In my mind’s eye, After-Bree looks almost like me. Tall, athletic, warm brown skin, broader-than-I-want shoulders. But where my dark, tight curls are usually pulled up on top of my head, After-Bree’s stretch wide and loose like a live oak tree. Where my eyes are brown, hers are the dark ochre, crimson, and obsidian of molten iron in a furnace, because After-Bree is in a constant state of near explosion. The worst is at night, when she presses against my skin from the inside and the pain is unbearable. We whisper together, I’m sorry, Mom. This is all my fault. She lives and breathes inside my chest, one heartbeat behind my own life and breath, like an angry echo.
Containing her is a full-time job.
Alice doesn’t know about After-Bree. Nobody does. Not even my dad. Especially not my dad.
Alice clears her throat, the sound breaking like a wave against my thoughts. How long did I zone out? A minute? Two? I focus on the three of them, face blank, wall up. Evan gets antsy in the silence and blurts out, “By the way, your hair is totally badass!”
I know without looking that the curls springing out of my puff are wide-awake, reaching toward the sky in the night’s humidity. I bristle, because his tone is the one that feels less like a compliment and more like he’s happened upon a fun oddity—and that fun oddity is Black me with my Black hair. Wonderful.
Alice shoots me a sympathetic glance that Evan misses entirely, because of course he does. “I think we’re done here. Can we go?”
Charlotte pouts. “Half an hour more, I promise. I wanna check out the party.”
“Yeah! Y’all come watch me shotgun a PBR!” Evan slings an arm around his girlfriend’s shoulders and leads her away before we can protest.
Alice grumbles under her breath and takes off after them, stepping high over rangy weeds at the edge of the tree line. Fall panicum and marestail, mostly. My mother had called the stuff “witchgrass” and “horseweed fleabane” back when she was alive to call out plants to me.
Alice is almost to the trees before she realizes I’m not following. “You comin’?”
“I’ll be there in a sec. I wanna watch some more jumps.” I jerk a thumb over my shoulder.
She stomps back. “I’ll wait with you.”
“No, that’s okay. You go ahead.”
She scrutinizes me, torn between taking me at my word or pushing further. “Watch, not jump?”
“Watch, not jump.”
“Matty.” Her childhood nickname for me—Matty, short for my last name—twists at something deep in my chest. Old memories have been doing that lately, even the ones that aren’t about her, and I sort of hate it. My vision goes fuzzy with the threat of tears, and I have to blink Alice’s features into focus—pale face, glasses perpetually sliding to the tip of her nose. “I… I know this isn’t how we thought it would be. Being at Carolina, I mean. But… I think your mom woulda come around to it. Eventually.”
I cast my gaze out as far as the moonlight allows. Across the lake, treetops are the shadowed fringe between the quarry and the murky sky. “We’ll never know.”
“But—”
“Always a but.”
Something hard slips into her voice. “But if she were here, I don’t think she’d want you to… to…”
“To what?”
“To become some other person.”
I kick at a pebble. “I need to be alone for a minute. Enjoy the party. I’ll be there soon.”
She eyes me as if gauging my mood. “ ‘I hate tiny parties—they force one into constant exertion.’ ”
I squint, searching my memories for the familiar words. “Did you—did you just Jane Austen me?”
Her dark eyes twinkle. “Who’s the literary nerd? The quoter or the one who recognizes the quote?”
“Wait.” I shake my head in amusement. “Did you just Star Wars me?”
“Nah.” She grins. “I New Hope’d you.”
“Y’all comin’?” Charlotte’s disembodied voice shoots back through the woods like an arrow. Alice’s eyes still hold a pinch of worry, but she squeezes my hand before walking away.
Once I can no longer hear the rustle of her shoes in the underbrush, I release a breath. Dig out my phone.
Hey, kiddo, you and Alice get settled in okay?
The second text had arrived fifteen minutes later.
I know you’re our Brave Bree who was ready to escape Bentonville, but don’t forget us little people back home. Make your mom proud. Call when you can. Love, Dad.
I shove my phone back into my pocket.
I had been ready to escape Bentonville, but not because I was brave. At first I’d wanted to stay home. It seemed right, after everything. But months of living under the same roof alone with my dad made my shame intolerable. Our grief is for the same person, but our grief is not the same. It’s like those bar magnets in physics class; you can push the matching poles together, but they don’t want to touch. I can’t touch my dad’s grief. Don’t really want to. In the end, I left Bentonville because I was too scared to stay.
I pace along the cliff, away from the crowd, and keep the quarry to my left. The scents of damp soil and pine rise up with every footstep. If I breathe in deeply enough, the mineral smell of ground stone catches at the back of my throat. A foot over, the earth falls away below my feet and the lake stretches out wide, reflecting the sky and the stars and the possibilities of night.
From here, I can see what the jumpers were working with: whatever cleaved the dirt and rocks to form the quarry had dug at a thirty-degree angle. To clear the face entirely, one has to run fast and leap far. No hesitation allowed.
I imagine myself running like the moon is my finish line. Running like I can leave the anger and the shame and gossip behind. I can almost feel the delicious burn in my muscles, the rush sweet and strong in my veins, as I sail over the cliff and into emptiness. Without warning, the roiling spark of After-Bree stretches up from my gut like a vine on fire, but this time I don’t shove her away. She unfurls behind my ribs, and the hot pressure of her is so powerful it feels like I could explode.
Part of me wants to explode.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
A wry voice from behind startles me and sends a few birds, hidden in the canopy above, squawking into the sky.
I hadn’t heard anyone approach through the underbrush, but a tall, dark-haired boy leans casually against a tree as if he’d been there the whole time; arms over his chest and black combat boots crossed at the ankles. The boy’s expression is lazy with disdain, like he can’t even be bothered to muster up a full dose of the stuff.
“Forgive me for interrupting. It looked like you were about to jump off a cliff. Alone. In the dark,” he drawls.
He is unsettlingly beautiful. His face is aristocratic and sharp, framed by high, pale cheekbones. The rest of his body is borne from shadows: black jacket, black pants, and ink-black hair that falls over his forehead and curls just below gauged ears bearing small black rubber plugs. He can’t be more than eighteen, but something about his features doesn’t belong to a teenager—the cut of his jaw, the line of his nose. His stillness.
The boy who is both young and old lets me study him, but only for a moment. Then, he levels his tawny gaze in challenge. When our eyes meet, a stinging shock races through me, head to heels, leaving fear in its wake.