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First published in Great Britain in 2017
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
First published in the USA in 2017 by Simon Pulse,
an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
Text copyright © 2017 by Lynn Weingarten
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First e-book edition 2017
ISBN 978 1 4052 7158 5
Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1494 5
www.egmont.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
SASHA
PART 1
SASHA: 3 WEEKS, 1 DAY EARLIER
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
PART 2
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
XAVIER
XAVIER
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
XAVIER
SASHA
SASHA
XAVIER
XAVIER
SASHA
XAVIER
1 YEAR LATER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Back series promotional page
SASHA
We were holding hands, palm against palm. I could feel his heart beating, his blood against my blood.
When I looked up, his smile was wide and real. “Ready?” he said.
I faked a smile back. I had gotten so good at faking things.
I thought: You brought this on yourself, Sasha. You will never get to stop pretending.
I thought: Protect those you love, no matter what the cost.
He squeezed my hand. This is exactly what I always wanted. And nothing I ever wanted at all. And there is just no taking anything back.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Road trip!” he said.
He couldn’t begin to imagine what this actually was. He had no idea what I’d done. What any of us had.
I turned the key. The engine started. We went.
PART 1
SASHA
3 WEEKS, 1 DAY EARLIER
On the eve of Xavier’s seventeenth birthday, I decided I was finally going to tell him the truth.
We were in his bathroom with a folding chair pushed up against the sink and I was dyeing his hair as his birthday present.
“I want it to look like a very deep part of the ocean,” he’d said a few days earlier, when he’d asked me to do it. “Like something a whale would drink.”
I’d taken this as a good sign: him wanting something, expressing wanting something. He’d spent the last month in his room wanting nothing but quiet and to sleep, or maybe his ex-girlfriend back, though we mostly didn’t talk about that part.
“The ocean isn’t any color,” I’d said. “It’s just water.”
“Then like the bottom of the ocean if somebody dumped a whole bunch of blue food coloring in it.”
I bought the bleach and a bottle of dye that looked like ink. I also got a bag of Swedish Fish, because that was our favorite candy, and it worked with the whole ocean theme. We were both really into the ocean back then.
I put the bleach on his hair while he sat on the chair. I had to lean in to do it, and that made my heart pound, and then I felt guilty for its pounding, because it was messed up to feel that way about him and be that close without him knowing. But I’ll tell him soon, I promised myself. I will tell him, and it won’t be a secret anymore.
The bleach burned our eyes and our noses as it turned his hair from black to coppery gold, and then from coppery gold to almost white. We drank whisky and ate the candy and watched part six of the eight-part ocean documentary series we’d been working our way through on his laptop. This episode was about whales and how sometimes a whale will go years in between seeing any other whales. It just floats along down there in the dark, all alone. “Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” Xavier said. But I knew he didn’t mean it.
After the bleach, I put on the dye. Xavier had already thrown away the plastic gloves, and so I got the blue all over my hands, and then it wouldn’t come off. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” he said when he saw what had happened. But he was laughing, which meant it was worth it.
We poured more whisky into our mugs and clinked them.
The buzzer on my phone went off, it was time to rinse. “I’ll get in the shower,” Xavier said. I got up and started to leave the bathroom, and he said, “No, just turn around.” But it felt very wrong to be in there while he was taking his clothes off, considering, even if I wasn’t looking.
“I’ll go wait in your room,” I said. “So the steam won’t mess up my hair.” The water was already on, and loud.
And he shouted, “Since when do you care about steam on your hair?”
“People change!” I shouted back.
I sat on his bed and stared down at my blue hands and decided enough was enough was enough was enough. I wouldn’t just tell him soon, I would tell him tonight. But how would I say it? I’d tried to imagine a million times, but had never quite come up with the words. Xavier, I know this might sound like it’s coming out of nowhere, but . . . or Xavier, you know how I always say I don’t want to date anyone, well, the thing is . . . Maybe it would be better not to plan. Maybe it would be better to just be brave: take a deep breath, open my mouth, and let my heart climb right out of it.
A few minutes later he came into his room in a towel, and I pretended to need to use the bathroom. When I got back he was standing there, dressed.
“What do you think?” he said. His hair hung in thick wet clumps. The blue was way lighter than it was supposed to be, like jeans that had been washed a thousand times. “I haven’t even looked yet,” he said. “I waited for you.”
