“I didn’t mean that,” Adam babbled, “I just meant, I was surprised to see you here-”
“Of course you were, since we were meeting up there,” Harper pointed out. There was a strange note in her voice, Beth realized. Something almost human. Almost like… pain. “Of course, I was surprised too… when you didn’t show. But now I get it. You found a better option.” She glared at Beth, her eyes narrowed and her teeth bared. “I didn’t mean to interrupt-I’ll just grab my jacket and get out of your hair.”
“It’s not like that, Harper, I just forgot, and-”
“Oh, that makes me feel a lot better. I’m standing up there like an idiot, waiting around, wondering if you were dead or something, because surely nothing but that would have kept you away, not after all that ‘I’ll never lose you again’ crap.”
“It wasn’t crap,” he said quietly.
“Good luck explaining that to your new girlfriend.”
“That’s not what’s going on here,” he insisted. “If you’d just give me a chance…” Beth expected him to move toward Harper, to do something, to force her to understand. But, instead, he just remained where he was, standing in front of the bed, his arms dangling loosely, one of them still brushing Beth’s shoulder.
“I gave you a chance, and you forgot,” Harper snapped.
“That’s not fair!”
“You want to talk fair? You want to sit here, with her, and talk fair?”
“I don’t even know why-”
“STOP!”
Beth wondered why they had both frozen and turned to stare at her. Then she realized that she was the one who had screamed.
She couldn’t stand it anymore; she couldn’t ruin anything else with her lies and her cowardice. Everything was falling apart around her, and all this destruction, all this pain, it was because of her. She was done. Whatever had happened to her tonight, whatever she had taken, it had apparently had an effect. The terror was still there, but it was quieter, farther away, like her mind had sunk into a deep sea, and all the excuses, all the rationalizations, all the terrifying consequences were muffled by the dark, still waters.
She couldn’t stand the twisted pain on Adam’s face and the hatred in Harper’s eyes, and she couldn’t stand her own weakness. Not anymore.
“Adam’s only here with me because I lied to him,” Beth said. She barely spoke above a whisper, but there must have been something in her voice, or in her face, that commanded attention. Harper and Adam didn’t interrupt; they barely moved. “If he knew the truth, he would-” She held her breath until the urge to sob passed. “He would hate me. He should hate me.”
Adam still didn’t speak, but he sat down again on the edge of the bed and took her hand, pressing it gently. Beth wanted to pull away, but speaking was hard enough. She couldn’t move. “I lied to everyone. At least, I didn’t tell the truth. Harper, I didn’t tell you what happened, and now you think that it was your fault and I wanted to tell you, I did, because I am so sorry, even if that sounds stupid and small to say, it’s true, I would do anything to change what happened, and if I could I would you have to believe that-”
“Beth! What the hell are you talking about?” Harper’s hand was trembling, and Beth wondered if some part of her already knew.
It didn’t make it any easier to say it out loud.
Beth allowed herself a moment to hope that speaking the truth would change everything: It would lift the cloud of guilt and let her breathe again. It would make up for what she’d done, redeem her so that she could enjoy her life again, allow herself to be happy. Maybe it wasn’t just a cliché-maybe the truth really would set her free.
The moment passed. And it didn’t matter, not anymore. Maybe nothing could save her now. But she had to try.
“I did it.” In her mind, Beth delivered the news standing up, facing Harper with strength and dignity, a noble image of apology and disgrace. In reality, she pressed her face into her hands, her shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs, her nose stuffed, her cheeks wet, her voice muffled. “I spiked your drink, Harper. Before the speech. Before the accident.” A wave of nausea swept through her, and she fell forward, her head spinning like she was going to pass out. Hunched over, she couldn’t see Harper’s reaction, didn’t even know if Adam was still by her side. A dull, roaring thunder filled her ears. She couldn’t even hear her own voice, and wasn’t sure if she was speaking at all anymore, or whether she was confessing in her own head.
Maybe, she thought, as the world spun around her, fading in and out of a gray mist, this is all still just a dream.
Still, she forced the words out. Each one hurt, as if scraping a razor blade across her tongue on the way out.
“It was me.”
She was no longer in the hotel room; she was back at school, a small pill warm in her hands, slipping into a mug of coffee. Dissolving. Disappearing.
“I did it.”
She was on an empty road, standing over a scorched patch of ground, everything matted down. Burned out. Dead. She choked on an acrid stench of smoke and gasoline.
“I killed Kaia.”
She stopped waiting to wake up.
Chapter 10
First came the relief.
Then came the rage.
Harper pressed herself flat against the wall, her nails digging into the cheap paint. She imagined they were digging into Beth’s big blue Bambi eyes. She wanted to claw them out.
I didn’t kill her. Every night as Harper went to sleep, she felt her hands on the steering wheel; she heard the crunch of metal, and the screams. But all of it had been a lie. It might as well have been Beth at that wheel; it might as well have been a gun in Beth’s hand. It wasn’t my fault, Harper thought in wonderment.
It was hers.
“I don’t… I don’t understand,” Adam stuttered. Harper realized he was still sitting next to Beth on the bed-next to a killer. Their hands were clasped together. She held herself still, and tried to resist the urge to attack. “How could you… what do you mean you killed her?” Adam said. “You weren’t even there, and-I thought Kaia was driving the car?”
“I was driving,” Harper said flatly. The words had been trapped in her for so long, poisoning everything. And now they didn’t even matter.
And Beth had known all along, she realized. Beth had known, and let Harper believe…
She almost hadn’t survived the guilt. She had almost drowned. And Beth held the life preserver in her arms, saw her flailing-and turned away.
“I was driving,” she said again, louder this time. The words gave her power. “But this-” Bitch. Psycho. Murderer. “You. You put something in my drink. And you let me get up there in front of all those people and make an ass of myself. Then you let me get into a car. You just let-” She gasped, remembering the sirens, remembering the screams. “You just let it happen.”
“I’m sorry…!” Beth wailed, her words trailing off into an incoherent moan. She tipped over onto her side and curled up into a tight fetal ball, shaking. Adam leaned over her, stroking her head.
“What the hell are you doing?” Harper asked Adam. “Didn’t you hear her? She killed Kaia. And she let me think that I-what are you doing?”
“We have to give her a chance to explain,” Adam said softly, as if Beth were a child who’d just confessed to breaking Harper’s favorite lamp. “This doesn’t make any sense, and she… it’s Beth. She’s a good person. There must be some explanation, some-”