Summer's Edge, page 15
To this day, I’m not sure what mistake cost Miss Palindrome’s life.
Whether it was Miss Palindrome herself that was unacceptable, or something my father did that I will never know, or whether they disapproved of my friends. I don’t know if the quiet ones meant to punish me, or Chelsea, or someone else.
Maybe all of us.
I do know that after Miss Palindrome’s killing, I never saw a quiet one again. I’ve felt them for a very long time, but I cannot see them anymore. Not so much as a glimmer of light in the darkness. Not until today.
I don’t want to think about what that means.
* * *
“How are you feeling?”
I turn around to see Chelsea standing over me. She looks completely innocent. Resentment vibrates through me, but I tamp it down. No more girl on the stairs. No more slamming doors.
“Better.”
Mila gives me an odd look as Chelsea settles down on the floor next to me like nothing ever happened. “Everything okay with Emily?” she asks pointedly.
“What?” Chelsea furrows her brow. “Oh. Yes.” Her eyes dart out the window toward Ryan just for a split second, and again I have to force myself to stay calm. I press my icy glass against my pounding forehead. I understand that she still cares about him. I don’t relate, but I believe he has an important place in her life. What I don’t understand is why she would need to lie to me. First about dating him. But at least we weren’t technically together then. There’s nothing to forgive about that, even if it hurts. But now? The fact that she’s still lying to me about anything involving Ryan scares the living hell out of me. But again she turns to Mila like nothing is wrong, the classic Chelsea subject change. “Catch me up? Speed round. Coke or Pepsi?”
Mila looks taken aback. “Water? I hate soda.”
“Mets or Yankees?”
“Islanders.”
“Fair. Killer or victim?”
“Final girl.”
Chelsea leans forward. “And how will the world end? With a bang or a whisper?”
Mila considers. “A series of clicks and chimes from the AI revolution.”
“Interesting. Explain.”
“The two biggest threats to humanity are artificial intelligence and climate change. But AI wins because it’s an economic, security, and potentially mass-weapon threat. And it’s the ultimate culmination of humanity’s impulse to self-destruct.”
Chelsea looks impressed. “All very good points.” And like that, Mila wins over Chelsea, too.
Mila might be more interesting than I originally estimated.
She’s also kind of cute. Or maybe I’m just pissed off at Chelsea. When I get angry at her, it makes other people automatically more attractive. It shouldn’t, but it does. I always wonder whether that’s human nature or something that makes me personally evil. Hopefully the former. But I’m too afraid to ask anyone else because I honestly don’t want to know if it’s just me.
Chelsea sips her gemonade slowly, and my eyes follow hers out the window again. I can’t tell if she’s looking at Ryan or the sunset. But I suddenly feel so sad and helpless I want to cry. Nothing feels good anymore. Maybe it’s my head. I put my drink down and struggle to rise.
Mila shifts over in the hammock. “Sorry. I’m tangled.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s basically a fishing net. This is how dolphins die and shit.” Chelsea reaches over and helps me up, and I lean into her.
“I feel light-headed,” I say.
She peers into my eyes as if she knows how to look for a concussion or something. “You should rest. Come on.” Chelsea crouches down and slides an arm under my knees.
“Chelsea, no.”
She tries to lift me, and we both go sprawling. Chelsea starts giggling uncontrollably, and I realize that she’s already buzzed too. She has to be on her second drink. I scowl at her. “You could have just concussed me.”
Chelsea laughs harder, her chin bent to her chest, legs tangled in mine. “That’s not even a word.”
“Yes it is. A person with a concussion is concussed.” I try to pick myself up, but she grabs me around the waist and I wonder if this is all it takes to be okay. Laughing like nothing is wrong. Smashing mirrors. Getting drunk. I feel like I’m stuck in a Noël Coward play. But I want it to be okay. I want all of us to be okay. I sigh and sink down to the floor with her.
Mila gazes down at us from the hammock. “I can see it,” she says.