He bit his lip and opened his eyes wide, a caricature of a nervous person waiting for a reaction. My face grew hot – he was beautiful. How strange to remember that I actually used to find him very ordinary looking. It seemed impossible to me now.
“Oh God, your expression. Is it bad? It’s bad.” He went over to the mirror. Xavier was not someone who looked in the mirror a lot. It was possible he hadn’t even seen himself in a month.
“No, it’s good,” I said.
He ran his hands through his hair, frowned, smiled, made a duck face, made a fish face. “Are you sure?” he said.
“Stop fishing,” I said. “That’s a command and also an ocean joke.”
He grinned. “I guess it’s time to be a functional human being and go out somewhere?” he said. “Like you’ve been saying all along? For my, like, birthday or something?”
It was the first time he had wanted to go out in a month.
He poured some more whisky into one of the mugs I’d made for him at the print-and-copy shop where I worked. This one had a picture of him holding a mug with a picture of him holding a mug with a picture of him holding a mug on it.
I thought maybe he was pouring too much whisky, considering. “Don’t worry,” he said, watching me watching him. “I promise this is okay.” He motioned to the whisky. “I’m really not going crazy like that anymore.”
It was almost 8:30. Through the window, the sun was setting and the sky was pink and red. “Well, we should at least have some snacks if we’re going to drink like this,” I said.
I went to his kitchen and grabbed some string cheese and pita chips. I told him to open the chips and cheeses and eat them, and we made a game of me directing him around. “Pull off a string. Put it in your mouth. Chew, chew, chew,” I said. “Now swallow.”
“Isn’t it weird, because string cheese is not really string and not really cheese and yet somehow is both?” he said.
“Save it for open-mic night, pal,” I said. “And keep eating.”
He opened up the pita chips. “Pita chips, neither pita nor chip!” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “Shoe yourself,” I said. “Become shod.” And I pointed to his Converse on the floor.
“Are you going to make all my decisions for me tonight?” he said.
“We’ll see,” I said.
“About time someone reasonable took over.”
We had another gulp of whisky each, then poured the rest into an empty Cherry Coke bottle, and it was time to go.
We walked to the train station. “Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot,” I said. We passed the bottle back and forth. The air outside was warm and soft. It was dark now.
The platform was mostly empty. Xavier and I leaned up against the wall. Our arms were touching. Now kiss me, I thought, but didn’t say it.
The train pulled up, we got on. We drank and drank while the trees rushed by outside. An old man was glaring at us over the top of his newspaper, and staring at my blue hands, which I’d forgotten about. Because I was a little bit drunk, I held my hands up like claws and bared my teeth at him. The man just shook his head.
“Thanks for being the world’s best friend,” Xavier said. “I love you.”
I turned toward the window. I felt my face getting hot. “I didn’t say speak,” I said.
He clamped his hand over his mouth.
“That’s more like it.”
But what I was thinking about was the last time he’d told me he loved me, eleven days before. And how different that I-love-you had sounded.
I’d gone over it in my head so many times. It was the sort of thing you make your best friend talk about for hours and hours forever, except I couldn’t because he was the only best friend I had. The only friend at all, really. We’d been at his house, sitting next to each other on his bed, watching part two of the ocean series. This one was about all the very crazy things down there, way at the bottom – creatures that were nothing but jagged, gaping mouths, worms that could turn themselves inside out, fish that mated by dissolving their bodies into each other.
We were drinking that night, too, but only a little, and Xavier seemed drunker than it made sense for him to be. Our legs were touching on the bed and for some reason neither of us pulled away. Xavier leaned in close and picked up the locket I always wore – a little brass book that had been my grandmother’s. It wasn’t even really my style, but I never took it off because I loved her, and the locket was all of her that was left. He opened it and pretended to read. “Once there was a girl named Sasha who was the greeeatest in all the land,” he said. Our faces were so close I could feel his warm breath on my lips. He stayed there, holding the necklace, then looked up at me. He mumbled something and I had to ask him to repeat himself. “I love you so much,” is what he said.
We said that sometimes as friends, so it’s not like that was particularly weird or anything. But there was something about the way he was staring at me that was not the usual way at all. It made me feel so good, it wasn’t even safe. Feeling that good could kill a person.
He let go of the necklace, then reached up like he was going to touch my face. I had wanted this for a very long time at that point. I had wanted it for so long and so badly that for just a second I let myself imagine it was actually happening in the real and normal way. But his eyes were all wrong, and I noticed then the prescription bottle on the windowsill. The top was off.
