Sweet Water(81)

10-7


Things haven’t been the same since Cash hit Finn—at home or in school.

Finn told me not to worry about it, no big deal. He let me cry on his shoulder, and it felt good that he cared. He’s so sweet. Almost too good for me.

That’s what Cash said. He said to watch myself. He told me not to trust Finn. He said Finn can never really love me because of where I came from, and he’s only after one thing, but that’s not Finn.

Cash doesn’t know him.

But maybe I’m not good enough.

It’s probably why I tested the limits tonight.

He played his music so well, trying to show me how. He’s sexy, rough, so much older, but he gets me. He just lets me be. We smoke together too when Cash doesn’t come along, and this time when he leaned in, I got closer and we almost kissed!

I’m glad now that we didn’t. He told me to chill.

Why didn’t I know that Cash hit Finn? Could that be the reason for the bruises and the scratch marks? Relief hits me, and I allow my arms and legs to relax a little beneath my threadbare covers. It’s one of the things I’ll have to get used to when downgrading my life, but shitty sheets are a welcome exchange for a shitty life.





9-18


I met Finn’s mother today, and it didn’t go well. I’m sorry I tried.

Finn’s so sweet, and I thought maybe she would be too, but I was triggered in so many ways, I can never go back there.

HER house. I cringe thinking about it.

She laughed at me because I took off my shoes before coming inside. Well, I didn’t want to trash her nice digs, and that’s what I’ve been taught to do, but she made me feel more ridiculous in my knee socks than the first day I tried them on.

“You look like an ad for private school for rejects!” Cash laughed at me.

Loser. Totes. He’s probably right.

But the house gave me the creeps too, so freakishly medieval, and those stained-glass windows . . . GOD.

I didn’t want to see what I saw, and just like the man that night, I still can’t be sure, but I recognized that symbol in the window, that letter, the way the sun shone through just like the flashlight flicked over it that day.

I hadn’t remembered it till right then.

The therapists couldn’t tell me I was imagining it anymore.

And it isn’t Finn’s fault who he’s related to, but it’s hard to believe this is all a coincidence. Cash says it was meant to be. It’s Dad’s divine intervention. We’re meant to get ours.

We only want a million. Cash said it needed to be an amount that could fit in a suitcase. I think it’s the amount Cash needs to move on. It will help us all move on.

That amount of money is probably nothing to these people. Maybe if I get Cash what he wants, he’ll compromise and let me have what I want too—Finn. The money doesn’t matter to me.

Money might help Mom out, but it will never bring Dad back.

They were after our money? Cash was after our money? Why? Because we’re rich? Yazmin stared at my windows oddly, but why? She mentioned a symbol. Did she mean our crest?

Chills prick my arms even though I’m bundled up in my comforter. Where did Yazmin see the family crest before? And how did it connect to her therapy? I’m skipping around, grabbing on to words, grabbing on to myself. Why didn’t she like me? I couldn’t find a good reason, but I hadn’t had a great reason for resenting the cancer survivor at the funeral either, other than she was there and my mother was gone and—she was rich. I hated her because she was so different from me, everything I wanted to be. Was Cash latching on to our family, making us the enemy to cope with his own father’s death?

Keep reading. I flip back to an older entry.





9-3


The nightmare was bad tonight. It’s three a.m., and I have school tomorrow, and I’m sweating and shaking, and I need to go back to sleep.

FUCK, I’m going to blow this scholarship. I don’t even know how I got it, and that’s part of the reason I trip so hard over it. I wrote about Dad in the entrance essay, and that got me in. It makes me sick. They tell me at least something good came out of the accident.

LIE.

Dr. Cjaskowski says to write down my thoughts, get them out, purge them, but that’s shit advice. My father was punctured through the stomach by a tree branch.

His blood seeped all over my face.

The car flipped; it pinned me on the bottom, Dad suspended above. I can feel it sometimes, the car sliding down the embankment, stopping at the river. Thank God it stopped, but then—the freezing-cold water entering the window, mixed with the warm blood dripping above, washing over me.

Dad’s life rushing out of him, all over me.

I felt it tonight. I scratched myself across the cheek, trying to get the blood off. The scratch is going to leave a mark, and I’m pissed.

My tears are burning the scratch. MAKE IT STOP. I can’t let these kids see me crushed.

It’s not the Yaz I want to create.

Sometimes in my dream, I see someone at the accident. Dr. C says it’s some kind of psycho mirage created by a combo of my concussion and my desperation to live.

BR—that’s him, a part of him anyway. I saw his initials pressed into the snow, but then they disappeared.

It was a “him,” though. The killer. The driver. The one who used the access road by the river to drive down and check us out. He left us behind to die. Someone was there that night. Headlights. A hand on the window, then pressing into the snow to investigate, leaving the BR. A light shining right at me, blinding me. I’m on the bottom of the car, but looking up, I can make out something shiny—metal.