Page 52

Jack pulled the marble out with an unsteady hand. He’d grown used to mild tremors by now, but this was something different. This wasn’t age. This was something he couldn’t put a name to.

Absently, he crouched and let the marble roll silently past the living room doorframe. Instead of immediately making her excuses to leave the way she always did at the signal, Greer fell silent for a second. It wasn’t long enough for just anyone to notice, but Jack wasn’t just anyone. That silence meant Greer hadn’t expected Jack to be there in that moment, that she wasn’t prepared for him to overhear her.

“Well, it’s been so nice catching up,” Greer said after the barely perceptible beat, her voice tight.

Jack slunk toward the back door as a couch creaked behind him and footsteps moved to the hallway. He joined Carter in the backyard, half in a daze, and together they made their way to the front of the house just as the door clicked shut.

Greer padded down the front steps and they all reached the car a moment later.

“How’d it go?” Carter asked Greer.

“Nothing downstairs, you?”

“Nada.”

“Damn,” said Greer, her tone distant. She wouldn’t meet Jack’s eye, and he found himself relieved by that. He wasn’t sure he could handle that hazel stare he’d always known as piercingly honest. Those eyes felt like strangers to him now.

Greer wedged a hand in her jeans pocket and pulled the marble out. Without raising her eyes, she placed it gently in Jack’s palm, her fingertips quickly grazing his creased skin before she pulled away, as if he were made of fire. “Here. Told Ian I had to tie my shoe so I could grab it for you. He didn’t notice they’re slip-ons.”

Jack said nothing. There was nothing to say. Or maybe there was too much.

For the first time since they’d met, Greer had lied to him, and suddenly everything he’d been risking his afterlife for was a lie as well.

32

Married

November 2007

Jack and Greer had different ideas about what information was worth sharing. Greer didn’t tell Jack when her grandmother died, or when she didn’t get into her dream college, or when her parents separated. The shadows cast over her world only became known to Jack through Eli. It was as if, by not addressing them herself, Greer could trick herself into believing there was only light. But the good things? Those she brought to him like fireflies trapped in her hand, only too eager to share the glow. Which was why it didn’t make sense that Jack didn’t hear it from her. That he didn’t even see her again after the police closed the case. After Jules’s funeral.

It had been three months since the You Agains had sat together on that hard wooden pew, black-clad and hollow. Jack had just turned eighteen, and so far adulthood had only stung. After the night that stole his friend, the police had been and gone and been again. Jack had only been spared from legal ramifications because he’d been a minor at the time. But for the first time in a life filled with the ability to inexplicably get away with everything, Jack would have almost preferred the punishment. At least it would have been something that made sense in a world where nothing seemed to anymore.

Lying there on his single bed still draped in the outer space–themed bedspread, feet nearly dangling off the end, he should have felt like a giant in that shoebox of a room, but somehow he’d never felt smaller. Someone knocked on the door and then pushed it open without waiting for a response.

Eli filled the doorframe, all frantic curls and dark circles under his eyes. He’d changed since his first full night in jail three months ago. He’d changed since everything that happened that summer night. They all had. For Eli, it meant a new level of recklessness, as though nothing mattered anymore, as though whatever underused pause button keeping him partly in check had busted, leaving him entirely on fast-forward.

“Hey.” He barely lifted his wave.

Jack raised his chin in something he hoped resembled a nod of greeting.

“Greer’s home for the weekend,” Eli said, feeling through his words with a level of caution Jack didn’t recognize in him. But Jack was too distracted to analyze that. As soon as Greer’s name was spoken, he bolted upright, shuffling off the bed, his thoughts consumed with nothing beyond seeing her.

Eli was at the bed in three long strides, a hand on Jack’s shoulder, pressing him back down. The role reversal brought Jack back into the room in a way Eli’s careful speech hadn’t. He had held Eli back from his own heedlessness with the same gesture too many times throughout the years. Was that what Eli was doing now?

Eli eased himself onto the mattress beside Jack.

“She doesn’t want to see you,” he said. “Or anybody,” he added quickly.

“Okay,” said Jack, swallowing his disappointment in a single gulp. She’d be back again for another visit soon enough. After more than two years of Greer’s college career, Jack had grown accustomed to her rhythms. He existed for long weekends and holidays, when Greer drove the two hours back to spend time with family and see her friends. She’d been gone for a longer stretch than usual this time, but under the circumstances, Jack could understand that. Her semester would be ending in less than a month and she’d be home for the winter holidays. He could wait. The last two years had taught him patience even as they taught Greer the ins and outs of literary analysis or whatever it was she did on campus all day.

“Jack,” Eli said, and Jack’s skin prickled at the way Eli hit the sharp consonants in his name, holding on to them just a bit too long.

“Yeah?”

Eli picked at a scab on his knuckle. Jack tried to remember which fight it was from, but in truth, he’d lost track by now.

“She got married.”