Perfect Lies. Кирстен Уайт

can’t let anyone know.”

      “I barely know the things we know. She isn’t pulling anything out of my head. There’s nothing to pull! I’m still waiting!” I know it’s irrational—it will take time. We are laying the groundwork for his father to be arrested, for the company to implode. It can’t happen overnight.

      But I just want it to be done. When it’s done, I can get Annie back. We can all leave this behind forever.

      “We have to be patient.”

      I want to rip out his hair. I want to grab the steering wheel and swerve into oncoming traffic.

      I lean forward, clutching my knees to my chest, taking deep breaths. James puts his hand on the back of my neck, warm and steady, and the breathing gets easier.

      “I know it’s hard,” he says, his voice so different when he’s being gentle. I don’t know whether I love it or hate it. It confuses me. Angry James I knew. Angry, distant James was easy to love because he was still safe. But this James that is mine feels dangerous.

      I don’t ever get to keep the things that are mine.

      He squeezes my shoulder. “I promise you, it will all be worth it. The things you’ve done—they haven’t been for nothing.”

      I look out the window into the night, not dark here but lit with thousands of glaring eyes, watching everything always. All these things I’ve done. So many things. Please, please, they have to be for something. I’ll make them for something.

      “How is your dad?” I ask, needing to get away from the horror movie of my life playing in my head.

      “We’re not talking about him tonight. Tonight is about us.”

      He pulls over and parks the car illegally, then gets out. I follow. We’re at a building I don’t recognize. It’s closed, dark, locked up for the night. He’s grinning, boyish in his anticipation.

      “Well?”

      “Do you remember the first time we met?”

      I do. Every second of it.

      I shrug.

      “I broke into an all-girls school and we got drunk together.” He pulls a bottle out of his jacket. I notice the copper plaque above the door, identifying it as St. Mary’s School for Girls. I can’t fight the smile that tugs on the edges of my mouth in response to his.

      He closes the distance between us, leaning down, forehead against mine. “I was feeling nostalgic.” I lean up and my lips meet his. I always lose myself in his lips, but it’s the best way of being lost.

      “So, what do you think?” he says, hand on the small of my back, pulling me closer. “Should we break into a school and get smashed?”

      James is mine. He is my north, and as long as we are together, everything is okay.

       ANNIE

       Two and a Half Months Before

      

      THE BLOOD IS POUNDING IN MY HEAD; I CAN FEEL IT building pressure behind my eyes. Still nothing. My arms and stomach muscles are trembling; I can’t hold this handstand much longer, even with the help of the wall bracing me.

      “What are you doing?”

      I startle and fall down, my legs smacking against the wood floor of my bedroom. “Ouch.”

      “Are you okay?” Cole asks.

      “This is my room,” I snap from my undignified position on the floor.

      “Door was open. Dinner’s ready.”

      “Not eating.”

      “That’d explain the crankiness.”

      I flip him off, then stand. I don’t have to put up with crap from someone who obviously hates me and wants me out of the house. Rafael and Adam and Sarah all like having me here. I’m determined to show that I have some value.

      Unfortunately, this experiment proved fasting plus making all the blood rush to my head does not a vision trigger. Sucks. Guess I won’t sleep tonight and add extreme fatigue.

      “What are you trying to accomplish?” Cole asks.

      “Are you still in here?” I grab a throw blanket off the edge of my bed and wrap it around my shoulders. Adam’s way more thoughtful.

      “Yes.”

      I sigh and flop down on the bed, light-headed. “Sometimes I can make myself see something if I push my body far enough.”

      “Doesn’t sound healthy.”

      “I need to see …” Fia. I need to see Fia. But I also don’t want to. I don’t want to see her trailing after James like a well-trained pet. It makes me sick, makes me angrier than I’ve ever been, that she chose him.

      She chose him. Call me, Fia. CALL ME. Tell me why.

      I kick a pillow off my bed. “I’m sick of being useless.”

      “You aren’t useless.”

      I laugh harshly. “Is that why you’re so eager to ship me off?”

      He doesn’t respond. I think he’s gone, so when he talks it startles me. “Fia wanted you safe.”

      “Yeah, well, Fia’s not here, is she?” I stomp past him and out of the house. I’ve gone on enough walks to familiarize myself with the path down to the beach. It’s late in the evening, the Georgia air still sticky, so there aren’t many people out. I walk in relative silence, guided by the steady pulse of the ocean.

      When I feel the ground shift into sand beneath my shoes, I take a few steps to the side and sit, facing the eternal ocean breeze. It doesn’t smell like I thought it would. I spent too many years with those horrible “sea air” candles confusing my brain about what, exactly, a huge body of salt water would smell like. It’s not sweet at all; it’s heavy and cold with the slightest hint of decay.

      But breathing it in, filling my lungs with it, makes me feel very, very alive.

      Eden was from California. She always talked about taking me there and teaching me to surf. It wasn’t until a year ago I found out she’d never surfed in her life; she’d lived in one of the interior desert cities and had never even seen the ocean.

      If Fia wasn’t going to stay with me, why couldn’t she have gotten Eden out so I wouldn’t have to be alone? Eden deserves the ocean.

      Then again, Eden never hated the school like Fia always did and like I learned to. She’d laugh and say everything’s relative. I can’t imagine what her “relative” comparison was that the school was preferable, but I don’t doubt it was horrible.

      Someone sits next to me and I startle. “Sarah?”

      “Cole.”

      I roll my eyes. I don’t know why he’s out here, but I’m not going to try and initiate conversation. I dig my hands into the sand, flashing back to that day on the beach in Chicago. That day I thought I knew exactly how everything would feel and turn out. That day they made my sister kill two people. I didn’t see that. I never see enough.

      I find a rock beneath the sand. Sarah told me they cart in the sand for the tourists, and that if you go a mile down the beach it’s nothing but rocks. I rub my thumb along the contours of the stone, wonder how long it had to be turned around on the bottom of the ocean, battered and broken, until it came out this smooth.

      “Why