“Holden,” I mumbled. “What kind of name is Holden, anyway?”

  Janna blinked at me. Justin laughed as he rifled through the stack of towels, searching for a dry one.

  “Hey,” I said. “Decker was my mom’s last name. It has significance.”

  Janna smiled. “Catcher in the Rye? Ring any bells?” By my blank expression, I guess she could tell that it did not. She sighed. “Holden is only the angsty-est voice of discontented youth in all of recent literature.”

  Shit.

  Delaney was going to love him.

  In my head I saw Delaney talking to him somewhere in the woods. Him saying something angsty. Frowning. Her commiserating. Smiling. Justin shook his head, and when Janna turned around, he mouthed, “Go, you idiot.”

  “Janna, my phone?”

  “Oh, right.” She handed it over. I wandered away, and she called out, “By the way, Delaney called.”

  “What? What did she say?”

  “Nothing. I said, ‘Decker’s phone,’ and she hung up. I mean, what the hell? Can’t even say hello?” Then Janna yelled, “She was the last person to see my brother alive, and she can’t even fucking say hello?”

  “Please,” I said, backing away. “Why would she say anything to you? You’re acting like she gave Carson epilepsy. Like she could’ve stopped it.” I was breathing heavily, and everyone was watching us. And I stopped talking because I had basically just accused Janna of the exact same thing I had been doing.

  “And you’re acting like something isn’t seriously wrong with this place,” she said.

  I almost flipped her off as I walked away, but I thought of Carson, and what he would do if he was here. What he’d think of me right now. What his death had done to her.

  What it had done to all of us.

  I tried calling Delaney back, but it just rang. I sent her a message, that it was me and not Janna.

  I could see Justin’s—no, Maya’s—house from here, about a quarter of the way around the lake. Rather, I saw where it should’ve been, but right now it was just a black shadow. No lights. I was starting to shake. The towel was pretty much useless since my clothes were soaked through. My shoes, too. They squished with each step, and as the sounds from the initiation faded, my own steps grew louder. The light from the cars still cut through a few of the trees, lighting the way. But it faded as I rounded the next turn. I could still see everyone behind me, shadows in the light, but the area in front of me was in total darkness.

  I walked by memory—there was a trunk coming up, a tree that the Baxters had cut down because it swayed too much in storms, threatening to come down on their roof. And when I reached the stump, I’d be able to see the backyard, sloping above me to my left. And then the sliding back door. There were no curtains on the back doors, then or now, but the inside of the house was pitch-dark. I tried Delaney’s cell once more, listening for ringing in the silence. Nothing.

  So I scrambled up the sloped grass and cupped my hands over my eyes as I pressed my face to the glass doors. The house was a ranch—but a big ranch. Huge, open living area, perfect for parties. A kitchen off to the side. A long hallway extending off the main area, leading to bedrooms. Perfect for parties. I could see a faint light coming from the hallway. I skirted the side of the house, peeking in the windows as I went. Like some sort of stalker. Great. I stepped away. None of my business.

  There was a red car in the driveway. A car that normally wasn’t here, that I hadn’t seen since the day Maya moved in. Holden’s, I assumed. He was back at the house. He was here. Maybe Delaney—

  None of my business, I thought again, but I pressed my face back to the window anyway. Nothing. The bedrooms all had shades drawn. But there was a light coming from behind one of them. My face was level with the base of the window, and I stooped down to try to see through the crack at the bottom. A shadow moved across the room.

  My phone rang, breaking the silence. I fumbled for the Mute button. And then the window was all shadow, and the shades fluttered for a second, then pulled lower, cutting off my vision. They flew upward as I dove down against the base of the house.

  Shit. I pressed my back to the wall, hoping whoever was in there couldn’t see me. Hoping it wasn’t her mother, scared of an intruder. Hoping they wouldn’t call the cops on me. Sorry, I was just checking to see if my ex-girlfriend was in there.

