As I lift the bottle from my face, Natalie’s expression is unreadable.
“So?” Beck asks. She scratches at the skin along her biggest bandage.
Natalie tugs at her stained sleeve, lip trembling a moment before she says, “This town thinks the only way they survive is through the suffering of people who aren’t from here. I love nature, I love this park, but there’s something fundamentally wrong about thinking you have to protect nature with human blood. I’m so sorry the witch story turned your friends against one another. I’m so sorry about your sister.”
Beck’s eyes go glassy. “She had other problems she should’ve gotten help for a long time ago. Something else would’ve set her off if not this place.”
My heart breaks for Beck. My heart breaks for Opal’s and Harlow’s families, who’re going to learn the ugly truth soon.
Natalie sighs. “And as for Evan, I’m not surprised. Rangers are usually such decent people, and I let that cloud my judgement of him. He played that innocent, do-gooder role so well, but there are always signs. I should’ve taken the weird photos in his desk drawer more seriously. I should’ve—” She squeezes her eyes shut. “It makes sense, suddenly, why he never wanted me to visit his cabin for long. And god, I remember that night Vanessa went running through the parking lot. I saw what you saw, Emma.” She looks right at me, her brown eyes molten with emotion. “I didn’t do anything. I might’ve been able to save her.”
She bunches her fist to her mouth, but it doesn’t keep us from seeing her cry.
Part of me wants to reach out and assure her, but something besides the smell of hand sanitizer hangs in the recovery room. Despite still being here, despite being alive, defeat suffocates us.
All these deaths were so pointless.
“I’m going to vouch for you both,” Natalie says. “Don’t worry about what the local police say. Federal agents will step in and the case will be taken without all the weird town biases. You two got a really good amount of evidence to corroborate your story. Especially with that last video on Paisley’s phone.”
She means the video Beck discovered in Paisley’s deleted videos folder, the Wi-Fi never having connected long enough for her to delete it eight months ago.
At least those words put a stop to the spinning top of my head. I can feel my anxiety slow down and quiet as the words sink in.
I’m going to vouch for you. I massage my stomach, the muscles sore. I’ve never in my life been this actively anxious for such a sustained a period of time.
We’re not going to prison for this.
A police officer enters the recovery room. “Natalie Medina?”
Natalie stands up and gives us a nod. “It’ll be okay. Seasons change. Everything heals eventually.”
Seasons change.As if the seasons could really keep coming when our worlds have shifted so deeply. What would it mean for the world without Harlow’s light-up Hanukkah sweater, without Opal’s friendship boxes full of heart candy and handwritten cards for Valentine’s Day, without Paisley having us run lines with her for hours as she prepares for auditions? I glance over at Beck. What does her graduation look like without her sister? With knowing what her sister did?
The sun sets through the recovery room window. It’s beautiful ina way that feels like it came from the wrong timeline, too lovely for the nightmare this weekend, this month, this year has been.
Now that we’re alone, I finally feel like I can talk to Beck.
We have so much to discuss.
“Did it make sense?” I ask. “When she first shot you, did it make sense?”
Beck takes a sip from a Dr Pepper can she got from the closest vending machine, buying time. “It made sense in that I always knew Paisley was smarter than me. Just look at everything she did. She dumped her friends’ bodies into a ravine and set up a ritual with their body parts? That she broke all her fingertips and ripped off the nails and left enough of her blood at the campsite to make it seem like she’d died? Then hid out at the fucking motel for months? All that while infected. Even if she was desperate and panicking and evil, she knew how to get shit done.”
I swallow the bitterness in my throat. “And the other part?”
Beck snorts. “Paisley has always wanted to be an only child. And she couldn’t run away and start her new life with her lost duckling still out looking for her. Neither of us stood a chance.”
I reach for Beck’s hand as she settles it on the mid-console. “What do you think she would’ve done if we’d never showed up?”
“If she survived the infection, I don’t know. Leave and go to New York?”
Paisley in New York feels like a faraway dream.
Maybe she’d be doing that now if she weren’t burning in hell.
“I shouldn’t have let my parents off the hook,” Beck says. “I knew she was going into a dark place when she threw that trophy at me. I knew her apology was bullshit.” Beck squeezes her knuckles so hard they turn white. “Harlow and Opal would be alive if I’d said something.”
The nurses said both our parents are on their way. Mine will lecture me and hug me and be so grateful their brave, stupid daughter survived her first real acting-out experience. All their kids are alive.
