Chapter 13

The words echo in myhead as I make my way back to the house, pack up the game, and place it on the living room table.

Someone in this house killed Emily.

It feels impossible, but Emily's death itself feels impossible, and the impossible fact remains: she's gone. I have forced myself not to think about her death, because the parts I have failed to scrub from my memory are unbearable. But what if in sparing myself the pain of reliving the trauma, I've willingly closed my eyes to a crucial detail? I pause by the closed door to Kennedy's bedroom, a small but beautiful room with a Juliet balcony and scenes from fairy tales carved into the walls. A sense of dread settles over me in the darkness. This is where it happened. Where the fire boxed her in, trapped in the attic, engulfed in flames. There was nothing I could do, and time had run out. Everyone else was already gone. I was forced to be the one to leave her behind, because I was the last to give up on her.

I frown.

But my memory begins with me in the bedroom, drowsy and disoriented from smoke inhalation, the fire well underway. The day up to that point is a hazy blur, blotted out with guilt. I'm a useless witness. I don't know how the fire started. I don't know how she got into the attic. I didn't even know about the gas leak. I've been away during what might in a sense be the most crucial year of our lives, when everyone else was sifting through ash and making meaning of things, and settling on the story of what happened in this house. Healing, maybe. I missed all of it. I should start questioning. Because accidents happen, sure.

But Emily was trapped. I wasn't. Why didn't any of my friends come back for me?

Kennedy is in bed with the lights out when I get to her parents' room, a gorgeous master suite overlooking the lake. We usually share a queen bed in her room. Emily used to crowd into the bed with us when we were little, until Kennedy and I started dating the summer after ninth. This year the room will remain empty. I can't bring myself to sleep in the room where Emily died, and even though it should feel strange to share a bed with Kennedy after a year of being ignored, it doesn't. This is the way it's always been, since we were children. There's a tiny bit of comfort in that. When I enter the master bedroom, I find one side of the bed turned down, duvet cover perfectly aired, sheets folded under in a triangle, smooth as the placid surface of the lake. She's even laid a little sprig of lavender on the pillow and a sleeping mask on the nightstand, next to a glass of water and a note reading For your pills.

I strip down to my T-shirt and a pair of boxers and sit at the edge of the bed. I can't sleep with all of the questions swirling around my head. I want to talk, but I hate to wake her. I won't learn much with everyone fast asleep, though. I dig through my backpack for my sleeping pills. I'm going to need two tonight. I tap them into my palm and knock them back with the glass of water—still ice-cold—and snap the light off.

"Where did you go?"

I turn. My eyes haven't had a chance to adjust, but I imagine Kennedy looming before me, and I feel her weight shift as she sits up. "Nowhere. Outside. I thought you were sleeping."

"I was waiting for you." I hear a clicking noise, like she's biting her nails. Kennedy doesn't really have any nails. She's a biter. "Can I ask you something without you reading into it?"

Probably not. But I desperately want something, anything, to read into. "Of course."

"Do you really hear voices?"

There it is. "I don't hear voices, I heard a voice. Emily's voice," I say.

She sighs. "I didn't." Her faint outline is beginning to materialize in the darkness. Her shoulders are hunched, and her hair is wound into a bun and pinned atop her head.

"Well, you don't have the sight, do you?"

She swats my knee. "You know Mrs. Joiner was full of shit." She pauses. "I know it's stressful being back here. Just… don't let it get inside your head."

"Casualty of having a heart, Kennedy." I say it a bit more sharply than I mean to. The encounter with Ryan rattled me, and it feels a little like I'm sitting in bed with a stranger. But there's so much I need to know, and the tarot card pointing to Kennedy is the only clue I have to go on, vague as it is. And I don't have much time because the pills work fast. I already feel my heart beating slow and steady in my chest, anxiety seeping out of me like poison glistening on my skin. The calm comes quickly, and it brings the strange, the little lights and sounds I know are fragments of dream waiting for the fall. The lucid in-between. Little sparks of waking sleep. I can see Kennedy now in the sliver of moonlight sneaking in through the half-drawn curtains draped over the enormous windows. A radiant halo of light illuminates her, and the image from the tarot card merges with the present, the crown of glass shards glittering like knives. Outside, the full moon sinks into the lake, lighting it up like a radioactive swamp.

