Viv shrugs. “That wasyourplan.”
“Damn it!” Trey’s voice echoes from the open door to the bridge. A metallic clanking noise punctuates the end of his sentence.
“How’s that going?” I ask, nodding to the open door.
“Not well, obviously.” Viv turns to the side, giving me the cold shoulder. “Rachel, can you start planning what we’re going to eat today? How many boxes of mac and cheese do we have left?”
“Enough,” Rachel says gloomily, not looking up from the crackers. “We should finish the leftover cheese and raw veggies from the party before I make more pasta though. Those’ll go bad first.”
Viv wrinkles her nose. “This is a nightmare. These food options are so disgusting. We’re going to have to limit our calories next week to make up for all this junk food.”
“Shut up, Viv.” Fiona’s voice is garroted by pain, but her words are clear.
Viv’s eyes bulge; none of them have spoken to her like that before. At least not in front of me.
Viv’s jaw works, fingers flexing and clenching at her sides. Finally, she says, “You’re hurting, Fee. I’ll let that slide.” A vicious expression flickers across her face, and Viv strides over to the high-top, snatching away the sleeve of crackers. “No more. The sodium will make you bloat.”
It’s clearly meant as a punishment, but Fiona doesn’t seem to notice or care. She puts her head in her hands and melts over the table, quiet sobs racking her throat.
The rest of us shift uncomfortably, and Rachel slings an arm around Fiona’s shoulders, tears of her own silently inching down her cheeks.
“This is so fucked up,” Ashley mutters from her spot at the bar, downing the remaining yellow liquid in her wineglass with a loud gulp.
Viv doesn’t respond, huffing and turning away—her version of a resigned nod.
My chest aches for Fiona and Rachel. Even Ashley. She was having an affair with Carl, but there was a complicated history there. The events of the past few days have taken their toll. The group is fractured and unstable—but I can’t trust any of them. Elena is dead. The bridge is destroyed. Carl is under a sheet upstairs.
I wonder if Trey ended up telling the others about my secondary drowning theory. I wasn’t sure if he believed me, in the end. It probably doesn’t matter. The influencers are grieving a sudden loss, and I am an intruder. I barely knew Carl. Why should they take my word for it?
Either way, I can’t ignore the theme following me around. It’s almost like I manifested it—all this drowning. I didn’t think about drowning once beforeThe Last Time We Drownedcame into my head. Then I did so much research. Imagined what it would be like so I could write the crux of the book when Paia nearly dies. Mermaids, water, and drowning all go together perfectly. It was a solid plot. Then Sage stole it, renamed it, published it. And now everywhere I go, everywhere I look, someone is drowning, starting with Sage herself.
Maybe I’m cursed. Or maybe that’s the reason why I’m seeing glimpses of a drowned girl on the yacht.
As Rachel continues to console Fiona, I realize that we’re missing someone. Again. “Where’s Piper?”
“In her room,” Viv replies, rolling her eyes. “She needs to sleep it off.”
I stand there next to the pool table for a minute, wondering why all the girls treat Piper’s drinking like a slightly embarrassing but normal quirk. They tried to hide it from me at first, but now they’ve dropped the pretense and seem to view it as something we have to live with. It doesn’t help that they drink a lot too, although none to the extent Piper does.
The fridges are stocked with beer and wine, not food. There’s no pizza or veggies in the freezer, but there are vodka bottles. I’ve only been here a couple days, but it’s already not surprising to see someone with a drink in their hand, regardless of time of day. It’s like drinking has become a part of their glamorous life. Like alcohol is expected and normalized in a setting like this.
Sage would have done well here. We both drank, but Sage liked to imbibe a little more than usual, even for Wisconsin. I was never a big drinker despite living in Milwaukee my whole life—my mother was very dismissive of the drunk writer stereotype—and in an effort to please her, Emily and I both steered clear from binge drinking.
But Sage loved her beer, and though I didn’t try to keep up with her, I did find myself drinking more when we lived together. When Sage drank, she would get loud and sometimes would pick fights for no reason, but it was hard to stop her once she decided to start.It was like she used any excuse to drink—bad day, good day, in-between day. If she was bored, it was time for a shot. If she was angry, a beer would calm her down.
I tried to talk to her about it, once, after a night where she insisted we stay up until the sunrise, drinking and plotting our books. She brushed me off. Said she wasn’t drinking any differently than any of the other writers she knew. But Sage wasn’t close to many other writers. Just me.
“You’re the weird one,” she told me. “I had to practically beg you to have a whiskey. That’s the unofficial drink of an author, Char! Maybe if you had a few more, you’d be able to finally start your draft!” She smirked, like it was a joke, but there were threads of honesty in her voice. She truly believed her own words.
I didn’t bring up her drinking again after that. Maybe I should have. Maybe it would have saved her. As it was, I wasn’t shocked when the autopsy found that Sage’s BAC was quite a bit above the legal limit when she died.
When we drank on the boat together, I could usually monitor how much she was drinking and keep an eye out when she got in the water. But I wasn’t with her on the boat that day.
Your fault, a voice in the back of my head utters, and I flinch. I can’t think like that. I can’t analyze that thought. I put it away, violently.
Clearly, Sage had a drinking problem, and it contributed to her death. And that’s what it was: aproblem. But if someone was young and pretty and wealthy, a dangerous relationship with alcohol wassuddenly excusable. And I lived with Sage long enough to be able to spot the similarities in Piper.
I can’t ignore the situation anymore. I didn’t do enough to help Sage. But I should at least try with Piper.
