These Things I’ve Done Page 3

The voice jerks me back, and the vision of Aubrey flickers out like a lightbulb going from bright to broken. I breathe through the ache in my chest and try to pull myself together before turning around. There’s a trio of girls standing a couple of feet away from me, huddled together and staring. Ninth-graders, going by their size and still-childish features. One is blond and the other two are dark-haired. I’ve never seen any of them before in my life.

  “What?” I say, confused.

  “You’re Dara, right?” asks one of the dark-haired girls. When I nod, she asks again, “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  She exchanges a quick look with her friends before turning back to me. “That you killed your best friend over some guy.”

  My body goes cold, but I resist the urge to shrink away and force myself to meet her eyes instead. “Where did you hear that?” I ask over the rising noise-level around us. The hallway is filling up fast, people retrieving belongings from lockers and heading off to class. The bell’s going to ring any minute, and I still haven’t made it upstairs.

  “It was all over school yesterday.” Dark-Haired Girl #1 looks at me steadily while her sidekicks divide their gazes between my face and the floor. Her air of confidence reminds me of mine at that age. She’s clearly the brave one, the one who steps up when no one else will. “So?” she prompts when I don’t respond. “Did you really, like, off your best friend?”

  I clench my hands to stop them from trembling. Who would say something so nasty about me? “No, I didn’t off her. It was an accident.”

  “That’s not what we heard,” she says, nudging the blonde with her elbow. “Someone said you—”

  “Back off.”

  The girl frowns at me for a second, as if I were the one who said this, but the words didn’t come from me. The voice is deep, authoritative, and located a few feet to the left of us. I turn my head, expecting a teacher, and meet a pair of familiar brown eyes. Aubrey’s eyes. Ethan’s eyes. But obviously it’s not Aubrey, and this tall boy with the angular face and broad shoulders and grown-up-man voice can’t be Ethan. Can it? The same gawky, baby-faced Ethan I saw at the graveyard fifteen months ago?

  “We were just curious,” the girl says in a snotty tone. Her friends nod quickly, eyes round as they look up at Ethan. “We wanted to know if the rumors were true, that’s all.”

  “I said back off.” He steps forward, and I realize I have to look up to see his face too. Ethan has never been bigger than me. He must be six feet tall now. And he’s let his buzzed hair grow out so it curls over his ears and forehead. And he’s wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt.

  Iron Maiden? Ethan?

  “Sure, whatever,” the girl says, turning away. She shrugs at her friends and they stroll off down the hall like they don’t have a care in the world.

  The bell rings, signaling the start of first period, but I’m still standing here, dumbstruck. I look up at Ethan, expecting a disgusted glare or some nasty words or something to let me know he’s offended by my presence. But all he does is brush past me and disappear just as fast as he arrived.

  At lunch, I head for the cafeteria.

  Yesterday, Mom took me out for lunch—a sort of reward for making it through the first half of the day, I guess—so this is the first time I’ve been inside the cafeteria since sophomore year. Everything looks basically the same. A new vending machine near the entrance is the only noticeable difference. Well, and the fact that Aubrey isn’t going to walk in any minute and join me in line for pizza.

  I move forward in line and scan the room. I don’t see Ethan, or Travis and Paige, but there are plenty of other familiar faces. A few of them are turned my way, watching me with big eyes. Everyone else seems to be ignoring my existence. It feels surreal, like the person I was the last time I stood here is just as dead as Aubrey. Like I’m a ghost.

  I buy pizza and a water and carry both to a mostly vacant table near the wall. As I bite into my slice, my gaze lands on the two girls at the other end of the table. I know them. Katherine and Saskia. We were on the volleyball team together sophomore year and became pretty good friends.

  They notice me a few seconds later. I stop chewing, wondering if this will be a repeat of earlier today, when Chloe practically ran out of the bathroom to get away from me. But Katherine and Saskia don’t run. Instead they wave at me casually, as if my presence in the caf were a totally normal thing. Like I’ve been on vacation for the past year and now I’m back—no big deal.

  “Hey, Dara,” Saskia calls down the table. “You joining the team again this year?”

