Could that be any more bizarre? Sara babysitting Andy while Mom picked me up? Mom’s words just hung there in the car. “You and Sara are friends again?” I asked finally.
Mom sighed. “It’s a little better between us,” she said, “though I wouldn’t use the word ‘friends’ to describe our relationship. I couldn’t find anyone else this morning and he was really so sick I didn’t want to leave him alone. Sara wasn’t thrilled about it, but she said yes.”
Mom looked older than I remembered. I hadn’t noticed it during her visits, but now I could see that the skin above her eyes sagged a little. She’d cut her dark hair short, though, and it looked good. Actually kind of cool. Our hair was the same color, but mine was much thicker and wilder, like Daddy’s had been. I had it in a long ponytail, which is how I wore it the whole year in prison.
“I don’t think it’ll ever be the same between Sara and me,” Mom said. “I’ve let it go, though. My end of it.” I knew she meant the part about Sara having an affair with my father while he was married to Mom. It turned out that my father was also Keith’s father. Surprise, surprise. Andy didn’t know that, though.
“But she’s still upset,” Mom said. “You know.”
Yeah, I knew. Upset about Keith getting burned in the fire. I didn’t blame her. I cried every time I thought about how I’d hurt him. “I won’t go in when we stop there. Okay?” I didn’t want to see Sara and I sure didn’t want to see Keith.
“That’s fine.” Mom sounded relieved, or maybe it was just my imagination.
We drove over the swing bridge that crossed the Intracoastal Waterway.
“Oh, the ocean!” I said, looking toward the horizon. The water was a blue-gray, the sky a bit overcast, but it was beautiful. I’d never take living on the island for granted again.
We were practically the only car on the bridge. Although I usually liked September on Topsail, when most of the tourists were gone and it felt more like home, the lack of cars—of people—suddenly made me realize I would stand out. If the summer crowds had still been there, I could blend in with them. Now, I would know everyone and everyone would know me. I felt sick thinking about the girl I’d been a year ago. The girl who hid out in the Sea Tender and who did crazy things for love. Who led a secret life.
“Mom?” I said.
She rested her hand on mine. “What, sweetie?”
“I’m going to drive you nuts at first,” I said. “I mean, I’m going to tell you everything that I think, okay? I need someone to tell me if I start thinking like a crazy person again.”
“You can tell me anything you like,” she said.
“Remember—” Uncle Marcus looked at me in the rearview mirror “—you’ll have a counselor, too, Mags. You can be completely open with her.”
We pulled into the trailer park and I scrunched down in the seat when Uncle Marcus stopped in front of the Westons’ faded gold double-wide.
“I’ll stay here with Mags,” Uncle Marcus said.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Mom said as she got out of the car.
Uncle Marcus turned in his seat to smile at me. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. His brown hair was really short. Shorter than I’d ever seen it, and he had amazing blue eyes that I’d loved my whole life. He was one of the best people I knew. I could always trust him to be in my corner no matter how I screwed up, and that thought made my eyes prickle.
I bit my lip. “I hope so,” I said.
“Here he comes.”
I sat up to see my brother fly down the steps from the trailer’s small deck and run across the sand. He pulled open the back door and flung himself toward me. I caught him, laughing.
“You’re free!” he said.
“Yup, Panda Bear,” I said. He seemed so much bigger. I brushed his thick hair off his forehead. “Now you’re stuck with me.”
Mom got back in the car, this time in the front passenger seat. “Everything okay with Sara?” Uncle Marcus asked her.
“She wasn’t there,” Mom said.
“She had to go to the store,” Andy said.
“I left a note, thanking her,” Mom said.
No one said it, but I knew why Sara wasn’t there: she didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see her.
Chapter Three
Keith
BRIDGET HAMMETT WAS SITTING NEXT TO ME IN ALGEBRA. TO my left. That mattered. I didn’t like anybody sitting on my left side. In most of my classes, I made sure to get the seat next to the window so nobody was on my left, but the first day of algebra, I was late to sixth period and all those seats were taken. So now, Bridget, who was the hottest junior—maybe the hottest girl in all of Douglas High School—was sitting on my left side and texting Sophie Tapper who sat on my right. I knew the text message was about me. It was like I could feel when people were talking about me.
My left arm was killing me and I needed another Percocet. Ten minutes till the bell rang. I needed to get out of there. Not just out of algebra—out of the whole damn school. I came in early today to do this stupid makeup exam, and now I was wiped. I used to leave after seventh period. These days, it was after sixth. Soon it would probably be after fifth. I couldn’t stand being there. Being a fucking junior again. A seventeen-year-old junior. The guy everybody pretended not to stare at. Before the fire, girls were always staring at me. I liked it back then, feeling them watch me in class, knowing they were texting their friends about me. I’d get these e-mails about how they wanted to do it with me. Lots of details in them. Now it was different. I got, like, no e-mails at all. I knew what the girls were saying about me now. How if they looked at me from the right side—as long as they didn’t see my hands and arms—I looked hot. If they looked at me from the left side, I was like something out of a horror flick. There was only so much of that kind of staring I could take before I wanted to toss all the desks out the windows.
The bell finally rang and I was outta there without looking back. I walked straight to my car and got in. Some dealership in Jacksonville donated the car to me after I got out of the hospital. It was a total dork of a car and I wanted to sell it and get a motorcycle, but my mother said that would be an insult and I needed to be grateful and blah blah blah.
I took a Percocet with what was left in a can of Dr Pepper I had stuck in my cup holder that morning. Then I laid rubber pulling out of the parking lot, heading toward the bridge and the beach. I wasn’t going home, though. First, because Mom would be there and I never let her know I was cutting. I didn’t want any grief from her. Second, today, for some total crap reason, Andy was at our house. Today! The day Maggie was getting sprung. The day I’d really like to forget the Lockwood family existed. Mom left a message on my cell about Andy being there, but said he’d be gone by the time I got home. She also said I should come straight home from school, probably because she knew I’d be freaking about Maggie getting out. “If you see any reporters,” she said, “walk right past them. Don’t engage them. You owe them nothing.” Reporters? Shit. They’d better just stay out of my way.
No way was I going home until I was sure Andy was outta there. I wasn’t taking any chances of seeing any Lockwood. Not Andy or Laurel or the bitch who burned my face. It was for her own sake. I might kill her if I saw her. Money could buy you anything, including a get-out-of-jail-free card. She visited me in the hospital before she went to jail and I swear, if I’d known then what I knew now, I would’ve found a way to kill her even with my arms bandaged up to my shoulders. I had this really tasty fantasy of setting her on fire—only someone else would have to light the match. I wasn’t big on flames of any kind these days. But I liked to imagine