Tess Sharpe - Far From You

“Let me know when you’re ready,” Dr. Shute says. She knows the deal, knows I can’t stand to see the long epidural needle, knows how freaked out it makes me—that even after all this time, after all the surgeries, I can’t handle a stupid needle sinking into me.

I’ll never be ready. I hate this. I’d almost prefer another surgery.

“Okay, do it,” I say.

The first one goes into the left side of my spine, in the middle of my back, where the pain is the worst. I breathe in and out, my clenched fists crumpling the paper liner set over the exam table. She moves down, three more on my left side, ending deep in my lower back. The long needles pierce through me, the cortisone pushes into my inflamed muscles, buying me some time. Then four on the right side. By the time she’s moved to my neck, I’m breathing hard, the music fuzzy in my ears, and I want it to stop, please, stop.

I want Mina holding my hand, brushing my hair off my face, telling me it’ll be okay.

On the way home, Dad pulls into Big Ed’s drive-through and orders a chocolate–peanut butter milk shake. It’s exactly what I need at that moment, and tears well up in my eyes when he does it without being asked. It’s like I’m fourteen again. I never thought I’d want to go back there, to the days of physical therapy and canes, floating on a cloud of Oxy, but I do. Because then, at least, she’d been alive.

When Dad hands over the shake, he meets my eyes, not letting go of the cup. “Are you okay, honey?” he asks, and I want to hide inside the concern in his voice.

“I’ll be fine,” I say. “Just stings a little.”

We both know I’m lying.

ONE YEAR AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

“I hate you!”

I duck just as a shoe comes flying out of Mina’s room, closely followed by Trev.

“Jerk!” Another shoe sails down the hall, and Trev barely looks at me as he stalks past, his face stormy. He yanks the back door open and charges outside, leaving the door swinging on the hinges.

I can hear Mina muttering angrily underneath her breath, and I peek around the corner, knocking lightly on her open door. She whirls around, and my chest tightens when I see she’s been crying.

“What’s wrong?” I ask her.

“Oh.” She brushes the tears away. “Nothing. It’s fine.”

“Um, bullshit.”

She flops on the bed, on top of a pile of papers scattered across her comforter. “Trev’s a jerk.”

I sit down next to her. “What’d he do?”

“He said I was being too open,” Mina snarls.

“Okay,” I say slowly. “You’re gonna have to fill me in more than that.”

Mina rolls over to her side, freeing up some of the papers she’s lying on. She grabs a stapled stack, handing it to me. “It’s my personal statement for the Beacon internship. I asked him to read it, and because he’s an asshole”—she shouts the last word so he can hear it—“he told me I shouldn’t submit it.”

“Can I read it?” I ask.

Mina shrugs, throwing an arm over her eyes dramatically. “Whatever,” she says, like it doesn’t matter, which means, of course, that it does.

She’s quiet for the five minutes that it takes me to read. The only sound in the room is the rustling of paper when she shifts on the bed.

When I finish, I stare at the last sentence for a long time, trying to think of what to say.

“Is it that bad?” Mina asks in a small voice.

“No,” I say. “No,” I say again, because she looks so unsure, and it makes me want to curl up next to her and tell her she’s wonderful until she stops. “It’s beautiful.” I squeeze her hand.

“It’s supposed to be about what shaped me,” Mina says, almost like she needs an excuse. “It was what I thought of first. Trev said he’d proof it for me. I didn’t think he’d get so mad.”

“Do you want me to go talk to him?”

Her gray eyes, still red and puffy, light up. “Would you?”

“Yeah. Be right back.”

I leave her in her room and walk outside to the shed in the backyard that Trev’s converted into a shop. I can hear the rhythmic scrape of sandpaper against wood as I walk up to the doors.

Trev’s hunched over his workbench, sanding a pair of triangle trellises for my garden. I watch for a moment, his broad fingers moving confidently over the cedar, smoothing the rough edges. I step forward into his domain, breathing in the smell of sawdust and the sharp bite of motor oil.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Soph,” he says before I can speak. He keeps his back to me, moving to the other side of the trellis. The sandpaper rasps against the wood, motes of sawdust floating up in the air.

“He was her dad, too. She should be able to write about him.”

Trev’s shoulders tense underneath the thin black cotton of his T-shirt. “She can write whatever she wants. Just not…about that.”

