Ashes to Ashes (30 page)

Then I turn my attention back to Reeve. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I'm so sorry, Elizabeth. This is all my fault. Don't hurt them. They don't have anything to do with this. Let them go. Let's talk, just you and me.”

“Shut up,” I tell him. I use my fingers to push his lips together. “You don't get to be the hero, do you understand me? That's not you. You're the bully. You're
my
bully. That's who you are to me. You're why I didn't want to live anymore.”

Reeve gets down on his knees. He tries to say something, but he can't, because I'm holding his mouth closed. I release it. He sucks in a breath. “Please. Forgive me, Elizabeth. I'm begging you.”

“It's too late for that,” I tell him.

He gasps for air. “I've been running from you ever since that day on the ferry. I've been so scared. That people would know what I did. What kind of person I was. And now it's here. You're here. I can finally tell you how sorry I am.”

“I already know you're sorry. But sorry doesn't change anything.” I lift my hand and push Reeve so hard he does a backward somersault and cracks his head on the floor. Cracks it like an egg. Blood trickles down his forehead. “Sorry doesn't bring me back to life.”

Lillia tries to go to him, but Kat holds her back. Reeve looks
up, stunned and woozy, and it takes him a second to get his bearings. Once he does, he keeps going. He inches toward me on his knees. “Elizabeth, please—”

“Who is Elizabeth? I was never Elizabeth to you. I'm Big Easy, remember? Say it.”

He shakes his head and begins to cry.

“Say it!” I scream so loudly, the glass in the windows rattles.

“Big Easy,” he chokes out.

“There you go,” I say, kindly now. “Feels good, right? Feels natural.”

I take my empty bookshelf and toss it across the room at Reeve. He throws his arms up and ducks out of the way, just in time. I do the same thing with my dresser. I send it flying across the room at Reeve, and it breaks into a thousand splinters.

I feel myself begin to change. Lillia, Kat, and Reeve, they see it happen. Their faces are white with shock. The prom dress, the long blond hair, it all goes away. I become Big Easy, fat and dripping wet.

“There's only one thing you can do for me now, Reeve.”

He inches toward me on his knees. “I'll do it. Anything.”

With a flick of my hand, the pocketknife, the one I gave Reeve, appears out of thin air and hovers in front of his face. “Kill yourself.”

Lillia screams “No!” as Reeve takes the knife into his hands. Reeve tries to push both of them out of the bedroom. Kat breaks free easily, but Reeve's got a better grip on Lillia. She fights him with all her might. “Please, Mary! Don't do this!”

I lift my hand and send Lillia and Kat flying into the hallway. Then I close the door, lock the lock. And it's just me and Reeve. At last. The way it was supposed to be.

They pound and pound their fists on the door. They scream for him as loud as they can. But Reeve keeps his eyes on me. It's like we're the only two people left in the world.

“Do it,” I tell him, and make the knife drop into his hand. “Do it and this will all end.”

He opens the knife and lays the blade against his wrist. His hand is shaking. He sucks in a deep breath and slashes the skin on his left side. The red comes so fast, I think it takes even him by surprise. And then he does the other side, a cut to match. Shaking, he sinks down to the floor.

I watch the red grow, the color drain from his face.

And I feel nothing.

His heart slows; it must be slowing. I take a few steps forward.

I feel nothing. There's no white light, no door that suddenly appears.

Reeve is dying. And I'm not going anywhere.

He whispers, “I hope this sets you free, Elizabeth.”

But it's not.

It's not! I'm still here.

The knife is lying on the floor next to me, blade out and streaked. I gave him that gift with all the love in my heart. It wasn't supposed to be for this.

I reach up to my neck and touch the gnarled blistered skin. It burns hot like fire. I feel the squeeze of the rope choking away the last bit of me that still feels like I could be real.

I'm the one.

I did this to myself. Nobody made me do it.

I open my mouth and scream. Hands fly up to cover ears. The windowpanes shake and shake and shake from my decibels, until they explode and shower the room in crackling shards, and the door bursts wide open.

Lillia and Kat rush inside. Kat tears at her dress, and the girls try to stop Reeve's bleeding.

I watch, motionless, as the flames flicker and hop to my bare mattress, what's left of my dresser. The room begins to fill with the blackest smoke.

I never meant for this to happen.