  Idiot.

  I eased my way along the wall, toward the backyard, and nearly bumped into Holden’s chest.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Holy shit, yourself,” he said. “Maya’s not here.”

  “I know,” I said. I took a step back. Tried to calm my breathing. “Sorry, I was looking for Delaney.”

  He looked confused. Then his eyes narrowed, and he looked back toward his house. “Why would she be here?”

  “I was just checking. …” Because you’re named after some angsty guy from literature. Because Maya said you wanted to meet her.

  “Did she say she’d be coming here?” He looked over his shoulder and then over my shoulder.

  “No, Maya said Delaney went to meet you, and I couldn’t find her. Sorry, this was stupid.”

  “She said she couldn’t make it,” he said. Which should’ve made me feel better but only made me realize they had talked. Who knows how frequently or what about. Holden was looking me over. “Were you swimming?”

  I pointed to the lake. “Everyone’s there. It’s … stupid. Never mind. Sorry,” I said, turning to go.

  Holden grabbed my arm as he leaned forward, closer to the water. He took a step toward the lake. “What are they doing?” he asked. “What the hell is going on?”

  “It’s this yearly prank,” I said, pulling my arm away. Trying to give him the quickest answer so I could get the hell out of there. “The alumni are dunking us.” I held out my arms as evidence.

  “I thought no one went in the water anymore,” he whispered. So the curse had reached them. They knew. Maybe not the why, but they knew the what.

  “Somebody forgot to tell them that,” I said. Holden was still watching the lake when I turned to go.

  I took off running, not once looking behind me. I walked behind the cars, still keeping out of the light, and checked my phone. The missed call had been from Delaney.

  I called her back. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I was looking for you.”

  A pause. “I had the ringer turned off. I’m home.”

  Because if she could walk to the lake house, she could also walk home. “Meet me at my house,” I said. And after the silence that followed, I added, “Please.”

  I had this thought, that if we went back to this place where it all started, where everything changed, if we could talk, if I could forgive her, we could move on. It was the perfect thought.

  She knocked. The electricity was still out, so it was dark. I had a flashlight, but that seemed weird. Still, I turned it on, set it on the table before me. “What am I doing here?” she asked. But she came, so she knew exactly what she was doing here. She was hoping.

  “I thought you were with Holden. Maya said …”

  “Yeah, not really in the mood to be friendly,” she said, and I felt myself smiling already.

  “You talk to him, though? You want to meet him?”

  “Am I at an inquisition?” she asked. And then she sighed. “He has my number in case he can’t reach Maya. For emergencies. And he called because he wanted to talk to me about her. Make sure she’s doing okay or something.”

  “And he wanted to meet you in the woods?”

  “I thought it would be awkward to talk about Maya with her there.”

  “Maya made it seem like she was setting you guys up or something.”

  She paused. “Is that a question? You called me ten times because I was meeting some guy, which, for the record, is the first time you’ve called me since August. I didn’t see him. I don’t want to hang out with him. Nothing happened. Am I free to go now?”

  “That’s not why I …” I took a step closer. “You left and I couldn’t find you.”

  “Turns out I’m not really a fan of watching you hang all over Tara Spano.”

  She had forgiven me for that, I thought.

  “That’s not what it looked like,” I said. “That Lance guy was being gross, and I was just—”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. Still sucks to watch. And I couldn’t think of any reason to stay.”

  She was standing near the door. I wanted her closer. I wanted her to walk closer. “I wanted you to stay,” I said. Please get what I mean.

  “I’m here right now,” she said. And she was waiting. I knew what she was waiting for.

  I felt my clothes dripping water on the brand-new floors. “I’m trying …,” I said. I cleared my throat and said, “I’m trying to forgive you.”

  She paused. I heard her shift positions. “You’re trying, or you’re pretending?” she asked.

  “I want to,” I said. “I miss you,” I added. Which seemed like the biggest understatement.

