Open House(62)

“So do you just like the guys I want, is that it?” Josie asks.

I let out a disbelieving gasp. “Is that what you think?” I ask.

“It’s what I know, Emma,” she says, and her eyes are so angry they scare me. “We both liked Noah. Didn’t you see that? He belonged to both of us, until you started fooling around with him, until you got pregnant by him.” She starts to laugh, but it sounds too strange, like the deranged cackle of someone who’s high. “Didn’t you know I got with him, too?”

I swallow, a zing of pain coursing through me, but it doesn’t surprise me, not after seeing them together tonight, the way her body was curled in his lap when I first got to the party. Something about it looked too familiar, the way two bodies fit together like a puzzle because they’ve done it before. “How many times?” I ask, because I need to know, I need to know how stupid I’ve been.

“Once, but why does that matter?” Josie asks. “The point is that he was both of ours, whether you want to admit that or not. But, not anymore, now I’m the one who’s left out again, the one everyone wants to get rid of. Not good enough for you guys, I guess, right? Do you know what Noah just told me?” she asks, her words so hard and deliberate, as if she wants me to take every one like a punch. “He told me we can’t hook up again,” she goes on. “That’s what he called it—hooking up, like we’re still in eighth grade, like he can’t call it what it really was, which was a relationship, whether he wants to admit that or not. You can’t even deny that, can you, Emma?” Her shrill laugh is back, ripping through the night air.

“I don’t know what was going on between you and Noah,” I say, “and I don’t even know if I . . .” I’m about to say if I want him anymore, but she freaks out and says, “What it was? Past tense? I was just with him, like, two weeks ago.”

I let that sink in, the nitty-gritty timing of it, the fact that she hooked up with him right around the time I got pregnant, but it hurts less than I thought it would. “You just said he called it off,” I say. “That’s all I meant.”

“Called it off!” she shrieks, incredulous. “Like it’s a game!” The clouds shroud the moon again, and her face goes dark. She’s really starting to freak me out, it’s so black up here, and she’s moving around frantically like she doesn’t realize how close we are to the edge of the cliff.

“Josie, be careful, please,” I say, but there’s no way she’s hearing me.

“And what a fun game it must be for you and Noah to play,” she’s shouting, “to just mess with me for whatever sordid thing he needs, but then cast me off, so that perfect you and perfect Noah can be together forever.” The pain in her voice is unbearable, and I need to fix this—to fix her—but I can’t find the words. “Don’t you see it?” she goes on. “It’s like perfect little Emma, so unassuming, so sweet, no marks on her, no dark past.”

“No marks on me?” I ask. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you get it?” she shrieks again. “They all see it on me. My messed-up life, how no one’s ever even wanted me to be theirs except Chris.”

I want to go to her, to put my arms around her, but I feel so frozen. “That’s not true,” I say. “Your mom . . .” I start.

“I know what you did, Emma,” she says, and the skin on her cheek starts to twitch. “I know you messed around with Chris. He admitted everything.”

My stomach drops so far I feel like I’m going to be sick. I take a step back, but the ground seems to teeter beneath me, and I almost fall. I shut my eyes, but it just makes it worse. “I still can’t believe it,” Josie says, and I try to open my eyes to face her, but I can’t. She screams at me, her words echoing through my skull:

“The only thing I ever asked of you was not to get with my brother, the one person I have in my life who’s mine, the only person who’s kept my secrets and tried to protect me from our father hurting me.”

I open my eyes. She’s barely ever told me anything about her dad except for her memory from the day he died, the day she sat at the bottom of the stairs with his dead body inside the circle of broken glass. When she told me that she hated him, and that she wasn’t sad when he died, was I supposed to intuit something more about the ways he hurt her? “I didn’t know your dad hurt you,” I say, my voice shaking.

“Maybe you should have used your imagination,” she says. “Do I really need to spell everything out for you?” Moonlight catches my silver bangle on her wrist—the one Brad got me that I let her borrow.

“Josie, come on,” I say. I reach out to touch her, but she rips away her arm.

“Get away from me!” she screams, but I don’t listen.

I move toward her, saying, “I’m really sorry if I didn’t understand what you were trying to tell me.” I try to put my arms around her, but she tucks her head, her eyes narrowed into slits.

“You’ve never understood what I’ve tried to tell you,” she says, her voice full of deep, resonating notes. Her hands are balled into fists, and when she flings my arms away, it hurts so badly that I cry out, and then we’re both losing our balance, and her hands find my body again, shoving me back until my feet give way and I stumble. She screams my name, her voice more desperate than I’ve ever heard it, her hands still pushing as I fall backward, over the edge of the cliff and into the dark night.