  I swallow the bite in my mouth and think about my year on the team. The coach assigned me the middle blocker position, because of my height and because I was confident and quick on my feet. Fearless. But the only one of those qualities I still possess is my height, and it’s not nearly enough.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. Saskia and Katherine glance at each other and shrug, then go back to whatever conversation they were having before I sat down. They don’t look at me again for the rest of lunch.

  It’s after eleven and I’m lying in bed, contemplating the new mature-looking Ethan and the way he came to my rescue today, when I hear my parents arguing downstairs. I get out of bed and slink over to my open door.

  “What were you thinking?” I hear my mother say. The anger in her voice makes me feel uneasy. My parents rarely spoke to each other this way before last year.

  “I told you, I wasn’t thinking,” Dad replies. His voice is calmer than hers. Mostly, he just sounds tired. Sad. “I didn’t even realize where I was driving until she . . . God, she looked so wrecked.”

  “We need to take it slow with her, Neil. Just being there, close to where it happened, destroys her. She goes through it all over again. That’s why I avoid that road when she’s in the car. You never should’ve—”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have gone down there. She’s obviously not ready for it yet.”

  “She just needs time. Before she went to stay with Jared and Lydia, Dr. Lemke said—”

  “I know what Dr. Lemke said. We have to be patient. Follow her lead. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for the past year. We sent her to therapy. We put her on antidepressants that made her even worse. We shipped her off to your sister when everyone suggested a change of scenery. We let her come home when she wanted to come home, even though I thought . . .” His voice trails away and I miss the rest of his sentence. Even though he thought what?

  “I’m not having this conversation again,” my mother snaps at him. “So drop it.”

  I hear the fridge door slam, an angry thump. “No, I won’t drop it. You weren’t there this morning, Mandy. You didn’t see her face. How is she supposed to move on when every time she turns around, there’s another reminder of the nightmare she went through? I get that you feel guilty for sending her away, but it was for the best. She should’ve never come home. She should’ve stayed there and graduated at Somerset Prep. She wasn’t ready to come back and you know it.”

  Mom says something else but I don’t stick around to hear it. I get back into bed, secure my earbuds, and hit shuffle on one of my longer playlists. I don’t bother to close my eyes, or even wipe them dry. Sleep is out of the question now. It’s hard to relax in the bedroom I’ve known all my life when my own father thinks I no longer belong here.

  four

  Sophomore Year

  “WE WON’T STAY LONG. AN HOUR OR TWO, TOPS. Come on, Aubs, don’t be antisocial.”

  She glowered at me across the kitchen table, where we were icing the shortbread cookies we’d made earlier. Aubrey loved to bake, but we always did it at my house because her mother had a thing about unnecessary messes. “I’m not antisocial,” she said, affixing a silver candy ball to the perfect icing swirl on her cookie. “I just don’t see the point in going to the park at eight o’clock on a Saturday night. What’s there to do there?”

  I licked a blob of icing off my thumb and sighed. She was such an old
lady sometimes. “Do? You don’t do anything. You just be. Everyone hangs out there on weekends. Paige told me—”

  “Paige hates me,” she cut in, as she did whenever I mentioned my second-closest friend.

  “She doesn’t hate you.” I said this as convincingly as I could, but my tone still rang false. Paige did kind of hate Aubrey, and I had a good idea why. Not only had Aubrey replaced Paige as my best friend back in middle school, she also had this mystifying bond with Paige’s boyfriend, Travis. I didn’t even understand their friendship, and whenever I asked Aubrey about it, she’d shrug and say something like, “Deep down he’s really sweet.”

  If Travis Rausch was sweet, he only ever showed it to Aubrey. I wasn’t convinced he even had a “deep down.”

  “Whatever,” she said, grabbing another cookie to ice. “Where’s Tobias? We need an impartial taste-tester.”

  I went upstairs to find my brother, happy to let the subject of Paige drop. I hated being caught between them.

  Tobias was in his room, damp from his bath and dressed in Spider-Man pajamas. “Are the cookies ready?” he asked the second he saw me.