"We should talk about last year." My voice sounds thin and tinny.

Kennedy walks her fingers over the sheets and weaves them through mine. "You disappeared on me."

Even through the rapidly thickening fog of drowsiness, this gets to me. I can imagine how busy Kennedy was over the past year. Horse shows, ribbons, trophies. Clam bakes with beautiful people in the Hamptons. Visiting Princeton and Yale and Harvard with her parents, wearing cashmere and pearls, a matching mother-and-daughter set. I wonder if she was just the tiniest bit glad not to have me by her side for a year, skewing the picture like a single pulled thread. With my torn jeans and secondhand sweaters, handmade jewelry and untamable hair, I always stuck out with the Hartfords. And that's before I opened my mouth.

I wonder if she wasn't a little relieved.

She had to have been.

Because after the fire, Kennedy changed her number.

"I almost didn't come this weekend," I say finally.

"Why?"

"You know damn well why. I didn't disappear; you know exactly where I was. Pathetically waiting for you to write or call or show up. And you never did."

"I wanted to," she says in a quiet voice. She strokes my hand, but I withdraw it.

"My parents shipped me off to boarding school again."

"I'm impressed the uniform still fit."

She casts me a withering glare. "It was a nightmare."

I laugh. "Let's not compare notes, then."

"I missed you," she says, her voice catching. She reaches out again, and this time I let her take my hand. I missed her too. But the missing is so wrapped up in hurt, it's impossible to untangle. Every single day I waited in line in the rec room with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. I dialed her number, whispering a prayer of please, please, please. And I listened to a prerecorded message, a hollow voice telling me that her number was no longer in service.

Kennedy had left me.

And that was her goodbye.

I stare at her in the darkness. "I missed you too. I guess I'm just used to losing you by now."

"That hurts."

"I'm sorry. It's not true. I don't think I'll ever get used to it. It just seems like you could have called if you wanted to."

"I'm here now. Isn't that what matters?" She tilts her chin up and I stare down. Her hair is damp, and she smells like lavender and honeysuckle. This is where we kiss. It is written in the history books.

But I turn away.

"What's wrong?" She sits up.

"Everything. You. You're acting like nothing happened." The drowsiness is starting to set in again. My body wants to drift away, but I can't.

She sighs heavily and snaps on the light, temporarily blinding me. "What do you want me to say?"

"That our best friend is dead, Kennedy." My words feel slow, and through the fog, I'm so frustrated I want to scream. "And maybe the fire wasn't an accident."

She stares at me, aghast. "Wasn't an accident?"

"As in, what if that game wasn't just a harmless prank?"

"The game?" Kennedy laughs, an ocean of relief in her voice. "You almost had me worried." Her face looks pale, though, and there are shadows under her eyes.

"Why?" I challenge. "Why would me suggesting that it wasn't an accident worry you?"

She pauses, seeming at a loss for words. "Because. You're talking about arson."

"I'm talking about murder." The word hangs in the air between us. Speaking it out loud feels like opening a door to a very dangerous place.

She looks up suddenly, past me, into the hallway, and places a finger over her lips.

I turn my head and stare down the dark hallway, and again I strain to hear a noise that shouldn't be there, to see a face emerging from the darkness. A long, low-pitched creak echoes down the hall, and I feel Kennedy's hand on my arm. I pull away gently, pressing my feet slowly onto the cold hardwood floor, and take a cautious step toward the door. A second creak freezes me in place, and the hair on the back of my neck stands up.

"Chelsea!" Kennedy hisses.

"There's something out there!"

"It's just Chase."

I look back over my shoulder in disbelief. "If it's just Chase, why do you care if I go after him?" I flick on the light switch. The hallway is empty. I turn back to Kennedy. "Must have been the wind."

She scoots to the edge of the bed. "You have me hearing things." She reaches for my hand, but I keep it by my side. "Look. We'll hike to the cell spot tomorrow and call my mom. I'll find out who sold her the game, track them down, and prove it was a prank. Then will you let this go?"

"It's not just the game!" I force myself to look at her. She looks concerned, but she can lie as well as anyone. "The game just reminded me that the circumstances were suspicious in the first place. But you've all avoided me so well, I've never had the opportunity to question them."