  I saw the shadows stretch over her. Thought she might’ve been taking a step back. But she was coming closer. “You’re trying. You want to.” Another step. “But you can’t, can you?”

  “I don’t know, Delaney. I don’t know. I want to just … move past it. Can we just skip this part?” She was standing so close that when she breathed, I could almost feel the air moving.

  Close enough that I could kiss her.

  “And pretend like this didn’t happen?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Pretend like it doesn’t exist?”

  “Yes.”

  “How the hell are we supposed to do that? You can’t even look at me right now,” she whispered.

  “I’m looking right at you.” I reached my hand out to her arm, almost touched her.

  She moved back. “We are standing in the dark. You invited me to a place without any light. You don’t want to see me,” she said.

  I wanted to turn on the light. Prove it to her. Kiss her in the light. “I hate that he’s dead,” she said. “I hate it for you, and I hate that it hurt you. That I hurt you. I love your parents too, you know.” I could tell from the waver in her voice that there were probably tears on her face. I wanted to wipe them away. I wanted her to stop talking.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I can’t. Because it was horrible, and I hated it, but I did it. And if he asked me to do the same thing all over again, I’d do it. I’d do it for him.”

  Wrong thing to say.

  “What about for me, though?” I said. Guess she was right. I couldn’t just pretend like it didn’t exist. “I thought that was kind of a requirement of being together, that you don’t lie. What about that promise?”

  Also the wrong thing to say.

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought. You don’t forgive me. And you don’t understand me.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. I grabbed her by the arm as she spun to leave. If this was an insult-throwing competition, that would win. That did win. “Don’t you dare say that.”

  “You keep things from me all the time,” she whispered. “What people say about me. What they think. What they thought when Carson died.”

  I thought she’d forgiven me for that, too. But everything I’d done wrong was still living inside of her, forgiven or not. Impossible not to remember.

  I was right. Something deeper than this was also broken.

  I swallowed hard. I hated knowing that it was all still there. Something I couldn’t cut out of existence. Forgiven. Not forgotten.

  How did this whole thing turn into me wanting to apologize to her, and not the other way around?

  “I’m sorry, Decker. I’m so sorry. But I can’t exactly apologize for something that I’d do all over again, can I? And you can’t exactly forgive me when you’re still furious, can you?”

  “I would’ve picked you,” I said, and I heard my voice break when I said it. That’s what killed me. Like it meant I cared about her more than she cared about me. I understood. I just would’ve made a different choice.

  She couldn’t respond to that. She almost left.

  “It wasn’t what that guy said, right? Not just pheromones, right?” I asked. I couldn’t stand to think that everything between us was a lie, but I couldn’t stand not to know, either.

  She stood in the doorway, half out. “Second week of freshman year.”

  “What?”

  “You were waiting at the bus stop.” She paused. “Shut up about the pheromones.” And she was gone.

  Freshman year. Two years before the accident. I actually remembered that day because she acted so weird. She saw me, same as every other day. I smiled at her. She blushed. She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day.

  I’d kissed her on a dare later that winter, but it was just an excuse to kiss her. And she got pissed. Because it was just a dare.

  I tried to think back and remember the first time I wanted her, but I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t.

  And then she threw the door back open. “He was dying,” she said. “That’s why I picked him. I can promise you a million things. But that was the last promise I could make to him.” She stepped outside. “I wish he hadn’t asked me that,” she said. And then she left.

  I put my hand on the wall, leaned my forehead against it, shaking in my wet clothes. This was who she was. And the person she would always be. A lifetime of listening to the secrets of the dying. A lifetime of keeping promises to the dead.

  Chapter 13

  Two days later, Justin slid into his seat beside me in math and stared at me until I looked his way. “What?”

  His eyes were red and his mouth was hanging open. “I’m sick,” he said. And then he coughed to prove it.

  I leaned away. “So go home.”

