fingers and waving her down. She disappears and I pace circles around her side yard, avoiding eye contact with the lake and breathing in the smoky leftover scent of burning leaves.
Too many minutes pass and I’m just about to head back to my car parked on the street when I hear the creak of the screened-in porch’s door at the back of the house. Edging around some juniper bushes, I see Hannah’s form inching the door shut carefully behind her. She holds a finger up to her lips and I nod as she freezes, listening. Then she tiptoes down the stairs and falls into step beside me. She’s in jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair in a sleek and boring ponytail. I didn’t even know Hannah owned a pair of jeans. Hell, I didn’t even know she owned a hair elastic.
Wordlessly, we move away from the lake and down the neatly trimmed grass running alongside her driveway. We don’t speak until we’re safely closed inside my car.
“Are you going to get into trouble?” I ask.
She shrugs, sighing and leaning her head back on the seat. “I told my parents I was going to bed, then snuck down the back stairs. Doesn’t matter.”
