Tess Sharpe - Far From You

Incorrect Password.

Bottled-up anger, twined with the lingering hurt of my mother’s words, floods through me. “Goddammit, Mina,” I mutter. I throw the ring, hard. It bounces off the wall and onto the carpet near my bed.

Almost as soon as it falls, I’m on my knees, wincing at the pain, but scrambling to scoop it up. My hands shake as I slip it on.

They don’t stop until I go over to my dresser and the second ring—mine—joins hers on my thumb.

A YEAR AND A HALF AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

After the party, I’m drunk and still high, lying on the floor of Trev’s living room next to Mina, each of us tucked into a sleeping bag. I can hear his roommates’ snores all the way down the hall.

The floor is hard, with thin carpet that has mysterious stains I don’t want to think about, in this apartment full of boys. I’m restless, shifting back and forth, staring at the beer caps pressed into the ceiling. My eyes are heavy, but I don’t let them shut.

Mina’s awake, but she’s pretending not to be. She can’t fool me; 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 fine.”

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.

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 swallows and seems to realize, suddenly, how close we are. Her fingers flex 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 flicker 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 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 fingers. The scent of vanilla swirls 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 fingers are still tangled together.

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 flaming 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 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, 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 direction and veering off into another midsentence. “You like girls, don’t you?”

My cheeks heat up, and I pick at the hem of my comforter, 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 fix.

Sometimes I wonder if my dad would mind that someday 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?

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 addiction, 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 fiddling with the comforter, wrapping the loose strands of thread around my fingers.

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.

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 endlessly 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 five 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, five-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 fix 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.

I toss the tube of foundation into my makeup 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 find something with sleeves. We must have tried on at least fifty dresses, sharing the same fitting 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 the bedroom, and I need it now, even though I don’t want to look at it.

I take the orange 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 floating above the mess of scars.

Mina beams. “Look at you.” She’s already dressed, wrapped and draped in silver fabric, all shimmer and tanned skin. Mrs. Bishop is going to freak when she sees how low her Grecian-style dress is cut. “I was right—the red is perfect.”

She spins around. Her curly hair is looped up in a headband of silver leaves, little tendrils falling over her bare shoulders as she rummages around in the blankets on her bed. She grabs something, hiding it behind her. “I have a surprise!” She’s practically vibrating in her eagerness.

“What is it?” I ask, playing along because she’s so happy. I always want her to be happy.

She holds it out triumphantly.

The cane she’s clutching is painted scarlet to match my dress. Mina has glued red and white crystals all along it. They twinkle and catch the light. Velvet ribbons stream from the handle, spirals of silver and red, twisting and swinging in the air.