Live Through This (22 page)

In a quiet voice, he says, “That isn’t how I feel about you. I thought you understood that.”

“Of course I understand!” I shout, pushing his hands off of me. “I understand that you’ve spent your whole life trying to make people think you want to be with me when, really, you want someone like Brody!”

Noah’s eyes widen and his mouth falls open. Without a word, he retreats to his car.

I grab at my hair and scream in frustration.

What am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing?

I run after him. “Noah, I’m sorry!”

He keeps walking, his focus straight ahead.

“I’m okay with it,” I say to his back. “I always have been. And I don’t like you in that way either. I promise.”

Noah turns. “Then
why
did you do that?”

“Because. I wanted to know who I was kissing for once in my life!”

“What is that supposed to
mean
?”

I look at the ground. “It means that I freaked out on Reece
tonight. He was kissing me and then I was crying. The look on his face. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I did that.”

“I don’t get it,” he says. “What are you saying? He was trying to . . . force you or something?”

“No! I got confused. Like, I didn’t even know where I was. Or who I was with.”

I meet Noah’s gaze. He doesn’t look shocked or angry anymore, just concerned.

“You have to take me back,” I say. “I left my phone in Reece’s truck. I have to find him and talk to him.”

“No, you
have
to go to bed.”

I glance toward my house, back at his car, and then at my house again. “I can’t go in there. And I can’t leave things like that with him.”

“You’re completely sloshed and you’re going to make things worse. Sleep it off. Figure out what you want to say to him.”

My eyes fill with tears. “I know what I want to say. That I’m sorry. And that none of it was his fault. And that I don’t want to lose him. And I’m so scared that I already have.”

“I’ll talk to him, okay? I’ll let him know that you’re sorry and you’ll talk to him tomorrow.” He takes my arm, carefully. “Now, let’s get you inside, drunk girl. You’ve had a crazy night.”

I’m nowhere near as drunk as he seems to think I am,
but I let him lead me up the steps anyway. When we reach the front door, Noah feels around until he locates our hidden key while I stare at the tops of our shoes. “I’m sorry,” I say, gesturing down to where we were standing before. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“I know that. But, um. Was I really that obvious about”—he drops his voice to a near-whisper—“Brody?”

“Total stab in the dark.”

He lets out a loud breath. “All right. I’m going to go. I’ll talk to Reece for you. Promise me you won’t stay up all night watching horror movies?”

I smile weakly. “I’ll try not to let you down.”

CHAPTER 26

T
he house is quiet as I creep into Bryan’s and my TV room downstairs, kick off my shoes, and turn on the television. According to the channel directory,
The Sixth Sense
is the only scary-type thing on right now. It isn’t technically horror, but it will do.

I know that Noah meant the horror-movie thing as a joke. Because, obviously, I can’t handle my regular life, so adding in a scary movie would push me right over the edge. But I’m determined. I am going to watch this movie.

I’ve caught it about twenty minutes in, so I don’t entirely know what’s happening. I pay close attention to the lighting, the makeup, the way the actors speak. But I find myself getting caught up in the music. My heart beats fast and I grip the blanket that’s spread across my lap. I turn the volume down, down, down. Is it still scary when I can’t hear anything, when I
don’t know what they’re saying? When all I see are gray faces, hanging by ropes?

Oh, yes. Yes, it is.

“What are you doing here?”

In the fraction of a second that it takes for my brain to register that Bryan has come into the room and is speaking to me, I’ve already tensed up and screamed.

“Jesus!” In two strides, my brother is on the couch beside me, taking the remote, and switching off the TV. “What are you trying to do?” he asks.

I burst into tears. I wanted to teach myself to not be afraid, to not need him for anything ever again. He’s here, ruining my plan, and all I feel is . . . relief.

Bryan scoots close and puts his arm around me. I let him. I don’t want to, but I’m sobbing so hard now that the thing that makes the least amount of sense is somehow the only thing that makes sense. I need my big brother to make me feel better. Right now, he’s the only one who can.

