“That’s why I’m getting prepared,” she says. “I’m taking your map with me, like a good little Girl Scout. That way, if anything happens, I won’t get lost.”
“Okayyyyy.” I drag out the word, pulling it through my mouth like taffy.
“What are you so afraid of?” Tabby swivels around. “That the woods are going to swallow me whole? I’m the big sister. I’m supposed to be the overprotective one.”
I do the math in my head. Even if they manage to hike three miles an hour, they won’t reach the Split until after seven. It makes me feel better, somehow, knowing where she’ll be, when to expect her home.
“I’d text you to let you know I’m okay, but there isn’t cell reception that deep in the woods,” she says. “At least, I bet there isn’t. Just don’t worry about me, okay?”
Later, I watch her jump into Mark’s car, picnic basket swinging from her arm. She has my shoes on, pink Nikes. I can’t describe it, but I feel like I’m being haunted as soon as she’s gone. It’s like I’m sure I’ll never see her again.
She doesn’t come home in time for a movie, and she never messages to let me know where she is. Mom and Dad start getting worried around eleven, when they haven’t heard from her. They’re oblivious. They should have been worried before she even left.
She’s dead, my brain screams. I picture Mark’s big hands, Mark’s cocky grin. We’ll have to identify her body.
“Don’t go out again.” Dad wags his finger at me. “I want you where I can see you.”
I forgot I even went out. I went for a run, my phone in the palm of my hand, my fingers clutching it tightly, like it could be a weapon if I needed it to, something hard enough to crack a skull. But that was hours ago. I forgot to shower. It was like I blacked out.
At midnight, Mom and Dad are pacing, and I’m upstairs with my face pressed against the window, like a little kid waiting for Santa.
They call Elle, but she doesn’t answer. Maybe I’m imagining it, but things seem to have changed a bit between them lately. Tabby doesn’t spend as much time with Elle. I know this because she’s spending that time with me instead.
By twelve thirty, Mom and Dad convince themselves Tabby lost track of the time. They say that she’ll be eighteen soon enough, and they have to loosen the leash before next year anyway, before college.
(What leash? There is no leash. There isn’t even a collar. Tabby belongs to nobody.)
They go to bed. I stay up, my nerves frayed like wires, fidgety with electricity splitting my body. I know something happened. I know it and it must be my sister intuition. Or maybe I don’t even need sister intuition, because anyone could see that it was wrong, Mark wanting to take Tabby to the Split. I imagine her eyes, big and panicked. Her head, smashed against rock, cracking in two like the Split itself.
The door doesn’t open until after one. Me at the kitchen table, on my phone, scrolling through her Instagram, trying to find a clue: Tabby’s syrupy smile, all summer long. Mark’s arm, a permanent fixture around her. A caption underneath one of her photos, the two of them looking slightly away from the camera. A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.
The door opens so quietly I barely hear it. Almost like she’s trying to sneak in, like she has done a thousand times before. Her face is a mess of the makeup I teased her for putting on before the hike, and her hands are shaking. Actually, her whole body is shaking, its own earthquake.
“What happened?” I say. “Where were you?”
Her hair isn’t straight like it was this morning but curly, bordering on frizzy, the way it gets after she showers and leaves it alone. Then I notice her legs. Dirt-stained, streaks of brown crosshatching every inch of bare space. My Nikes are soaked, more red than pink.
“Bridge,” she says. “Something happened. He—he—he fell.”
Then she collapses on the kitchen floor, and I know Mark is gone.
3
KEEGEN
HOW DO YOU THINK I FEEL? I get a call telling me my best friend is dead. The same guy I just saw in the morning, and now he’s gone.
And right away I know why.
4
BRIDGET
WHAT THEY DON’T TELL YOU is that death doesn’t kill a golden boy. Death will only make him immortal. Maybe I didn’t fully understand that before, but I do now that Mark’s funeral has become this year’s defining event in Coldcliff.
Here’s something to understand about our community. We have something like eight thousand residents, so we’re called “cozy” in tourism brochures. If you haven’t heard of our little pocket of Colorado, you’re not alone. We’re about thirty miles from Boulder and our nearest mountain is Longs Peak, so we get overlooked. We tend to disappear. Sure, people come to hike the trails, but they usually don’t stay. Every town has its thing. Some are famous for a huge ball of twine or the world’s best hot dog. We have the Split. Suicide Sledge. The Giant’s Thumb. Whatever you want to call it. Basically, we have a piece of rock where a bunch of people have died, and for some reason other people want to see it in person.
Especially now.
Now, when I run in the woods, there are memorials for Mark. A bunch of guys from the swim team at our high school, Coldcliff Heights, put swim caps and goggles on the path leading up to the Split. It’s their version of flowers. Today on my run, I stepped on one of the pairs of goggles and enjoyed how the wet ground sucked them up.
Here’s something else to understand about our community. We protect our own. We curl in like a leaf, blocking out intruders. We’re small and sheltered and when one of us gets hurt, everyone rallies together. The owner of Reid’s Ice Cream, Mickey, got in a car accident a couple years back and someone set up a GoFundMe page to pay for his hospital bills, and everyone donated. My parents gave something like five hundred bucks. So of course, someone set one up for Mark’s funeral, and it raised a ridiculous amount of money.
My parents donated.
My parents are at the funeral today. We all are. We’re in a church and it’s way too hot and crowded, and I’m making awkward eye contact with a guy with blond curls who keeps staring at me. Boys usually stare at Tabby, but this one seems almost determined not to notice her.
He’s the only one. Everyone else notices her. I don’t blame them. She’s in black, like the rest of us, but it looks different on her, less dead and more alive. “Your dress is too short,” Mom told her before we left the house.
“Mark liked this dress,” Tabby shot back. “He would have wanted me to wear it.”
Mom didn’t argue with that. That’s another thing about dead golden boys. They always get the last word.
The service is what you’d expect from a funeral, stuffy and smothered with tears. A priest reads from the Bible. Everyone bows their heads. When I glance over at Tabby, her eyes are cast down like the rest of us, but she’s staring at something in her hand. Her phone. Then she knows I’m looking, and she sneaks me a little smile.
People deal with grief in weird ways. But sometimes it’s like my sister isn’t sad at all. And I honestly don’t blame her, because I’m not either.