Twisted Fate(54)

There. Done. Over. I turned to walk away, but gasped as Ally was literally right behind me—my face nearly touching her face. She was stunned and horror-stricken, in shock.

“What have you done?” she wailed, tears streaming down her face. “We have to get him out of the water, he’s going to drown. He needs to go to a hospital!” She lunged for the water, but I held her back.

“No, Ally, we have to get out of here now. He hurt you. He hurt you and a lot of other people and he won’t be able to do that anymore.”

I held her around the waist and pulled her backward into my arms, trying to drag her off the dock as she dug in her heels. Finally she broke free and ran, threw herself off the end of the dock into the water with him.

“Ally, stop. Stop! There’s nothing we can do now. This was his fate. This is how it ends for him after all the things he did.”

I saw her struggling in the water. Ally is a great swimmer. She had lifted his head above the water, his face torn and bruised and broken, his nose flattened his lips smashed. She was swimming with one arm around him making slow progress to the ladder beneath the dock.

“Let him go, Ally, we have to get out of here. Let him go,” I said. “I won’t let you bring him back up on this dock.”

It seemed that he was still breathing—bubbles of foamy blood came out of his mouth and nose. His weight was pulling Ally down. I watched my sister struggling, crying flailing in the water, trying desperately to carry the weight of someone who was more than half dead, who had filmed her naked and lied to her and sold her image to old men who wanted to do her harm, someone who did this all under the guise of loving her. I couldn’t bear to see her this way. And I knew I would almost rather see her dead than see her revive Graham Copeland.

Almost.

“Help me get him up the ladder,” she called to me, spitting water from her mouth and gasping.

“No,” I said.

“Sydney! Please, we can’t do this. Please! Help me!” She inhaled water and then spluttered and choked it up. Her head disappearing below the surface for a minute. I climbed down the ladder and kicked hard at his body to get it away from her, but she held tightly to him. I am certain he was already dead but still she clung to him, trying to raise his face, putting his body above hers.

I grabbed the ladder with one hand, then held tight to her wrist with the other and put my foot on Graham’s shoulder, trying to sink him back beneath the waves as I pulled her up.

She was crying hysterically and shouting for me to stop and then I watched it happen. A large wave came cresting in and threw her against the base of the peer knocking her unconscious. It pulled her down where I couldn’t see her anymore. And only Graham’s body was bobbing there streaming blood.

I felt light-headed. I screamed her name and dove into the cold waves. I swam in the choppy water trying to see her. I thrashed in the water in my soaking cumbersome clothes for what seemed like an eternity. Minutes ticked by, each second a precious moment of my sister’s life. Then I caught a glimpse of her floating facedown far away—the wave that had crested had sucked her right out into the harbor. She wasn’t moving.

I knew that she was dead and that the water was already freezing my limbs making it impossible for me to swim. I climbed back up the ladder and raced to Graham’s car, looking for a cell phone or anything I could call someone from. There was nothing. I screamed for help but the whole idea of meeting at the abandoned pier is that there is no one to help. I looked for a rope I could throw to her—knowing as the minutes raced by that there was no way she could have survived this.

I heard myself scream as if I were drowning and then I ran. Fast. I had to save the only thing I could.

I put the key in the ignition, turned the car around and drove frantically to Graham’s house. His parents were not home—and if mine were they didn’t notice their dripping-wet daughter crying and whimpering as she fumbled for the neighbor’s house key and let herself in.

I raced up to his room and followed the instructions Becky had given me and got to the dummy site—logged in and then there it was. The swirling beach-ball timer showing how many girl-next-door videos were being downloaded.

I logged into Graham’s site administrator page and voided the sale of the videos. Then I called up the full list of other footage, selected them all, and hit delete. I knew I was destroying evidence. But the boy who had committed that crime had already paid. And so had my sister. I would not let him be the one who controlled what people remembered of her. I would not have people know her for anything other than what she really was. Not a piece of meat, or some girl who should have known better, or all the other terrible things people say about girls when boys hurt them and use them. I had gotten rid of all the disgusting images he made of people because he thought that they weren’t real or were just for his own entertainment or his own way to make money.

When I got back to the pier, their waterlogged forms still bobbed in the waves and I was wracked with guilt. I had made sure Ally’s life would speak for itself. But she was still gone.

It didn’t seem possible. I’d tried to save her, and now she was floating below me in the harbor she’d loved, beside the boy she never should have loved. I couldn’t let her drift anymore. I dove into the icy waves to drag her out, pull her up the ladder, to feel her hand in mine one last time. And I rocked in the waves, swimming with her head against my chest, clinging to my sister’s body as if it were my own.