“What’s that?” I look up at her as Chelsea wraps her arms around me from behind, forming a kind of human armchair.
“Ryan is kind of sexy. In an unexpected way.” She takes a thoughtful sip of gemonade. “He did fight Chase for me.”
“He slapped Chase,” I point out. “And I don’t know if that was a hundred percent about you. They… have unresolved issues.”
Mila smiles, almost condescendingly. “It’s not the first time two guys have fought over me. Unresolved issues or not, that was about me.”
“Well, you’re just tumbling right on out of your shell now, aren’t you?” Chelsea says.
Mila shrugs. “I’m shy when I first meet people. I know you now.”
“Eh,” Chelsea says.
“How well do you ever know anyone?” I say, untangling my hair from Chelsea’s. Innocuous enough. I think.
“You don’t.” Mila nods her head toward Chelsea and raises an eyebrow, then tilts her glass up to catch the last piece of ice between her teeth.
37
Dinner is strained, and we gather around a bonfire for s’mores afterward. Seating is trickier than usual. I don’t usually bother with seating for something like a bonfire—even I’m not that big of a control freak—but then, we’ve never been on the brink of a serious group implosion with multiple forces of massive pressure acting upon us.
There’s a first time for everything.
I end up placing Emily next to Mila, next to Ryan, across from me, next to Chelsea, next to Chase. That way Emily is farthest from me, and Chase is farthest from Ryan. And, though it’s getting pretty damn half-hearted on my part, Emily is across from Chase, and Mila is next to Ryan. So if there’s still some remote cosmic possibility that Chase and Emily are meant to be together, let there be magic tonight. It’s not really about that, though. It’s the gesture. The peace offering.
Because if peace isn’t restored soon, what then?
Chase starts the night off with a toast, short and sweet. “To friends, old and new.”
We clink branches, and the chill begins to settle like a slow, creeping dread.
I pull my sweater closer around me and gaze around anxiously, but the night is a beautiful sunset haze. “Tell us a story, Chase.”
He lights up. Chase is full of stories, most of them true. Things just happen to him. He’ll stroll into the grocery store and run into a celebrity, or stumble onto a movie set on a morning jog and be recruited as an extra. Once he sat on a bus for an hour chatting with a man, only to realize after he got off that it was Stephen King.
“Okay,” he says, breaking his bar of chocolate into precise little squares. “I’ve been saving this one.”
Emily twists her hair over her shoulder and leans on her elbow. “Do tell.”
Ryan catches Chelsea’s eye over the fire and rolls his eyes, and she hides a smirk behind her hand. But she looks tired. Maybe a little sad. I squeeze her hand and she squeezes mine back.
Chase swallows a square of chocolate and then looks around the circle. “I’ve told you about the hunting cabin up in Phoenicia, right?” He launches into a ghost story, obviously 100 percent pure, unadulterated bullshit. Chase’s parents and mine go back to the days before Chase and I were born. I know him better than anyone else sitting in this circle. And Chase doesn’t believe in ghosts or know anything about them. This house is too full to just ignore them. If you spend a night in the lake house and don’t see a ghost, it’s because you can’t see them, and you never will.
Emily squeals and grabs his arm, and Mila glares at her openly. I don’t blame her.
Ryan cuts him off halfway through the story. “Let me guess. The brother did it.”
Chase lifts his glass. “You’ve been reading my diary, you scoundrel.”
Ryan averts his eyes. I guess the “talking shit out” didn’t go particularly well. I rise to clean up, but Chelsea tugs me down by the sleeve.
Here’s what’s messed up about this whole situation. Everyone’s acting like nothing’s wrong, and at the same time, they’re sending out major signals that something really bad is about to happen. Not otherworldly bad. Living bad. It feels like the night before a battle. If you didn’t know us and you dropped in, you wouldn’t notice a thing. You’d see Chase telling one of his epic stories and Emily and Mila listening like an onstage Greek chorus. Ryan and Chelsea trading knowing looks back and forth over the fire. Me, nodding and smiling, keeping up the conversation, asking questions where appropriate to show that I’m engaged, offering more chocolate and graham crackers at intervals, catching crumbs before they fall.
