I shake my head. Jamie’s figure is getting hazy as tears blur my vision.
“We have to, she looks really hurt.” My words clumsily spill from my lips. I need to get out.
“It’s gonna be okay—no cops and it’ll be fine,” Jamie says, his voice cracking. “We can’t go to prison, so no cops. We need to do something. My dad… He can’t fucking find out about this.”
Prison? I hadn’t thought of prison.
The words stab at my chest, stopping my lungs from functioning the way they should. Each time I try to breathe, there’s not enough air; when I try to swallow, it’s like there’s something lodged in my throat.
I can hear myself crying, but it’s almost like it’s someone else. I can’t feel the tears, but I know it’s me. The girl’s doll-like face is scratched into a distorted image in my mind.
I should get out and make sure she’s okay. I reach for the door handle. I have to see that she’s still alive. She’s not moving. The blood. We hit her really hard—
The next part happens so fast. I hear the loud slam of the car door as Jamie suddenly reappears next to me. The sound of tires screeching on the wet road as he backs the car away. There’s a pause and I look at him.
I have to get out—
There’s a click as the doors lock. I rattle the handle uselessly.
“What are you doing?” I scream, banging on the window.
We can’t leave her. We can’t leave her.
Jamie looks at me briefly, eyes glazed over. Then in one quick motion, he swerves around the girl’s body and races forward, not looking back.
“Chi?” Jamie says, dragging me back into the present.
“You’re right,” I say, dizzy, gripping the bench as the sound of people talking in the distance fills my ears once again.
He smiles.
Jamie is good at rationalizing everything, making sense of the cracks in reality.
Especially when it’s the things we need to forget.
My dreams, since the accident, always begin like this: Water enters my body in every way it can, flooding my organs, squeezing and squeezing as I yell for help, which only makes more water seep through, burning my lungs, my throat, while my skin prickles on fire. I turn to the side and Jamie is there next to me in the car, frozen, staring blankly at the road ahead. I wave my arms to swim out, away,but I’m no longer in water. I’m dry and I’m back in the passenger’s seat, watching her scream, eyes wide as we stop and she falls to the ground. In my dreams, I stumble out of Jamie’s black car, palms stinging as I hit the gravel. I try to stand. But I can’t. I drag myself toward the body, watching the blood seeping into the holes in the gravel, away from her blond curls—everything is silent. Her face is the last thing I see. The face I will never forget.
Then I’m gasping for breath, choking on air as I jerk myself awake.
I’m up like this every single night, in my dark bedroom, sweating and heaving. Some nights I have that dream more than once. Other nights, that dream is accompanied by another that is just as disturbing. Me trapped in a dark room, drunk, disoriented. Hundreds of blond, bloodstained dolls surrounding me as the girl Jamie hit stands over me, a grin plastered to her pale face.
I get up, spots dancing in my vision as I run into my bathroom, my stomach rejecting all its contents.
In my dreams, I’m not a coward. I don’t let us drive away, leaving her to die. I get out. I touch her. I see her blood on my hands. In my dreams, I don’t help her either. I kneel on the ground, staring at her pale face, her eyes closed as blood oozes out, until my mind can’t take it anymore.
At night when I’m alone, I’m reminded of the things I can’t control. When I’m at school, I get to be someone else. Someone people like. But when I’m here, sitting in the dark, shaking as that night replays over and over, her face a permanent bloodstain, I remember that the person I play at school isn’t me, not in the slightest. The Chi who turns up at Niveus every day might not be afraid to hurt people’s feelings, to do things to get what she wants. But she’d never do the things I’ve done.
She’s a good person. Someone who deserves to be Head Prefect and to go to Yale, to become a doctor.
I clutch the toilet bowl, letting my body shudder and release quiet sobs.
And me…
I’m a monster.
5
DEVON
