“Are you okay?”
I stumble up to the Jeep. I see myself reflected in the glass. I’m not in my party dress, but in a pair of still-damp jeans and a wet white T-shirt, speckled with gravel and dirt, clinging to my rolls of fat. I look down, and there are my old sneakers, soaked through with water.
I try to answer Rennie but I can’t. I’m choking on my tears.
She tells me to get in. I don’t move. She opens the door for me and I finally climb in.
“Where do you live? Where are your parents?”
Maybe she knows where Kat is. Or Lillia. Maybe she can take me to them. I try to ask her, to make words, but nothing comes out of my mouth. It’s like I’m choking. Like something is around my neck, squeezing it closed. I can feel my eyes bulge out of my head. My lungs burn for oxygen.
Rennie’s scared; I can tell she’s scared. “Just breathe. It’s going to be okay. Just breathe.”
“Breathe! Breathe!” I want to. I want to suck in a deep, cool breath, but all I can feel is the burn of the rope around my neck. I’m dizzy from lack of oxygen. That and the way I’ve been swinging, to and fro from the beam in my ceiling, before she cut me down.
“My beautiful baby!” Mom sobs. She leans forward; she kisses my face. Hers is wet with tears. “Why? Why would you do this to yourself?”
I turn to Rennie and am finally able to choke out, in a strained whisper of a voice, “Reeve.” Rennie’s eyes go wide. “Reeve did this to me. This is his fault.”
I watch her hands tighten around the steering wheel. She can’t look at me; she’s too frightened. “I . . . I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“Hold on, baby!” Mom is screaming herself raw. “The ambulance is coming! Hold on. I’ve got you.” I try to do what she wants, but it’s hard. I feel myself slipping away. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. But that’s exactly what’s happening.
And then, with one last rush, I’m pulled out of my body and up to the ceiling. I can see my mom holding me as the ambulance arrives. I see them grab at me, but my mom won’t let me go. She knows. She already knows.
I’m gone. “What are you doing!” Rennie screams. She’s terrified. She’s scooting over as far as she can away from me. She’s not looking at the road, not looking at the turns.
I feel myself heat up, a fire. Hotter than any other time before. I close my eyes and everything goes white, like the center of the sun.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Reeve and I drive around in silence, except for a few times when one of us says, “Oh my God,” because of how crazy this all is.
I don’t ask where he’s going. I just let him drive.
We end up parking in the woods. It’s so dark and quiet. Reeve pulls to a stop and clicks off his headlights, but leaves the car running so it can stay warm.
Not that it matters. For once I’m not even cold. It’s like we’re in our own real-life snow globe.
He unbuckles his seat belt and then I unclick mine, too. And in a second we are completely going at it. I am pressing my lips as hard as I can against his, and his arms are around me, squeezing me so tight. I feel a rush of everything I’ve been trying so hard to hold back. And I can tell he does too.
I can’t kiss him enough; I can’t hold enough of him in my hands.
I pull his coat off his shoulders and then I wriggle out of mine. Reeve lifts me clean out of my seat and puts me in his lap, my back pressed into the steering wheel. The horn keeps honking, but neither of us cares.
He pulls his face away from mine and says, in a panic, “After I left your house that day, I went up to my room and lay in my bed listening to depressing music.”
I keep kissing his face. His eyes, his cheeks. “Like what?”
His eyes roll back in his head. “Like . . . um . . . damn.” He laughs nervously. “Radiohead . . . Beck. I don’t remember now.”
I plant kisses on the side of his neck, up to his ears.
Reeve shivers. “If I had known you came over, I would have run downstairs. I would have showed you off to my whole family.” He pushes me away suddenly, so he can stare me straight in the eyes. “I want you to know that I didn’t invite Rennie. She came on her own.”
I drop my head to his chest and cling to him. I don’t want to, I don’t want to do anything to ruin this moment, but I have to confess. I have to be true to him. “That stuff she was saying at the party . . .”
He lifts my face to his. “Forget it,” he says.
“Reeve, please. Let me finish. I—”
But his mouth comes up my neck and over my lips and then we’re kissing again. His lips are urgent, like all we have is tonight. And I don’t even remember what I was going to say anymore, it’s that good. We kiss over and over and over again. This time there’s no one around to stop us.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
It’s easy to get the pictures. I sneak in to the gallery, grab them out of the bathroom sink cabinet, and sneak straight back out. And then I go find my brother.
Pat and all his friends are camping. I know roughly where the spot is, a wooded clearing near the bluffs that he found on one of his dirt-bike rides. I park as close as I can get, on the side of the road, and head through the woods in my dress and my heels. The trees are so dense the snow barely hits the ground.
I find them. They’ve got a fire going, and everyone’s festive and drunk and cold as shit.
“Kat,” Pat says, standing up from the log he’s sitting on. “What’s up?”
I walk straight up to the fire and toss the stack of Rennie’s photos on the flames. “Someone pour me a whiskey.”
Ricky passes me his bottle. I down what’s left in one thick, smoky gulp.
I sit quietly for a while, while everyone else parties. Every few minutes I send Rennie a text like, Where are you? and Let me know where you are? and Rennie, WTF?!!
Then, through the crackle of the logs and the conversation and the Led Zeppelin, I think I hear a siren. Like a fire truck or an ambulance. I can’t tell. But it sends a shiver down my spine. I glance down at my cell. Rennie hasn’t answered my texts, not a single one.
I’ve got a feeling. A bad feeling.
“Everyone shut up a second!”
Pat laughs at me. He’s sitting across the fire on his sleeping bag, cooking some nasty-looking hot dog on a stick. “You hear Big foot out there?”
The rest of the group either laugh at his lame joke or ignore me and keep talking.