Page 77 of Dead Girls Can't Tell Secrets

I try to step back, but my leg bumps the chair. “You let everyone—my parents, me—think she tried to kill herself. How could you do that? I thought…” I rub my hand over my wet eyes. “She was your closest friend.”

“I know, and I was a coward! I wasn’t sure what she’d say when she woke up and I…I freaked.”

I look down at my fingertips, stained with the blood from my head wound. “Did you hit me today?”

Noah winces and then grabs at a chunk of his hair, his hand covering half his face. “I panicked.” His voice drops. “I knew it was only a matter of time before you guys figured out I was the last person to see Piper.”

“So you tried to sacrifice Sam?” The memories are sharp shafts of light, mottled by black tar. Sam’s phone in my hand. Splitting pain. Darkness. Alexandra helping me up. Sam coming back to camp with his phone back in his pocket. “You hit me and then passed the phone back to Sam so we’d think he did it.”

“He’s a drug dealer,” Noah spits.

“And you? Who are you, Noah?” In the dim afternoon light filtering through the hospital blinds, I can barely make out the green in his eyes. But I see his face, angular and taut with worry. And the most gut-wrenching part isn’t that I never really knew him these past ten years.

It isn’t that he broke my sister’s heart.

It’s that I knew him all along.

I recognized him then, and I recognize him now, even with the familiar green leached from his eyes.

Because we’re the same.

We understand each other. We both reach for things that will cost too much. Things that will cost everything.

We both reach anyway, until finally, we grasp a great big handful of nothing.

“This was never what I wanted,” Noah says. “I just wanted everyone to…” His head drops into his hands.

“You just wanted everyone to forget about her.” With a quivering hand, I twist the doorknob, my own words—my last text message to Piper—smothering every thought.You don’t exist. Then I push open the door.

Noah watches in silence, eyes shimmering jade again in the fluorescent glow of the hallway lights. And he walks out.

I watch him go, wiping the tears from my cheeks. I shut the door and turn to face the room, the necklace charm pressed between two fingers. Then I pad to my sister’s bedside.

“Piper?” I whisper. But she’s silent, her body still. Even weeks after her fall, the sight of her twists my insides. A bandage covers her forehead. Every inch of her body is healing from cuts and bruises. “Piper, I’m sorry.”

Her chest rises and falls, thanks to the machines. But in every other respect, my sister looks like a corpse.

I move to the other side of the bed, lowering into the chair my mom usually occupies. I take Piper’s cold, thin hand in my dirty, bleeding one and squeeze it. “Thank you for what you tried to do at school. I know I didn’t deserve it. And I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you that day.”

I sniffle. “I wish it hadn’t been a lie.” I wish she’d really woken up. I wish it with everything in me.

A tear falls into her hair. Then another. I let go of her hand to wipe at them and to straighten the once-pristine bedsheet, now marred by tears and dirt. With each drop, something in me starts to yield. Some part that was steely and invincible, but somehow anything but strong. It wears and fractures until I give in. When I do, the tears come harder. I let them.

For once, I’m not trying to be tough in front of Piper. I’m just trying to be her sister.

Chapter 32

Six Weeks Later

“Go fish,” I say, using my splayed cards as a fan even though it’s freezing in this hospital room.

Jacey growls and reaches for the draw pile.

I pretend to study my hand another moment. “Chains, give me all your queens.”

Alex’s head tilts as he squints at me. “Did you peek at my hand?”

I grin deviously over my cards, and he turns to Jacey with his mouth open.

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