But it’s all wrong.
It’s supposed to be Ryan and Chase having an animated discussion, or Chase telling the anecdotes and Ryan constantly interrupting him, not letting him get away with embellishments. Chelsea, Emily, and I discussing the evening plans. And Mila. Mila isn’t even supposed to be here.
I blink back to reality, and Chase is already on to another story, really putting on a show without Ryan to keep him in check, and after a while I wonder whether it’s to get Ryan’s attention. “So the tire’s shredded, the bus is blocking two of the lanes, and we have no way of getting to the game or home. One hour from the game, three hours from home, nobody’s coming to get us. Farmland all around, as far as the eye can see. Semifinals. We gear up, divide into two groups, and play our own game, right there on the cornfield.”
“Wow,” Emily says, her eyes shining.
“That just shows so much spirit.” Mila takes a sip of her wine.
“Well, I mean, some of the guys wanted to give up.” Chase takes a bite of his double-decker s’more, his specialty.
I glance at Ryan, wondering if it’s a dig at him. He’s on the lacrosse team. I wasn’t listening to the first half of the story. But Ryan doesn’t react. He’s using one of my father’s knives to sharpen the end of his roasting stick. I should tell him that the knife has been used to scale hundreds upon hundreds of fish, that it’s the last flavor you’d want to infuse into a chocolate-marshmallow dessert. But I pettily want to see if he notices.
“That’s unfortunate,” Mila says. “Spirit is kind of my thing. Obviously. It can literally change a tragedy to an uplifting story.” She gestures to him, and Emily snorts into her lemonade. I frown at her. This is going too far. Mila looks at her for a moment, and her demeanor completely transforms. It’s absolutely stunning. For just a split second, she looks older. Cool, confident, disdainful. But it melts in an instant and she turns back to Chase. “When something bad happens, you can let it ruin your day. Or you can use your spirit to make something amazing.”
“Yeah, babe, that’s what I said.” Chase winks at her. “It was a little bit of a downer. We were short a couple of players—”
“I had a sprained neck.” Ryan slams his hand down on the table.
Chase laughs. “Whoa. I wasn’t specifically talking about you. Of course you couldn’t play. You had a sore neck.”
“A sprained neck.”
“Right, that’s what I said.” He takes a sip of beer and then looks at Emily and shrugs. Emily purses her lips and looks back and forth between Ryan and Chase.
“He wasn’t talking about you, Ryan,” she says finally.
Ryan looks stung. Even Chase’s mouth drops open. Emily and Ryan have always defended each other. Always.
“You weren’t there,” Ryan says finally. He rises and Chelsea touches his arm.
“Ryan, he was just telling a story.” She nods her head toward his seat.
“No, he wasn’t.” He looks at the rest of us. “You know he wasn’t.”
Chase studies the fire. “Ryan, why don’t you tell the rest.”
“I had to lay immobile on the ground for two hours waiting for a tow truck while the rest of the guys alternated between playing a pathetic practice game and bitching about how life isn’t fair and they could have been getting laid right now. That’s the rest of the story.” Ryan taps his fingers on the table. “Did I tell it right?”
Chase sighs. “Whatever.”
Ryan heads back toward the house. Chelsea and I exchange a weary look, and she takes my hand.
“Pick out a board game,” I call after him with an encouraging smile. I wrap my sweater around me more tightly. It’s getting colder by the minute. I put my glass down on the ground. The world is starting to waltz.
“He has no spirit,” Chase mutters.
“I don’t know if I agree,” Mila says.
Emily begins to refill Mila’s glass, and it suddenly shatters in her hand.
All four of us stare down in shock at the red wine soaking Mila’s skin, the glittering shards of glass catching fragments of moonlight.
“I’m not hurt,” Mila says slowly, as if not quite convinced.
It isn’t necessarily a sign.
But it feels like one.
