Tess Sharpe - Far From You

“Um, Jason still has your keys,” I say as I try to catch up with her. She’s already halfway across Adam’s yard, heading toward the winding dirt road that leads to the highway.

“I took care of it,” she says. She stops, turns, and waits for me. When I reach her, she loops her arm in mine.

Out here, away from lights and cloud cover, the stars shine amazingly bright, and Mina tilts her head up to look at them, a smile on her face.

“I am so breaking up with him,” she announces. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

I stumble, kicking up clouds of dirt with my boots, navigating around tufts of prickly star thistle and blue cornflowers. “Whatever you want,” I say, but inside I am glowing, triumphant.

“Come on, Soph. I told him we’d be at the end of the road.” She skips ahead, shaking her hips to the strains of music floating from the house. I grin, following after her.

“Who did you call?”

“Trev.”

I stop. “You didn’t.”

“Of course I did.” She tugs me forward, knocking her hips against mine. The moon is bright, and I’m messed up enough to let my eyes linger on the curl of her hair, the dark ripple against her pale skin. I can smell vanilla underneath the pine and almost-rain scent in the air.

“He’ll freak when he sees we’re drunk.”

“I don’t care. He’d freak more if we ditched Jason and drove drunk. You know how he gets about you and cars.”

This is true. Trev is morbidly afraid of something else happening to me. Even years later, he watches me in that way I’ve gotten used to, part fear, part want, all protectiveness. Occasionally I’ll turn, meet his gaze. Sometimes he doesn’t look away, and I catch a glimpse of what all the other girls see in him, what they want from him.

“Becky’s probably with him,” I say. “She hates me.”

Mina laughs, a little too long. She always was a lightweight. “She really does; you should hear her talk about you. Girl’s got a mouth on her.”

“Trev’s girlfriend talks to you about me?” I ask, surprised through my Oxy-vodka haze.

“Well, not to me. I heard her on the phone one day after you left. I took care of it.”

“What was she saying?” I stagger to a stop and face her. “What do you mean you took care of it?”

Mina sighs, dropping her arm from mine and leaning against a fence post. She bends down and plucks a cornflower, twirling it between her fingers. “It doesn’t matter.” I watch her tear off the blue petals, one by one—She loves me, she loves me not—before tossing the stem on the ground. She spins in a lazy circle, her short skirt flaring up.

“Anyway, everyone knows you and Trev will end up married with babies and stuff,” Mina says with a smile, but I can hear it: the bitterness underlying her slurred words. “And Becky wants him for good. She can’t admit the only person he wants is you.”

“But I don’t want Trev,” I say.

Sometimes I wish Trev knew that he was caught in the middle of this; then I wouldn’t feel so guilty. But he can’t imagine it, because Mina hides behind her secrets and I wither away my soul with pills, and we are Just Fine, Thank You. Reckless girls dancing down dirt roads, waiting to be saved from ourselves.

“We’d be sisters if you married Trev,” Mina says, and her lower lip sticks out like she’s pouting at the thought of it. Like Trev’s taking away a toy she wants.

The idea horrifies me, makes me want to vomit. “You’re not my sister.”

Mina blinks, and her eyes glint in the moonlight. I want to lean forward, press my lips against hers. I need to know what her mouth tastes like—sweet, maybe, like strawberries.

I’m almost messed up enough to do it, emboldened by her fight with Jason and how high I am. I step toward her, but my knee gives out, the pain sharp and sudden, and it makes me falter. I pitch forward with an “oomph,” and Mina catches me halfway. But I’ve got four inches and twenty-five pounds on her, and we end up tangled in the dirt, laughing. Giggles fill the air as truck headlights wind down the road toward us.

“There you two are.” Trev leans out the window as he cuts the engine. “I heard you shrieking all the way down the road.”

“Trev!” Mina beams at him, and her hands squeeze my waist in a way that makes my stomach leap. “You came! I’m breaking up with Jason. He’s an ass.”

“And you’re drunk.” He gets out of the truck and hauls her up, gently setting her on her feet. He brushes dirt off her shoulders before crouching down next to me. “You fall, Soph?”

“I’m okay.” I smile and he smiles back, the concern in his face retreating. He waits until I hold my hand out for him to pull me up.

“Steady,” he says when my leg wobbles and I lean into him. Trev is solid, warm. Mina giggles and presses into his other side until he’s got two armfuls of us. We hold on to him. Put him between us like our barrier against the truth.

