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I stumble, kicking up clouds of dirt with my boots, navigating

around tuft s of prickly star thistle and blue cornfl owers. “Whatever

you want,” I say, but inside I am glowing, triumphant.

“Come on, Soph. I told him we’d be at the end of the road.” She

skips ahead, shaking her hips to the strains of music fl oating from the

house. I grin, following aft er her.

“Who did you call?”

“Trev.”

I stop. “You didn’t.”

“Of course I did.” She tugs me forward, knocking her hips against

mine. The moon is bright, and I’m messed up enough to let my eyes

linger on the curl of her hair, the dark ripple against her pale skin. I

can smell vanilla underneath the pine and almost-rain scent in the air.

“He’ll freak when he sees we’re drunk.”

“I don’t care. He’d freak more if we ditched Jason and drove drunk.

You know how he gets about you and cars.”

This is true. Trev is morbidly afraid of something else happening

to me. Even years later, he watches me in that way I’ve gotten used to,

part fear, part want, all protectiveness Occasionally I’ll turn, meet his

gaze. Sometimes he doesn’t look away, and I catch a glimpse of what

all the other girls see in him, what they want from him.

“Becky’s probably with him,” I say. “She hates me.”

Mina laughs, a little too long. She always was a lightweight. “She

152

F A R F R O M Y O U

really does; you should hear her talk about you. Girl’s got a mouth

on her.”

“Trev’s girlfriend talks to you about me?” I ask, surprised through

my Oxy-vodka haze.

“Well, not to me. I heard her on the phone one day aft er you left .

I took care of it.”

“What was she saying?” I stagger to a stop and face her. “What do

you mean you took care of it?”

Mina sighs, dropping her arm from mine and leaning against

a fence post. She bends down and plucks a cornfl ower, twirling it

between her fi ngers. “It doesn’t matter.” I watch her tear off the blue

petals, one by one—
She loves me, she loves me not
—before tossing the

stem on the ground. She spins in a lazy circle, her short skirt fl aring up.

“Anyway, everyone knows you and Trev will end up married with

babies and stuff ,” Mina says with a smile, but I can hear it: the bitter-

ness underlying her slurred words. “And Becky wants him for good.

She can’t admit the only person he wants is you.”

“But I don’t want Trev,” I say.

Sometimes I wish Trev knew that he was caught in the middle of

this; then I wouldn’t feel so guilty. But he can’t imagine it, because

Mina hides behind her secrets and I wither away my soul with pills,

and we are Just Fine, Thank You. Reckless girls dancing down dirt

roads, waiting to be saved from ourselves.

“We’d be sisters if you married Trev,” Mina says, and her lower

lip sticks out like she’s pouting at the thought of it. Like Trev’s taking

away a toy she wants.

The idea horrifi es me, makes me want to vomit. “You’re not my

sister.”

Mina blinks, and her eyes glint in the moonlight. I want to lean

T E S S S H A R P E

153

forward, press my lips against hers. I need to know what her mouth

tastes like—sweet, maybe, like strawberries.

I’m almost messed up enough to do it, emboldened by her fi ght

with Jason and how high I am. I step toward her, but my knee gives

out, the pain sharp and sudden, and it makes me falter. I pitch for-

ward with an “oomph,” and Mina catches me halfway. But I’ve got

four inches and twenty-fi ve pounds on her, and we end up tangled in

the dirt, laughing. Giggles fi ll the air as truck headlights wind down

the road toward us.

“There you two are.” Trev leans out the window as he cuts the

engine. “I heard you shrieking all the way down the road.”

“Trev!” Mina beams at him, and her hands squeeze my waist in

a way that makes my stomach leap. “You came! I’m breaking up with

Jason. He’s an ass.”

“And you’re drunk.” He gets out of the truck and hauls her up,

gently setting her on her feet. He brushes dirt off her shoulders before

crouching down next to me. “You fall, Soph?”

“I’m okay.” I smile and he smiles back, the concern in his face

retreating. He waits until I hold my hand out for him to pull me up.

“Steady,” he says when my leg wobbles and I lean into him. Trev is

solid, warm. Mina giggles and presses into his other side until he’s got

two armfuls of us. We hold on to him. Put him between us like our

barrier against the truth.

But her hand fi nds mine behind his back and our fi ngers lace

together, the click of our rings a secret sound only we understand.

Some barriers, they’re made to be broken.

33

NOW (JUNE)

“You’re quiet today,” David says halfway into our sec-

ond therapy session on Monday. “What are you thinking

about?”

I look up from my place on his couch. I’ve been twisting

the rings on my thumb, tracing the grooves of the letters

like they’re a key to a lock I haven’t found yet. “Promises,”

I say.

“Do you keep your promises?” David asks.

“Sometimes you can’t keep them.”

“Do you try?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

David smiles. “In a perfect world. But I think you’re well

acquainted with the unfairness of real life.”

“I try to keep mine. I want to.”

“Did Mina keep her promises?”

“Mina didn’t need to. You always ended up forgiving

her, no matter what she did.”

“You care about her a lot.”

“Way to state the obvious, David.”

