Song of the Fireflies

“Yeah,” he said and I felt an uncomfortable twinge in my stomach. “But she wasn’t you. I can love a lot of people. Aline. My parents. Hell, even Mitch’s dumb ass. But I could never love anyone the way I love you.”

The twinge softened and became something warm.

“Did you love him?” Elias asked.

“No,” I answered honestly. “I, uh…” I sighed and looked out ahead of me again. “I think I used him,” I admitted to Elias and to myself. And while I felt like a horrible person for it, suddenly I felt the need to spill the truth because I had been holding this inside for so long.

I went on:

“Even before I left, before we got together on your twenty-second birthday, every guy I was with, I think deep down was a substitute for you. It’s why none of them lasted, why I couldn’t date anyone for more than two months. I told you before, Elias, I was always scared of being with you. Of ruining what we had.”

“I know,” he said, but it was all that he said. I got the sense he wanted me to continue.

And so I did. I took another deep breath and began to tap my fingers against my knees out of nervousness.

“Lissa introduced me to Garrett,” I said. “He was a friend of her brother’s. I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me, or how I managed to stay with him for a year, but I did. I didn’t love him, but I guess I needed him. He wasn’t you, but he was there.”

And I needed sex, I wanted to say, but couldn’t. I didn’t want to sleep around with a bunch of different guys, so I found one and stuck with him. I used him for sex. I used him to pretend that he was you. I used him. I’m awful.

I couldn’t say these things out loud. I wanted to. I wanted to so bad that every word was on my tongue, pushing against the back of my teeth. I needed to get the truth out—about Garrett, about all of the other guys after him—to feel the impending relief. But I was still scared. I knew that I could trust Elias more than anyone in this world, that Elias would stand behind me no matter my flaws. But it was a double-edged knife, because I was terrified of losing that one person. And I had seen people lose others over much less.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said, surprising me.

My gut twisted in knots.

“You know you can always tell me anything,” he went on, but I couldn’t look at him. “There is absolutely nothing you could ever say or do that would make me leave you.”

He knew I was hiding things from him, and he was desperate to know my secrets. And I was desperate to tell him. But he didn’t want to push me. He wanted me to tell him when I was ready, but he was letting me know that it would be OK.

And I believed him. I looked over, into his eyes, and he smiled warmly back at me.

I was going to tell him right then. Suddenly, it felt right. That small window a person is given in which to say or do something they’ve always been afraid to had opened up for me in that moment. I felt elated and alive and longed to not feel suffocated anymore by the weight I carried on my chest.

But the window closed too quickly, and I shut down.

It was as if he could sense it right away, too, because I saw the hope and determination in his eyes fade seconds after the window closed. But he wasn’t mad. Disappointed, yes, but never mad at me. That only made me love him more.

He reached out his hand and cupped the back of my neck, pulling my head toward him. He pressed his lips to my forehead.

“Y’know, I think I’d rather sleep up here than in that stuffy tent,” I said after a minute of quiet.

Elias pursed his lips and thought about it, then his head bobbed in agreement. “Not a bad idea,” he said and stood up. “Let’s go back and get the blankets.” He reached out his hand to me.

“I can wait here,” I said. “Unless you want me to go with you.”

“No, I can go,” he said. “It’s not that far. I’ll be right back.”

He leaned over and kissed me on the lips, then walked across the opening and disappeared among the trees.

It was so peaceful sitting on the top of the ridge all alone, looking out at the dark landscape and how the river snaked a path through the trees below. I gazed up at the sky and closed my eyes again to savor the wind on my face. It had been a long time since I felt this free, not since I was kid. I hated that with growing up came the knowledge that life won’t always be like it was when we were children. I wished we could just grow backward.

I heard footsteps behind me coming from the trees, and I thought initially that Elias was back sooner than expected. Two figures emerged from the woods far away from where Elias had gone back in.

As the two moved closer into the moonlight, I saw that the skinny blonde-haired one was Jana. The other was a girl with supershort black hair whom I had never seen before.

