Page 34 of The Narrow

“Grace,” Delphine says.

“Maybe,” I allow. “You really believe me?”

She looks at me steadily. Those eyes could cut right through you. She’d see the secret heart of me even if I tried to hide it, I think. “I believe what you say you saw, but what actually happened?”

“You drowned. And you came back,” I say slowly. “And in between...”

“In between, something changed. Something that left me like this,” Delphine says.

“You don’t remember anything about that night?” I ask.

She looks away, arms wrapped tightly around her middle. “Maybe. It’s hard to know what’s a dream and what’s a memory.”

“You drowned. And the Drowning Girl keeps coming here,” I say.

She snorts. “Right. A ghost who wants to drag me back to the watery grave that was meant for me?”

“Or maybe that’s not it at all,” I say. We’re standing so close to each other it’s almost harder not to touch her. “Something saved you that night. Something lifted you out of the water. You couldn’t have gotten free yourself.”

“Are you saying a ghost saved my life, Eden?” Delphine asks softly. She looks up at me. I can see the golden flecks in her blue eyes.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I say. I want to touch her arm, to reassure her, but I curl my fingers against my palm instead. “But I want to find out. I want to know what it is she wants.”

“And then what?” Delphine asks wearily.

“Maybe we find a way to stop this,” I say. “Maybe we find a way to get you out of here.”

“Maybe,” she echoes. She turns away, stepping toward the door. There she pauses, her hand on the frame. “Or maybe you’ve got it wrong. Maybe I did drown in the Narrow. Maybe I died, and I’m the one who’s a ghost.”

—

On Saturday, it rains all day, and Delphine doesn’t summon me to her room. Veronica and Ruth both text me to meet up, but I give them excuses. I don’t want to risk venturing outside. I bury myself in schoolwork instead, opening the door only once, when a harried-looking staff member drops my long-lost luggage at my door. I leave my bags heaped inside, not able to summon up the energy to unpack them. My arm aches. It’s hard typing one-handed. Hard thinking at all.

If I don’t go out, the water can’t get in. I’ll be safe.

The throbbing of my arm makes my thoughts fray. The bruises are still there, purple and ugly.

As night falls, I give in at last. I’ve put the painkillers Delphine gave me in an empty ibuprofen bottle. I shake one out into my palm, then hold it up to the light. You’re supposed to take it so that it’s time-released, smothering your pain without getting you high, but of course the high was the point for Dylan. He acted like he was giving me a special present every time he offered me some. I shouldn’t have taken it, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice—and it helped. It left me euphoric and disconnected, drifting. It was like those days were a piece of paper I could fold in half and skip from edge to edge. And that was what I needed. After he found me in the kitchen, Dylan knew that he was screwed. Well, Luke was screwed. Whatever he threatened me with, all I had to do was make one phone call. Luke would go to jail, and Dylan would lose a steady paycheck. He needed leverage.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he told me. And together, we walked out to the pool house.

Luke was crashed out on the couch, playing some first-personshooter badly. He barely looked up when we came in. “What’s she doing here?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dylan said.

The whole place looked like a TV set: Interior, Druggie Loser’s Living Room, Day. It would have been funny if I wasn’t terrified. “Have a drink. Settle your nerves,” Dylan suggested, but it wasn’t a suggestion. He made me a screwdriver, and then another. I looked over at Luke, some naive little part of me still hoping he’d act like my big brother and save me, but he seemed amused by the whole thing. Then Dylan gave me something—not one of these pills, something else, I didn’t know what, and I was drifting.

That’s when he started taking pictures. Photos of me, glassy-eyed, a bottle of vodka in my hand. Pills spilled over the table. Accepting the sloppily rolled joint Luke held out. Any one of those photos would get me kicked out of Atwood and tank my ability to get into college.

He finally let me stagger back to the house after dark. I puked for what felt like an hour and passed out fully dressed on my bed. In the morning, I took a forty-minute shower and I thought it was over, but just as I finished getting dressed, I looked up and there he was in the doorway. “Hey, Princess,” he said.

And so that’s what we did. Every day until the day before my parents got home, I went out to the pool house with Dylan and Luke.

That was my summer. Weeks spent trying to make myself empty. To do nothing but survive. All I had to do was get to the end, get back to Atwood, and I would be safe and I could forget it ever happened.

But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

“Hey, Princess,” Dylan said, and I’m in Abigail House, but his grin is a pale slash in the darkness of my room, and it isn’t over at all. Maybe it never will be.

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