She should have been happy—no, happy was too high a bar. She should have gotten some kind of satisfaction from resisting Liss’s influence, but now Dan could barely remember what she’d said, only that she’d gotten what she wanted: Liss had driven off feeling abandoned.
It was only right that Liss got to taste that feeling too.
It was true that Dan had promised to go along with her plan, but Liss hadn’t held up her end of the bargain. She’d made a promise to Dan too—that they would help Johnny, but they had to wait for the right time.
Dan had waited. She kept quiet and lied when she had to and trusted Liss to tell her when the waiting was over. Neither of them liked talking about that night. Plus, Dan felt for sure Liss was mad at her for wanting to do the stupid spell in the first place, and it was only a matter of time before that anger exploded in her face. Now, Dan remembered the day in June, more than three months after Johnny had vanished, when she finally asked Liss what the plan was, because once school was out, they could focus on getting Johnny back. Liss had grimaced and admitted that she would be in Guatemala all summer. Her parents had signed her up for a program to generate content for her college admissions essays. She was leaving a week after school ended.
That was when Dan knew: promises weren’t binding forever, and the clock on theirs had already run out. Dan was ashamed to admit it, but it had come as a sad relief. Part of her had always known that the time would never be right, because Johnny was gone.
That summer, Dan had been afraid for what it would mean for her to be Liss-less. Dan had expected to miss her, but distance made it easier not to have to pretend that whatever once made them inseparable had turned bitter and broken. It made it easier to try to forget what they’d done.
Dan rounded a turn onto an uphill slope. The road clung to the cliff, then turned sharply at the top of the climb. She forced herself on, although her legs felt heavy as lead and the air kept slipping from her lungs. One foot, then the other, then the other again.
Obviously Liss would have no problem making Johnny’s death about how much she’d sacrificed to try to find him, then bulldoze back into Dan’s life just to rub it in her face. Had she expected Dan to thank her, after everything she’d done? It was as if nothing at all had changed between them: the more Liss demanded of her, the more Dan resented her—the kind of anger that was only possible when you really, truly loved someone—and the more Dan resented her, the more Liss demanded.
Why had Liss needed to get involved with Johnny in the first place?
Dan’s foot came down funny, and she stumbled over to the very edge of the road, gasping for air. She pulled out her earbuds and set her hands on her hips. “Fuck,” she gasped.
This hill was too steep for her. It beat her every time. Her legs turned to deadweight, her muscles seized. She heaved in air and spat on the ground and looked back the way she’d come. She still had to make it home, and anyway, she was almost at the Black Grass Spiritual Advancement Center, which had a severe gate that always gave her the creeps. Up ahead, she could barely see where the road curved around the hill. It was a blind turn, she knew, from the thousands of times she’d driven it on the way from her house to Liss’s in Marlena.
On the road’s narrow shoulder, Dan kneeled in the sharp, cold gravel and pressed her fists into her stomach.
In her mind, she saw a road not unlike this one, not so far from here. She saw the scattered salt of the broken line. Johnny’s pupils blown out black, filling his eyes, as the woman took him, and Dan herself standing there, doing nothing to stop it.
Thinking of Johnny opened a cavern inside her, a gnawing abyss that made her want to fold herself in two. The abyss took whatever she could give it, and never went away, never shrank, never healed.
Dan wanted to scream.
Instead, she stepped back onto the road. Her heart was beating in her ears—a quick, monotone thud—as she lay down on the asphalt. Above her, fog obscured the night sky. Below her, the ocean curled against the cliffs with a quiet purr. The road was cool against her sweaty shoulders and back. Gone was the heat she’d burned with while she ran. She shivered.
Dan could barely breathe.
If a car came, would she hear it? Could she, if she wanted to, move in time? Or would she let it crush her, alone and unprotected out here on the road?
She held her hands open to the sky and ground her knuckles against the rough pavement until they stung. She pushed harder. She hoped they would bleed.
If Alexa asked about her knuckles tomorrow, Dan would have to lie to her.
Alexa somehow saw a person in Dan who was worth discovering. Dan ached with how badly she wanted that to be true.
Alexa would tell her that she shouldn’t give Liss this power over her—shouldn’t hurt herself because Liss had already hurt her.
Dan took a breath. She flipped her hand over and pressed her palm onto the road.
This was the final thing about running at night in North Coast: the roads were empty. You might run for miles, never seeing another car or another person. You might lie down in the street just beyond the edge of a blind turn and wait, and a car might never come by.
Dan got up and ran home.
SPRING OF SOPHOMORE YEAR
Dan
They both should have stayed away from Johnny Su. He had black hair that fell in slashes across his forehead and a collection of actual records and a sheepish way of smiling the tiniest bit when you caught him looking at you with those rich brown eyes and eyelashes out of a mascara commercial. He played the guitar and loved surfing in the freezing Pacific and spoke Chinese, he said, like a five-year-old who loved to swear. He was a year older than Dan and Liss, so that he gave the impression of a better-formed version of the boys their age. He lived on the outskirts of Gratton and could be spotted skateboarding to school on the sunny mornings that were so rare in North Coast.
Dan met Johnny in Spanish class—she had been the only sophomore in Spanish 3—but she didn’t get to know him until she got a job at Achieve! that spring. Johnny had been working at the tutoring service for a year already, so he trained her in how pull up the right math or reading program for each kid on their assigned computer and what to do in the nightmare situation that one of the younger ones had an accident. Most of the job was standing around in khakis and an unflattering red polo while the kids tapped away at their keyboards with headphones on, handing out stickers, and taking their parents’ credit cards.
Dan didn’t like working with children. She didn’t know how to behave around them. When they had questions, she couldn’t find answers simple enough for the younger ones, but the middle schoolers would tell her they weren’t little kids anymore. The embarrassing fact was that she really wanted them to like her, but kids had a way of seeing right through you, of finding you boring almost immediately, and they didn’t have any interest in pretending otherwise.