  “Yeah.” I stood in the doorway and pressed a hand on either side of the doorframe. “But to get to them, you’ll have to get past me.”

  He gave me a gap-toothed grin and moved to duck between my legs. I crouched down to block him, but he squeezed past me and flung himself over my back, wrapping all four limbs around me. I rose slowly to my feet, acting like he wasn’t even there, and carried him downstairs to the kitchen. We found Dad standing by the sink, cracking open a can of beer.

  “Help me, Dad!” I mock-cried, reaching back to poke a finger into my brother’s ribs. He wiggled, almost jerking me sideways into the stove. “I seem to have some sort of giant growth on my back.”

  “Uh-oh.” Dad sipped his beer and leaned in to examine my “growth.” “Looks serious. I think I might have to go out to the truck and get my pry bar. That’ll take care of it.”

  Tobias giggled in my ear as Dad pretended to excise him from my back. Aubrey watched us from her seat at the table, a small, wistful smile on her face.

  Later, after a large percentage of the cookies had been tested and approved, I started working on Aubrey again.

  “Just for an hour,” I begged. “It’s a five-minute walk down the street, and we both have to be home by ten anyway.” She didn’t respond, so I brought out the ace I’d been saving for when all else failed. “I heard Justin Gates hangs out there sometimes.”

  A spark of interest flashed in her eyes. She and Justin had been semi-flirting at school for the past two weeks, smiling when they saw each other in the halls and accidentally-on-purpose walking by each other’s lockers. While I was happy for her, I couldn’t deny that ever since that day in the cafeteria, I’d been thinking about him too. I kept it to myself, though. I wasn’t the one he liked, and I didn’t want Aubrey stop flirting with him out of loyalty to me. If the situation had been reversed, I knew she’d feel the same.

  “Okay,” she said with a long-suffering sigh, like she was agreeing only because I’d badgered her into it. “But I have to go home and change first. My shirt’s full of flour.”

  My parents let me go with the usual warnings—no drinking, no smoking, no drugs, and text if I’m going to be later than ten. Aubrey’s parents had all the same rules, but unlike my parents, they didn’t bother issuing them more than once. They correctly assumed their kids would stay out of trouble without their reminding.

  When Aubrey and I had dropped by her house so she could change clothes, we discovered Ethan playing video games in his eerily neat room. And before I could stop her, Aubrey somehow persuaded him to come with us to the park. I felt like throttling her. Who brings their little brother along on a spontaneous, sort-of-maybe date thing?

  Aubrey. That’s who. But she was nervous, and she and Ethan had always been each other’s security blanket.

  In any case, the three of us were now walking along the gravel path that snaked through Juniper Park, heading toward the stone fountain area, where everyone had gathered. The fountain was dry and had been since August, when some kids dumped in a few bottles of dish soap and made a huge, bubbly mess.

  “Hey,” Paige said as we approached. She was sitting on the lip of the fountain, her thigh pressed against Travis’s and her fingers cradling a lit cigarette. When we reached them, she stood up and hugged me as if we hadn’t just seen each other in school yesterday. As she pulled away, her gaze landed on Aubrey and Ethan. “Hey,” she said again, but with much less enthusiasm.

  Aubrey nodded at her once and then glanced around. A dozen or so people lounged around the fountain and on benches and grass, talking and laughing and smoking. Justin Gates wasn’t one of them. Looking slightly dejected, she sat down on the fountain edge a few inches from Travis.

  “How’s it going, McCrae?” he asked her as Ethan and I sat on her other side. Travis called everyone by their last names. Probably even his parents.

  “Oh, you know,” Aubrey said with a shrug. “It’s going.”

  Beside me, Ethan coughed into his hand. Paige’s smoke was clearly aggravating his asthma. I bumped his shoulder with mine and leaned in to ask him if he was okay.

  He nodded briskly. “I’m fine.”

  I turned back to Aubrey, who was now staring down at her phone. Even in the shadows, I could see the blush staining her cheeks.

  “What?” I asked.

