Marcelina nods, then goes quiet. She’s really good at comfortable silences—it never feels awkward to just be together, not talking about anything, looking up at the moon. After a while, Handsome comes loping out of the forest and sits next to me. I pick pine needles out of his fur and he pants happily, occasionally twisting around to aim a lick at my arm.
“What were you doing with Josh?” Marcelina asks after a few minutes. “I mean, I don’t care who you sleep with, it’s just … I didn’t even think you knew Josh.”
I glance over at her, but she’s not looking at me. She’s staring down at the clover next to her, gently brushing her palm across the tops of the leaves. I can’t tell what they’re saying to her, or what she’s saying to them. Or maybe it’s neither—maybe they’re just sitting there in a companionable silence, like she and I were until a second ago.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “I guess I just wanted tonight to be special.”
The lie is as obvious as Handsome’s dog-smell. Marcelina is quiet, waiting for me to tell the truth. Giving me a chance. I keep picking pine needles out of Handsome’s fur. After a long time—long enough that I start to feel guilt creeping up the back of my neck—Marcelina stands up and brushes grass off her butt.
“It’s gonna be okay,” she says. “I know it doesn’t feel like it’s gonna be okay, but it is.”
“But what if it’s not?” I ask, burying my face in Handsome’s fur. He smells like pine and dog and wind. I feel Marcelina’s footsteps behind me, soft and patient in the grass.
“Then you won’t be alone with it,” she says. “We’ll all be not-okay with you.”
I stand up and Handsome stands with me, his tail already wagging. He looks back toward the house.
“Come on,” Marcelina says. “The rest of it will still be there in the morning. We’ll do the liver another day.”
We walk back to the house together, me and Marcelina and Handsome, and for the time it takes us to get there, I believe her. Maybe things will be okay.
4.
WHEN I WAKE UP ON the floor of Marcelina’s bedroom, I don’t remember right away. I lie in the early-morning grayness under a pile of lap blankets stolen from the living room. My mouth is dry and my shoulders ache a little, but I don’t have that sense of oh-shit-where-am-I that happens sometimes when I wake up someplace that isn’t my own bed. I’m not hungover, because honestly, I was too nervous to drink at the party. I just feel sleepy. That’s all. Just sleepy.
I reach up a hand to rub my face, and a flicker of something crosses my brain. You should be feeling bad about something.
Then I remember.
Josh. Blood everywhere—on my cheeks and burning and coppery in my mouth and sprayed across posters of cars. Maryam leaving. Roya’s incredulous glare. My fault. My fault. My fault.
Before I can think about it, my hand shoots out. My fingertips find canvas, a zipper, a solid lump. My stomach turns.
It was all real.
There is no part of me that thinks, Maybe this is all a terrible dream. It hurts to realize that Josh exploding is just a nightmare was a safe psychological harbor I passed by without docking.
“Marcelina?” I whisper. She doesn’t answer. I poke my head up and can see the small hill that is her and her million tangled blankets. She’s motionless in the bed, sleeping so soundly that I’d be worried she was dead if I hadn’t seen her sleep a hundred times before. Still, I wait to see the slow rise of her breathing before I trust that she’s really just asleep. I get up as quietly as I can, gathering my own nest of blankets in one arm and slinging the backpack across my shoulder with the other. I close her bedroom door behind me, holding the latch back with my thumb until the last possible second.
I dump the blankets into the basket next to her parents’ couch. I sneak into her kitchen and grab a roll of duct tape from the junk drawer. I rip off a five-inch strip and slap it over the place on Josh’s backpack where his name is scrawled in Sharpie. For good measure, I put another piece on top of that one. It’s bad enough that I’m coming home from prom with no dress and a strange bag; I can’t have a boy’s name on the bag. A dead boy’s name. No, I remind myself, a missing boy’s name. As far as everyone else knows, Josh is missing. Nothing more.
I ease the bag open just a little and reach in, my fingertips finding the smooth, glassy surface of the heart. It feels a little warmer than it did last night—still hard, still wrong, but just a tiny bit warm. I press gently with my fingers, trying to figure out if it’s softened, if it’s really warmer or if I’m just imagining things. Why would it be different?
“How was prom?” The voice comes from right behind me. I jump a mile and whip around to glare at him—Uncle Trev is there, and he holds two hands up, lifting his shoulders in a whoa-don’t-kill-me stance. “Sorry,” he says, aiming an awkward grin at me. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Well, you did,” I say, breathless, my heart pounding. I adjust the backpack onto both of my shoulders. Oh god, I’m talking to Trev and there’s a head in my bag. “Prom was fine. What are you doing awake?”
“I’ve got a workout this morning,” he says. “Just ‘fine’?” he asks, leaning a shoulder against the wall and crossing his arms. His biceps swell a little with the motion. Trev took up weightlifting after he lost his job, and I’m never sure if he’s showing off his muscles on purpose or if that’s just what happens when you train for three hours a day. He looks like what I imagine Josh would look like if he grew up, stayed sober, got divorced, and did a lot of CrossFit. Tall, blond, trying a little too hard but not in an irritating way. “Did something happen?” he asks.
I’ve always liked Uncle Trev, but right now I really hate how interested and engaged he is all the time. “Um, nothing big,” I say. “Just some drama.” That’s normally a foolproof way to get adults to mind their own business—explanations of drama are usually drawn-out, expansive diagrams of high school social politics. The only people who hate high school social politics more than actual high schoolers are adults who are pretending to be interested.
“Did you and Roya have a fight?” he asks, tipping his head to one side.
“What? No. What? We didn’t—why would you think that?” I’m talking too fast and my ears feel hot. Trev laughs.
“Okay, well, if you ever want to talk about it, you know where to find me,” he says.
“Thanks, Trev,” I say awkwardly. He shrugs and walks out of the kitchen.
The first time I told my dads about Uncle Trev, they exchanged a long look and then had a talk with me about Red Flags and What to Watch Out For and Adult Men and Grooming Behavior. And I’ve watched out for all the red flags—but honestly, Trev is just a nice guy. I talk to Marcelina about it all the time: how much it sucks to have to be suspicious of a grown man just because he’s kind and thoughtful and listens. But then again, Marcelina and I also talk a lot about grown men we were right to be suspicious of. The kinds of grown men who pretend to be interested in our lives and then start texting us late at night. The kinds of grown men who ask for hugs. The kinds of grown men who say they want to be our friends, who try to tell us secrets because they think we don’t know what it means when a grown man tries to tell a teenage girl a secret. Uncle Trev isn’t like them, and I know that, but it’s awful to be constantly watching just in case he turns out to be that kind of guy.