“I think you should get some rest,” I said. He nodded and lay down. I flapped his blankets out over him, then sat on the floor next to his bed. I poked him every couple minutes to make sure he was only sleeping and not unconscious.
Those fucking pills.
Xavier’s parents were good people, but they were also very serious and uncomfortable with emotions and had no clue what to do when Xavier’s girlfriend dumped him and he basically stopped leaving his room. So they sent him to their regular family doctor, who whipped out a prescription pad.
“I know brain drugs can help people, and that’s great. But maybe you should see an actual shrink or something, too,” is what I said when he first told me about the doctor. “Like a person who will, y’know, discuss some stuff ?”
“Nope, don’t need to,” he’d said. “These will fix me right up.” He shook his pill bottles like maracas.
There were two kinds of pills: pink sticks to take “as needed” that made Xavier loopy and forgetful, and little white oval sleeping pills.
I’d put my hand on his shoulder, then made my voice all dramatic, like I was in a cheesy TV movie. “There’s not a pill for a broken heart, Xavier,” I’d said. Because sometimes pretending you’re making a joke is the only way to say the thing you actually mean.
“Ah,” said Xavier. He had half-smiled, which was the most he smiled back then. “But apparently there is.”
I sat with him, waking him up every few minutes, thinking about how if he’d meant that I-love-you in the way it had sounded, it would change everything. How I wanted it to change everything.
But in the morning, Xavier had had no memory of the night before. The pills plus alcohol had switched his brain right off. He asked me what had happened. I told him he’d just seemed drunk, so I tucked him in and that was it.
Xavier hadn’t been convinced. He asked me again and again, “Are you sure I didn’t do anything terrible? Are you positive?”
“Well, if you really want to know, you can look at the video I put up on YouTube,” I’d said finally. “We’re getting soooooo many hits.” And only then did he drop it.
After that he decided to stop taking the pills, to drink less. He started getting out of bed more. He went running once even. It was a turning point and he moved past it. I was happy for him. Relieved, obviously.
But still I couldn’t stop thinking about that night. I wanted desperately to believe it had meant more than I knew it did. I googled “blackouts,” looking for evidence that in a blacked-out state people reveal only the true truth of themselves. But I knew I wouldn’t find any.
And I didn’t.
The train sped on. We passed the bottle back and forth. By the time we got to our stop, it was half empty.
“Now be a normal person for a while,” I said, playing our game.
“Don’t ask me to do the impossible,” said Xavier. He took my hand as we got off the train.
And I gave myself an instruction then, too: Tell him by the end of the night. Tell him no matter what.
I closed my eyes and breathed in, breathed out, and looked up at the moon. His hand was warm in mine, and the alcohol was warm in my belly.
I knew that night was going to change everything.
And it did, is the thing. It did.
Just not in ways I ever could have imagined.
SASHA
We walked toward the back of Sloe Joe’s Tavern. Technically you were supposed to be twenty-one to go there at all, but nobody ever checked or cared.
It was hot and crowded and loud, like usual, with dim lights and red walls and a huge falling-apart crystal chandelier hanging over the dance floor. There was a rumor the chandelier was left over from when Sloe Joe’s had been a speakeasy during Prohibition. There was another rumor that if you sat on the couch by the door, you’d catch crabs.
I loved everything about the place, especially the way all that sound drowned out all the thoughts in my head, rattled them around until I couldn’t even think them, and then there was nothing but the heat and the stench of sweat and the feeling of music thumping inside me, beating in my chest like a heart.
It felt good to be back there with Xavier. This place used to be ours. Back when we first became friends, we’d come here most weekends, back when weekends were ours, too.
Then he started dating Ivy and that changed. But I kept coming by myself after that. I liked going places alone. (Xavier was maybe the first and only person whose company I preferred to no one’s.) I liked to be anonymous and watch people. I liked that when you were surrounded by people you didn’t know, you could do and say whatever you wanted, and nothing counted.
I had a game, and the game was called Kiss a Stranger. The way you play is you look at a stranger and try to imagine what kissing them might be like.
And then you go and find out if you’re right.
I liked the feeling of a mouth on my mouth. I liked that you could have an intense time with someone, crushed together in the dark, then let them go and never think about them again. Xavier said he was both baffled by and jealous of my ability to do that, because he was completely the opposite. “There are rocks inside the middle of you,” he’d told me. He meant it as a compliment.
