Summer's Edge, page 18
“Nothing.”
Ryan stands, a silhouette against the moon. “Then ask me.”
I raise my head wearily. “What?”
“What really happened between Chelsea and me.”
A chill runs down my spine. “It’s none of my business. All that matters is it’s over.”
“Nothing stays a secret between friends, though, does it?” He starts walking toward me, and I stand instinctively.
“Sure it does. I don’t want to know.”
“Yes, you do. You need to know everything. You always have to be in the center of everything. You’re the hostess.” He says it mockingly. “You make the seating arrangements. The sleeping arrangements. You decide who eats with who. Who talks to who. Who sleeps with who.”
“God, Ryan, stop. I don’t want to know.” I hold my hands up, but he presses forward like some nightmare zombie creature, and I edge backward until I’m up against the side of the boat and he’s pressed against me. I want to scream for Chase, but my voice feels stuck. I’m so thrown off, so taken aback, it feels like the world has turned completely upside down. Ryan is the quiet one. Chelsea’s weird-secret-psychic-bond person. He’s not the one who pushes you against the side of a boat and says creepy things. I have to be misinterpreting this. I have to.
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason I get so mad at you is because deep down I’m in love with you?” It’s so cold I start shivering. I shake my head. “Good,” he says. “Because it’s bullshit.” He grins.
I duck under his arm. “You’re an asshole.” I try to gather all my anger, bottle and bury it. We’re not alone out here. Asshole or not, I can’t let my anger put him in danger.
“Now you know how it feels,” he says.
But my head aches and my heart pounds, and the cold is already seeping in.
I turn. “How it feels? You’re a foot taller than I am, and you cornered me in the dark. On a boat. Far from help. Today you’ve slapped Chase, given Mila a bloody nose, and pushed Chelsea into the lake, which she’s terrified of. You have no idea how it feels.”
He nods slowly. “Okay. But Kennedy? I don’t care. Because I don’t like you.”
I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. It’s a stunning thing to hear, especially from someone you’ve spent so much time with for so many years. It’s literally breathtaking.
“You play power games,” he goes on. His face is so still, his voice so low and calm. “You control people. It’s all a game to you. Everything is a game. Playing house. Playing friends. Playing life. No consequences for golden boy and gossip girl.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” That shit. That ungrateful shit. The amount of terror and isolation and exhaustion I’ve lived with to protect them. All of them.
But he’s not done. “You always win. I hate that, too. Chelsea—”
“Chelsea isn’t a fluffy toy at a carnival. She’s a person.”
“She sees through you,” he says with a slanted smile. “Sooner or later, she’s going to be gone. Or is she already? It’s hard to tell sometimes. When we were—you know.” He averts his eyes in an unconvincing display of modesty.
I glare at him, blood beginning to pulse loudly, pounding an angry rhythm in my ears. “I told you, it’s none of my business.”
He bites his lip and smiles, gazing up. “I’ll leave it up to your imagination. She had a lot to say about you. I was pretty shocked when you got back together, I’ll put it that way.”
“Well. Guess you don’t know her very well.” I keep my face placid. Now he looks furious.
“I know her better than you ever will.”
“Excuse me?”
“Why do you think we got together in the first place? Because neither of us could stand the rest of you. On the surface, sure. We’ll always care about each other. But underneath, she resents you every bit as much as I do, because you don’t respect her, you treat her like an outsider, and no one, no one in the world, wants to feel like that. You make Chelsea feel bad about herself. So you can drop the smug true-love act. She may not want me, but you’re bad for her.” He stares at me derisively as my heart goes cold in my chest. The worst words, the ones that cut like knives, are ones dipped in the subtle poison of truth. And I don’t want to believe him, but I can see in his eyes that he believes, and I feel in the pit of my stomach that there might be some truth to it. Do the words we use to describe Chelsea—quirky, random, unique—make her feel less special and more like an outsider? When I say offhand things like her ability to silence a room, does it make her feel like she doesn’t fit in with the rest of us?