  She stuffed her phone back in her pocket and looked at me, panicked. “He texted me. Justin. Asked me what I was doing. I told him I was here and he said he’s on his way.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but . . .” She grabbed my arm. “Is my hair okay? Do you see any cookie dough stuck in it?”

  I inspected her long hair and pronounced it dough-free. She raked her fingers through the strands anyway, checking for herself. I caught Ethan’s eye and made a your-sister-is-a-weirdo face. He smiled. Whenever Aubrey went into freak-out mode around us, Ethan and I banded together to make fun of her.

  After a while, Travis and Paige and some of the others drifted over to the playground a few yards away. Aubrey had told Justin she’d wait for him at the fountain, so Ethan and I stayed to keep her company. By the time Justin finally showed up, Aubrey was practically vibrating with nerves. He walked across the grass toward us, flanked by two guys I’d seen around school. Neither of them was Wyatt, much to my—and Ethan’s—relief.

  Justin broke away from his friends and came to a stop in front of us. I saw a flash of white teeth as he grinned down at Aubrey.

  “Prodigy,” he said in greeting.

  “Stop calling me that.”

  Her voice was more flirty than annoyed, and he grinned even wider.

  “It’s a compliment.”

  “I think you can do better,” she said.

  Justin laughed and all of a sudden I felt like a third wheel. He hadn’t looked at me or said hi or even noticed my presence. Not that I expected him to, with Aubrey beside me, but still. I didn’t want to sit here like an idiot and watch them flirt.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told my best friend. She nodded, eyes locked on Justin’s as if he’d evaporate if she looked away. I got up and motioned for Ethan to join me. The second we’d vacated the fountain’s edge, Justin took my place.

  Ethan and I headed across the gravel path to the playground.

  “I don’t like that guy,” he said as we walked.

  “You don’t?” I assumed he meant Travis, who was sitting on top of the monkey bars, showing off for the small crowd below.

  “He hangs around with that Wyatt jerk. Anyone who’s friends with someone like that can’t be a decent person.”

  For a moment I was confused, wondering when Travis became friends with Wyatt, and then it hit me that he was talking about Justin. “He seems okay to me.”

  Ethan smirked, letting me know my not-so-innocent thoughts were completely transparent. I elbowed him
in the ribs, realizing as I did that I no longer had to bend down to do it. He really had shot up over the summer. Soon we’d be the same size and I’d lose my advantage over him. Not that I wrestled around with him anymore. That stopped last year sometime when it started getting awkward. Now I just punched him in the arm when he got out of line.

  “Hey, Shepard, look at me!” Travis yelled when he saw me. He ignored Ethan, as most of Aubrey’s and my friends did. He was simply there—quiet, unassuming—easily blending into any crowd.

  “Travis,” Paige said dully as she lit another cigarette. “Get down from there before you break your neck.”

  Travis arranged his legs around the monkey bars and crossed his arms. No hands. Were we supposed to be impressed with his heroic bravery? I’d seen little kids do that.

  “Last year,” said a guy sitting on a bench a few feet away, “someone walked across the top of the bars and slipped. Landed right on his nutsack and now he can’t have kids.”

  Travis’s jaw went slack and he slid down, landing with a thump on the gravel. “Fuck that. I value my manhood.”

  While everyone laughed, I examined the bars. They weren’t very high, and they were definitely thick enough to hold a foot. A steady one. “I bet I could do it,” I said to no one in particular. “Walk across.”

  Travis snorted. “Sure. At least you don’t have a nutsack in danger of crushing.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He stopped brushing his hands off on his shirt and studied me closely, checking to see if I really meant it. Whatever he saw in my face made him grin. “Okay, then. I dare you to walk all the way across. You have to walk on the bars, too, not on the wood where it’s wider.”

  “Oh God,” Paige groaned. “You had to dare her, didn’t you? Now she’s actually gonna do it.”

  I would have done it without the dare, but I let them think that was the reason. I was Dare-ya Shepard, after all.

  I kicked off my flip-flops and stepped toward the wooden stairs leading up to the platform.

  “Dara, I don’t think . . . ,” Ethan mumbled from somewhere behind me, but I ignored him. What I was about to do required concentration.