But her hand finds mine behind his back and our fingers lace together, the click of our rings a secret sound only we understand.

Some barriers, they’re made to be broken.

NOW (JUNE)

“You’re quiet today,” David says halfway into our second therapy session on Monday. “What are you thinking about?”

I look up from my place on his couch. I’ve been twisting the rings on my thumb, tracing the grooves of the letters like they’re a key to a lock I haven’t found yet. “Promises,” I say.

“Do you keep your promises?” David asks.

“Sometimes you can’t keep them.”

“Do you try?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

David smiles. “In a perfect world. But I think you’re well acquainted with the unfairness of real life.”

“I try to keep mine. I want to.”

“Did Mina keep her promises?”

“Mina didn’t need to. You always ended up forgiving her, no matter what she did.”

“You care about her a lot.”

“Way to state the obvious, David.”

David’s eyebrow twitches, his pleasant smile dropping at my hostility before settling back to neutral. “You forgave her a lot, too.”

“Don’t talk about her like you knew her,” I say. “You didn’t. You won’t.”

“Not unless you tell me.”

I don’t talk for a long time, just sit there, and he doesn’t force me to continue. He folds his hands together and sits back in his chair to wait me out.

“She was bossy,” I say finally. “And spoiled. But really thoughtful. And smart. Smarter than everyone else. She could bullshit her way out of anything by just smiling. She was a bitch when she needed to be and she’d never apologize for it. She’s the first thing I think of when I wake up, the last thing I think of when I go to sleep, and the only thing I think about in between.”

I stare at the framed diplomas on the wall, the award David got from some organization for homeless youth, another from an abused women’s group. By the time he speaks, I’ve practically memorized the entire wall.

“That makes her sound like an addiction, Sophie.”

I keep staring at the wall. I can’t look at him. Not now.

“I don’t want to talk anymore today.”

“Okay,” David says. “We’ll sit here just a few minutes longer, in case you change your mind.”

When I get into the car, my phone vibrates. I’d turned it off during my session, but now I see that Rachel has left me a message.

I call my voice mail and freeze in the act of turning my keys in the ignition, listening to the message play: “It’s me. I got the drive open. You need to call me. I think I know why Mina was killed.”

TEN MONTHS AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

“We’re lost,” I insist.

“No, we’re not.” Mina navigates Trev’s truck down the dirt utility road we’ve been on for the past thirty minutes. It’s dark outside, and the Ford’s brights cut through the forest as we rock back and forth on the rough road. “Amber said off Route 3, down the second road to the right.”

“We’re totally lost,” I say. “No way there’s a campground out this far. There’s nothing here but trees and deer.”

Mina sighs. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll turn around. Maybe we missed a turnoff or something.”

The trees are too thick to get a signal, so I can’t call Amber to tell her why Mina and I are so late to join her and Adam at the campground. Mina backs the truck up slowly—the road we’re on is cut out of the mountain, hugging a cliff that’s so steep, I can’t see the bottom in the darkness. The wheels skirt close to the slope and Mina bites her lip in concentration, her knuckles white against the wheel. After a few false starts, she finally gets us turned around, but we only get a half a mile before a thunka-dunk, thunka-dunk reverberates through the cab, and the ride gets even bumpier.

“Crap.” Mina slows to a stop. “I think we have a flat.”

I grab the flashlight from the glove box and follow her out of the truck, shining the beam on the tire.

Mina frowns. “Do you know how to change it?”

I shake my head and look down the road. It’s at least three miles back to the highway. I rub absently at my leg, thinking about how much it’s gonna hurt, walking that far.

Mina pulls her phone out and stomps around, trying to get a signal. I don’t tell her it’s useless, because she’s got that determined look on her face and she keeps throwing glances at my leg, like she knows the hurt I’m anticipating. I lean against a big piece of slate that’s embedded in the mountain looming over us like a gray giant, and wait for her to admit defeat. It’s August, but it’s still cool at night, and I like the little shiver that goes down my back, the prickle of goose bumps over my skin. It’s nice being out here in the forest; loud in its own way, the rustle and cracks in the undergrowth—hopefully a deer instead of a bear—the groan of the branches in the wind punctuated by the steady crunch of Mina’s boots against the road. I close my eyes and let the sounds fill me.