  “No,” he said, coughing into his closed fist. “I’m sick.”

  I put my arm up over my face. “Yeah, could you maybe move back, man?”

  Kevin took his spot in front of us and turned around. “Did Justin tell you about his cold of death yet?”

  Justin ignored Kevin and leaned across the aisle toward me. “I inhale fucking lake water and now I’m sick,” he said.

  “Makes sense,” I said, grinning at Kevin. “You did, after all, inhale water while you panicked.”

  “Lake water,” he repeated.

  “Any water,” I said, speaking louder now, “in your lungs isn’t exactly healthy.”

  Someone coughed in the back corner. “What about her?” I asked. “You think she got a cold from choking on lake water? Let’s ask her.”

  Justin punched me in the arm. “Don’t be an ass.”

  “Ditto,” I said, taking out my notebook. But every time I heard him cough throughout class, each time I heard the rattle of his breath, I jumped.

  I pictured him panicking in the lake, his arms desperately grasping at the surface. I pictured the water dripping off of him, inside of him, circulating in his blood now.

  Not him.

  I thought it quickly, in a whisper, as I cleared my throat and took out my pencil.

  After class, Janna met us in the hall. I dealt with the fact that we’d had it out the best way I knew how. “Hey,” I said, like nothing had happened.

  “Hey,” she said. And that was it.

  Justin leaned in for a kiss—I guess they were together now, but her eyes went wide and she put a hand on his chest. “Keep the plague to yourself, thank you very much.”

  “See?” Justin said to me as Kevin waved Maya over.

  “You shouldn’t have gone in that water,” Janna said. Then she pointed her finger at each of us. “None of you should’ve gone in that water. Don’t you remember?”

  “What is it?” Maya asked, and it looked like the panic had transferred straight to her. “Why can’t you go in the water?”

  “Because it’s cursed,” Janna said. “Everyone knows that.”

  Kevin forced a laugh and put his hand on Janna’s shoulder. “Allow me to do Carson’s job here.” He cleared his throat, pretended to shake his hair out of his face, like Carson would’ve done, even though Kevin’s hair was shorter. “Snap out of it.”

  She looked down at her shoes, but her face broke into a smile.

  “Hey, my lungs are not a joke,” Justin said. But Kevin waved him off.

  “Anyone up for pizza? It comes with good news,” Kevin said.

  “How about just the news,” Justin said. “I want to go home and die.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “I’m not going to Johnny’s,” Janna said.

  “News first,” I said. “Pizza after.”

  “Fine,” Kevin said. “Important stuff: since Justin’s lake house is now Maya’s real house and is no longer at our disposal, I went above and beyond and procured a new facility.”

  “Huh?” Justin asked.

  “A place for Halloween. This weekend.”

  “Um, Halloween is in, like, three weeks,” Janna said.

  “Yeah, well, the place is available this week.” He held up a set of keys. “Renters moved out this weekend. New lease starts in two weeks. Cleaning company comes next week. It’s perfect.”

  His family really did own half the town. “Your parents are going to kill you,” I said.

  “They can add it to the long list of things they already want to kill me for. Anyway,” Kevin said. “Costumes required.”

  “I’m not wearing a costume,” I said.

  “Costumes required,” he repeated. “Now, pizza.”

  He hung an arm around Maya and nodded toward me. “Oh,” Maya said. “I can’t. My brother’s home this week. Can you drop me off on the way?”

  He stopped walking. “Come on, My, he’s not your dad.”

  He didn’t see the look that passed across her face for a brief second. “You’re right,” she said. “But seeing as my dad left when I was five, and seeing as my mom has been sick on and off since I was ten, and seeing as Holden will probably have to drop a class now, mostly because of me, and seeing as how he practically raised me and already took a year off school to help out with my mom, how about I don’t make his life any harder than it already is? Some of us have more to worry about than driving a spare car, Kevin.”