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years of sleepovers have taught me when she’s faking.

“I know you’re awake.”

“Go to sleep” is all she says. She doesn’t open her eyes, doesn’t even

change that annoying exaggerated slow-breathing thing she’s doing.

“You still mad?”

“C’mon, Soph, I’m tired.”

I play with the zipper on my sleeping bag, jerking it up and down,

waiting for her to answer me, knowing she might not.

“Is your back okay?” her eyes pop open in concern as she breaks

her self-imposed silence.

“I’ll be fi ne.”

I won’t, though. I’ll wake up stiff tomorrow. My good leg will be

numb, but the bad one will ache like a bitch where the scar tissue is

tight in my knee.

T E S S S H A R P E

119

I should take another pill. I deserve it.

“Here, have my pillow.” She leans over and tucks it underneath my

head. “Better?”

“You haven’t answered my question,” I remind her.

Mina sighs. “I’m not mad at you,” she says. “I already told you, I’m

worried
.”

“You don’t need to be,” I insist.

It’s the wrong thing to say. I can see real fear in her. It bothers me

more than I’d like to admit, makes me want to hide, to numb myself

further from this, from her.

“Yes I do,” she hisses, sitting up, half out of her sleeping bag. She

grabs my arm, pulling at me until I do the same. Then she’s leaning

into my space so fast that I’m startled into letting her.

“You’re taking too many pills. You’re hurting yourself.” She swal-

lows and seems to realize, suddenly, how close we are. Her fi ngers fl ex

around my arm, tightening and loosening, then tightening again.

“Sophie, please,” she says, and I can’t tell what she’s asking here.

She’s too close; I can smell the vanilla lotion she rubbed into her hands

before we went to bed. “
Please
,” she says again, and my breath catches,

because there’s no denying what she’s asking for now.

Her eyes fl icker down to my mouth, she’s pulling me toward her,

and I’m breathless, so caught in the anticipation, in the
oh my God,

this is actually happening
feeling that spikes through me, that I don’t

hear the footsteps until it’s almost too late.

But Mina does, and she jerks away before Trev comes down the

hall. “You two still awake?” He yawns, walking into the kitchen and

grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge.

“We were just going to sleep,” Mina says hastily, lying back down.

She won’t look at me, and I can feel my cheeks redden. My entire

body’s gone hot and heavy, and I want to squirm deeper into my

120

F A R F R O M Y O U

sleeping bag and press my legs together tightly.

“Night,” Trev says. He leaves the kitchen light on so Mina doesn’t

have to be in the dark.

Mina doesn’t say anything. She settles in her sleeping bag next

to me and tucks one hand under her head. For one long moment, we

stare at each other.

I’m afraid to move. To speak.

Then Mina smiles, just for me, small and real and on the edge of

wistful, and her other hand slips into mine as she closes her eyes. Her

silver rings, warmed from her skin, are smooth against my fi ngers.

The scent of vanilla curls around me, making blood rush beneath

my skin, and the hot pull inside my stomach twists and revels in the

contact.

When I wake the next morning, our fi ngers are still tangled

together.

25

NOW (JUNE)

“Thanks for coming.” I step aside to let Rachel into the

house.

“Sophie, was that the—” My mother catches sight of

Rachel, with her fl aming hair, the mustard-yellow sweater

she’s buttoned wrong, the chunky skull pendant dangling

from the bike chain around her neck. “Oh,” she says.

“Mom, you remember Rachel.”

“I do.” Mom smiles, and it’s almost genuine, though her

eyes linger on Rachel a moment too long. I wonder if it’s

Rachel’s appearance or if Mom is remembering that night.

Rachel had stayed by my side until my parents showed up.

I hadn’t really given her a choice; I wouldn’t let go of her

hand.

“How are you, Mrs. Winters?” Rachel asks.

“Well. And you?”

“Fabulous.” Rachel grins.

“There’s something wrong with my computer. Rachel’s

gonna check it out for me.”

“Bye!” Rachel says cheerfully, following me up to my

room. When we close the door behind us, she tosses her

purse on my bed, collapsing next to it. “Okay, I’ve only got

122

F A R F R O M Y O U

forty minutes. I have to drive to Mount Shasta to spend

time with my dad. It’s his birthday.”

“Can you hack a thumb drive in forty minutes?”

A smile tugs up the ends of her red-painted lips. “No

way. I’m good with taking computers apart and putting

them back together. Code is another monster. It’ll take me

a while.”

I hand over the drive. “I appreciate your trying. My

method involved entering as many passwords as I could

think of.”

“Probably not the most effective approach.”

“Agreed.”

“So how did it go, talking to Mina’s supervisor at the

Beacon
?” Rachel asks, grabbing a pillow to prop her chin

on. She tucks a leg underneath her, the other dangling off

my bed.

“He’s out of town, but he’s coming back next week. I’m

going to go back then to talk to him.”

“And obviously getting inside the house went smoothly,”

Rachel says, holding up the drive, wiggling it in the air.

I shrug. “Trev hates me.”

“I really doubt that,” Rachel says.

