New Girl (33 page)

But most of all, she felt hollow.

The dark, ferocious waves were fighting each other to swallow up the sand. Everything was wet. Everything was black. Everything was threatening to engulf her. The water hit her like small bullets.

She looked up at the dark sky, and breathed. From this angle all the air above looked like it was coming at her fast.

Nothingness was all she wanted now.

The dock swayed. She glanced back at the boathouse. People might look for her in the morning. But now she was alone. She untied the boat and climbed onto it.

Something was guiding her. Something besides herself. She wasn’t thinking or deciding. It was like she’d made a choice, and now her body was holding her to it.

She climbed into the boat and immediately drifted too far away from the dock she’d released it from. She turned on the light, partly to battle the sky, and it cast a dim and dirty glow on her surroundings.

Very quickly, the ocean ripped control away from her, and fear ran through Becca. The waves were ripping the boat from its sturdy position and rocking it back and forth like a bath toy. She held on to the side. Water smacked her in the face. It was all she was breathing, hearing, seeing, tasting or coughing up. She’d had enough trouble standing on the beach. She was slipping on the slick floor of the boat, and barely holding on to the side.

More thunder and lightning, simultaneous. She was right in the eye of the storm. She was more nauseous than ever, and puked, not even seeing or feeling where it landed. She let go of the side to try and get to the pole of the sail. In that moment, her side of the boat was whipped into the air, and her light body was thrown into the waves. The powerful waves curled her within them, and she was helpless against them. She couldn’t find the bottom, and she couldn’t find the top. She opened her eyes, and everything was black. Her foot smacked painfully into the hull of the boat once, but she was unable to do anything but flounder helplessly.

Her head came above water once and she started to take a breath, but was then swallowed back into the water. She would be gasping for breath but instead she was just filling her body with the salty, black water. There was no up, there was no down. There was a steady, nauseated life five minutes ago, but nothing five minutes from now.

And then, very suddenly, there was no “now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE NEWS HIT MANDERLEY LIKE A THRASHING
storm. Becca Normandy was dead. Her body had been found.

And Manderley became colder than ever.

Even though it was May, the sky was flat and gray with clouds that raced across the sky, threatening icy rain. The air was foggy and thick, and my mind was much the same.

I was guilty and sick for my jealousy. I had been selfish. The world was bigger than just me. I should have realized that and stayed to myself.

But nothing was worse than the assembly where we all found out. All we’d known were the rumors: that it had something to do with Becca’s whereabouts.

“We should have
known
she’d wait until the end of the school year. It makes so much sense!” I overheard one girl saying to her friend as they passed by. We all thought she was alive.

We all assumed it was good news.

The noisy talking and laughing ebbed as Professor Crawley took the stage. He cleared his throat and adjusted the microphone. Max squeezed my hand.

“Hello, everyone. I’m sorry to have to call you all here on one of your last nights at Manderley. But…”

Professor Crawley spoke calmly and gently to us. He told us in the only way he must have known how. He gave us the facts.

An initial din quieted to only a few hushed sobs. Everyone listened as Professor Crawley explained, quickly and without gruesome detail, that her body had been found in the water.

I thought back to the recurring dream I’d been having all year long about being whipped around beneath the waves, unable to find air. I knew the feeling well, having grown up next to the beach. You go in the ocean enough and you’ll eventually get caught in a riptide that sends your brain the thought that this time, the water is going to…

Swallow me whole.

I remembered the ghostly Becca I had seen in my dream on the night of the Halloween Ball and how she had asked if I could hear the ocean, and how she told me that no one knew if it had swallowed her whole.

Why had she gone near the water?
Had
she taken out the boat, like Blake had wondered? If so…did she know she was going to die?

I barely listened as Dr. Morgan took the stage, to urge us all once again to come talk to her. Her small face contorted with worry as she looked out at the auditorium filled with sobbing teenagers. I spotted Johnny along our same row. He looked etched out of marble he was so still. His eyes were fixed on the seat in front of him, but I could tell that he was not really seeing it.

I didn’t find Blake and Cam until the end, and when we did they were as somber as we were. Neither shed a tear, but the shock had clearly affected them.

“Are you okay?” Blake asked, looking to Max after nodding a hello to me.

He hesitated. “Yes, I’m okay.”

Blake nodded and then looked concernedly at him. “If you need anything…”

“I know.” He glanced up at them. “Thanks. I’m going to bed for right now. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

“Dana’s mom is here.”

“What?” I asked.

“Her mom. They told her before us. I guess she wanted to tell Dana herself, but got here too late…”

Max and I both muttered something about that being too bad, and then our conversation wound down to good-nights.

Max walked me up to the girls’ dorms, where we, too, said a quick, polite good-night and then parted ways.

I floated up the stairs in a haze, and then into my room. The door was cracked, so I pushed it open quietly. I was walking to my side of the room when I heard Dana in the bathroom. It was muffled through the door, but I could tell she was weeping. Her sobs were unbridled and deep. It stung my eyes and throat to hear.

“It’s okay, it’s all right. You’re okay.”

The person who must be her mother was speaking in a slow, calm voice.

“I watched her…I watched her on the dock and I didn’t stop her. It’s my fault…”

“No, honey, it’s not. It’s not because of you. It’s not because of anyone. You’re okay.” Her voice was still measured and soothing. I imagined that she was soothing Dana in the way my mother always had me, by running her hands through her hair and wiping tears from her cheeks.

