Golden (14 page)

I've been thinking about the picture Orion drew of me at the lake. He closed his sketchbook without showing me, so I didn't ask. We walked down the trail together, quiet, and when we got to my car, he smiled and gave me a tiny slip of paper. A fortune. I laughed when I looked down and read the words he said to me the first night we met, about meeting your destiny while trying to avoid it. And then I went quiet when I turned it over and saw a phone number on the back. A moment went by where we didn't say anything, like we both knew what it could mean if I took it.

“If you ever need to find me,” he said.

I nodded and put it in my pocket, and we went our separate ways.

I haven't seen him since, but there isn't anything I want to do more. I don't know how I can feel this way about someone who's so different from Shane, or who, really, I hardly know. But it doesn't feel like that with him. Orion feels like someone I've always known, but also someone I need to know more.

I got in my car yesterday and drove circles around town, then up to the lakes hoping the entire time to find him by accident again, without having to cross that line and call him. And the whole time I was pleading with fate, or chance, or whatever, for him to find me. Just find me again. Find me and take me somewhere secret, where I can be who I am when I'm with him. I even told myself that if we did somehow find each other, it would mean something. Maybe something important enough to justify the way I feel.

But he wasn't anywhere.

I came home and stared at the numbers etched out in pencil for a long, long time. Read the fortune over and over. Thought about what I would say to Orion if he picked up. Calling him, period, would say it all: that I needed to find him.

I didn't. Thank God I didn't. I tucked the slip of paper away in the back of this book, safe like all of the other secrets I've put down in here. And now I'm going to close it up tight. Pack it away. This is dangerous, what I'm doing.

Shane's supposed to call soon to go out tonight, and that's where my head and my heart should both be. With him.

I stop reading, positive now that I know where this is going. Then I turn the page. The entry is short, but I can tell from the very first line that I'm right.

June 7

A moment was all it took to change everything. A moment to sit alone in my room after Shane told me he was going out with his friends tonight. A moment to justify dialing Orion's number. To slip out my front door and into the warmth of his car waiting in my driveway. A moment to end up at the hot springs under a glittering sky and a fresh dusting of snow, to feel the fire of the water and the ice of the air mix between us. For hands to brush skin, and lips to meet beneath the moonless sky.

A moment for want to erase thought.

A moment for him to pull back and search my eyes for a reason to stop.

A moment for me to close them against every last one and press my lips to his.

A moment was all it took to lose my balance on this tightrope I've been walking.

And now I don't know what comes after this.

I don't know what comes next.

I drop the journal in my lap. Oh my God, Julianna. I know what comes next.

In two days you and Shane will graduate. You'll pose for a picture in your gowns, with your hats crooked on your heads and your arms around each other. That night a storm will blow in out of nowhere. The two of you will go to a party, then leave together, and that will be the last anyone ever sees of you. Some will say Shane was drunk. Others will say you both were. A few people will think they remember you having a fight.

The next morning a snowplow will spot Shane's Jeep half buried at the bottom of the ravine before you're even reported missing. Search and rescue will be called out when it's found empty. Half the town will volunteer to help, including my dad and uncle. They won't find you, but they will find some of your things—Shane's leather wallet, with everything still in it. A tiny diamond snowflake. Two graduation tassels. And blood in the snow.

Then, after a week of searches and vigils and prayers, it'll be announced that you and Shane were swept down the river into Summit Lake. That a further search will have to wait for the summer when the ice on the lake melts completely, but even then, the chances of recovering anything are slim. The lake is deep, and below the surface it narrows like the neck of an hourglass before opening up into an
underground cavern. Few of those lost in it are ever found.

People will cover the shore with flowers that stand out bright against the melting patches of snow. They'll leave prayer candles, whose glass will crack from the cold, spilling out wax of different colors. The whole town will come to the memorial at the edge of the half-frozen lake. A little girl will watch the grief hang heavy on the people's faces, not understanding or really knowing what was lost.

Until ten years later.