“I’m not bad for her,” I whisper. But the squeezing feeling in my chest grows tighter.
“Then why did she come to me when you tossed her aside?”
I try to make sense of what he’s saying. “I didn’t toss her aside. It was complicated.”
Ryan shrugs. “No, it wasn’t. You wanted Chelsea at the lake house, in our little world, where everything was under your control. Back at school you had to deal with the real world. Judgment. Reputation. You don’t belong with a Chelsea, do you? You belong with someone like Chase. You can’t tell me that never went through your head. Can you?” His eyes meet mine, and they are so devoid of emotion, I want to smack him in the face. No. That’s too little. Child’s play.
“I don’t give a shit what people think.”
“But you thought about it.”
“Everyone thinks!” I scream, my head pounding. I hate him. I hate myself. Everyone thinks terrible things. Fleeting, wrong things that they regret. They shouldn’t come back to haunt you. Not when you keep them silent, bottled inside. Ryan has no right.
“Not me,” he snarls back. “I am not like you.”
“Well, good for you, Ryan. Good for the nice guys. You’re right. You never win.”
He tears at his hair and lets out a burst of angry, disbelieving laughter. “Maybe I’m not nice. But I never broke her heart. That’s the difference between you and me. You’re a heartless, entitled princess. Chase is a spoiled brat. My sister is a manipulative jerk. And Chelsea is just naive. I’m so done with all of you.”
I try not to let tears show, but I can’t stop them from stinging my eyes. I had no idea how much contempt he had for all of us. Even his own sister. But especially for Chelsea. “I want you out.”
“Fine with me. I’m sick of all of you. Your fakeness. Chase’s arrogance. The way Chelsea looks at me. It’s all so pathetic. She’s pathetic.”
I grit my teeth. “Do not say her name again.”
He smiles that infuriating smirk again.
My heart pounds. I have protected him. I may not have liked him always, but I have loved him like family.
“It’s your fault, Kennedy,” he says. “You threw us together. Your house. Your rules. If it wasn’t for you, Chelsea and I never would have fucked.”
I push him.
41
It happens so quickly I don’t realize it until it’s done. The splash is immediately swallowed up in silence. Everything is wrong. Every instinct in my body tells me to rush to the edge of the boat, to throw a line, to shout Man overboard, to start the safety protocol I’ve known by heart since I was six.
But I somehow don’t move.
The moonlight hazes down through a light mist that’s begun to settle over the lake, my arms look almost iridescent rising up before me, and I listen. Below, Chase and Mila are silent. I look back to the house, my eyes instinctively going straight to the attic window, and I see the silhouette of a head in profile, bent down. Reading. Emily. Maybe with her tarot cards. I see a shadow pass behind her, and frost creeps over my skin.
After Miss Palindrome’s murder, the blue lady disappeared along with the others, but they weren’t gone. The woman on the stairs always gave me a chill when I had to get something from the cellar, and sometimes I stumbled on the steps. The crushed man bounced around between the living room and garden. He might have been a groundskeeper once—I feel the breeze of his approval when I tend to the roses. Or he might be the one who kills them. I like to think it’s the former. No one who hates flowers haunts a garden.
The backward girl is a drifter, sometimes lying in the grass in the warm sunshine, sometimes fluttering a breeze through an open door. And the blue lady is everywhere, but especially the attic. I sometimes feel they’re hiding from me. Like they think that since I can’t see them anymore, I don’t know they’re there. Like I can’t feel when they draw close to inspect me curiously or allow themselves to treat me like their pet again. I’m pretty sure that’s how they’ve always seen me. Their quaint, living pet.
The problem is that the living and the dead aren’t meant to mix.
The problem is that I think the line has begun to blur.
The problem is that I have spent so long in the world of the dead that I am about to lose one of the living and it is entirely my fault.
Oh god, what if that was their plan from the beginning?
What have I done?
Suddenly a sound splits the air and I’m jolted back into the present.
Chelsea. She’s standing on the dock, shouting.