Her eyes widen. "You make it sound like we conspired against you."

"I just want to fill in the blanks about what happened."

"You don't remember?"

I hesitate. "Not everything. But even if I did, I wouldn't know the whole story. I'm just one witness out of five, and I don't know what the rest of you know. What you saw, heard… Any evidence that came out while I was away."

"You didn't think to ask until now? Your parents, your doctors, pick up a newspaper maybe? Did you try to find out what happened all of this time?"

I shrink from her accusing gaze. Of course I didn't. I didn't want to think about it. In a haze of grief and sedatives, it isn't hard to set bad memories afloat, and in the wake of the tragedy I pushed those details as far away as I could. Because thinking about it meant images and sounds like a newsreel, occupying every moment, every space in my head. No sleep. No peace. Just the attic door stuck shut, billows of smoke pouring in from the hallway, the sound of screaming, and then, almost the worst, the moment my gaze swung away from the fog of smoke and toward the open balcony doors. The terrible moment my eyes zeroed in on the sky, the lake beyond, all of the little living things outside, and I knew I was going to leave her behind. And I was never going to forgive myself.

"Why do you want to revisit that night?" Kennedy says.

"I need to in order to make peace with it, Kennedy! You weren't the one who abandoned her. Can you for once please think of what it feels like to be someone other than you?"

She's quiet for a moment. "What do you want to know?"

"How did the fire start?"

She shrugs helplessly. "I don't know. I was outside when Emily went in. Something must have happened while I was out in the yard. You were the last one to see her alive, Chelsea. If anyone saw anything, it would be you. But I accept that you didn't because it was an accident."

"But why was I the last? No one thought I was worth saving either?"

She flinches. "That's not fair. The doors were locked." Were they? I frown. I couldn't have known—my escape route was Kennedy's balcony. "I pounded and shouted until my voice was shot," Kennedy continues. "And no one would ever say you didn't think Emily was worth saving, because everyone understands that you had to let her go."

"Are you sure about that?" I try to ignore the guilty feeling that overwhelms me whenever I start to think too hard about last summer. I bet a lot of people would say that about me. I bet the Joiners would. How do you forgive your daughter's friend for letting her die?

"Everyone who matters, anyway."

"If you were outside…" The tarot card comes back to me. "Did you take the boat out?" I picture her on the bloodred water, radiant in the moonlight. There has to be some significance to the tarot card. Unless Kennedy is right, and Ryan and I are grasping at straws, searching for meaning that doesn't exist.

She looks at me oddly. "Why?"

"Just… I want to know."

She starts biting her nails again. "I don't recall."

"That's convenient. Is that what your dad told you to say?"

"I don't recall," she snaps.

I stare at her. That's coached speech. It's what lawyers tell guilty clients to say to avoid admitting something that could lead to their guilt, without telling an outright lie. It's a very specific phrase. Who says I don't recall in everyday conversation?

"Look, Chels. If you need to process your grief with this… game? Go for it. But I don't want to be part of it. It's not funny to me."

"Does it look like I'm joking?"

"It looks like you think one of us could have actually killed Emily. Why would I kill one of my best friends?"

"I don't know why you do a lot of things you do, Kennedy. Or don't do."

She stares at me. "If that's true, either you really have changed or you never knew me as well as I thought you did."

I stand unsteadily, grabbing a pillow and throw blanket. "Maybe I didn't." My head is swimming now. The images are floating before me, blinking in and out of dreams, the jagged crown, the golden sails, the lake of blood.

She looks at me, perplexed. "Where are you going?"

"I'm sleeping on the couch."

I stumble downstairs, and when I sink onto the couch, I feel like I'm sinking down and down and down through layers of soft, soft, earth, an endless descent, as if the world is bending inward and changing shape, all time and space destabilizing to open an eye for sleep. But I immediately regret my decision. This is where I heard Emily speak. I glance up the stairs and consider apologizing. But I'm so tired I can't think without glittering crowns, or breathe without gallons of blood, or dream without yards of golden silk, billowing in the lavender wind, carrying me through the in-between. I sink my head into the deep, downy pillow and close my eyes.

A voice whispers in my ear, "Don't think you're going to get away—"

Darkness falls.