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childish whimper. “Are you okay?” he asks. “I shouldn’t

have let you go off alone. You were just gone for a second

and then we couldn’t fi nd you.”

“I’ll be fi ne. It’s not your fault. I thought Adam was okay.

I walked right into it.”

324

F A R F R O M Y O U

“This is so fucked up, Soph,” he says, his voice rough.

He rakes his hand through his fl oppy hair, making it stick

up. “He was one of my best friends. We were on the same

soccer team since we were, like, six. And he . . . he took her

away
.”

Kyle swallows, fi ddling with an open bag of M&M’s.

He starts to group them by color, eyes focused on his task

instead of on me.

“I hate him,” I say. It feels good to say it out loud again. It

rushes underneath my skin, the fact that now I
know
.

“I want to fucking kill him,” Kyle mutters as he makes a

neat pile of the green M&M’s before moving onto the blue.

“I tried,” I confess quietly.

Kyle pauses, turning his head just a sliver toward me,

his brown eyes bloodshot. “Good,” he says, and the word

echoes between the beeping of the machines. For some rea-

son, it makes me breathe easier.

“I’m glad you didn’t die,” Kyle says.

“Yeah, me too,” I say, and it’s the truth. It feels good for

it to be the truth.

I shift in the bed, wincing when the movement jostles

my ribs.

Kyle stares at my IV bag like it’s gonna tell him what to

do. “Want me to get the nurse?”

I shake my head. “They can’t do anything. No narcotics,

remember? Anyway, I don’t want to sleep. I’ll be fi ne.”

I sound sure, even to my own ears. I know the truth: that

months in David’s offi ce are waiting for me. That I’m going

to have to work at it, through it. That there’ll be nightmares

and freak-outs and days I jump at the slightest thing and

T E S S S H A R P E

325

days I want to use so badly I can taste it and days all I want

to do is cry and scream. That David is probably going to be

on speed dial, and it’s going to suck and hurt, but hopefully

there’ll be some light at the end of the tunnel, because there

usually is.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so shitty to you,” Kyle says.

I take a red M&M from his pile and pop it in my mouth.

“I’ve been shitty to you, too,” I admit.

For the fi rst time since he came into the room, he looks

up, his expression serious and measuring. It makes my

mouth goes dry.

“What?” I ask, half hoping he’ll break the gaze.

But he doesn’t. “I know I promised I wouldn’t talk about

it,” he says. “What she told me, about her, about the two of

you. But I’m gonna break that promise, this one time.” He

stares me down, and there’s a gentleness in him I’ve never

seen before.

“She was in love with you,” he says. “And I don’t think

she got to tell you, did she?”

My heart lurches, seizes inside my chest, fl uttering to

life at the words I’ve always wanted to hear. I shake my

head. Tears spill down my cheeks.

“She loved you. She wanted to be with you. That’s why

she told me about herself. She said she’d made her choice. It

was you. I think it was always you.”

I look away from him, out through the blinds at the

lights of town, and he stays quiet, a comforting witness, let-

ting me cry.

Letting me fi nally let her go.

64

A YEAR AND A HALF AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

“Watch out!” Mina stomps into the puddle. Muddy water splashes

against my back, drenching me.

“Oh my God!” I shriek, spinning around. “I can’t believe you just

did that.”

She beams over her shoulder, rain dripping down her forehead.

She’s abandoned her umbrella on the sidewalk, and she’s standing

smack-dab in the middle of a room-sized puddle. When she tilts her

head to the sky, opening her mouth to let in the rain, my stomach

swoops. “Come on. Play with me.”

“You are such a brat sometimes,” I tell her, but when she pouts, I

grin and kick water her way, wading in aft er her. In the deepest part of

the puddle, the water reaches my ankles. My feet squelch in the mud

as we splash each other, helpless with laughter. We fl ing mud like we’re

seven again. I rub it into her hair, and she darts around me like a seal,

quick and sleek.

For once, she falls fi rst, right on her ass in the mud, and instead of

getting up she holds her hand out, pulling me gently down with her.

Just the two of us and the mud and rain, side by side, like we’re sup-

posed to be.

Mina sighs happily, her arm looped in mine. She leans her head

against my shoulder.

T E S S S H A R P E

327

“You’re crazy. We’re gonna catch pneumonia.”

She squeezes my arm, snuggling closer to me. “Admit it. There’s

nowhere else you’d rather be than here with me.”

I close my eyes, let the rain drop on my skin, let the weight of her

press into me, her warmth seep into my skin. “You got me,” I say.

65

(NOW) JULY

“How are you feeling today?” David asks.

I bite my lip. “I’m okay.”

“We had a deal, remember?” David says. “It’s been six

sessions. It’s time, Sophie.”

“Can’t we just talk about the woods instead?”

“The fact that you’d rather talk through being attacked

again than talk about Mina is exactly why we need to start

discussing her,” David says. “It’s okay to start small.”

