“She knew what would happen. It was never a cry for help, not for Tori. It was always the real deal. And the worst thing about it all is she never should have been alone that afternoon. Jase had a football game, a final of a local competition, and Dad insisted we all went. Tori got to stay behind because she was studying for her exams, but I was forced into going. And I did. I went, and that’s what I found when I came home. My last memory of my big sister was always supposed to be of us dancing together at Juilliard, but instead it’s of her dead body.”
Abbi’s arms slide around me, and she pulls me closer to her. Her fingers splay across my back, like she’s trying to wrap every part of me up.
“And no one dares to speak about her. Just me. I’m the only one who remembers she even existed. And it f**king kills me.” I close my eyes as the tears I’ve fought this whole time spill out and down my cheeks. They roll down silently, nothing like the tears that fell the day I found Tori. I can hear it in my head; my shouts for help, my inconsolable sobbing, the scrambles of my parents, my mother’s cries, Kiera’s shushing and shuffling of the other kids. Yet over it all I hear one long scream filled with more pain than I ever thought one person could feel. My scream. The one that belonged to the bond I’d had with Tori, the bond that had shattered the second my eyes fell on her broken, still body.
Abbi’s arms tighten around me. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You didn’t make that choice, did you? She did. No one can apologize for her mistakes.”
“No, I didn’t, but I almost did.” Her whispers are muffled, and I’m certain I wouldn’t have heard her if it wasn’t my shoulder she was snuggled into.
“What?”
She takes a deep breath and pulls back. Her fingers slip under her sleeves, and she rolls them up to her elbows, doing the same with her sweatpants to her knees. Finally, she pulls her top up, exposing her stomach, and drops her head.
I comb my eyes over her bare skin. Almost every inch is covered with white lines, long and short, deep and shallow, and I can’t stop myself from reaching for her. My fingers run over her arms, her legs, her stomach, feeling every bump across her skin.
“Almost,” she whispers, stilling my hands against her stomach. “I get why Tori did it. I understand. Sometimes it gets too much. Sometimes,” she breathes in heavily. “Sometimes just once isn’t enough. It’s addictive. The release you get, however short, it’s like a drug. Once you’ve done it once, you keep doing it, over and over. Tori knew what she was doing, and I did too. I didn’t want to hurt anymore, I didn’t want to keep getting hurt, but it was too late for me to get out that way, so I took the easy way. The coward’s way. I just wanted a life where I’d be happy, where I wouldn’t be controlled by him. I didn’t want a life where I wondered when the next argument or fight would be, and I was in too deep to get out. I was too broken and too weak to even fight with him anymore. I didn’t want that for myself.
“If Maddie hadn’t of found me, I wouldn’t be here now. I tried what Tori did – hit the main arteries and just bleed. Unlike Tori, I misjudged it. When I woke up, they told me I was half an inch away from it. If I’d hit it I wouldn’t have been around for Maddie to save. It would have been too late for me.”
Him. Argument. Fight.
“Who is “him?”” My arms are tense. The thought that someone, anyone, could have hurt her so badly she wanted to take her own life sparks a fury in me I didn’t know I had.
She curls her fingers around mine. “He doesn’t matter. He can’t hurt me anymore. Only I can do that now.”
“You can, but you won’t.” I tug her clothes down, covering the marks, and look her in the eyes. “If it hurts I want to know.”
“It’s not a pain you can take away.”
“No, but it’s a pain I can ride out with you. I can be there and hold you whenever you need it. You don’t have to do this alone anymore, Abbi.”
“I’ve never been alone,” she whispers. “When I left the hospital I didn’t come home. They sent me to a mental institution. I came home six weeks ago.”
Shit.
I tug her into my body, needing to do nothing but just hold her.
“They sent me there so I couldn’t try again. So I couldn’t get that half an inch over.”
“Would you have? If you’d come straight home?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She shrugs, laying her head against me. “Last year feels like a lifetime away, but even then I remember thinking I didn’t get it right for a reason. If I was truly meant to go, if it was meant to work, I would have hit the artery dead on, or Maddie wouldn’t have found me. That half an inch saved my life.”
I bend my head forward, letting my lips press against the top of her head. “I’m really, really glad you missed.”
Abbi curves her arms around me, tucking her legs under her. She turns her face into my chest. “Me too.”
~
Pain shoots through my neck as I try to move, and cramp takes my calf hostage.
“Bastard,” I mutter, rubbing both my neck and my leg at the same time. This is why no one should sleep on a sofa – especially not if it’s only two seats and you’re over six foot tall. It’s like trying to get a blow-up bed back to the size it was when it first came out the box.
A royal pain in the arse.
I roll over on Abbi’s sofa, rubbing my eyes. When I open them, I find her sitting cross-legged on the floor with a book open in her lap. Her hair is flowing over her shoulders, and for the first time since I met her, she’s wearing something other than long sleeves. Her tank top and yoga pants show her scars clearly even in the low morning light.
I ease myself up onto my elbow. “Good reading?”
Abbi pushes her hair back from her face as she tilts her face up to me. “Depends on your definition of “good” at six in the morning.”
“Okay.” I rub a hand down my face. “There is nothing that could even be considered good at six a.m.”
She smiles slightly. “It’s my diary. From St. Morris’s… The mental institution.”
“Ah.” I push myself to a sitting position. “I can’t imagine that’s light morning reading.”
A small laugh leaves her. “Not exactly.” She closes the book and runs her finger across the cover. “I haven’t looked at it since I left. I shoved it in a drawer when I got home and left it there. I didn’t want to look at it. I thought it was the most stupid and pointless thing ever – writing in a diary wasn’t going to help me get better. Dr. Hausen – my psychiatrist – made me do it. She said even if I just wrote one line a day about how I was feeling, it would help me.”