“She was my f-friend! I could have done something. Should have gone after her or…or…” Her voice trembled, and I could hear her trying to catch her breath. “No one was there for her and
I
should have been! She had enough time out there alone to…to…”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You did all you could. You are okay.”

Dana broke into tears again. A few seconds later she had caught her breath. “What was the last
thought
she had? When she…when she woke up that day, she didn’t know it was the last time she ever would. Did she know she was going to die? When did she stop being aware of what was happening? She must have been cold… I can’t…I can’t stop imagining it....”

This time her mother said nothing. I didn’t blame her for being stumped. After all, I had thought the same thoughts, too.

“I want to
die!
”

There was a twinge in my chest.
No, Dana, you don’t want to kill yourself,
I thought.

“I know that you feel that way now, but you
will
change your mind. It’s going to be okay.”

I snuck back out of the room, not wanting them to know that I had been there. It was the last time I’d see Dana until the funeral.

For the next few days, the students that filled the halls of Manderley were in constant funeral march. No one spoke, it seemed, and when they did it was almost always in hushed voices.

The last few lacrosse games we had, we were crushed in. No one could fight hard, playing or cheering. Everyone was lethargic with the loss.

Becca was dead. We were all about to graduate. A feeling of finality was pushing in everywhere.

For a lot of us, I think it was the first time we’d thought about life or death that way. My grandfather had died when I was too young to understand, but that was it. I might not have known Becca, but it didn’t matter. She was our age and she was no different than us. I might not have stumbled into the ocean if I had been her that night, but maybe I would have. The possibility that it could be any of us at any moment for whatever reason was shaking us all to the core. The mystery around her disappearance had kept these thoughts at bay, that we were seventeen, maybe a little older or a little younger, and we could, all of us, just die like that. We could be as dead as anyone who’d lived to be a hundred or as someone who was given a lethal injection. Our lives could be over at any moment.

We were not invincible.

I think that thought was a new one. We all knew it of course, but we had never really felt it. And as we were all getting ready to end our high school lives and begin our new ones, I realized that these were thoughts worth remembering.

For me, it made me decide that I needed to live. Really
live.
I could not be afraid or timid; I had to make my life worth living. I couldn’t push anything off. As I realized that, I thought of my friends back home and the college life we’d planned out. We’d be friends forever, we had decided, and college would be no different than high school except we’d be older and freer. Whenever I had thought of a life beyond those friends and the streets I already knew, I had always thought:
Later. I’ll tackle the real world later.

Maybe it didn’t have to be later. I remembered my acceptance letters to Florida State and Boston. They had both come on the same day. When I opened the letter from FSU, I had expected to get in. I hoped for an acceptance because it would be embarrassing not to get into the school my friends did. I wanted to be accepted because that was the plan. And when I was, I was happy…but there was something else I had squelched and ignored. I thought of it now, and wondered if that was the part of me who wanted to be pushed from the nest. Maybe what I wanted was a reason to leave the comfort of my plan.

I’d opened the envelope with the big blue letters
BU
in the left-hand corner, and there was a quiver in my chest as I’d read the words telling me I was accepted. I ignored that feeling, too, it turned out. Here a door had opened right next to the one I planned to walk through, and another, more daring and spontaneous version of myself had strode through it.

Maybe that’s who I wanted to be now. I’d already taken the first step and left home. Would I regret it if I sank back into an old routine with the same people when I’d already gotten the worst of it over with?

I’d been homesick a lot, but I’d also been okay. It had been a difficult year, but I had lived. I didn’t even have to take a leap into the cold water of newness; all I had to do was keep swimming.

I thought about it all night until I fell asleep. Then suddenly I
was
swimming.

The water was cold and biting. It was the same old dream, I figured, where I was caught under the waves and couldn’t find the surface. But this time it was different. Two hands grasped me and pulled me up out of the water. I breathed desperately, coughing water from my lungs. When I opened my eyes, it wasn’t a rainy scene on turbulent waters as I had expected. It was that moment right before the sun sets, when all the sky is golden, and the water sparkles invitingly as if it had never done any harm to anyone.

And there was Becca again, as perfect as she had looked the last time we’d met in my dreams.

She smiled at me. “Hello.”

My throat was tight, but this time I could speak. “Becca.”

She considered me for a moment. “I wish I had met you.”

“M-me?”

“Yes, you. You would have been a worthy adversary for me. I think I would have liked you.” She laughed the coquettish laugh I’d always imagined she would have. “You would not have liked me, however.”

She paused and her smile faded. “You are everything I ever wanted or pretended to be.”

My voice was gone from me again, and all I could do was listen.

“I went about it all wrong. I lied and cheated and craved attention, while never seeing why I should deserve it. But you didn’t scratch your way to the top. You lived a year in my shadow, but somehow you still never lost your light. You wondered what was so wrong about you that people wouldn’t want to be around you, but then you realized that you were someone worth knowing, and did not understand why no one else could see that. I was popular and adored for pretending to be a person like you. But I hated myself, and felt ugly and shameful.”

She shook her golden head and looked down at her lap. “Max never wanted me, but I made him stay by making him feel guilty. Johnny never wanted me either, but I appealed to his weaknesses to obtain him. The main weakness being that he’d never felt that he was as good as Max, and I made him feel like he was better. My family wanted me to be more, but all I could do was push them away. You never would have done the things I did. And I’m sorry that you ever had to feel like there was something wrong with you. Believe me,
I was the messed-up one.
”