She’s kind of right.
“You know what drives me crazy?” I say. My voice is low now. “Months. I was here for months, Mara. Alone, with no one from my old life and no one who knew me from before. I went through a Hunt. I got chased through this building by strangers in masks. It was terrifying and fucked-up. Then, I had to figure out who to trust and who to avoid and how to survive in a place with no rules and three men who owned me.”
“I know?—”
“You don’t know. You don’t know what it was like. You were outside. You were free. And I was in here trying not to fall apart.”
Her eyes go bright and for a second, she looks like she might cry, and then she doesn’t. She gets angry instead.
“You’re right. You didn’t ask me to come,” she says.
We stare at each other. Two women who’ve known each other since they were kids, standing on opposite sides of something that’s been building since the day Mara walked into the Rot with guilt in her eyes and a bag of letters hidden outside.
I didn’t reach out to her and ask her to come. Why would I have?
“We weren’t talking, Mara. Remember? That was your decision. You pulled away when Dad’s shit went public. You stopped calling. You stopped showing up, because your mother told you to. You told me that yourself. She said my family was poison and you chose her over me. So don’t stand there and act like you were waiting by the phone for an invitation.”
That’s ugly. I know it’s ugly.
“I was scared,” Mara says. Her voice breaks on the word. “I was scared for you. And I came as soon as I could. I brought everything I had. And since I got here, I’ve been trying so hard to be useful and not be in the way. I’ve tried to help you with your dad’s stuff, and you look at me like I’m a tourist. Like I’m visiting your life instead of being part of it. I know I deserted you. I was a coward. And I’ve been trying to make up for it since I got here.”
The anger drains out of me. All of it. Gone.
“Sorry,” I say. My voice cracks. “I’ve been unfair.”
“Yeah,” she says. “You have. But I’m sorry too. I’m scared for you, Vi. Not about the Rot or the guys or anything. For you. You’re so deep in this thing with your dad, I barely recognize you sometimes.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I barely recognize myself sometimes.
I cross the room to the bed, sit down beside her, and pull her into me. She resists for about half a second and then she’s holding on, and I’m holding on. We’re both crying, which is stupid but also honest.
“Talk to Tommy,” I say into her hair. “Talk to whoever you want. It’s not my place to police you.”
“I was going to anyway,” she says. Her voice is muffled against my shoulder. “But thank you for the permission I didn’t ask for.”
I laugh and it comes out wet and broken. She laughs too.
“Don’t disappear on me,” she says. “No matter what happens with the papers or the guys or any of it. Don’t go somewhere I can’t reach you. Don’t do the same thing he did, Vi, keeping everything close, shutting people out, handling stuff alone. Your dad did that and look what happened to him.”
“I won’t.” I mean it, right now, in this moment, holding my best friend on a bed in a dead mall, I mean it completely.
Whether I can keep that promise is another question.
45
VI
After Mara falls asleep,I lie there listening to her breathe, thinking about what she said. Not the fight stuff. Something else. The thing that snagged.
Don’t disappear on me.
Disappear.
Dad disappeared.
That’s the official version, anyway. The version I’ve been living with. Dad was investigating corruption on the city council, he got too close, and they got to him. No body was recovered, which isn’t unusual in a town falling apart at the seams. People disappeared all the time during the collapse. Some left. Some were buried. Some just stopped existing in any way that could be tracked.
But something Mara said is scratching at me, and I can’t sleep.