I stood up as Jana stumbled toward me, the black-haired girl following close behind.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” I thought I heard Jana say, but I wasn’t completely sure, as her words were slurred and choppy.

She was clearly drunk. And maybe high on something, too. Her more so than her friend, who didn’t have any trouble standing up straight.

“Are you all right?” I asked, peering at Jana.

Her black bikini top sat sloppily over her breasts, barely containing them. The straps were left untied from around her neck and hung freely. She had on a pair of men’s shorts, and she wore no shoes. I noticed one of her big toes was bleeding.

“I’m fanfuckingtastic,” she said with a big drunken smile. “Hey, aren’t you Elias’s girlfriend?” Her finger unfolded from her hand and pointed at me shakily.

Then she looked over at her friend and said, “This was the girl I was telling you about.”

Jana stumbled again and almost fell. I grabbed her instinctively and held her up by the elbow, but she shoved my hand away. “I got this,” she snapped. “Don’t… I’m great, I told you.”

I didn’t really want to help her anyway, so I was happy to let go.

“Yes, I’m Elias’s girlfriend,” I finally answered.

She attempted a grin, but it was quickly overrun by the lazy fluttering of her eyelids as though she was struggling to keep her eyes open.

“He’s a good lay,” she said to me and then smiled at the black-haired girl, who looked bored, or just ready to get back to the party rather than stand up here with the two of us.

I gritted my teeth at Jana’s comment but held my composure.

Jana laughed and almost fell over again. This time I didn’t try to stop her. I wanted her to fall.

“They both fucked me at the same time,” she added, that grin finally winning its battle with the inevitable unconsciousness. But she didn’t seem to be gloating about it, just reminiscing a little too openly. “Him and Mitchell. God damn.” Then she looked right at me and pointed again. “Have you done them both? Surely you have, since you lived with them and all.” She said it so casually, as if she and I were talking about what to have for breakfast. Clearly she wouldn’t be saying these things if she wasn’t so messed up. No, I take that back—she definitely would.

“Ummm, no, I haven’t,” I answered, trying to stay calm when really what I wanted to do was hit her in the fucking mouth.

“Let’s go back to the fire,” the black-haired girl said.

“Well, you should,” Jana said to me, ignoring the girl’s suggestion. Her upper body swayed backward slightly like a tower hit by a gust of wind.

Then she stuck her finger in my face. “Hey. Oh my God!” Her breath was rancid. “We could totally have a foursome. You game? Or shit, a fivesome!” She pointed at the girl and the girl’s face soured. “Wait”—she had a dumb moment look on her face all of a sudden—“that’s an orgy, right?”

I swallowed hard and took a step back away from her. “No,” I said. “I think I’ll fucking pass.”

“Uh, yeah, me too,” the black-haired girl said. “Jana, I think you need to find your tent and sleep it off. Seriously.”

“Fine. Whatever,” Jana said, but she wasn’t responding to the girl. She was still talking to me. Her eyelids started getting heavy again. “Probably better, anyway. I think I fucked up when I screwed them. I mean it wasn’t that long ago, but I think I might be pregnant with your boyfriend’s baby.”

The breeze burned my eyes as they widened and I sucked in a sharp breath. “What the hell did you say?”

The black-haired girl shook her head and took a step back. “I’ll see you later. No bitch drama for me tonight.” And then she walked off toward the path that Elias took and left Jana and me standing alone.

Jana’s head swiveled on her shoulders and she tried to stifle a laugh, pressing the side of her index finger against her lips.

Now she was gloating.

“Yeah, I’m like five days late,” she said twirling a hand in the air, pleased to be filling my head with this information. “And I’m never late. So yeah, I’m pretty sure I’m knocked up.”

I punched her right between the eyes and her head snapped backward. I don’t know how she managed to stay on her feet that time. It was an uncontrollable reaction to hit her, in retaliation to her taunting me about it. I regretted it a second after I pulled my fist back. My knuckles stung painfully.

With her hand cupping her nose, she just laughed.

