Dad comes down the stairs and frowns. “You’re back early. I thought it was two miles today.”
I force myself to act normal and shrug. “I just wasn’t feeling it. I forgot we’re doing sprints this afternoon.”
He nods, taking my words at face value. “Okay. I’ll make breakfast.”
“Okay, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Shower, get dressed, pretend everything is fine.
Noah and Mom are probably still asleep, and Dad is going to be on his way out soon. Suddenly, I don’t want to be alone. I leave my room, grabbing my bag and water bottle on the way out.
“Anything fun happening at school today?” Dad asks. He slides a plate across the kitchen table to me.
Eggs and bacon, and a slice of toast cut diagonally.
“I have a test in math.” I shrug. “Nothing exciting. Practice is going to be tough, though. They’re doing a fitness test next week, and this is a trial assessment.”
He grunts. “With all your running, I’m sure you’ll do fine.”
Between bites, I manage, “I hope so.”
He leaves soon after that, and I go to school. I’m early, but Amy’s parting gift—she went off to get her master’s degree last year, leaving the librarian position that she’d held for almost four years—was a copy of her keys.
If only the school knew how devious she really was, I’m sure she would’ve been banned from Emery-Rose. As it stood, she gave her notice and left soon after. On to bigger and better things.
It’s been taking longer to get lighter as winter creeps closer. The sky is still twilight-blue when I arrive at school. It’s been hovering there since I went for my run and encountered Eli.
I unlock the greenhouse door and slip inside, going to the back row of raised beds. I’m not sure who takes care of these plants, but if anyone besides me even cares… they don’t do a good job.
I spend the next hour plucking little weeds from the soil, running my fingers over leaves and flower petals. I water them, then brush off my hands on a rag. It’s still too early, so I finish my homework. Stretch. Contemplate starting a book, but then I’d get sucked in.
So my thoughts turn, inevitably, to Eli.
He’s back, and apparently he’s going to be in my life. He sent that message crystal clear this morning.
Loathing crawls up my spine.
He can’t just walk in without an invitation—that was the whole point of even giving the stupid file to my father in the first place. I can’t play dumb: I knew what I was doing.
I read it.
Eli was untouchable—except for this. He wanted to be a lawyer, to follow in his dad’s footsteps. Ruin that, I’d ruin the boy.
That was my goal.
I close my eyes.
It was my goal, but it took a while to actually work. I didn’t ask questions after I gave it to Dad. I watched the defense crumble, I heard about it in the news. For that trial to get the sort of coverage it did… It’s exactly the sort of high-profile client Mr. Black had a reputation of procuring not guilty verdicts for—the bad people who make up New York City’s underbelly. And I don’t mean the gangs or lowlifes who deal drugs from the street corners. I mean the rich ones who sit in comfortable penthouses, who create chaos just because they like it.
Isn’t that what I did? Create chaos?
Maybe.
Voices seep in from the courtyard, and I silently curse. I like to get out of here before students show up, if only to keep my reputation as a quiet nobody intact. Otherwise, they’ll start to question how I got in. If they can get in, too.
Too late, the door cracks open and a girl slips in.
“Riley?” she asks.
I tilt my head. She’s immediately familiar, and I want to kick myself for not being able to bring up a related memory.
“Are you okay?” Her voice comes from a long way off, shouting down a train tunnel.
I blink, then hoist myself up. I don’t like sitting when other people are standing. It puts me beneath them, and it never fails to illicit a skin-crawling feeling.
“I…”
Short dark hair, pale skin. A heavy smudge of eyeliner all the way around her eyes, glossed lips. Even with the school uniform—white shirt and black skirt—she manages to seem edgy. Maybe it’s the choker necklace with spikes wrapped around her neck, or the million braided and beaded bracelets on her arm. The shit-stomping boots. Those remind me of Margo, for some reason.
And still, nothing.
Her face falls just a bit.
“Parker,” she offers.
I’ve only met one Parker, and I’m pretty sure she died.
“From the hospital,” she adds.
Or maybe not. I stare at her. “Are you a ghost?”
She laughs, but even then—I might be imagining it. It cuts off abruptly when I don’t laugh along with her, and her frown returns. “Seriously?”
“You…” I rub the space between my eyebrows. A sudden headache has begun to form.
Parker Avery was a patient alongside my mother in the oncology department at Beacon Hill Hospital. That hospital—a place I would prefer to never see again—was the reason we moved to Rose Hill in the first place. Close to the hospital, a good school district.
She caught me in the middle of a panic attack once. Rather, I stumbled into the meditation room where she was reading. I was a mess back then—my whole life was disintegrating.
And it isn’t right now?
I shove that dark thought away.
We were friends while she was receiving treatment, but… I wasn’t family. When she left, the nurses couldn’t tell me where, or how she was. I got breadcrumbs from sympathetic rule-breakers. It certainly wasn’t enough to deduce anything except that she might be alive.
The story I formed in my head is that the chemoradiation didn’t work, and she elected to die at home. She didn’t say goodbye because she didn’t want to be another person to leave me.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I can only shake my head. “What are you doing here?”
She hooks her thumb back toward the door. “The guidance counselor said the door might be open if you were in here.”
I narrow my eyes. How the hell does the guidance counselor know I come in here?
Maybe it’s obvious.
“I just transferred,” she says. “Um, well, more like I was forced to change schools? I didn’t last long at Lion’s Head.”
We grew up in different worlds, and she’d lament the public school system in its entirety.
“I didn’t know you were there,” I manage.
She exhales. “I’m sorry. I totally bailed on you. I liked your mom, you know? I got into a trial and she didn’t, and it just made me feel too fucking guilty to reach out.”
I squint at her. There were so many close calls to even remember most of them—drug trials and programs, new FDA approved treatments, on and on. Through it all, I was struggling in my freshman year of high school, missing more classes than I attended.
“Is she okay?”
I appreciate that she doesn’t ask if she died. If the cancer got her in the end.
She was never one to mince words.
“She’s in remission.” I can’t quite call her okay when she spends more hours in her bed than out of it, but she’s alive. Time for a subject change. “Did you just transfer in?”