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She leans back in the seat. “Why shouldn’t I?”

I shrug. “Sometimes I wonder, if you’d known me

before . . . if you’d think I was lying, like everybody else

does.”

“Anyone who saw you in the middle of that road . . .”

Rachel pauses, and then goes on. “Anyone who saw you the

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F A R F R O M Y O U

way I did that night, they’d understand you weren’t capable

of coming up with a lie—you could barely talk. And then in

the hospital . . .” She pauses again, and I know we’re both

thinking about it. How I’d yelled and thrown things when

the nurse tried to make me take off my bloody clothes. I

can still feel the prick of the needle against my skin, the

sedative moving through me as I begged, “No drugs, no

drugs, no drugs,” when I really meant, “She’s dead, she’s

dead, she’s dead.”

“But you didn’t have to stick around. At the hospital, or

after. I mean, you barely knew me.”

“You went through something horrible,” Rachel says

quietly. “And it isn’t fair that everyone blames you. Even if

you
had
been buying drugs that night, it wouldn’t matter.

The only person who’s guilty is the guy who pulled the

trigger. And we’ll fi nd him. I bet you. Ten whole dollars.”

She smiles determinedly at me, daring me to smile back.

I do.

14

ELEVEN MONTHS AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

I don’t mean to steal the prescription pad.

I really don’t. It never even crosses my mind until the Saturday

I take Dad lunch at his offi

ce. It’s hot that summer, tipping 110 some

days, and I should be out at the lake or something, but I like to spend

time with Dad. He does free teeth cleanings for kids on every fourth

Saturday, so I usually grab some takeout to share on his lunch break.

“Give me a second, sweetie?” he asks aft er one of his dental hygien-

ists lets me into his offi

ce. “I’ve just got to check on some things. Then

we can eat.”

I set the bag of pastrami sandwiches on his desk, next to the burl

wood clock that Mom got for him for one of their anniversaries.

He closes his offi

ce door behind him, and I sit down in his swivel

chair, wincing when it leans back too far.

Dad’s desk is orderly, everything in its right place. There’s a picture

of me and Mom, standing side by side, our shoulders nearly touching,

framed in silver, one of Dad on the sidelines, from before the accident,

when he coached Mina’s and my soccer team. There’s a black-and-

white one of me when I was eleven or twelve, my hair long and tucked

behind my too-big ears. I’m smiling at something off camera, my eyes

lowered, almost hopeful as my hand reaches out. For Mina, of course.

Always for Mina. She’d been making faces at me while Dad took the

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F A R F R O M Y O U

picture. I remember how hard it was to not let my face scrunch with

laughter.

I brush my fi ngers across the top of Dad’s stash of pens, neatly

grouped together by color. I pull open his top drawer. There’s a bunch

of Post-its, color-coded again, and underneath that . . .

Prescription pads. A stack of them.

And suddenly it’s all I can think about.

I’d always have enough pills. I’d never have to worry. Never have

to keep count, just in case the doctors noticed. It’d be so good. So

right.

The paper tickles my skin as I thumb through one of the pads like

it’s a fl ip book. I’m giddy, almost high on the mere thought of it.

I don’t plan on stealing them.

But I do.

I don’t even think about the trouble it could cause as I shove them

in my purse.

I’m too in love with the idea of
more
and
numb
and
gone
.

15

NOW (JUNE)

When I hear the front door open, I think it’s Mom checking

on me. She came home yesterday during lunch, and we sat

across from each other at the kitchen table, silent as I picked

at my food and she drank a cup of coffee, shuffl ing through

legal briefs.

I stop at the top of the stairs. I catch sight of him before

he sees me, and I have a second, just a second, when I can

hope.

But then his eyes fi x on me and the awkwardness sparks

in the air, as it has every time since he found my stash and

the triplicates I’d stolen from him.

Dad isn’t disappointed in me like Mom is. He doesn’t

have that mix of anger and fear that’s fueling her. Instead,

he doesn’t know what to do or how to feel with me, and

sometimes I think it’s worse, that he can’t decide between

forgiving and blaming me.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, Sophie.”

I stay at the top of the stairs, hoping the distance will

protect me. “Did you have a good trip?”

“I did. How have things been? Have you settled in?”

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F A R F R O M Y O U

I want to tell him everything. How Trev looks at me like

he’s a masochist and I’m the embodiment of pain. How

Mom and I are stuck in this sick game of who’ll break fi rst.

How I should go out to Mina’s grave but I can’t, because I’m

afraid if I do, it’ll make it so real that I’ll slip. I’ll fall down

and never get up.