“For your sake,” I said with anger rising in my voice, “you better hope that’s not true.”

I started to walk away, back through the clearing and toward the trees. She followed.

“Or what?” she mocked me. “You won’t do shit except babysit our kid on the weekends. Fuck you.” She laughed.

I kept walking toward the trees, but I was blinded by anger and hatred and so many other emotions that I didn’t realize I was walking in the wrong direction, more toward the area Jana had come from rather than to where Elias had gone.

She kept following me, and I kept walking. All the while, she yelled curses at me and taunted me. Tears streamed down my face. My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands, almost breaking the skin. I couldn’t get the images out of my head: her pregnant with Elias’s baby, him divided between the two of us, him leaving me to be with her, thinking he was only doing the right thing. I even saw him marrying her. Their life together flashed before my eyes, and before I knew it I was standing at the edge of a ravine. I had taken a wrong turn at some point, and the only way back was past Jana, who was closing in on me from behind with her hateful, spiteful words and that laughter in her voice that made me want to kill her. Figuratively, of course.

“Move!” I said, turning to face her. I went to push my way past her, but she grabbed me by the arm.

“Fucking move!” I roared.

A white-hot pain seared through the side of my head. I spun on one heel and fell backward, tripping over a rock. Before I could get to my feet, I reached up and touched the side of my face where she had hit me, letting the realization of what she did sink in. Then I sprung to my feet and was mere seconds from beating the shit out of her. I was in her face, our noses practically touching, my hands clenched into fists at my sides.

But I couldn’t bring myself to hit her again. If she was pregnant, I couldn’t hit her because I felt like I’d be hitting that baby, too. I hated her. I fucking hated that bitch for coming into my life and ruining what Elias and I had gone through so much together to have. But I couldn’t hit her back. I started to walk away, but she grabbed me from behind, both of her hands winding tightly in the back of my hair. She became violent, like an animal, so quickly it made my head spin. She screamed something I didn’t understand, and all I could do was try to pry her hands off me.

Finally, I managed to whirl around at her, flinging her hands away and into the air above her.

“GET! OFF!” I wailed and pushed her in a last desperate attempt to be free of her.

She stumbled backward.

I froze and watched in absolute horror as she missed the tree, tripped over her own feet, and fell right off the side of the ravine.

Through the seemingly infinite silence that suddenly consumed me, I heard her body hit the rocks below with a stomach-turning crunch.

I stopped breathing in that moment. No, everything stopped in that moment. The wind. The sky. The river. The world. Everything….

Chapter Nine

Elias

When I made my way back to the top, I found Bray wasn’t sitting near the edge of the ridge where I had left her I moved farther out into the clearing with our blankets draped over one shoulder.

“Bray?” I said, looking around.

I brushed it off for a second, thinking she was probably just taking a piss behind a tree somewhere, and I set our blankets on the ground.

But then I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I walked quickly toward the edge and looked over. My heart started to bang against my rib cage. I peered down as far as my sight could penetrate the darkness, but took a step back upon realizing that if she had fallen there was no way I’d be able to see from way up here.

She had to be somewhere around close by. She had to be.

“Bray?” I called out again. “Where the hell did you go?”

Still no answer.

Panic set in quickly. I stood there as still and as quiet as I could for several long seconds in case she was coming through the woods, but I heard nothing. I arranged both hands around my mouth and shouted, “BRAY!” and my voice echoed through the wide-open space. But still nothing. I felt sick to my stomach. She wouldn’t have left like that way out here. And if she did, I would’ve seen her on the path coming down as I was making my way back up.

I ran toward the tree line, searching for any sign of her, for another path she might have taken. I refused to believe that she had fallen off the edge.

Just as I noticed another path through the woods that seemed to head south and I started to go toward it, I heard footfalls in the leaves. I didn’t wait to see if it was her, I ran blindly straight into the woods. A skinny branch slapped me across the forehead on my way, but I didn’t stop.

Bray and I nearly crashed into each other.