“You know you can’t watch those movies,” he says softly.

“I know,” I say as my tears fall onto his arm.

“Hey, don’t cry.” He brushes my cheeks and then pulls me up so that I’m sitting sideways across his lap. “Don’t be scared. I’m never going to let anything happen to you. You
know
that.”

“I know,” I say again, wrapping my arms around his neck and crying onto his shoulder.

I wish I could redo this whole day from the second I got up. I don’t care what Noah says, I should talk to Reece. He deserves so much better than this. He deserves so much better than me. I need to see him.

But maybe he won’t want to see me.

I cry until my head hurts, until I’ve used up all my energy, until I physically can’t cry anymore. As my sobbing subsides, Bryan hands me tissues from the end table and then shifts us both so that we’re lying across the couch on our sides, my back against his chest. I wipe my nose.

“I thought you weren’t coming home tonight,” he says, stroking my hair.

“I didn’t mean to.”

He doesn’t ask me to explain. He tucks my hair behind my ear and runs his fingers up and down my arms. I close my eyes. I can’t get up, wash my face, brush my teeth, walk to my room, change my clothes. I can’t do anything except lie here against Bryan. Maybe if I fall asleep, he’ll carry me to bed.

I imagine the voice of the instructor from my yoga video:

Let your thoughts slip away.

Breathe.

Relax.

Experience the continuous flow of breath from your center.

Close out the rest of the world.

Be at one with your inner self.

I’m breathing, relaxing. Drifting, drifting, drifting, drifting, drifting . . .

Fingers trace my ribs and startle me back to semi-consciousness. I pull my arm close against my side to try to block him from touching me there, but he slips his hand up and cups my breast in his hand.

“Don’t,” I say.

“Shhh,” he says by my ear. “It’s okay.”

I awaken fully and wrench free from his arms, moving to the other side of the couch. “No, it
isn’t
.”

He tries to get close to me again, but I put up both of my hands, and he stops and slumps back against the cushion. “C, what’s wrong?”

“What do you think?”

I need him to tell me that I imagined the whole thing, that he wasn’t feeling me up, that he’s never done anything like that and never, ever, ever could. I need for him to make me believe it.

Instead, he crosses his arms over his chest and says, “I was trying to calm you down.”

Oh, my God. We’re really having this conversation.

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Bryan, this. Us. It isn’t normal.
We’re
not normal. I’m your sister, not your girlfriend.”

“Like I don’t know that.”

“Well, it seems like—I mean, the things you do sometimes. I have a boyfriend and I don’t want . . . 
this
.”

Bryan pushes himself to stand. “Why are you turning against me all of a sudden?”

“I’m not.” I get to my feet and place my hand his arm. “You know that the last thing I would ever want is to hurt you.”

He shakes me off, glaring. “How would I know that? You’ve been a complete bitch to me lately. You wouldn’t talk to me. You wouldn’t even
look
at me for days.”

That’s the way he sees it? That this was all my doing?

“Bryan, neither would you!”

He closes his eyes for a long moment and then looks at me again. “Don’t you get how much I love you? How much I need you?”

The anguish in his voice makes me feel like my chest has been kicked in, and now I’m crying again. “I love you, too. But I don’t want . . . 
that
with you. And I don’t want to have to be scared for Emma all the time.”

“Scared for Emma?”

The look on his face seems to be complete puzzlement. I hope it means that I’m being paranoid, that he has never touched her and never will. But how can I know for sure? How can I ever know anything?

He shakes his head, frowning. “Are you serious with this? I’ve been stuck dealing with all this school bullshit on my own, and now I try to make you feel better and you make it seem like—”

“How would
you
grabbing my boobs make me feel better? It’s confusing and upsetting and—”

“And you like it. No. You
love
it.” His voice cracks. “I know you do. I know how you want to be touched. I know everything that turns you on—”

“Stop,” I say.

“And because of me, you know what you’re into too. Like your boyfriend was going to figure it out on his own. That loser owes me a thank you.”

