She Dims the Stars (22 page)

Elliot smiles at me from behind a couple of the raindrops, and I reach up to move them, sending them floating off into the distance with the smallest touch of my fingers. His face is fully visible again as he reaches up and brushes a few more drops aside so that he can see me clearly as well.

“What the hell, Elliot?” Nothing is moving. There is no noise, no wind, nothing is making a sound except the two of us. The entire world around us is frozen.

“It’s a glitch,” he explains like it’s the most obvious answer in the entire world. “A gorgeous, wonderful glitch in an otherwise perfect system. Everything is paused except for us. We can go anywhere. Do anything. Where should we start?” He’s full of curiosity as his fingers reach out to touch another glistening drop.

Where should we start? My mind reels with the possibilities. “Can we go back in time, or just stay here?”

“Anything you want.”

There are so many options. The day my dad met Miranda. Just one different choice and she wouldn’t have been in our lives at all. Or the day I ran home. Maybe throwing a drink at Cline would have changed everything and none of this would have ever transpired.

My heartbeat quickens. Take me back to the day my mother became pregnant with me. I’ll stop it from ever happening.

But looking into his eyes, I know my real answer. I know where I would go if I had the choice.

“Take me back to the day I first met you,” I whisper. “Let’s run away.” His hand extends and I take it, watching as he turns his back and begins to lead. My head and my heart are at war as the words form and present themselves in my subconscious.

I could love him. This could be what love is.

But this love could be my undoing.

I awake with a start, covered in sweat, Elliot’s arms wrapped around my middle. It’s night and the house is quiet. Somehow, I have slept the entire day away, and my mouth is sticky, while my head is throbbing uncontrollably. Bleary eyed, I untangle myself from his grasp and fumble my way into the bathroom. The light is so bright it causes my head to pound even harder, and I groan in protest. I feel terrible, like I have the flu. My head is spinning and my thoughts are scattered, but I try to focus on one simple thing: a shower.

As quietly as I can, I creep back into the room and grab some things to change into so that I can clean up, and then maybe I can get something to eat or drink. I’ve missed an entire day’s worth of medication, but the timing is off, so if I take anything now I’ll be up forever, and I don’t even know what kind of effect that will have because I’ve never missed a dose. Not even once.

I decide maybe Cara or Dr. Stark will have an answer, so I grab my phone to take with me in hopes that they’ll answer a late night call. As I shut the bathroom door, I check the home screen of my phone and notice all of the missed phone calls and texts I’ve been avoiding since leaving school.

Miranda’s texts stand out the most, so I begin to read.

There is a noise that pulls me from my sleep. It’s faint but out of place, so it brings me out of my dream gently and then with a jolt. The room is pitch black save for light filtering out from beneath the bathroom door. I reach over to check the time on my phone and it’s just after 2 a.m. Audrey must have gotten up after sleeping all day and gone to take a bath. Maybe that’s the noise I heard.

I get up and go to stand in front of the door to listen for the sound of her in the tub, but there’s nothing. No slosh of water, no drips, no movement of any kind. Tentatively, I knock and wait for an answer, but all I get in return is more silence. Thinking maybe I’m wrong and she’s not in there, I try the door only to find that it’s been locked.

“Audrey,” I call and knock again, worry beginning to crawl up my spine and prickling the hairs on my arms. There’s a chance that she woke up and accidentally locked the door when she left the room. Maybe she’s downstairs with the others. They could be watching a movie or drinking. Maybe they’re reminiscing about old times when she and Cline were inseparable.

These scenarios play out while I take the stairs two at a time and skid into the living room where Cline and September are asleep on the couch. Whatever movie they were watching finished a while ago, and the DVD is continually playing the menu music over and over, the sound of which is putting my nerves on edge. Audrey is nowhere to be seen.

“Hey,” I yell just a little too loudly and watch them both jolt awake. “I can’t find Audrey. The bathroom door in the guest bedroom is locked. The light is on, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is in there. Did she come down here with you?”

“No. We watched the movie after you went up to bed and just fell asleep a bit ago. I didn't see or hear anything.” September gets up and checks all the doors then returns with worry etched into her features. “Everything is locked. Are you sure she’s not in the bathroom?”

“Do you have a key?” I ask, my hands sweating and stomach turning in knots.

She grabs one of the all-purpose keys from above the door frame, and we all head upstairs together. Cline is mumbling something to September, and I crane my neck to hear what he’s saying.