“Shit, baby! Where the hell did you go? Scared the hell out of me!” I started to pull her into a hug, but something about her was off and I stopped. She didn’t respond or even raise her head to look at me.

“Are you all right?”

I took her hands into mine. Hers were shaking. Her whole body was shaking.

I cupped her face in my palms and raised her head so that she’d look at me. She was crying, and something in her eyes… I couldn’t place it, but it haunted me. I wondered if she even knew I was standing right in front of her. Her hair was messy, with pieces of leaves stuck within a mass of strands. Dirt was smeared across her left cheek. She looked like she’d been in a fight.

I touched her split lip, where a thin line of blood glistened near the corner. “Bray, you’re scaring me. What happened to you?” I shook her gently and then more aggressively when she still didn’t respond. “What happened? Talk to me!”

Her lips trembled and more tears seeped from the corners of her eyes. And then as if a floodgate had been opened, she started screaming through her tears, “It was my fault! Elias! Oh my God!”

“What happened?” I roared, scared for her and for myself, my heart about to burst through my chest.

“Jana!” her voice trembled and she began to stutter. “Sh-she fell. Jana f-fell. Right off the cliff!”

“What?” I said, suddenly almost completely calm. I don’t think what she had just said registered in my mind yet.

Then suddenly, it did register and my heart stopped.

I crouched down in front of her, squeezed her trembling hands within mine, and I looked up into her reddened, tear-soaked eyes as she stood before me.

“Bray, look at me. Look at me.” She did. “Are you sure?”

She nodded in an unsteady, jerking motion. The tears never stopped flowing. Her pretty face distorted with every kind of pain and anguish and guilt that a person could possibly feel at once.

“Show me,” I said with intent, trying to contain the dread and panic. “Take me to where it happened.”

She shook her head at first but then nodded. “OK.”

I followed close beside her as she led me through the woods toward the edge of a ravine not even two minutes from the clearing. I held her hand tight as I stepped to the edge and looked over. The drop was no more than fifty or sixty feet, where I could clearly see Jana’s body splayed out on the rocks.

“Holy shit….”

Bray ruptured into heartrending sobs, and she buried her face in her hands. I seized her and pulled her harshly against my chest, squeezing my arms tight around her shaking body, my hands holding fast to her head.

“Shhh, baby please, stop crying. Listen to me. We have to go down there. We have make sure. Can you do that? Bray, can you help me?” I tried my best to calm her down. I held her gaze until she seemed fully coherent and cooperative. I wiped the tears from her cheeks.

She nodded slowly.

“We’ll figure this out, OK? Now let’s go.”

It took us what felt like a very long time, thirty minutes at least, to find the easiest way partway down the ravine and to Jana’s body. And once we got there, I knew before we even got close enough to see if she was breathing, that she dead.

Jana was dead. Jana was dead.

The words kept running through my mind, over and over again like a broken record. I think for two minutes straight I had an out-of-body experience, because nothing around me felt real. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the body. The rock beneath her head was painted with glistening red that appeared black in the darkness. Jana’s eyes were open, staring up at the sky, lifeless and empty, though still full of something… they were full of the truth of what happened. I finally looked at Bray standing next to me, on the verge of full-blown traumatization. At any moment she was going to crack. She was going to slip into oblivion, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to pull her out of it.

I pulled her against me again, even tighter this time, and felt her ribs moving against mine. “Stay with me,” I said. “We’re going to figure this out. Do you understand?”

And I held her there. We stood together next to the body.

I thought of my mother and the things she always said to me when I was growing up: Always do what you know in your heart is right. No matter what, Elias.

And I wept going over those words in my mind. I cried and shook and lost myself as much as Bray had done for a moment, crushing her against me, never wanting to let her go. But finally, I pulled Bray away from my chest and clasped my hands around her upper arms. “Baby, look at me and tell me… swear to me… that this was an accident.”

She fell to her knees on the cool rock and I went down with her.

“Please, Bray, tell me the truth.”