“Shut up!” I yell.

“You like to pretend that you’re so innocent, but I’ve been with other girls, and believe me, not one of them has ever come as fast for me as you do.”

I slap his face with such force that I wonder for a moment if my shoulder’s bounced out of the socket. My hand stings and throbs, but I try to hit him again. This time, Bryan catches
my arm mid-swing and holds on to it. “Coley, why are you
doing
this to me?”

“Me?” I shout, pulling free. “What about you? How can you talk to me like this?”

Bryan’s face is red and his eyes are wet with tears. He’s looking at me like I’ve lost my mind right before his eyes.

“I am not the crazy one here!” I scream at the top of my lungs. “Why won’t you go back to Connecticut and leave me alone?”

“What’s going on?” Tony’s voice thunders from behind me.

My heart seizes.

I turn to look at him and I can tell by his confused expression that our voices brought him downstairs, but he didn’t hear the incriminating words. He has no idea about anything, anything, anything. He never has and he never will.

“She was watching
The Sixth Sense
.” Bryan wipes his eyes in two quick swipes. He sounds like he’s never been so bored in his life. “I startled her and she freaked out on me.”

It’s amazing how easily he lies. How easily
we
lie. I glance at Tony and I can tell that he’s falling for it. And why wouldn’t he? Sure, it’s insane that I would yell at Bryan in the middle of the night because of a movie, but the truth would be a million times harder to grasp.

I can’t take this anymore. I grab my shoes and stamp my feet into them.

“We talked about this, Coley,” Tony says. “You need to avoid those movies. They’re not doing anything good for you.”

I grab a random coat from the closet, punch my arms into it, and push past Tony.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he calls after me as I run upstairs and out the front door.

CHAPTER 27

T
here are three routes to get to the Valley from my house: the highway, which is the quickest but also the easiest way to get caught if anyone were to come after me; the scenic way, which basically requires trudging through the forest and across the river; or the back way, which runs through a newer neighborhood of mostly condos.

I pick option three, darting behind trees and cars parked on the street the whole trek down. When I finally get to the abandoned house by Alejandra’s, I feel my way up two flights of stairs. The stuff we stashed up here all those months ago to make our secret hideout more comfortable is still piled in a box in the corner.

I pull out a lantern-style flashlight and turn it on. The batteries work, so I set it on the floor to illuminate the room while I unroll two dusty sleeping bags across the plywood floor. I
take a small pillow from a bag and tuck it behind my head as I crawl into one sleeping bag and layer the other on top.

The ripped plastic over one of the windows crinkles loudly as the wind whips around outside. This is the perfect setting for a horror movie, but I’m not scared of it. I’m more afraid of having to go home again to face Bryan.

Everything that he said to me was the truth. The things he’s done to me over the years should have felt awful. I should have hated every single second of it. Why didn’t I? How can I get turned on being touched by my brother, but be scared of my boyfriend? Why am I such a freak?

I switch off the lantern and am plunged in blackness once again. This isn’t a plan. It isn’t a solution. I’m hiding out in an unfinished house that has no windows, no heat, and no running water. But, for now, it will have to do; I can’t keep my eyes open for another second.

•    •    •

Emma and I are in a dark room, and the windows are boarded up. I’m searching, searching, searching for other ways out—a ceiling vent, a hole in the floor, a hidden passage in the closet—but there’s nothing.

The locks will break soon; they always break. The door will fly open.

And then what? What will happen to us?

Shoes stomp loudly. Someone’s getting closer and closer. Are they coming for me? For Emma? For us both?

“Coley?”

For me.

“Coley, wake up.”

My eyes flutter open and Alejandra is staring down at me. “What are you doing?” she asks.

Of all the people to startle me awake, it would just
have
to be her.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

She takes several steps back and holds up her phone. A light flashes and there’s a soft
click
.

I push myself to sit. “What the hell? Did you just take my picture?”

“Yes.” Peering at the screen, she presses buttons. “And now I’ve sent it to your mom, Ming, Piper, and Noah.”