Ripple (4 page)

My voice cracks and catches in my throat. This is the only time of day I let my guard down. I’m not sure why I come up here every day, as if I’ll find the answers, as if he’ll tell me he doesn’t blame me for what happened. But somehow talking to him takes a tiny piece of the guilt away. It’s just a little ice chip of a huge iceberg, but it’s something.

I swallow as the first tear brims and rolls across my temple. As my vision swims with tears, it makes the darkening sky look like the ocean, like rippling, shimmering water.

And suddenly, I’m there again, standing on the dark beach with Steven.

It can’t be me, singing it, but it is. The notes ring out, stronger and stronger as I pick up an urgent paddle. I don’t know why I’m doing this; I only know it feels
right.
As if I’ve waited my entire life to sing this song.

What am I doing? Where did Steven go?

I swim upright, treading water, trying to make out the beach in the distance.
Did he get out? Swim to shore?
I peer into the darkness, but it’s impossible to see beyond twenty feet. The swells rise around me, and I bob along the surface, waiting.

Hair.

Skin.

Steven.

No. No, no, no, no.

I lean over and try to breathe life into him. I plug his nose and give him everything I have. I press on his chest, trying to force his heart to beat.
He can’t be that far gone. He can’t be.
It seemed like only seconds we were apart.

 

I play it over and over in my mind, every day of my life, but every time it ends the same. I’m wrapped up in a blanket in the backseat of a police car as Steven’s cold, sheet-covered body is wheeled past me. The bed jostles as they lift it into the ambulance, and his hand slides out from under the sheet, and all I can see is his pale, lifeless fingers.

I blink, hard, washing away the memory. You don’t have to sleep, you don’t have to dream, to have nightmares.

His death was considered suspicious. He was a vibrant seventeenyear-old athlete who shouldn’t have succumbed to the waves—he swam in his family’s pool every day and surfed during the summer. The police never understood why we went swimming on such a dark night; and at the time, neither did I.

I was brought in for questioning again and again. I retold the story over and over—leaving out the part where I sang. Even then, before I really understood what that meant, I knew not to mention it.

Eventually, the police determined that there was no way I could have drowned him myself. At least not by any normal means. Steven was so much bigger than me, so much stronger. When the autopsy came back clean—no bruising, no skin underneath his fingernails, no sign of a struggle—the drowning was ruled accidental.

Reporters speculated that he’d become disoriented in the dark. Unable to find the shore, he simply got too tired to keep his head above water. Others said it must have been a leg cramp, worsened by the growing waves. A sad, tragic accident.

But my friends never saw it that way. They wanted to know why I led him out of the house, toward the beach. Why I didn’t save him. And when I refused to explain anything, even to Sienna, they turned on me.

In the days following his death, I ignored the intense desire to swim, and I shut everyone out. I pulled the drapes closed in my room and lay there all night long, staring at the shadows, pretending I wasn’t craving the feel of the water against my skin.

With each day, I grew sicker. It was just a little fever at first, but soon I could hardly stand it. Eventually, I drove up to an old lake where I used to go swimming with Sienna and Nikki and Kristi.

I sang all night. And by morning, I felt stronger than ever. But the feeling only lasted a day.

Within two weeks, I was swimming every night.

 

I sigh, rolling over onto my stomach and propping myself up on my elbows. Maybe it’s morbid to be lying here in the grass, just six feet above the bodies. Maybe someone would be horrified if they saw me. But I need this time with him—it’s the only thing that keeps me sane. Luckily, Steven’s grave is hard to see from the pathways because of a few shrubs and the willow. I would probably see someone long before they’d see me.

I reach out and trace my fingers over Steven’s grave marker.
Steven Goode. Beloved Son, Brother and Friend.
At the bottom is an engraved football. Steven didn’t even like football. I never told anyone that. He did it for his dad, who played through high school and college but never made it pro. That was when I first began to hope that he liked me—he was telling me secrets no one else knew. Secrets he trusted me with.

I never got to tell him mine. I spent three years pining for him; just when things started to shift, just when it looked as if the romance wasn’t all in my head, I killed him.

I set the Chevelle in front of his headstone. Every night, I tell him everything, even about the curse I live with. He’s the only one who knows the truth. Unless I want all my old friends to end up in the ground next to him, I have to keep them away.

I kiss my fingertips and then place them on his headstone. For a brief moment, my fingers linger on the marble, and I wonder for the thousandth time what it would have been like to
be
with him for more than just a moment. My sixteenth-birthday party could have been the start of something. And instead, it was the end.

I wonder for the thousandth time if he could have loved me in that same fierce way I loved him. “Good night, Steven.”

I get up and wipe my knees off and then step back onto the pathways. It’s getting darker now and harder to see. I have another night of swimming ahead of me. Even as I leave his body to rot in a grave that I put him in, I must return to the water.

“See you tomorrow,” I whisper, as if someone will hear.

And then I take the first few steps that will leave him behind.

I
swam all night, but my stomach still churns as I walk into the doors at school, zipping up my fleece jacket as though somehow it will protect me from what’s to come. Getting through today will be a gauntlet.

We’re two weeks into the school year, now, which means one thing: it’s my birthday. It should be a happy day. For any other person in this school, it would be. But my birthday will forever mark the anniversary of Steven’s death; and no one is going to let me forget it. The police may have cleared my name, but to everyone else, I was found guilty. Forever and always, the one who stole Steven from their lives.

I tip my chin up, square my shoulders, and try to walk to my locker as if I don’t notice the watchful eyes of my classmates.

An underclassman, oblivious to the tension in the hall, walks by me, his eyes sweeping over me in an appreciative, almost lustful way before he catches my glare and turns away.

A group of people, Sienna and her boyfriend Patrick, plus Nikki and Kristi, stand together not far from my locker. They lounge around a big bay window, officially reserved for seniors.
Unofficially,
it’s for top tier seniors, and that means it belongs to them. Why did I have to be cursed with a locker so close to their stomping grounds?

I turn to my locker, concentrating on keeping my hand from shaking so much they’ll see it. I screw up the combination the first time and have to start over. I can feel their eyes on my back, watching me. My chest tightens and it seems harder to breathe.

Finally, I hit the last digit and pop the door open.

Sand spills out in a wave, piling up at my feet. My books, my papers, everything is filled with grit.

I whirl around, wondering which of my classmates is to blame. Sienna’s closer than before, her hand on her hip. She’s wearing a kneelength black skirt and one of Steven’s old T-shirts, the one he used to wear at least once a week. I haven’t seen that shirt since last year. Since my
seventeenth
birthday. I wonder what else of his she’s kept.

My chest rises and falls rapidly, and I’m so close to losing it I want to just leave everything like this and run.

“Happy birthday,” she says, her voice trembling.

I blink.