“It was an accident! I swear! I pushed her off of me, but she stumbled back too far and tripped and went over the edge! I didn’t think I’d pushed her hard enough! I didn’t want to push her off!” She screamed every word at me but it felt more like she was trying to convince herself, to make herself understand what just happened. Her face was stricken by pain. So much pain. Her fists were clenched against her thighs.

I tried to grab her head, but she jostled herself to the side and started puking on the damp bank next to the rock we stood on. I pulled her hair back and away from her shoulders and held her loosely around the waist while she threw up. She cried so much that her voice was strained when she tried to speak between vomiting intervals. “I didn’t mean—” and she’d vomit before she could get the rest of the words out. “I wasn’t try—”

Finally, she fell against my body when she couldn’t puke anymore, and I enveloped her in my arms and rocked her gently, brushing her hair away from her forehead.

“I-I don’t want to go to prison,” she said. “They’ll send me to prison, Elias. I can’t prove it was an accident. Elias, they’ll charge me with murder.” Her voice started to rise again and her body became stiff in my arms. “Please don’t let them take me to prison!”

She was crying heavily again.

“Shhh… that’s not going to happen. You can tell them the truth. Just tell the truth and this will work out. I have to believe that.”

I didn’t believe that…

“No, Elias,” she cried. “They won’t believe me. People know you slept with her. Mitchell knows. I’m the new girlfriend. People will assume. And…” She stopped cold.

“And what?”

Her hands were trembling harder.

“Bray, what is it?”

“She… she told me she thought she might’ve been pregnant.” She hesitated again. She didn’t want to finish. “With your baby.”

I froze.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I-I mean, it’s not impossible, but I used protection. It wasn’t even that long ago.” My head was spinning now with the possibilities, my heart a heavy, uneven series of beats. I was almost as traumatized as Bray was at this point. “How would she even know something like that so early? I used a condom. It didn’t break. If she was pregnant, I doubt it was mine. Possible, but unlikely.” I was rambling now. Nervous as hell that something like that could’ve been true.

“She was just fucking with you,” I added, completely believing that, because it was the only thing that made sense.

“It doesn’t matter, Elias. She’s dead and I was the last one to be seen with her! There was a girl here with her just before it happened! And I, more than anyone out here, had motive. They won’t believe it was an accident! They’ll crucify me!” She buried her face in my chest, her fingers digging into the back of my neck.

I decided to do the right thing, just like my mother always said. In that moment, it was the right thing to do…

“Let’s go,” I said, pulling her to her feet. “We have to get out of here.”

Bray looked at me with confusion in her eyes, but it took all of two seconds for her to understand and follow me. We found our way back to the ridge in the clearing. We didn’t speak, overwhelmed by what had happened and exhausted by the uphill climb. I held her hand tight the whole way, afraid to let her go for even a second.

I was afraid to let her go…

I grabbed our blankets from the ground and tossed them over my shoulder.

Finally, I spoke. “Now listen to me, OK?”

She nodded.

“When we go back to the main camp we have to act normal. Hopefully no one will notice us, but if they do we have to act normal.”

“Are we leaving… now?” she asked nervously.

“Yes,” I said. “If they find her while we’re still here…” I stopped. I sighed. But I had to be truthful with her. “Bray, I’m not confident enough to believe that you won’t break down in front of everyone. We can’t stay here for that. Do you understand?”

She nodded again. “But it won’t be normal for us to leave in the middle of the night,” she pointed out.

I hadn’t thought of that. A heavy breath rattled through my chest. I looked out toward the ridge for a moment.

In the end, I could think of nothing. Nothing was going to make this better. I knew deep in my gut that unless she turned herself in, that if I didn’t talk her into doing the right thing, that from this point on everything would just get worse.

I pushed myself away from her and threw the blankets on the ground in a rage. “AHHH!” I shouted, balling my fists beside me, my arms bent upward. I went to the edge of the ridge. “God damn it!” My hands gripped the back of my head and I just stood there like that, staring into the dark sky.

Bray came up behind me. I felt her hands slip around my waist from behind, the softness of her cheek pressed against my bare back.