I rush to the edge of the boat and look down, the gravity of the situation finally sinking in. He hasn’t resurfaced. Ryan, who is an excellent swimmer, who just today jumped in to rescue Mila, is still underwater, and I don’t know how long it’s been. He is underwater with the dripping man. And the dripping man doesn’t let go. I move clumsily, hyperaware of the amount of alcohol in my bloodstream, the possible concussion, the instructions to sit still and rest tonight. My sweater sticks around my neck, and I stumble on my way to the cabin door. I pound my sneaker down on it repeatedly as I wrestle to get my sweater over my head.
Chase finally yanks the door open. “What?”
I pull the sweater off, gasping. “Ryan went overboard. He’s gone under. I don’t see him. I need you above to watch the water while I go after him.”
“No. You stay on board. I’ll go in after him.” He scales the ladder in an instant and surveys the water uncertainly. “Where?”
Mila climbs up, looking terrified. “I can barely swim.”
“Good.” I kick my sneakers off. “I need you to stay aboard. Both of you. If you see me in distress, throw me a safety line.”
Chase shakes his head. “I’m going in.”
At that moment, there is a distant splash, and all three of us turn our heads.
“Was that him?” Mila asks.
“Shit. No.” I climb over the edge of the boat and scan the water by the dock, at the figure cutting through the water toward us. “That was Chelsea.”
“Chelsea can’t swim,” Chase says, rising panic in his voice.
“She can,” I say. “She just doesn’t.” The terrible feeling in my gut is beginning to spread throughout my body like frost. There’s no time to explain. Or decide. “Chase, if you start to feel cold, get out. It’s not worth it. You take that side. I’ll take this area. He went in over here.” I point to the general area where Ryan hit the water. My heart continues to race faster and faster. What if we can’t rescue him? I pushed him. I did it. This isn’t happening. It can’t. It can’t happen. “Mila, keep your eyes on Chelsea.”
I dive into the water without wasting another second. We’ve wasted too many. No. Organization is vital to rescue. What if we both searched the same spot? What if we both looked for Ryan, but no one looked out for Chelsea, and we lost both of them? The black water surrounds me, and my thoughts overcrowd my mind.
He’s down here. One of us will drown tonight.
How did this happen? I swim down as far as I can and spiral my way up in attempt to cover as much area as possible, but I hit nothing. When my head breaks the surface, I have to tread water for a moment to regain my balance. The world is tilting back and forth, sliding in and out of focus. Not now. I’m not going to lose it now.
I see Chase surface and we make eye contact. “Anything?” I shout.
“No. Going a little deeper.”
His face is calm, but I hear the panic in his voice. He has no idea what we’re up against. He gulps in a lungful of air and dives back down. I glance back up to the house. Emily hasn’t moved. I can hear Chelsea still swimming toward us. I fill my lungs and plunge back into the darkness. It’s harder this time. I feel out of air almost immediately, my heart drumming a death sentence, my head aching, the Tylenol wearing off, the wine swirling around, driving me up when I mean to swim down. I try again, and again I become disoriented and quickly propel myself straight up to the surface. My eyes sting with tears, and I scream and punch the water.
“What’s going on?” Mila shouts.
“Nothing. Just, nothing. Is your eye on Chelsea?” I can’t help snapping at her. This isn’t a time for being nice.
“I was looking for Ryan.” She falters.
My blood runs cold. “Stop looking. Where is she now?” I swing my head around, but I don’t see her. Then I hear a splash about fifty yards away, no voice. I immediately begin to swim toward it, slowed by tears and shivering and my body beginning to shut down from panic.
I collide with Chelsea before I see her. She grabs onto my neck and the weight pulls me under, water flooding into my nostrils, intense pain filling my head. I can’t breathe. I’m a fish out of water. No. The other. I kick away from her and grasp for the surface, pulling, pulling up. “Stop. Chelsea. Stop swimming. Just stop. Let go. Trust me.”
She spits out a mouthful of water, coughs. “I’m drowning.”
