I snatch the pillow up and dust it off. It’s not that bad. I feel stupid for overreacting. Hugo confirms the fact by snapping a picture of me and captioning it “Girl About to Explode.” He grins. “Not like there probably aren’t four thousand pillows in this place.”
I push the camera out of my face. I’m about to explain that my pillow is hypoallergenic and my allergies are always worst in the spring and it’s the only pillow I’ve found that’s comfortable enough, but he’s right. I do need to loosen up. Funny, I’ve spent so much energy trying to convince my dad that he’d be okay if he took the shackles off my wrists that I never even thought about whether I would be okay once I finally got loose. This is my first trip away from my dad, away from home. And that is thrilling … but terrifying.
I stifle a sneeze, then cross my arms over my chest, pinching my skin and mentally reciting my motto: You will be chill. Ice cubes will be jealous of you.
I’m about to pick up my backpack from Justin’s feet but stop when I see something in the woods. The curve of an elbow, pale white against the lush green, still and stark among the new leaves as they sway in the wind. But the next second, it’s gone. I suck in a breath, exhale slowly. The last thing I need to be doing is seeing things. Again.
The thing is, nobody here knows about my mother. Not even Angela. Hell, I don’t really even know. The mystery Nia Levesque became a part of is five hundred miles away, and I’d like it to stay there. Nobody here knows my history. And I’m going to keep it that way.
Chapter Two
It’s been almost ten years since I moved into the tall pines of Wayview, Maine, the last place on earth I’d have picked to live, if it was up to me.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
So I guess that means it will be the tenth anniversary of my mom’s death. Not that I’m keeping track. We left New Jersey only a couple weeks afterward, and we’ve never been back.
These are the facts I have: Nia Levesque waded into the Delaware River one fair summer’s night shortly after my seventh birthday. I know little else because how much a person’s mother hated life is not something people like to discuss with a seven-year-old. I remember things, though, like that her skin was always damp and clammy and that her hair always looked like it needed a comb run through it. Despite those things, she was my sun. When she was gone, it was like my whole universe went out of orbit, because I’d been so used to following three steps behind her.
I’ve heard that after a suicide, the people left behind always look back and see signs in the victim, signs of pain or trauma they somehow ignored. I know I was only seven, but with my mom, there were no indications. Nothing. She was never distant; she smiled and hugged and kissed me all the time. When I look back at my mom, I can’t help but think there was so much about her I didn’t know, so much she must have kept hidden from me.
I know that I have forgotten things: the slope of her nose, the color of her skin, the exact blue shade of her eyes, the little mannerisms she had. Pictures don’t convey a whole person, and I only have one of those. It wasn’t the one I would have chosen, but I didn’t know that my father and I would never return home. I would have taken my whole photo book, which had countless beautiful pictures of my mother, but he chose one picture, from my sixth birthday. In it, she’s not even smiling. She’s leaning over me as I blow out the candles on my birthday cake and she looks worried, probably that a lock of my hair might get caught in the flame. I don’t know what her smile looks like anymore. Every memory I have is just a poor reproduction, merely a shade of her. I worry that as days go by I will forget more and more, and the only thing left will be this overwhelming feeling of abandonment. That and the worried, uneasy woman she was in that picture.
When we lived in New Jersey, we had a house right on the river. I had the best room, all pink, and the sunrise would bounce off the waves and create magical iridescent ripples on my walls. My father put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, but when the moon shone, it would splash the brightest white ripples right onto them. More often than not, I felt like I was sleeping underwater rather than under a night sky.
Strange things happened around the time of her death. I can’t really explain it. I would lie in my bed, listening to the rush of the river against the rocks, and in time it would sound like voices. Whispering to me. Then the visions came. They didn’t start off frightening. I’d lie in the dark with my eyes open, watching them parade through my room, oblivious to me, a series of who-knows-what—ideas or dreams or ghosts, playing on a movie reel. Redheaded boys in overalls, fishing. Girls in old-fashioned swim trunks, holding their noses as they plunged into the blackness. Men in waders, sleeves rolled up. Sometimes I’d have conversations with them, play games with them, but usually I’d just watch them quietly, all night long, wishing I could be part of their carefree, happy lives.
Until the images … changed.
I fight back the picture of the girl in the pink party dress and tight, stringy braids. I didn’t know her name, didn’t know anything about her except that her expression was hopeless and sad, she was covered in dirt, one of her knee-high socks was pooled around her ankle, and her knees were bloody. I think she wanted to tell me something, but whenever she opened her mouth to speak to me, mud poured from it. Mud trickled from her nose, covering the lower part of her face like a beard. Her cheeks were muddy and lined with tears.
I stopped sleeping. My dad was stressed out enough teaching history to inner-city kids in Paterson, in a district two hours from our house, so he didn’t need me screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night, like I so often did. He thought I missed my mom. And yeah, I did, but there was more. And I was afraid to tell him. Turned out I was as good at keeping secrets as my mom was.
I lost so many things from that room. My fairy brush, my favorite blue hair ties, my stuffed zebra. And every picture of my mother, except for one. One day, my dad took me out for what I thought was ice cream but turned out to be forever. He’d hastily packed a bag with only a few of my clothes, and so I lost my brand-new Cinderella T-shirt and my comfortable jeans. I don’t know why we left so quickly. Luckily, he’d said, he had family up in Wayview, with a kid just my age, and he couldn’t wait for me to meet them. I knew my father was anxious, because when he is, he repeats himself. As we drove, he kept telling me, over and over again, how much I’d like Maine. How Aunt Missy and Uncle Jim and Angela couldn’t wait to see me. How I was his “everything.” That’s the thing I remember the most, “You’re my everything,” spouted out again and again until it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t care. I had to pee so bad but kept thinking we were almost there. With every passing mile, I became more and more certain I’d never see my things, my old house, again. And I couldn’t stop thinking that if Mom were here, she wouldn’t have agreed to this. She hated the cold. I realized then that this was the first of many things she wouldn’t be around to protect me from.
That was when I started to hate her. Not long after, I stopped asking questions about why she did what she did. My father always changed the subject anyway.
Last year Angela hooked up with this guy named Spee. Ken Specian, really, but everyone called him Spee. He was a big jock, totally full of himself, which tells you how much I liked him. Angela has the worst luck with guys; watching her trying to get on with a guy she’s really into is like watching a plane attempting to touch down without landing gear. Anyway, she was so into Spee, but it was obvious that he didn’t give a rat’s you-know-what about her, because, well, he never took her out in public. He never took her anywhere they might see other people from school. All they ever did was go to Frank’s Diner, ten miles out of town on this deserted mountain road. Angela would just mention Frank’s and I would know what she was up to. It was a place the toothless crowd frequented, so she and Spee brought the average age of the customers down to ninety.