Tess Sharpe - Far From You

I take the photo from her, trying to remember when it was taken; some sunny day during swim practice. Mina’s missing a front tooth, which means we must’ve been about ten. She’d pitched headfirst off her bike that summer, racing me. Trev had run all the way home with her in his arms, and later I found him checking her bike to make sure it was safe.

“That was before a lot of things,” I say. I put the photo back into the box, grabbing up others, shoving them out of sight.

“I want to talk to you.” Mom sits down on the edge of my bed, and I keep on putting the photos away to give myself something to do. I pause at the photo of Trev and me, standing on the deck of his boat, sticking our tongues out. There’s a pink blur on the side of the photo: the edge of Mina’s finger, obscuring the lens.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did about your college essay,” Mom continues. “I’m sorry. You should be able to write about anything you’d like.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

She takes another photo, this one of me, fat and happy in the lap of Aunt Macy. “You know,” she says quietly, “my mother died of an overdose.”

I look up, and I’m so surprised she’s brought it up that I drop the stack of photos. “I know,” I say, bending over quickly to pick them up, grateful I won’t have to look at her right away.

Mom rarely talks about my grandmother. My grandpa lives on fifty acres of wilderness, in a house he built with his own hands. After the crash, he’d clapped his hand (a ­little too hard) on my shoulder and said, “You’ll get through this.”

It’d been almost an order, but I’d felt comforted by it, like it was a promise at the same time.

“I was the one who found her,” Mom says. “I was fifteen. It was one of the worst moments of my life. When your father searched your room…when I realized that you could’ve followed her down that path…when I realized that someday I might walk into your room and you wouldn’t be breathing…I knew I’d failed you.”

It’s unimaginable, the words coming out of her mouth. She had failed me, but only after I’d recovered. She’d refused to see the changes in me, the things I’d overcome and accepted about myself—the ones she never could. She’d stood there, stone-faced to my begging and tears, my heart still a fresh wound pouring out grief and shock, and she’d seen it all as guilt and lies.

I hate it, but there’s a part of me, the sliver that’s not consumed by Mina, that can understand why she and Dad didn’t believe me. Why they shoved me into rehab and practically threw away the key. They wanted any way to keep me safe.

I understand.

I just can’t forgive them for it yet.

ONE YEAR AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)

Adam’s back field is crowded with people. School’s finally done and his mom is out of town, leaving him and his brother to throw a party that everyone from two counties seems to have shown up for.

After waiting forever for the bathroom and a much-needed pill break, I head outside to find Mina and Amber. I stumble down the deck steps and I tell myself it’s because of my leg.

It’s not.

“Hey, Sophie, careful.” Adam hurries over from the cluster of kegs and coolers at the end of the deck, grabbing my arm. He leads me over to the picnic table, where Amber is sitting next to a tray of Jell-O shots.

“Having fun?” she asks me as Adam slips his arm around her waist.

“Yeah,” I lie. It’s sweltering, and I’d rather be home than out here, getting drunk and bitten by mosquitoes. I’ve already had a few drinks, but I take the little plastic cup Amber hands me, and we tap them together before popping them back. Fake cherry and vodka slide across my tongue, and I swallow hard.

“Where’s Mina?” Amber asks.

“Not sure,” I say.

“I saw her in the house earlier with Jason,” Adam says. He squeezes Amber’s waist, pulling her closer as music suddenly booms through the yard. “Oh, you gotta dance with me, babe.” And Amber grins at me as I wave them off.

I abandon the Jell-O shots and go back into the house, weaving my way around the crowd of older people, Adam’s brother holding court among them. They are definitely Matt’s friends, if the smell of pot coming off them is any indication.

I’m walking through the kitchen and into the living room when I hear it.

“Screw you, Jason!”

I walk in on the tail end of the confrontation. Mina’s smack-dab in a crowd of people, swaying on heels planted in the brown plush carpet. She’s right up in her boyfriend’s face, and Jason clutches his red plastic cup, looking miserable. People are staring, and I catch Kyle’s eye from across the room. I mouth, How long?

He shrugs and raises his eyebrows like, Need some help?

I shake my head. They’ve been fighting on and off for a week now, so I’m used to it. I walk over and grab her arm. She’s shaking, wobbly in a too-many-Jell-O-shots way, and she stumbles against me in her heels.

“You’re such a jerk!” She lunges at him, and I grab her by the waist, struggling to stay balanced and restrain her at the same time. It’s kind of hard considering I’m bordering on drunk and just snorted two lines in the bathroom.

“I’m done, I’m done!” Mina says. It’s more for my benefit, so I don’t end up falling, because I will if she keeps this up. She rolls her eyes when she realizes the room’s gone silent, everyone staring at her. “Let’s go,” she huffs, and she stalks out of there, with me following, as usual.

“Um, Jason still has your keys,” I say as I try to catch up with her. She’s already halfway across Adam’s yard, heading toward the winding dirt road that leads to the highway.

“I took care of it,” she says. She stops, turns, and waits for me. When I reach her, she loops her arm in mine.

Out here, away from lights and cloud cover, the stars shine amazingly bright, and Mina tilts her head up to look at them, a smile on her face.

“I am so breaking up with him,” she announces. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

I stumble, kicking up clouds of dirt with my boots, navigating around tufts of prickly star thistle and blue cornflowers. “Whatever you want,” I say, but inside I am glowing, triumphant.