But in that moment with Xavier, I wasn’t thinking about all of that. I was trying not to think of anything at all. There was a band onstage, a dozen people playing every instrument at once. And it was time to dance.
“Dance like no one’s watching!!” I shouted at him, which was a joke we had about that corny saying you find on inspirational-quotes websites, superimposed over a picture of the ocean or whatever. Our joke was that it really meant dance while also picking people’s pockets, because when no one is watching is the best time to be a thief. The game always progressed from there. Dance like everyone’s asleep! Dance like this room is full of ghosts! Dance like you just landed on Earth from space and what the hell is gravity even??!!
But the thing was people always watched Xavier when he danced. It was something about the tallness, the broad shoulders, the sheer size of him, combined with the way he moved, rhythmic and graceful and lost in the moment entirely. In regular life he tried to make himself smaller, to take up less space, uncomfortable being a sweet introvert in the body of a big manly jock. But when he danced he seemed more sure of himself than he ever did in any other context. He seemed free.
Xavier bumped up against me and grinned that grin that he did when he was just a little bit drunk. The lights flashed. Xavier took the whisky from his bag.
Was it time to tell him? Even through all that alcohol the thought made my stomach twist. I wasn’t ready. Not quite yet.
He cracked the top, took a sip. When he handed it to me, I gulped. The room shifted. We raised our arms and shook our hips. Another band went on. Cymbals and bells. More dancing.
Nsst nsst. Bzzz bzzz bzzz. We grinned, wide white teeth glowing in the dark. The room was packed, people on all sides pushing us toward each other, arms and shoulders, knees colliding. What was I ever worried about? I smiled up at him. But when he looked down at me he had this curious expression on his face, and maybe it was all the alcohol, but I swore he was staring at me in a very different way than usual. It was the same look I remembered from the night he’d forgotten.
I felt a delicate bubble of hope getting bigger and bigger inside my chest, terrifying and dangerous, but I could not even stop it.
Maybe this is happening, I told myself. For real this time.
A spotlight on stage lit up a singer all in glitter. She was enormous and gorgeous, like someone from another better planet. She leaned in toward the microphone. Her voice was a sex growl. “I wrote this song to be fucked to, but you could dance to it, too.” She leaned back, and shouted, “WE ARE ALL GODDAMN MIRACLES!” Music burst forth like confetti, the lights blinked on and off. I could feel Xavier’s breath on my cheek.
And we were really dancing like no one was watching.
Closer.
Closer.
Closer.
But then I looked up and realized someone was.
She was over by the bar when the lights flashed, but I swear a second before I saw her, I’d felt her, deep in my gut the way some animals sense an earthquake just before it comes.
Holy fuck.
Ivy.
“Xavier,” I said. The music was so loud. “XAVIER!” I grabbed his hand. He turned toward me, his mouth so close again. He was smiling, but I could barely see it, I could only smell the smell of him and feel his hard chest against my chest. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw motion near the bar. Ivy was making her way toward us.
My heart pounded and pounded. I felt like the building was on fire. Like the flames were about to swallow us whole. “Let’s go outside!” I said.
Xavier nodded.
Then he froze.
“Oh God,” he said. He’d seen her, too.
“C’mon!” I said. But he wasn’t listening to me anymore.
Somehow she was always smaller than I remembered her. She was tiny and wiry in black knee-length cutoffs and an army-green tank top. She had a million metal bracelets on each wrist like armor and hair clumped and cut short, big eyes with eyeliner caked around them that had maybe been on for a couple of days. She had a pointed chin like a bat, a wide mouth, and a space between her two front teeth. The fact that Ivy wasn’t conventionally beautiful made it worse. Power you get from being beautiful is cheap. But Ivy’s appeal just came from the her of her. She was a tornado, unpredictable and cracklingly alive. “She isn’t scared of anything,” Xavier had told me once with pride and awe. “Like literally not one single thing.” But everyone is scared of something is what I had thought, though I didn’t say it.
Ivy was right in front of us now. Xavier wasn’t moving. Her friend Gwen was next to her. Gwen and I shared a nod. In elementary school Gwen and I had briefly been friends, good friends even. But that was a very long time ago.
The song ended, and the band started playing something else, slower and softer.
“I’m going to get another drink,” Gwen said, then slipped away, as though maybe that had been the plan all along.
I stood there with Xavier and Ivy. The room swirled around us.
“It’s been . . .” Xavier said finally. They hadn’t been in contact at all since that day a month ago when everything happened.