“One please, yes.” I clear my throat and turn to my cousins.
Sabina is eating her cotton candy Italian ice with her spoon, and I’m pretty sure she inhaled that pretzel in under thirtyseconds. Her dark hair is pulled back in a messy braid, arrows tattooed along her forearm in a pattern that moves if you stare too long.
Vanessa is using her pretzel as a spoon to scoop her large cherry ice, which is both delicious and deeply impressive. Her eyes catch the light wrong, too reflective, too hungry. Even then, before any of us knew what we really were, she looked at the world like she was calculating how it might taste.
Pepper got a bag of pretzels, which she will stash in the freezer when we get home. Ridiculous, since the stand is literally on the corner, but that’s Pepper. Her blueberry ice is halfway gone, purple staining her lips.
“Here ya go, honey.” The vendor sets my treat on the counter and I hand over the cash.
“What are we doing today?” Pepper asks, walking backward toward the house. “Gotta stash these.”
This summer, this very one, may have been one of my favorite summers.
“We should go to the lake,” Vanessa offers, licking cherry syrup off her thumb. “Sab?”
“I can ask Dad.” Sabina kicks a few pebbles, but we can tell she isn’t that into it. Her dad was strict about the lake, something about too many bodies of water attracting too many wolves.
Talk about foreshadowing.
“Let’s go to Main and see what we see,” I say.Words I uttered back then. The ones that led us to the river, a bonfire with strangers we’d never met before, music from someone’s shitty Bluetooth speaker, and honestly? The time of our lives.
“Hey.” Pepper steps up beside me.
I blink and the dream shifts. We’re halfway to the river now, the road stretching ahead, summer haze making everything soft at the edges.
“Hey.” I glance at her, the Pepper from all those years ago. Band t-shirt, some metal group with an unreadable logo. Cutoff shorts frayed at the hem. Dark hair spilling down her back like ink poured from a bottle.
“You’re lucid, right?” She raises an eyebrow. “This dream shit. I amsoover it.”
I nudge her elbow, thinking about one of my dreams. Kieran’s hands on my hips. His mouth on mine. The way he felt inside me while the dream world bent around us. “Not all so bad.”
“I didn’t think the last one was good.” She pauses, and her expression shifts. Softer. Sadder. “It was insane to see Lucy again.”
My feet stop moving before my brain catches up.
“Lucy?”
“Oh yeah.” Pepper snorts, but there’s no humor in it. “I was in the last dream, too. Apparently whatever bullshit you are going through right now is bleeding onto me.”
The last dream. The one where I saw an alternate timeline. Where Lucy was alive. Where I almost married Davis. Where she forgave me for choosing myself.
Pepper saw that?
“But it was good to see her,” she says softly. Her voice cracks on the last word, and I watch her swallow it down, then store it somewhere she can obsess over later. “Listen, I’m not sorry.”
I snort. “Pepper, I wouldn’t expect you to feel sorry. And I don’t.”
“It’s all so fucking messy.” She kicks a stone that skips over the sidewalk, ironically landing on a hopscotch square. “Lucy came into my life fast and hard. I fell in love with her in a way that only two friends can fall in love, and no one warns you that recovering from that loss is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
As fucked up as it sounds I’ve thought about it. Hell, it was all I could think about when we didn’t talk for so long. Would I let my last words to bethelast words?
Could I survive a life without them?No.
“I am sorry,” I tell her. “For not being there.”
The words are too small for what I did. Three years of silence. Three years of letting them grieve without me.
“I know even if I had showed up in the way you needed, eventually it wouldn’t have made a difference, but—” I pause our walk and turn to face her fully. “That doesn’t excuse my not reaching out.”