It's unsettling to think that this is what happened two days before. Two days before they left a party together and ended up dead. From a car crash. In his Jeep. Where maybe they had a fight. It could have just been the icy road and the blinding snow that caused it. But what if that wasn't it at all? What if she told Shane about Orion, or he found out some other way? Maybe anger or hurt or shock was what sent them hurtling over the edge. And all this time they've been remembered as something that wasn't true at all: Lakes High's golden couple. A legacy unknowingly built on a lie.

I don't know what to think. The second I start to judge her for what she did, I feel bad. She was seventeen. Torn. Felt something for Orion that was enough to make her question what she had with Shane. But it's unnerving to find out something isn't actually like you always imagined it. To see the tarnish just past the shine, or find a crack in the glossy finish. And there's something else. The sketch that she wrote about sounds eerily similar to one I've seen hanging behind the counter at Kismet. It's one I've noticed
before when I ordered, but never
really
looked at.

A fat raindrop plops onto the open page of Julianna's journal, smudging the ink, and then another and another. I shut it quickly and tuck it up under my shirt, then make a run for the trail down. Miraculously, I make it to my car just before the sky opens up. I sit in the seat for a moment, catching my breath and watching the rain pound the windshield. Julianna's journal rests on the dash, damp but safe. There are two more entries before her story ends and the pages go blank. I don't want to get there just yet, so instead I turn the key and I drive. I need to see that sketch up close.

“But oh, the agitated heart

Till someone really find us out.”

—“REVELATION,” 1915

Inside Kismet it's warm and cozy, and surprisingly empty for a rainy day. The bells on the door jangle when I step in, but no one's behind the counter, which is actually perfect. I spent the entire drive down from the lakes trying to figure out how I could get a closer look at the sketches hanging on the wall behind the register. Whereas all of the art on the walls of Kismet is in constant flux, these three have never moved. They've always been there, for as long as I remember, right in front of me.

I know it's a crazy thought, but I have to see if one of them could possibly be the one of Julianna that Orion drew
that day at the lake. Because if it is, that means . . . I don't know exactly, but it feels like something. Maybe that Josh knew Orion? Was friends with him? Or maybe he's his brother. Ex-tattoo-artist-turned-coffee-shop-owner? That would explain the full sleeves on both arms. I realize as I think each of these things how crazy they'd sound if I said them out loud, but at the moment I don't care about the lack of logic in it. For now I hope that maybe the feeling is enough to lead me to something.

I stand in the middle of the empty café a moment, waiting for someone to appear from the back room, and hoping it's Lane. He's not intimidating to me in the same way Josh is, so I could actually carry on a conversation with him. Maybe even ask him if he knows anything about the sketches. No one comes out, but I can hear a steady rhythm from the back room that sounds like something heavy being moved and then stacked. Whoever it is working back there probably didn't hear me come in, which means I might have a minute or two to inspect the sketches before they even realize I'm here.

I inch my way toward the register and the three frames behind it. After one look over my shoulder, and another at the door of the storeroom, I step through the opening in the counter, past the register and stacks of paper coffee cups, and come face to face with three framed sketches, the middle of which is the “sexy girl,” as Kat calls her.

The picture is of her in profile, and she's lying on her back on what I always pictured as a beach rather than the shore of a lake. She's stretched out on her back, one knee bent so her
leg forms a triangle, chin tilted toward the sky, eyes closed, hair tumbling down over her shoulders. She's smiling, just barely, like maybe she's dreaming. Or soaking up the sun after a swim. Nothing about it jumps out at me as distinctly Julianna, but there isn't anything that says it couldn't be her either. From what I know, a sketch is an imprecise art form.

I look at the two on either side, the ones I never paid much attention to before today. They're of trees. Not dying trees, but trees with branches that wave like arms on the page so that I can practically see the wind in them. I lean in closer, sure I'm going to see
I WAS HERE
carved into one of them, and—

“What can I do for you?”

The voice makes me jump—no, leap—backward. “Oh, God,” I say, hand to my chest. My heart pounds so hard against it, I think Josh must be able to hear it too. “I'm so sorry,” I add. “I just . . . I just was trying to get a closer look at these drawings.” I point, as if that will somehow explain everything and lessen the sudden burn in my cheeks.