The floor opens up, and my burning bed drops down to the first floor. Sparks fly up through the hole. Kat screams and nearly falls through, but Lillia pulls her out of the way just in
time. They try to pick up Reeve, to carry him to safety, but he's too heavy. And the fire is too hot. And the smoke is too thick. I can feel it blackening their lungs.

They will die if I don't do something.

They will die just like I did. For no good reason at all.

I killed myself to teach Reeve a lesson. To show him how badly he'd hurt me, to punish him for what he'd done. Only I was the one who was punished. I did it to myself. And I'd give anything, everything, to go back and do it over again.

The flames are an orange wall closing in on them. Lillia and Kat. My friends. The only real friends I ever had. And Reeve, the only boy I've ever loved. The boy who is so sorry for what he did to me. Who'd take it back if he could.

He can't.

But I can. Not for me, but for them.

I concentrate as hard as I can, and I hold back the fire for them. The flames hiss away from me as if I were a force field. I wrap myself around the three of them and carry them to the window, the heat on my back.

And then, the warmth and the light, they move through me. They envelop me.

I'm changing again. This time into something new.

And I'm gone.

W
E FALL ONTO THE COOL
green grass. I can't stop coughing, I can't get air into my lungs. I can hardly even see, my eyes are so watery.

Beside me Kat is doubled over, heaving and spitting black soot into the grass. Her face is streaked with ash and sweat. “Mary!” she screams, hoarse. We stare up at the burning house.

In that moment Mary's house becomes a fireball. Every inch of it is embers. The house lights up the whole sky like a second sun. I see Reeve in the grass. He's still moving. I crawl over to him and press on his wrists as hard as I can.

Sirens wail in the distance. Whatever brought Mary back, whatever brought us together, it's over. Mary is gone. Kat sobs against me, full-body racking sobs, and I hold her tight. I can hear the sirens, getting closer and closer. I feel Reeve's pulse. He's alive.

He's free. We all are.

Because whatever Mary was in the end, she saved us.

W
HAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT CHANGED
us forever, Reeve, Kat, and me. None of us would ever be the same again.

In the fall, when everyone else left for college, Kat stayed behind. She reapplied and went to college in the spring. Not to Oberlin. Instead she chose NYU. She said New York would be good for her, a better scene than Ohio. But we both knew the truth.

Reeve needed twenty stitches in each wrist. He was still in bandages for graduation. Everyone at school thought he'd tried to kill himself over me, and he never denied it.

He was pretty scarce that summer. Reeve moved to Connecticut only a few weeks after graduation to do summer sessions. I thought I might hear from him when I started at BC, the way he said he would at prom, but he never called. The following year he played football in Florida, then reinjured his leg his sophomore year, and that was that.

Alex waited until the last minute of summer to decide where he was going to college, but he eventually said yes to USC and went out to California. I cried when he left.

I had a couple of boyfriends throughout college, nothing too serious and nothing close to being in love. Alex and I would e-mail every so often, and he'd always send me something on my birthday. After Nadia graduated from high school, my parents moved back to Boston, but we kept the house on Jar Island. We turned into summer people again.

Kat's dad died of a heart attack a year after college graduation. We all went back to Jar Island for the funeral. Everyone who cared about Kat was there by her side—Reeve and his family, Alex, me. During the service I thought I saw Mary, sitting in the balcony, and then I blinked, and she was gone. I guess it was a trick of the light.

When Alex and I took the ferry back to Boston together, I asked him if he was seeing anyone special, holding my breath all the while. Alex half smiled in a sardonic sort of way and
said, “You've ruined me for other girls, Lillia. No one else comes close.”

I let my head fall onto his shoulder. “That was my whole plan.”

We haven't spent more than a few days apart ever since. Some things are just meant to be, I suppose.

Kat hasn't set foot on Jar Island since her dad's funeral. She lives in Brooklyn now, which is probably where she was meant to be all along. Pat moved there too, after selling the house. It went for an insane price; real estate on Jar Island is in such high demand. Now they share a loft space in an old factory. I want to visit Kat, see what her life is like. Maybe Alex and I will go sometime this year.

I still go back to Jar Island for holidays and during the summer. And sometimes I'll see Reeve driving around in his truck. He and Luke took over his dad's business.

I remember how he used to look in his football uniform. No boy has ever been as handsome as Reeve in that uniform, on that field. I remember what it felt like to fall in love for the first time. You think you'll never love like that again. But you do.

Life is long if you let it be.

I only wish Mary had been able to find that out.

I hope she got off Jar Island.

I hope she found her peace.

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