Everything You Are(21)

She’s read them a hundred times, but it never gets easier than the first time. Her hand is locked around the phone. It’s the only thing that exists in the world, the only thing that matters. No more Ethan. No more ocean. No sand. Just Mom dead and Trey dead and the knowledge that it’s all her fault.

“Allie?” Ethan’s voice breaks through the void. “Allie.”

His hand is over hers, prying her fingers loose. Taking the phone. She hides her face in her hands, waiting for him to read the story of her guilt.

“Oh God, Allie.”

His arms go around her, warm, but the heat can’t touch her because she is made of glass. She can’t move. Can’t anything. The guilt feels like a boulder in her chest. Boulders and glass. Not a good combination. Any moment now she’s going to break, going to shatter into a million pieces.

“God,” Ethan says again. “That’s some serious shit.”

His voice sounds far away, like it belongs in another universe. Allie isn’t breathing. Her heart isn’t beating. Glass doesn’t breathe, of course. Doesn’t have a heartbeat, or blood.

She can see, now, as if she’s behind a camera lens. The driftwood tangled together. The sky. The waves in their endless, repetitive rhythm, breaking on the shore. Seagulls.

A slant of light strikes blue highlights out of Ethan’s hair as he gets up and walks toward the surf.

He’s still got her phone in his hand.

His steps speed up, his stride lengthens into a run. She tries to scream after him, but the wind snatches away her voice.

It turns out she’s not glass after all. She runs after him, but it’s like running in a dream. The sand drags at her feet, slows her down. She’s only halfway across the expanse of the beach when she sees him come to a standstill. His arm, the one attached to the hand that holds her phone, draws back and then snaps forward.

The phone catches the light as it arcs up and out and then down. The crest of a wave reaches up for it, engulfs it, pulls it under.

“No!” Allie’s scream tears something loose inside of her. Her feet hit the icy water, but she keeps running, sending spray up all around her. She drops to her knees, feeling around frantically, stupidly, as if it’s not lost forever, as if it would still work if she found it.

Ethan’s arms clamp around her like a vise and he hauls her up onto her feet. She kicks and struggles, blind and crazed, fingernails raking over his face. Her knee connects with some part of his body that elicits an outrush of air and a grunt from him. Still he doesn’t let her go, dragging her back up onto the sand.

Sobs crash through her, as relentless as the waves. They are going to tear her apart. She can’t survive this. Her legs won’t hold her, but Ethan keeps her upright. “It’s okay,” he tells her, over and over and over. “It will pass.”

Miraculously, it does. The intensity eases. The tears slow. She feels hollowed out inside, which is better than the giant boulder. Sensation returns to her body, the cold wind whipping through her soaking clothes making her shiver at the same time as sunlight warms her. Ethan’s body presses against hers. She lets her cheek settle against his chest, feeling it rise and fall with his breath.

“Better?” he asks.

Not better, exactly. Different. Lighter, as if the wind could lift her and carry her up to ride the sky with the seagulls. Free, even. There is nothing to hold her, nothing to tie her down. Nothing matters. Her own life doesn’t matter. No ties, no consequences.

Suddenly she is laughing. Ethan laughs, too, and spins her around.

“You’re shivering,” he says then. “Let’s get you warm.”

He carries her, still laughing like a wild thing, up onto the dry sand to where the hill shelters them from the wind and the sun can warm her. He sits her down, as if she’s a child, on the driftwood log, and then fetches his jacket and drapes it around her shoulders.

“What?” he asks, in answer to the look she gives him.

“You’re different than I expected, is all.”

“Don’t you dare blow my reputation.” He sits down beside her, digs in the pocket of the jacket, and comes up with a lighter, a pipe, and a little baggie of weed.

He fills the pipe, lights up. “Does this restore my street cred?”

“I dunno. Maybe?”

“Wanna try?”

Allie considers. Her life has been structured and controlled up until now. The one time she broke the rules, it ended in tragedy. But she’s got nothing to lose. Her mother is beyond being hurt. Her past life seems to belong to somebody else. Now she’s the girl who killed her family, who doesn’t care about anything.

“Why not?”

She inhales deeply. The smoke burns her throat and sets her coughing.

“You’ll get used to it,” Ethan says. “Try again.”

When she hesitates, he grins. “Gonna take more than that to get you high.”

“Why?” she asks, taking another hit, shallower this time. It still burns, but not quite so much.

“Why what?”

Why anything, really, but what she wants to know is more specific. “Why me? Why now? You’ve never talked to me before the funeral.”

“I like you.”

“You could have liked me all year.”

He takes the pipe out of her hands and inhales deeply, then forgets to give it back. His gaze is fixed out over the ocean.