David’s eyebrow twitches, his pleasant smile dropping

at my hostility before settling back to neutral. “You forgave

her a lot, too.”

T E S S S H A R P E

155

“Don’t talk about her like you knew her,” I say. “You

didn’t. You won’t.”

“Not unless you tell me.”

I don’t talk for a long time, just sit there, and he doesn’t

force me to continue. He folds his hands together and sits

back in his chair to wait me out.

“She was bossy,” I say fi nally. “And spoiled. But really

thoughtful. And smart. Smarter than everyone else. She

could bullshit her way out of anything by just smiling. She

was a bitch when she needed to be and she’d never apolo-

gize for it. She’s the fi rst thing I think of when I wake up,

the last thing I think of when I go to sleep, and the only

thing I think about in between.”

I stare at the framed diplomas on the wall, the award

David got from some organization for homeless youth,

another from an abused women’s group. By the time he

speaks, I’ve practically memorized the entire wall.

“That makes her sound like an addiction, Sophie.”

I keep staring at the wall. I can’t look at him. Not now.

“I don’t want to talk anymore today.”

“Okay,” David says. “We’ll sit here just a few minutes

longer, in case you change your mind.”

When I get into the car, my phone vibrates. I’d turned it off

during my session, but now I see that Rachel has left me a

message.

I call my voicemail and freeze in the act of turning my

keys in the ignition, listening to the message play: “It’s me. I

got the drive open. You need to call me. I think I know why

Mina was killed.”

34

TEN MONTHS AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

“We’re lost,” I insist.

“No, we’re not.” Mina navigates the truck down the dirt utility

road we’ve been driving down the past thirty minutes. It’s dark out-

side, and the brights of Trev’s truck cut through the forest as we rock

back and forth on the rough road. “Amber said off Route 3, down the

second road to the right.”

“We’re totally lost,” I say. “No way there’s a campground out this

far. There’s nothing here but trees and deer.”

Mina sighs. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll turn around. Maybe we missed

a turnoff or something.”

The trees are too thick to get a signal—so I can’t callAmber to

tell her why Mina and I are so late to join her and Adam at the camp-

ground. Mina backs the truck up slowly—the road we’re on is cut out

of the mountain, hugging a cliff that’s so steep, I can’t see the bottom

in the darkness. The wheels skirt close to the slope and Mina bites her

lip in concentration, her knuckles white against the wheel. Aft er a few

false starts, she fi nally gets us turned around, but we only get a half

a mile before a
thunka-dunk, thunka-dunk
reverberates through the

cab, and the ride gets even bumpier.

“Crap.” Mina slows to a stop. “I think we have a fl at.”

I grab the fl ashlight from the glove box and follow her out of the

truck, shining the beam on the tire.

T E S S S H A R P E

157

Mina frowns. “Do you know how to change it?”

I shake my head and look down the road. It’s at least three miles

back to the highway. I rub absently at my leg, thinking about how

much it’s gonna hurt, walking that far.

Mina pulls her phone out and stomps around, trying to get a

signal. I don’t tell her it’s useless, because she’s got that determined

look on her face and she keeps throwing glances at my leg, like she

knows the hurt I’m anticipating. I lean against a big piece of slate that’s

embedded in the mountain looming over us like a gray giant, and wait

for her to admit defeat. It’s August, but it’s still cool at night, and I like

the little shiver that goes down my back, the prickle of goose bumps

over my skin. It’s nice being out here in the forest; loud in its own way,

the rustle and cracks in the undergrowth—hopefully a deer instead

of a bear—the groan of the branches in the wind punctuated by the

steady crunch of Mina’s boots against the road. I close my eyes and let

the sounds fi ll me.

“You don’t have any signal?” Mina asks hopefully aft er about fi ve

minutes of walking back and forth, waving her phone around.

“Nope. We should start walking,” I say. “It’s not like we’re blocking

a main road. We’ll get Trev to come change the tire in the morning.”

“Don’t be stupid. I can’t make you walk that far. I’ll go get help and

come back for you.”

“I’m being stupid? You’re the one who failed the wilderness skills

part of Girl Scouts. You’ll probably get eaten by a bear. You go, I go.”

“It’s a road. I can’t get lost following a road. And anyway, you

couldn’t walk that far,” she says.

“Sure I can.”

“No way,” she says, her mouth set mulishly.

“You can’t tell me what to do. I’m coming.”

“No!” Mina says.

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F A R F R O M Y O U

“Yes,” I say, starting to get annoyed. “What is up with you? Stop

treating me like I’m—”

“Weak?” she fi nishes for me. “Disabled? Hurt?” Her voice rises

with each word, trembling and high-pitched, like they’ve been stuck

in her forever, now fi nally free.

I jerk back from her, like she’s hit me instead of just telling the

truth. Even though she’s standing ten feet away, I need more distance

from her. I stumble back, achingly aware of my clumsiness in that

moment. “What the hell, Mina?”

But I’ve inadvertently unleashed something in her, and she keeps

talking, the words spilling out in the night. “If you walk that far, you’ll

use it as an excuse to take more of those stupid pills. And then you’re