“He wants to,” I say. “And he should. He would. If he

knew the truth.”

Rachel shifts on my bed, turning the thumb drive over

in her hands. But she looks up to meet my eyes when she

says, “The truth?”

I don’t say anything else, because when you hide, it’s

instinctual. It’s something you have to train yourself out of,

T E S S S H A R P E

123

and I never trained myself out of this secret, even when I

wanted to.

“Soph, can I ask you something?” She looks me in the

eye, and there’s a question there.

The
question.

I can look away and stay quiet. I can say no. I can be that

girl, hiding from the truth, denying her heart.

But it’ll eat at me. Through me. Until there’s nothing

real left.

I twist our rings on my thumb, and they bump against

each other, trading nicks and scratches earned through the

years.

“Sure. Ask away.”

“You and Mina, you two were . . .” She switches tactics,

suddenly so blunt, just like her letters, starting in one direc-

tion and veering off into another midsentence. “You like

girls, don’t you?”

My cheeks heat up, and I pick at the hem of my com-

forter, trying to decide how to say it.

Sometimes I wonder what my mother would think,

if she’d try to sweep it under the rug, add it to the ever-

growing list of things to fi x.

Sometimes I wonder if my dad would mind that some-

day he might walk me down the aisle and give me away

to a woman instead of a man, gaining another daughter

instead of a son.

Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like if I had

been open from the start. If we’d never had to hide. How

much would it have changed things if we’d been honest?

124

F A R F R O M Y O U

I’ll never know. But I can be honest now, here, with

Rachel. Maybe it’s because she met me at the worst moment

of my life. Maybe it’s because she stuck around, even after.

Maybe it’s because I don’t want to be afraid anymore. Not

of this. Because compared to everything else—the addic-

tion, the hole that losing Mina left inside me, the guilty

knot that Trev twists me into—being hung up on this isn’t

worth it. Not anymore.

Which is why I say, “Sometimes.”

“So you like guys, too.”

“It just depends. On the person.” I’m still fi ddling with

the comforter, wrapping the loose strands of thread around

my fi ngers.

She smiles, open and encouraging. “Best of both worlds,

I guess.”

It makes me laugh, the sound bursting out of me like

truth. It makes me want to cry and thank her. To tell her

that I’ve never told anyone before, and to tell it and have it

be accepted like it’s no big deal, feels like a gift.

26

THREE YEARS AGO (FOURTEEN YEARS OLD)

“Come on. Open the door.” Mina knocks for the third time.

I’m locked in the bathroom, trying to smear enough foundation

to cover the scar on my neck. I’m failing. No matter how hard I try, a

shadow shows through.

It’s been almost six months since the crash, and the idea of going

to a dance, the irony of going to a dance when it still hurts to move too

fast, makes me want to scream and yell
no, no, no
like a toddler. But

my mom was so excited when Cody asked me, and Mina talked end-

lessly about dresses, and I couldn’t bring myself to say no to anyone.

But now I don’t want to leave the bathroom. I hate how twisted

and uneven I am, how I have to lean hard on my cane with every step.

“Soph, if you don’t open this door in the next fi ve seconds, I’ll

break it down. I swear I will.” Mina knocks harder.

“You couldn’t,” I say, but I smile at the thought of her, fi ve-foot-

two, a hundred pounds soaking wet trying.

“I can! Or I’ll go get Trev—I bet he could break it down.”

“Don’t you dare get Trev.” Every time I’m alone with him, he wants

to apologize—to
fi x
me.

I can almost see her triumphant expression through the door. “I

will! I’ll go get him right now.” I hear exaggerated footsteps—Mina

stomping in place outside the door. I can see the shadow of her feet.

126

F A R F R O M Y O U

I toss the tube of foundation into my make up bag and wash my

hands off . The elaborate curls that Mina coaxed into my hair skim

my bare shoulders. “I’ll be out in a second.” I tug the neck of my dress

higher. The red silk is pretty, it makes my skin look milky instead of

sickly pale, but Mom had to take it to a tailor to get lace added to the

deep v-neckline so it would cover the worst of the scarring.

It’d taken forever to fi nd a dress that had sleeves. We must have

tried on at least fi ft y dresses, sharing the same fi tting room as my

mom waited outside. Mina had fussed with me, helping me step in

and out of the heaps of tulle and satin. She’d grabbed my hand and

steadied me, and when she’d let go (holding on a second too long, my

skin against hers, half-dressed in the tiny room), she’d blushed and

stammered when I asked her if she was all right.

My leg is killing me. I’d left my cane in Mina’s bedroom this

morning, instead of using it, and I need it now, even though I don’t

want to look at it.

I take the pill bottle out of the beaded clutch that Mina had insisted

I buy along with the dress. I shake out two pills.

She knocks again. “Come on, Sophie!”

Make that three. I down them with water from the tap, tucking

the bottle away.

I open the door, and red silk swishes against my legs, a foreign,

almost pleasant feeling fl oating above the mess of scars.

Mina beams. “Look at you.” She’s already dressed, wrapped and