“I didn’t know. She never told me,” I say haltingly. “That you two were with him when he died.”

“Yeah, well, we were.” I hate how flat his voice is, like it’s the only way he can actually admit it. “Happened kind of fast.”

I don’t know what else to say. It makes me ache to think of ten-year-old Trev playing ball with his dad and watching him drop from a brain aneurysm between one pitch and the next.

“I didn’t realize how much she remembered,” Trev says hoarsely. His back is to me, which might be the only reason he’s still talking. “I told her to look away. She was good about listening to me when we were little. And she never talked about it afterward. I thought she blocked it out or something…hoped she did.”

“She didn’t. So you guys need to talk about it.”

“No.”

“Yes.” I know I’m crossing a line here. Spurred on by Mina, unheeding in her shadow.

He finally turns around, holding on to the sandpaper like a lifeline.

“Trev,” I say softly. “It’s been years. If you never have before…you have to.”

He shakes his head, but when I hug him, he falls into me like I’ve cut him off at the knees. I hold on tight, press my palms flat against his shoulders, two points of warmth seeping through his shirt.

When I look up, over his shoulder, I can see Mina standing on the porch, watching us.

I hold out my hand, beckoning, beseeching, and she steps forward hesitantly, off the porch, one step, two, steadier now, until she’s in front of me, wrapping her arms around Trev’s waist as I pull back.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, or maybe it’s her, or both of them who say it, and I move away, out of the shed, toward the house.

Like a silent guard, I sit on the porch, the indistinct murmur of their voices blending with the crickets and night noises, and I wish that things were easy.

NOW (JUNE)

I’m supposed to rest after I get my shots, but when Dad goes back to work, I drive downtown to the Harper Beacon office. The newspaper is in a slant-roofed, mustard-yellow build­ing from the seventies that’s next to the best—and only—­Mexican restaurant in town. The air is fragrant with cilantro and carne asada as I push through the swinging doors.

The guy at the reception desk points me to the right when I ask him about internships, and I make my way down a winding hallway with framed front pages on the walls, their headlines blaring. The hall leads to a room neatly divided into a dozen or so gray cubicles, the overhead lights bathing everything in a sickly blue sheen.

I make my way through the maze of cubicles. Every few seconds, a phone rings or someone’s printer screeches. There’s a low hum of computers and voices. I can just picture her standing in the center of it all, that smile on her face as the buzz washed over her.

This had been Mina’s first step toward what she always wanted. To become a part of the world outside of our dusty little town, “to contribute,” as she used to put it.

Instead, she’d been reduced to a handful of stories written about her instead of by her.

“Mr. Wells?” I tap on the cubicle wall with his name on it.

“Just one second,” he says before I can move into the cube. All his focus is on his computer screen as he types, giving me time to look him over.

He’s younger than I thought he’d be. Only a few years older than Trev, so maybe twenty-three or twenty-four. His button-down shirt is half-tucked into his jeans, and he’s wearing black Chucks. He’s cute in a rumpled sort of way, like he spends a lot of time running his hands through his brown hair, thinking big thoughts.

Mina had liked him. A lot, actually. Half of our conversations when I was in Portland had been about her internship and Mr. Wells and how much he was teaching her about digital media and what a great journalist he was.

She hadn’t mentioned he was cute.

Probably on purpose.

“Okay, hi,” he says. He spins around in his chair and looks me up and down. “Internship apps, right? Jenny has them, she’s right over—”

“I’m not here about an internship,” I interrupt. “I’m here because of Mina Bishop.”

The easy cheer in his brown eyes dims. “Mina,” he repeats sadly, and sighs.

“I’m Sophie Winters,” I say, and then I don’t say anything else. I just wait for the understanding to snap across his face.

It’s there instantly. He is a reporter, after all. Even if the police weren’t allowed to release my name to the press as a minor, everyone knew. “What can I help you with, Sophie?”

“Can I sit?”

He nods, gesturing to the stool in the corner of the cube. I balance as best I can, my lower back, still red and sensitive from the shots, flaring hot with pain. “I found some notes of Mina’s.” I open my bag, grab the printouts I’d made of the excerpts from Mina’s time line, and hand them to him. “I was wondering if she ever mentioned to you that she was looking into Jackie Dennings’s disappearance.”