38
By the time I’ve finished cleaning up, a game of Monopoly is well underway. I usually love Monopoly, but tonight I have a headache, and it’s no fun jumping in after people have already snatched up property. I linger in the kitchen and mix up a fresh pitcher of sangria. I love the idea of sangria. Wine and juice. It sounds like they wouldn’t work together, but they’re absolutely perfect. Chelsea wanders in as I’m slicing the apples and hangs her head over my shoulder.
“Careful. Sharp knife.” I lay it down and turn around to face her.
She leans into me and sighs. “Everything feels off tonight.”
Understatement of the year. “It’ll be fine.”
“Ryan and Chase got into a fistfight.”
“Slapfight.” I wipe my hands on a dishcloth and comb her thick, frizzy hair with my fingers.
“Emily literally smashed a mirror on your head.”
“She didn’t mean to.”
Chelsea pulls back and studies my face. Her dark eyes are unreadable. “I think she did.”
“She shoved me. That’s all.”
“Into a pane of glass.” She glances over her shoulder at the living room. “Everything is falling apart. I just have a bad feeling. I wish we could read the cards or something.”
“The cards are a game.” I wish they weren’t, though. After Emily’s claim about Chelsea and Ryan, there are a few things I’d like to know too.
“They’re tools,” she insists. She looks so earnest. “They show us what we already know. Instinctively. Knowledge we feel but can’t access. I know you’re not a believer. But you not believing something doesn’t make it not true.” Chelsea sighs and looks toward the stairs. Then her eyes light up. “Let’s do it,” she whispers. “No one will think anything of us going upstairs. They’ll think we’re going to your room. Which we will. Emily’s cards are still in the attic.” She nods with big eyes.
I look at my half-finished pitcher of sangria. “I’m busy.”
Chelsea lifts the handful of apple slices and dumps them into the pitcher. “Done.”
“You didn’t wash your hands. Now I have to start over.”
“Kennedy, none of us need to be drinking tonight. Come on.”
I sigh and follow her up the stairs. “Emily is the reader,” I whisper. “You’ve never done it.”
“I have the sight.” She closes my bedroom door behind us and locks it. “Remember?”
I remember her as a child again, sitting in the attic with her teacup, looking so lost. Seeing nothing. “Of course. How could I forget. Still, isn’t there an art to reading tarot cards? Doesn’t each one stand for something specific?”
“Yes.” Chelsea lowers the stairs to the attic, and I follow her up. “But I remember some of them. We’ve been watching Emily for years. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“Sort of.” Not really. When we were little, it was fun to have Emily predict who liked us and what we were going to get on our birthdays, and if we were going to be in the same classes. That sort of thing. But why would I bother listening to the drawn-out explanations about what exactly each card meant and why it indicated that we’d all end up with Mrs. Oglebie, or that Chase was secretly in love with Emily? This result came up repeatedly, which was mostly why I thought the cards were full of shit. I honestly don’t know why Chelsea has any faith in them. Maybe she has her own read on them and thinks Emily’s interpretation is skewed by what she wants to see. But when I look at the cards, all I see are pretty pictures. A game.
We tiptoe across the floorboards and arrange ourselves in front of the cards, and Chelsea gathers them and begins to shuffle them carefully, almost reverently.
“They’re not going to turn to ash if you bend one,” I say as she meticulously slides one half of the deck into the other, making sure to keep the cards perfectly straight. She’s touching them like they’re made of glass or something.
She glances up at me. “You want Emily to know we were up here messing with them without her?”
I sigh. “Just hurry up.”
She presents them to me. “Cut the deck.”
I divide the cards twice the way Emily always has us do it. “We haven’t thought of a question.”
Chelsea chews her lower lip. “Will Emily and Chase end up together?”
“Fair litmus test. The cards always seem consistent on this point.”
“One-card draw?”
I nod. “The fewer cards, the less likely we are to get confused.”
Chelsea turns over the top card and sets it down between us. It’s the Queen of Cups. “Interesting,” she says, nodding her head.