“Just relax, and I’ll get you to the boat.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.” It takes everything in me to mask my own panic. But I do, long enough for her to roll onto her stomach in a dead man’s float, her head turned to the side, shivering. I grasp her carefully and begin to sidestroke slowly toward the boat.
“Someone fell off the boat. They went straight under and didn’t come back up. It was like something grabbed them or something,” she says.
“I know. Chase is getting them.”
“Who was it?”
“Ryan.”
She starts crying, and I feel the last part of my heart that was intact rip in two. “Chase is taking care of it,” I say.
“There was something in the water. Something grabbed him.”
“It’s a lake,” I say. “Nothing grabbed him.” But it did. He did. Stop. Protect.
“Then how did he disappear like that? People don’t just sink.”
I don’t answer. Instead, I focus my strength on closing the distance between us and the boat. When I reach it, Mila helps pull Chelsea up onto the deck, but she doesn’t look at either of us. Her face looks completely drained of blood and her eyes are wide open, fixed on the water. Her hair is wild and messed up, her shirt thrown on backward. She looks like a figure from a horror movie, like someone who just stepped through a mirror in a haunted house or something. As soon as Chelsea is safely on board, Mila turns from us as if in a trance and leans over the side of the boat, watching. I try to help Chelsea sit down, but she drapes herself next to Mila, shaking hard, shuddering breaths, blinking tears down her face.
“We have to do something,” Chelsea says.
I stand behind her, afraid to do or say anything. It’s been minutes. There is nothing else to do. Chase resurfaces yet again, takes another determined breath, and goes back under. Mila inhales sharply, as if each dive is another stab of a needle. That’s what it’s beginning to feel like. My eyes go back to the house. Emily is still in the window, her head down. She doesn’t know.
I turn to Chelsea. “You’re right, you know. People don’t just sink. He probably swam away to freak us all out.”
She looks at me with contempt. “He wouldn’t do that. He’s not cruel.”
I look at her. I love her. I really do. “Of course he isn’t.”
Chase reappears. He floats on the surface for a moment, a shadow in the water. Then he slowly makes his way to us and silently climbs the ladder, dripping water on the already-soaked deck. Mila continues to stare at the water, and Chelsea covers her face with her hands, but I look at Chase.
“I can’t do it anymore,” he whispers. “I’m exhausted.” I want to cry. Those words are everything.
“He probably swam for shore,” I say in an even voice. “People aren’t stones. They’re filled with air.”
“Not when they drown.” Chelsea looks at me. “I saw him fall.”
A shiver runs down my spine. “So, what did happen?”
She shakes her head. “It was far away. He fell in and never came back up. I told you, it was like something pulled him down.”
Chase glances at me. “Where were you when it happened?”
“I got tired waiting for the wind. I closed my eyes for just a second. At least it felt like just a second. Then I heard the splash and…” I shrug. “I got you right away.”
He nods. “But you definitely saw where he went in?”
“I saw the splash.” I steal a look at Chelsea. She’s pacing back and forth, biting her nails.
“It’s my fault. I should have stayed with you.” She points at me. “You never would have gone out on the boat. I never would have tried to swim to the boat and then panicked, and you never would have had to rescue me, and you might have rescued him.”
“It’s not your fault,” I say, a little sharper than I mean to.
“It is.” Chelsea sits, her knees bouncing rapidly.
“I was the one who brought out the sangria,” Mila says. “I got him drunk. He wouldn’t have fallen without me. He would have been able to swim.”
“I’m sure he did swim,” I say.
“No.” Mila shakes her head. “I’m bad luck. I wanted to see the stars. I’m the whole reason we’re out here on the boat.” She finally turns and looks at us, and there’s an odd expression on her face. “I’m cursed. I’m a siren. People follow me to their doom.”
“No one is doomed.” I eye Chase carefully. “I really think Ryan is fine.”
He looks between me and the radio. “Well, you didn’t seem to think so a few minutes ago. We should call for help right now. We should have done that first.”
