Page 37

Isaac’s text lights up in my lap, in response to my middle finger pic.

“Tell her, Brooke,” Lilly says.

“Sasha . . .” Brooke’s voice is unsure, watery, something I’ve never heard from her. “It’s just that . . .”

“Say it,” Lilly pushes. “Everyone thinks it anyway.”

Brooke straightens and looks right at me, regal as hell even with a smear of pizza grease across her chest and a pimple in the middle of her forehead.

“You’re a bitch,” she says, just as my phone vibrates, tumbling from my lap.

Gotta go

I hear the low purr of a motorcycle as he fires up the engine, the noise sending my heart into a patter to match, black spots careening across everything I see as I push back from my desk, chair rolling across my phone and crunching the screen.

“A total bitch,” Lilly agrees, her face briefly visible between flashes of black as I run to the window, my heart leading the way. It’s pushing, beating frantically in a voiceless scream to tell him to come back, to stay, to lay with me in the moonlight and mold me into what I want to be.

The fastest way between two points is a straight line. Shanna knows this because I know this, and her heart feeds my brain, blood pulsing up and coming back down, knowledge and need combining to create the perfect storm as our body hits the window.

My head hits first, skull shattering the glass and making way for hands that search for purchase, feet kicking as if the air may suddenly coalesce. It doesn’t, and I fall, branches tearing at my limbs, blood and blackness in my vision and two girls’ voices from above calling . . .

Sasha?

Sasha?

Sasha?

I hit the ground and all the air is knocked out of me, a perpetual exhale that won’t let me pull anything back in, my lungs flattened by the impact. I try but get only a hissing sound and the coppery taste of blood as I suck in streams of warmth running down both sides of my face. I try again to breathe, and this time it’s a gurgle as blood surges up from inside as well, rising to meet what I’m swallowing.

I’ve managed a third breath when Mom and Dad come running, the side door slamming behind them. Mom’s hands are on me, touching, pulling, pushing, grabbing, but they come back slick with blood so dark it’s as black as the sky, fragments of glass sparkling with their own constellations on her palms.

“Don’t touch her,” Dad is yelling. “They said don’t try to move her.”

He’s got one hand on his cell and the other on Mom’s shoulder, but it’s too late. She’s already done everything she can think of: propped my head, wiped my face, told me it’s going to be okay. All the things that got me through fevers and colds, chicken pox and strep throat. But I didn’t have a tree branch stuck in my side then, or a flap of my scalp hanging to one side.

I move my hands, for what I don’t know. I don’t have the strength to raise my arms, so I dig into the ground, making ten tiny holes on either side of my body as I try to find something to root myself to. Mom is hurting more than helping, Dad keeps saying our address over and over, even though surely emergency services has got it by now, and still I can hear my friends through what’s left of my window, vaguely calling for me.

What I don’t hear is Isaac coming back.

I clench my teeth as Mom reaches for my face, trying to find some way to put my head back together. Maybe something she picked up in one of her crafting classes will finally be useful.

“Don’t touch her,” Dad says again, leaning over us both. “You’ll make it worse.”

“Jesus Christ, Mark,” Mom says. “How? Look at her!”

“They’ll be here,” Dad says, repeating it as if it will make the ambulance come faster. “They’ll be here. They’re on their way.”

“They’re on the way.” Mom puts her face right down to mine and says it a third time, in case I hadn’t picked up on that fact.

The sirens can be heard from miles away. Dad leaves Mom and me under the tree to wave them down, just in case GPS fails them, I suppose. Mom puts her cheek next to mine, coating her own in blood and accidentally inhaling some of my hair, which hurts like hell when she finally pulls back and part of my scalp follows.

“Sasha,” she whispers. “What have you done?”

My fingers dig deeper into the dirt, the cold solidness of it giving me more comfort than she can. I’ve done nothing, and I know it. It was Shanna who made this leap, her heart leading the way though our body shared the fall. Spasmodic light fills the yard, the branches of the tree we lie under dancing across the side of the house.

“Ma’am, we need you to move aside,” a woman says, replacing my panicking mother with something I can relate to. She’s all calculation, her eyes skimming over me in a moment, decisions being made immediately.

I like her.