“Come on, Soph. I told him we’d be at the end of the road.” She skips ahead, shaking her hips to the strains of music floating from the house. I grin, following after her.

“Who did you call?”

“Trev.”

I stop. “You didn’t.”

“Of course I did.” She tugs me forward, knocking her hips against mine. The moon is bright, and I’m messed up enough to let my eyes linger on the curl of her hair, the dark ripple against her pale skin. I can smell vanilla underneath the pine and almost-rain scent in the air.

“He’ll freak when he sees we’re drunk.”

“I don’t care. He’d freak more if we ditched Jason and drove drunk. You know how he gets about you and cars.”

This is true. Trev is morbidly afraid of something else happening to me. Even years later, he watches me in that way I’ve gotten used to, part fear, part want, all protectiveness. Occasionally I’ll turn, meet his gaze. Sometimes he doesn’t look away, and I catch a glimpse of what all the other girls see in him, what they want from him.

“Becky’s probably with him,” I say. “She hates me.”

Mina laughs, a little too long. She always was a lightweight. “She really does; you should hear her talk about you. Girl’s got a mouth on her.”

“Trev’s girlfriend talks to you about me?” I ask, surprised through my Oxy-vodka haze.

“Well, not to me. I heard her on the phone one day after you left. I took care of it.”

“What was she saying?” I stagger to a stop and face her. “What do you mean you took care of it?”

Mina sighs, dropping her arm from mine and leaning against a fence post. She bends down and plucks a cornflower, twirling it between her fingers. “It doesn’t matter.” I watch her tear off the blue petals, one by one—She loves me, she loves me not—before tossing the stem on the ground. She spins in a lazy circle, her short skirt flaring up.

“Anyway, everyone knows you and Trev will end up married with babies and stuff,” Mina says with a smile, but I can hear it: the bitterness underlying her slurred words. “And Becky wants him for good. She can’t admit the only person he wants is you.”

“But I don’t want Trev,” I say.

Sometimes I wish Trev knew that he was caught in the middle of this; then I wouldn’t feel so guilty. But he can’t imagine it, because Mina hides behind her secrets and I wither away my soul with pills, and we are Just Fine, Thank You. Reckless girls dancing down dirt roads, waiting to be saved from ourselves.

“We’d be sisters if you married Trev,” Mina says, and her lower lip sticks out like she’s pouting at the thought of it. Like Trev’s taking away a toy she wants.

The idea horrifies me, makes me want to vomit. “You’re not my sister.”

Mina blinks, and her eyes glint in the moonlight. I want to lean forward, press my lips against hers. I need to know what her mouth tastes like—sweet, maybe, like strawberries.

I’m almost messed up enough to do it, emboldened by her fight with Jason and how high I am. I step toward her, but my knee gives out, the pain sharp and sudden, and it makes me falter. I pitch forward with an “oomph,” and Mina catches me halfway. But I’ve got four inches and twenty-five pounds on her, and we end up tangled in the dirt, laughing. Giggles fill the air as truck headlights wind down the road toward us.

“There you two are.” Trev leans out the window as he cuts the engine. “I heard you shrieking all the way down the road.”

“Trev!” Mina beams at him, and her hands squeeze my waist in a way that makes my stomach leap. “You came! I’m breaking up with Jason. He’s an ass.”

“And you’re drunk.” He gets out of the truck and hauls her up, gently setting her on her feet. He brushes dirt off her shoulders before crouching down next to me. “You fall, Soph?”

“I’m okay.” I smile and he smiles back, the concern in his face retreating. He waits until I hold my hand out for him to pull me up.

“Steady,” he says when my leg wobbles and I lean into him. Trev is solid, warm. Mina giggles and presses into his other side until he’s got two armfuls of us. We hold on to him. Put him between us like our barrier against the truth.

But her hand finds mine behind his back and our fingers lace together, the click of our rings a secret sound only we understand.

Some barriers, they’re made to be broken.

NOW (JUNE)

“You’re quiet today,” David says halfway into our second therapy session on Monday. “What are you thinking about?”

I look up from my place on his couch. I’ve been twisting the rings on my thumb, tracing the grooves of the letters like they’re a key to a lock I haven’t found yet. “Promises,” I say.

“Do you keep your promises?” David asks.

“Sometimes you can’t keep them.”

“Do you try?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

David smiles. “In a perfect world. But I think you’re well acquainted with the unfairness of real life.”

“I try to keep mine. I want to.”

“Did Mina keep her promises?”

“Mina didn’t need to. You always ended up forgiving her, no matter what she did.”

“You care about her a lot.”

“Way to state the obvious, David.”

David’s eyebrow twitches, his pleasant smile dropping at my hostility before settling back to neutral. “You forgave her a lot, too.”

“Don’t talk about her like you knew her,” I say. “You didn’t. You won’t.”

“Not unless you tell me.”

I don’t talk for a long time, just sit there, and he doesn’t force me to continue. He folds his hands together and sits back in his chair to wait me out.

“She was bossy,” I say finally. “And spoiled. But really thoughtful. And smart. Smarter than everyone else. She could bullshit her way out of anything by just smiling. She was a bitch when she needed to be and she’d never apologize for it. She’s the first thing I think of when I wake up, the last thing I think of when I go to sleep, and the only thing I think about in between.”

I stare at the framed diplomas on the wall, the award David got from some organization for homeless youth, another from an abused women’s group. By the time he speaks, I’ve practically memorized the entire wall.

“That makes her sound like an addiction, Sophie.”