The Girls I've Been(35)

Which is how, after one escalating game of Truth or Dare that ends with Iris spraining her wrist because she almost falls off the roof of Terry’s house when he dares her to climb the widow’s walk, Wes comes up with the game Truth for Truth instead.

It’s exactly what it says on the box: If you give someone a truth, they have to give you one in return. Usually it involves drinking, which makes things easier. But now it involves just us and danger and this locked room, and sure, Iris has that vodka in her pocket, but it’s not time for drinking.

It’s just time for the truth. For all of us.





— 33 —


    The Mayor


Almost Three Years Ago



For three whole years, I do what Lee asks of me. I act normal. Like a kid, not a con artist. I still look for exits and people to talk into walking me through them. I still wake up three nights out of four fighting people who aren’t there. But I go to therapy and I don’t skip school. Wes and I are friends, and months, then years tick by, and we’re fourteen and we’re something more . . . and then we’re fifteen and we’re us.

I didn’t realize what being part of an us was like. I didn’t know what that kind of love would nurture and bloom in me. A thorny kind of plant, more thistle than flower, one that protected and pierced, that would turn to poison if threatened.

By the time we’re an us, we’ve already got a routine. We’re good at juggling it, his time in and out of that house. I don’t think of it as his house. It’s not—it’s the mayor’s. It’s his little fiefdom. An ostentatious log-cabin-style lodge sitting on ten acres that he rules like a medieval lord. But we’ve made it so Wes is always out the door as the mayor’s coming in. It’s not an exact science, and it’s not perfect. I can’t keep him from getting hit. But I can reduce the time he’s there, so his father has fewer opportunities.

There are good excuses and flimsy ones, study sessions and late nights we just hold our breath, and there are times I think about creating an entire club that meets every day after school for hours if I have to, just to keep him out of there, to keep him away.

Lee watches. More often than not, she doesn’t say anything about the boy in the guest room. She won’t, unless I step over the line. Unless I really risk us.

And then, I do.

Because one day, Wes doesn’t come over when he’s supposed to.

One day, I have to go over there, looking for him.

I know what I’m going to find before I even slip through the back door without knocking, because three years and his love is not enough to strip me of instincts that took twelve years and six girls to warp into me.

He’s shirtless on the floor of his bathroom upstairs, and there’s so much blood on the bath towels, my stomach and my head swoop all at once. I have to grab the edge of the counter. The tile is cool against my fingers, grounding me enough to let me suck in a breath. His eyes are swollen; there are tear tracks down his face as he turns away from me.

I’m on my knees on the towel-heaped tile next to him, and for a terrible, too-long moment, my hands just hover. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to do. His shoulders . . .

I’m frozen; the girl who always knows what to do. I want to ask what happened. I don’t know how to say it in a way that doesn’t make it sound like I’m blaming him for something, because the mayor, shit, the mayor is usually smarter than this. I hate that thought more than anything, but it’s the truth. He hardly ever leaves marks that won’t go away.

And these won’t go away.

“What do you need?” I blurt it out, because it’s the thing that my therapist asks me sometimes. Need is more than want. Need is . . . I can do need. I can help him.

I have to help him. I have to stop this.

(You could stop the mayor, something whispers inside me, and it sounds so much like me, and not like my mother or any of the girls, that I don’t know what to do but reject it.)

“You gotta go,” he says. He whispers it, like he’s still afraid, and that’s when I realize he is, and that I’ve never seen him afraid before. He is strong and he is quiet until you draw him out, and then he runs his mouth in the best way, but he carries himself like he’s accepted the pain of the world, not like he fears it. “He’ll be back soon. If he finds you here . . .”

“I’m not leaving you,” I say. “You need a hospital. Stitches.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t.”

Of course. Why did I even say that? Why am I not thinking right?

I’m thinking like Nora. Like I’m normal. Time to stop doing that.

“Where’s the first aid kit?”

“Downstairs. In the kitchen.”

“I’ll be right back. Keep the pressure on it.” I press the towel against his shoulder, and his hand comes up to hold it, his fingers brushing against mine. “I love you,” I tell him, and it’s so little, it’s nothing, but he looks at me through red-rimmed eyes like it’s everything.

It takes me forever to find the first aid kit. I’m still rooting around in the bottom cupboards when I hear it: the sound of tires on gravel. Someone’s coming.

I jerk up, snapping the cupboard door shut, the kit forgotten. The hairs on my arms rise as the sound grows louder, and I glance over my shoulder. The back door is right there. I could . . .