Page 29 of The Narrow

“What do you dream about?” I ask. Focusing on Delphine makes it easier to breathe steadily. To tell myself the pain will fade and the sun will rise and all of this will be over.

“Drowning,” Delphine says. A sharp hiss slips between my teeth. She doesn’t know what happened all those years ago, but some part of her must remember. “It’s always the same. I’m falling, and then I hit the water. I try to get free, but I’m being pulled under. I don’t mean to gasp, but I do, and the water fills my lungs. But I’m still alive when I hit the rocks. It hurts. It always hurts.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, because I can’t think of what else I could offer.

“Do you have nightmares?” Delphine asks, as if eager to shift the attention away from herself.

“Other than this one?” I ask. She makes a soft noise of affirmation. I wet my lips. “I’ve been having this dream lately. There’s aroom. The lights are bright, and there are people talking, but I can’t understand what they’re saying. I stand up and walk away, but when I get outside, there’s nothing there. The world is just a black, scorched husk. And I keep walking, on and on and on, hoping to find someone. Just one person. But there’s no one. And no matter how far I go, when I look back, I can see the room I left. The whole world is dark except for that room, and it’s bright, and I can see everything in it perfectly, even though it’s far away.”

“Why don’t you want to go back?” Delphine asks.

Because it isn’t just any room. It’s the pool house. It’s Dylan and Luke and the bright little pills on the glass table. “Something happened to me,” I say. I shouldn’t tell her. I know I shouldn’t, but the pull of confession is hard to resist.

“Is that how you hurt your arm?”

“You can tell?” I thought I was doing a decent job of hiding it.

“Did someone hurt you?” she says instead of answering.

I open my mouth to lie. But then I remember my promise. “I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell anyone,” I say.

“Okay.”

The plainness of her words is hiding something. It isn’t deception, exactly. It’s more like ice over the water. You might see the whole surface and never guess how deep the water is below or how swift the current. But I want to test those waters. Perhaps it will be worth it to fall through them, to find what lies beneath.

“How did you hurt your arm?” Delphine asks. Softly, deliberately. Not a demand but an invitation—permission.

“Someone twisted it,” I say.Someone.A word of hesitation. Someone could be anyone, faceless, nameless.

“Was it an accident?” she asks.

“No.”

Silence. I can feel her fitting this piece of information into the rest of the puzzle of me, but I find, oddly, that I don’t mind.

“What happened?” Delphine asks.

I make a noise in the back of my throat, remembering. “My brother, Luke. He’s out on probation. Part of that is he’s not supposed to be around his old friends. But this guy Dylan, he was at our house. I found out. Dylan... Dylan made sure I couldn’t tell.” I don’t say anything about the pills, the photos, the blurred hours.

“By hurting you.”

I rub the back of my neck. I grope for words, not wanting to lie, not ready to tell the truth. “It’s my fault, really. It was stupid. It was the day before my parents got home. All I had to do was shut up, but I told Dylan... Actually, I don’t even remember what I said. I’m not sure I know what I was saying in the first place,” I say, staring at the sharp wedge of light the window throws against the wall. I try to speak the words, to explain what happened next. But they don’t come. “I think it’s broken.”

Saying it out loud, I have to admit it’s true. A sprain wouldn’t still be hurting like this. There’s a crack in the bone, a fault, a fracture.

“Why haven’t you told anyone?”

“My parents asked me not to,” I say. Then, quickly, “I didn’t tell them how badly it was hurt. My arm, I mean. I told them I didn’t need to go to a doctor. And Luke—if anyone found out Dylan was even there, it would be...” I trail off. She hasn’t saida word, and yet I’m scrambling to defend my parents. “It’s his last chance.”

“I see.” Her voice is so quiet, I almost can’t make it out.

“You must think my family is horrible,” I say. “But it’s more complicated than that. Other families would have given up on Luke. My parents puteverythinginto getting him diagnosed, getting him treated.”

“What does he have?” she asks.

It’s not that simple, I could tell her. The diagnosis is a line you draw around a set of behaviors to give them a shape. A dozen doctors have drawn a dozen shapes. Their names have changed as he’s aged, doctors have disagreed, my parents have rejected the ones they don’t like and shopped around for others. It’s never clear if they’re looking for an explanation or an excuse for the things he’s done.

“Basically, he hates authority, and he doesn’t form bonds with people. He can’t regulate his anger, and he perceives pretty much any kind of criticism as a threat. Sometimes he has sudden rages. Other times he does something to you, and it’s because of something you said six months ago that you forgot about, but he’s been holding on to it this entire time because he keeps this exhaustive list of every bad thing anyone’s ever done to him.”

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