“What?” I ask, turning toward him before we get to the guest bedroom door.

His face is pale, and his eyes are wide as he looks beyond me into the darkness. “I was telling her about Audrey’s confession at the tree. She said that the reason she stopped talking to me was because she’d tried to kill herself when she was fifteen. She’s in therapy now, though. And she’s been
so
happy this whole trip.”

“You’d be surprised how easily people can fake it,” September says matter-of-factly as she slips the key into the lock. When the door opens, her hand flies to her mouth, and she turns directly to Cline. “Call an ambulance. Elliot, I need you in here now.”

The sight of Audrey splayed out on the bathroom floor surrounded by pill bottles, white foam pooling at the corner of her mouth, lips turning gray, is an image that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

“Lift her up,” September instructs, and I gather this lifeless girl in my arms, pressing an open palm to her chest to feel a faint heartbeat beneath my hand. September raises the toilet lid, and without any pretense whatsoever, she opens Audrey’s mouth and sticks two fingers down her throat.

There’s nothing at first, and then suddenly Audrey’s entire body convulses and she gags, retching into the bowl. Her heart slams repeatedly against my hand, and she claws at my grip on her, but I will not let her go. September will not stop trying to empty her stomach. We will not stop trying to save her from herself.

“How many, Audrey?” She’s asking, and there’s only a choking sound and moan in response before she gags again.

Cline is in the doorway, phone in hand, white as a ghost. “Five minutes. They’re five minutes away.”

“Pick up all of these and put them in a bag. They’ll want to know what she took. Get her purse. And here …” She slides Audrey’s phone my way. “We’ll need to get in touch with her emergency contacts.”

September takes over for me, and I let Audrey go, watching her lay her head in the other girl’s lap. Her eyes open just enough to focus on me as I press the home button on her phone. I bend down and use her thumb to grant access to her contacts and she whispers, “I found out about my dad. Miranda told me everything.”

The paramedics arrive faster than I can fathom, and within minutes, she’s on a stretcher and being rolled out into an ambulance. September jumps in with her, and I’m left holding Audrey’s phone and standing in the driveway with a shaken Cline and a stomach full of bile that empties onto the grass as soon as the sirens turn on and the ambulance drives away.

I don’t want to look, but I have to, so once I’ve composed myself, I begin to scroll through the texts between Audrey and Miranda. The ones I had seen earlier were Miranda telling her that she was irresponsible for being at the lake house and that it was no longer her property to use. The next came to say that she was ungrateful for the amount of money they had put forth for the care she was being provided. Not to mention the money for school. There was one about calling her dad. Then, when she wasn’t getting a response at all, Miranda had said that she was tracking the phone and knew where Audrey was. If she didn’t call home immediately there would be hell to pay.

Audrey responded that she’d been on a trip. Said she would call her dad in the morning.

Miranda demanded to know where she had been, and I’m not quite sure why she did it, why she felt like telling the truth, but Audrey’s text was honest. She said that she had gone on the trip to find out more about her mom. And in doing so, she thought maybe she would find out about her dad.

This is when Miranda’s rage hits the roof. It’s hard for me to read the words. I can’t bring myself to understand the level of pain it must have caused Audrey in that moment.

YOUR FATHER? YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FATHER? WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE MAN WHO RAPED YOUR MOTHER AND RUINED EVERYONE’S LIVES BY GETTING HER PREGNANT?

There’s no response from Audrey after that. I check her call logs to see if she tried to contact her dad or her therapist or anyone, for that matter. Nothing. Why didn’t she wake me up? How alone must she have felt after reading that?

The hardest part to grasp is whether she believed that Miranda had told her, in no simple terms, that everything she had hoped wasn’t true,
was
. Her mental illness is hereditary. From a man who did something so vile it ruined three generations of lives with one horrible act.

Cline has the truck running, and I’m still looking through her phone as I climb into the passenger seat, buckling myself in while I try to find the number I’m searching for. He answers on the second ring. Patrick Byrd must not be used to getting phone calls at 3 a.m. from his daughter’s phone.

He’ll be even more surprised with the screenshots of the conversation I’m sending him between his daughter and his wife.

“They pumped her stomach. I think we got to her just in time.” September is holding a cup of coffee in one hand, and her forehead is resting in the other. Audrey is in ICU, and we’re all in some sort of limbo because we are not next of kin, so there’s no entry. “We won’t get to see her. You know that, right?”