“I’m . . .” I stop, because I don’t even know how to fi nish

that sentence. “I haven’t been able to go out to her grave,”

I say instead, because it’s the thing that’s been waking me

up at night, in between nightmares of hiding in the for-

est again. “I thought I’d be able to. Go out there, I mean. I

thought that after we caught who killed her—
if
we did—

it’d be easier. Like a reward. I know that’s stupid. But it’s

what I thought.”

David leans back in his chair, thoughtful.

“I don’t think that’s stupid,” he says. “Why do you think

it’s so hard for you to go see Mina’s grave?”

“I just . . . I miss . . .” I struggle for strength, for com-

posure, for any control, but I am safe here, and I have to

say the words. They need to exist somewhere, because they

T E S S S H A R P E

329

were never said in the right place at the right time.

“We were in love. Me and Mina. We were in love.”

I lean back on the couch, hugging myself. I meet his eyes,

and the approval I fi nd there, the confi rmation, makes the

tightness in my chest ease.

“I guess that’s why it’s so hard,” I say.

When my Dad comes out of the house, he fi nds me out on

the deck, curled up in one of the Adirondack chairs. The

sun’s setting on my fl ower beds, and I turn my head toward

him, slipping off my sunglasses.

Dad took a few weeks off after I was attacked. And even

now, night after night, I hear the rhythmic thumping of the

basketball against concrete as he shoots hoops in the drive-

way while the rest of the world sleeps. Sometimes I sit at

the kitchen window and watch him.

Now he sits down in the chair next to me and clears his

throat. “Sweetie, I need to tell you something.”

“What happened?” I sit up straighter, because his

mouth’s a fl at, unhappy line.

“I just got a call. The forensic team fi nally found Jackie’s

body on Rob Hill’s property.” He rubs a hand across his jaw,

his stubble almost completely silver now. He’s not sleeping

much, and neither am I. Both of us look it.

“Oh,” I say. I don’t know what else to do. It’s weird, but

fi nding Jackie’s body feels like a good thing, because I can’t

330

F A R F R O M Y O U

help but think of Amy, of not knowing. Of not having a

grave to visit.

“So that’s it, right?” I ask. “They’ll put him away for

good?”

“It’ll be hard for a jury to overlook that kind of evidence.”

I pull my feet up onto the chair, hugging my knees,

ignoring the way my bad leg twinges. Sometimes I need to

do this, pull into myself, when I think about Coach. When

I think about hiding behind that rock, waiting for him to

fi nd me. Kill me.

“Sweetie . . .” Dad begins, but then he doesn’t say any-

thing else, just continues to watch me.

I wait.

“Is there . . . is there anything you want to talk about?”

he asks fi nally.

I think about it for a second. Telling him. All of it. Me

and Mina. Me and Trev. The tangle I found myself in, no

way out but drugs, for so long. A part of me wants to. But

a bigger part wants to keep it to myself, foster it inside me

for a while longer.

“Not right now,” I say.

He nods, takes it as a dismissal, and when he moves to

get up, I reach over and grab his hand. I push the words out

of my mouth—I have to start somewhere.

“Dad, someday, I’ll tell you everything. All of it. I promise.”

He squeezes my hand, and when he smiles at me, the

sadness in his eyes fades a little.

A few weeks later, I stand outside the cemetery gates alone

as the funeral procession passes by. I watch from the gates

T E S S S H A R P E

331

as they bury Jackie, unable to venture inside. In the dis-

tance, I can see the group of mourners gathered around the

grave. A girl breaks from the crowd at the end.

Amy doesn’t say anything. She walks to the bottom of

the hill and faces me, close enough to the fence that I can

see her clearly. She presses her hand against her heart and

nods her head. A silent thank-you.

I nod back.

“Please tell me your mom’s stopped freaking out about

this,” Rachel says, dipping her fries into barbecue sauce. A

few drops splatter on the practice test she’s grading.

“Neither of them is really happy about it,” I say. I’ve

been shredding my napkin into little pieces, and they fl ut-

ter across the table when Rachel turns the page of the test.

“I may have played the ‘I was attacked by psychos’ card to

get them to agree.”

“It’s well earned,” Rachel says. “Twice in one year.”

I grin and lean over the table, trying to see what she’s

writing. “How’d I do?”

She scribbles my score on the top of the paper, circling it

with a big red heart. “Ninety-fi ve. Congratulations—if this

were the actual test, you’d be the proud owner of a GED.”

“Let’s hope I do as well on the real thing,” I say.

“Someone’s ready to get out of here.”

I shrug. “I’m just . . . I’m over school, you know? I want

332

F A R F R O M Y O U

to move forward, or whatever. I like Portland. I like living

with Macy. I’m just lucky she wants me to come back.”

“Well, I’ll miss you. But I think I get it. Plus, now I have

an excuse to visit Portland. I am very fond of roses.”

“We can go to the Botanical Garden,” I promise. “And

I’ll be back for the trials and stuff.”

I’m not looking forward to testifying, but I know I have

to. They need to pay for what they did to Mina. To Jackie.

I rub my knee. When Matt came to see me a few weeks

after it happened, I’d tried to apologize to him. He could

barely look me in the eye, and we’d both ended up crying.