Once upon a time, I’d been a daddy’s girl. I loved him

wholly, preferred him to the point of cruelty. But that girl is

gone. I rotted away what was left of her with pills and loss.

I’m not the daughter he raised. I’m not the daughter my

mother wanted.

I’ve become something different, every parent’s night-

mare: the drugs hidden in the bedroom, the lies, the call in

the middle of the night, the police knocking on the door.

Those are the things he remembers now. Not the time

he took me to
The Nutcracker
, just him and me, and I’d been

so scared of the Mouse King that I’d crawled into his lap

and he’d promised to keep me safe. Or how he had tried to

help Trev build me raised fl ower beds in the backyard, even

though he kept slamming his fi ngers with the hammer. A

dentist has no business hammering things, but he’d done it

anyway.

“Sophie?” Dad asks, his voice breaking me from my

thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” I say automatically. “It’s been fi ne. Things

have been fi ne.”

He stares at me longer than he should, and there are

worry lines on his forehead I haven’t noticed before. My

eyes fl ick to the gray at his temples. Is there more since I

T E S S S H A R P E

73

last saw him? I know what he’s thinking:
Is she zoning out,

or is she on something?

I can’t bear it.

Nine months. Three weeks. Three days.

“I was going out to my garden,” I gesture towards the

backyard, feeling stupid.

“I’ve got some work to do.” He hesitates. “I could do it

out on the deck? If you’d like the company?”

I almost say no, but then I think about those worry lines

and the gray in his hair, what I’ve done to him. I shrug.

“Sure.”

We don’t speak for the hour we stay out in my garden.

He just sits at the teak table on the deck and goes through

his fi les while I dig and root rocks out of the soil.

It feels like what I used to think safe was.

I know better now.

16

NINE MONTHS AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

For three weeks, Macy plays hardball: no phone, no computer, nothing

until I start talking to the shrink she sends me to, until I follow the

schedule Macy’s given me, until I fi nally admit that there’s something

wrong.

The only order I’ve obeyed is doing yoga with Pete. Pete’s nice, I

like him. He’s quiet, he doesn’t pester me with questions, just helps me

through the poses he’s shown me, the ones adjusted to my problem

areas. That fi rst week, I’d heard him on the phone, deep in conversa-

tion with my old physical therapist. The next morning, he’d dropped

a mat on my bed and told me to meet him in the brick two-room stu-

dio in the backyard. The bamboo fl oors are cold underneath my bare

feet and Pete has some sort of cinnamon oil in a diff user so it always

smells like Christmas.

I won’t admit it to Macy, but I like that hour every morning. Aft er

years of dulling all my senses with anything I could get my hands

on, it’s weird to focus positively on my body. To pay attention to my

breathing and the way my muscles stretch, to let my thoughts go, to

push them away so I can
feel
—feel the air and movement and the way

I can make my bad leg bend and make it do what
I
want for once.

Sometimes I falter. Sometimes my leg or back wins.

But sometimes I can go through an entire sun salutation without

T E S S S H A R P E

75

one mistake or wobble, and it feels so amazing to be in control, so sin-

gularly powerful, that tears track down my face and something close

to relief surges through me.

Pete never mentions the tears. When I’m done, we roll the mats up

and head into the house, where Macy’s making breakfast. My cheeks

are dry and I pretend it never happened.

But the feeling, the memory, it lingers inside me. A spark waiting

for enough fuel to spread.

One night, when Macy’s off chasing down another idiot trying to jump

bail, Pete knocks on my door. I’m allowed to keep it closed, but there’s

no lock, something I’ve hated since I got here.

Macy never knocks. She says I haven’t earned it.

“Come in.”

Pete holds up an envelope. “Something came for you.”

“I thought the warden said no contact with the outside world.”

“Just don’t rat me out.”

“Seriously?” I can’t believe he’s going to give it to me. But he places

the letter at the foot of my bed and ambles out of the room, whistling.

“Pete,” I call. He turns and grins. His front teeth are a little

crooked, and there are acne scars pitting his cheeks, but his eyes are

big and green and sweet, and I suddenly understand why Macy looks

at him like he’s the best thing she’s ever seen. “Thank you.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, his smile wide

and innocent.

I look down at the letter. My name, above Macy’s address, is writ-

ten in loopy purple letters.

Mina’s handwriting.

I tear the envelope open, almost ripping the letter in my hurry.

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F A R F R O M Y O U

I unfold the notebook paper, my heart pounding like I’ve been hold-