All the Rage(71)

“Make me feel like I wasn’t—” I falter and then my voice starts breaking all over the words and I can’t stop it, any of it. “Like you did when you didn’t know. Because I hate her, Leon, and when I was around you, I wasn’t—her. You … stopped. That’s why you were the good part. So if you want to help, pretend you don’t know and we could—”

I can’t finish. It’s too impossible to finish. And I wait for him to speak, all of this washing over him slowly, too slowly.

“You’re right,” he finally says. “I can’t help you if that’s what you need from me. And if I’d known, this whole time, you were using me like that…”

I bring my hand to my forehead and dig my nails into the skin there, hard as I can, because I want to be able to choose what hurts me for once.

“How did you think you would help?” I ask faintly. “Tell me to accept it?”

“I wouldn’t do that. You don’t have to accept it.” He pauses. “But maybe you should hate the people responsible. Because it’s not you.”

“I don’t want you here if you know,” I say again.

He sighs and turns away, his footsteps leading him out and I close my eyes until I hear the screen door whine closed, until I hear the sound of him driving away and the only thing I feel after is her, this slit, this dead girl, trying to burn herself out of me—





“hello?”

I’m on the phone in the kitchen. The man’s voice on the other end of the line is gruff and half-awake. The sound of it sends a surge of adrenaline through me, enough to make me light-headed. For a moment, I forget how to speak.

“Who is this?” He’s more awake now, and still I can’t speak. I pick at one of the phone buttons and accidentally push it in. The tone blares in my ear, in his, and I startle, pull my hand back.

“It’s the girl from the diner,” I manage.

“Who?”

“The one who doesn’t like to talk.”

The longest pause before he laughs. “This a joke?”

“You said you’d tell me how.”

“I’ll be damned. That doesn’t usually work.”

I stare at the phone cord, twirled nervously around my finger. My body tremors, a sick chill up and down my spine like a warning.

“Will you meet me?”





i scrawl a note under the note my mother left me. I keep it as simple as I love you because that’s always there to say. I get my bike from the garage and wheel it over the vines on the walkway, before I throw my leg over its side and push off. The streets are quiet, the pall of Penny’s funeral cast over everything. I feel more relief passing the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING GREBE sign than I ever have before.

The bike ride to Taraldson Road tests me. All the running I haven’t done has made me soft where I should be stronger. I have to break halfway, my calves aching, my stomach churning.

The highway is some kind of nightmare, the way the cars and trucks rush by me. The feel of them, the sound. It hurts. It makes my teeth ache. It starts to rain and I bike so far, I bike through it—I can see the point I’ve left that weather behind me.

It’s forever before I make the turn off the highway onto the dirt road I’m looking for, my road. I drag my feet and come to a stop. I climb off my bike, letting it clatter to its side. I ease myself to the ground, on my back and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe in this air and I wonder what it’s like underwater, wonder again if she was dead before she hit the river or if that happened after. It’s hard to think of what’s left of her in any kind of dark.

I wait, listening.

I wait, tracing letters on my stomach.

I wait.

And then I hear it, the truck, ahead of me.

The truck slows, grinds to a halt and then it’s just the sound of the engine idling. I dig my fingers into the dirt, I dig them there, anchoring myself to it, while the truck stays where it is, its driver inside. Maybe someone nice. Maybe someone finally come to finish what’s been started. I don’t care, as long as it’s finished …

My heart beats frantically in my chest.

Her heart beats frantically in my chest.

The engine cuts.

And I—

I scramble to my feet, stumbling past my bike. I leave it there and move down the bank as fast as I can, trying for the trees before he gets out of his truck. The grass is slick from the rainfall and I lose my footing, end up sliding down on my thigh, turning one side of me grass-stained and mud-streaked.

I get my feet under me and look back once, glimpse the truck parked and silent, and I imagine the man inside not understanding, trying to understand what he’s supposed to do about this girl who was just there and isn’t anymore. I fight through a cluster of trees so close together, I’m afraid I won’t fit in their spaces but I do. The branches tear at my arms. I hear the truck door open and close and I stop, leaning against a dying birch.

“Hello?” the man yells. I don’t even know his name, didn’t ask for it, just like he didn’t ask for mine and it didn’t seem scary then, but now—“You there?”

I press my fingertips against bark. Silence. I wait for the sound of his driving away but it doesn’t happen. I hear the crunch of his shoes on the ground instead.