The Love That Split the World(87)

Just then Rachel honks the Jeep’s horn and shouts, “Hey, Nat, it’s hot, and God can hear you fine in the car, okay? Come on.”

Before Grandmother disappeared and before there were more than two worlds and before my childhood love was in a coma, Raider Madness used to be one of my favorite events of the summer. I remember all the excited nerves jostling around inside me freshman year as Mom drove me over. The carnival-style night ends with an open football practice, and it was Matt’s first year on the team.

I wondered if they’d give him any playing time, or if Devin Berskhire, the senior QB, would be out strutting across the field the whole time. I actually worried that Matt would get to do a few plays and mess up. Not because I cared whether or not he was good at football, but because I knew how embarrassed he’d be, and the kinds of things his dad would say to him later. It’s weird to think that Matt was only weeks away from escaping Raymond’s constant criticism, and now . . .

The things that used to scare me seem so small now. An increasingly familiar pain pushes against me, an ache to have Beau here. I can’t help thinking everything would be okay, or at least better, with Beau here.

Rachel and I make our way through the parking lot, snagging a fair amount of stares and whispers. Rachel responds by baring her teeth. “Goddamn gossips,” she says. “Staring at us like, what are those two girls who’ve both made out with Matt Kincaid doing standing beside each other?”

“It’s not you,” I say. “It’s me.”

“Well, that’s not egotistical.”

“It’s a fact. I’m the one who made out with someone else at Derek’s, then argued with Matt in the street before he drove off. They all think it’s my fault, and they’re not exactly wrong.”

Rachel stops walking and snorts. “Oh my God. You don’t honestly buy that?”

“Don’t you?”

She sort of glances around then grabs my sleeve and drags me behind an inflatable obstacle course. “Look,” she says. “Matt told me something. And he really didn’t want me to tell anyone else, but if it’ll help you get over this phase, then I guess it’s worth it.”

“Go on,” I say.

She crosses her arms and looks down at her sandal, which she’s twisting against the ground. “Matty’s an alcoholic.”

“What?” I say. “No, he’s not.”

“I mean, that’s the short version, not his words, but yeah,” Rachel says. “He told me the night of his birthday party. Or . . . the next morning, actually.” I stifle a groan as she looks back up at me. “He started drinking more when you guys broke up, and I guess it got out of hand. Lately, the guy hasn’t been able to take a sip without finishing the bottle.”

I shake my head in disbelief and slump against the moon bounce. “How could I not have known that?”

She shrugs. “No one did. We all just thought he was partying, like the rest of us. He only told me because he felt bad that we almost screwed and he barely remembered it. He was really ashamed. It wasn’t the first time he blacked out, and he knows he’s a dick when he drinks too. He just hadn’t figured out how to let go of it yet.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah,” Rachel says, though she doesn’t know the half of it.

She doesn’t know how the Other Matt refused a drink that fateful night of the party, how Beau tensed when I even offered it.

Nah, I shouldn’t, he’d said.

How, after Matt and I fought by his car, Beau dragged him off me and threw him down in the street.

And then that morning, in the hospital, when Beau sat apart from the Kincaids, Joyce’s upper lip raised in a near-snarl like she blamed him for the accident. The Other Megan affirming, that yes, in fact, Joyce did blame him. Not for the accident. For the drinking in general.

It’s all making sense. Matt may have just become an alcoholic in our world, but he’d already been one in Beau’s. A golden boy with a predisposition to addiction, regardless of his circumstances.

“Are you all right?” Rachel asks, gripping my shoulder. That’s when I realize how lightheaded I feel. Rachel steadies me as I slide down the side of the inflatable castle to the ground.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I say.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“It’s raining.”

“You really are a genius.” But I barely hear Rachel. I’m distracted by the faint shadow of a person moving across my line of view behind her.

Rachel turns around to see what I’m staring at then looks back to me, clueless. Completely unaware that I just watched a platinum-blond version of her wandering around the carnival alone. The other world is there again, within reach. Just like at the hospital, when I saw both Joyces. It’s like the two are colliding, then bouncing off one another, sometimes overlapping and other times separated by an impassable amount of space.

“I have to go somewhere,” I tell Rachel. “Can you get a ride home?”

“I mean, everyone’s treating me like a leper since Matt and I hooked up, but sure, I guess I can suck it up and get in a car with someone who smiles to my face and trash-talks behind my back.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s important.”

She sighs. “Fine, Brown. But you’ll owe me one.”