Page 225 of Secrets Along the Shore
Becca turned me over to see her lips. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere until you admit the truth of happened to you and her. The same way Livvie couldn’t leave. Trapped. Now you’ll know what it felt like.”
I could barely focus on her words because, oddly enough, I think I already did.
The cuffs duginto my skin, the sharp metal biting at my wrists while ropes rubbed against the skin of my ankles every time I shifted. My arms ached from being twisted behind my back, my legs stiff from where Becca had yanked them together and bound them tightly. I lay on Livvie’s old bed, twin bed with its yellowing quilt and matching wooden dresser between two windows, curtains drawn. The wallpaper, once a cheerful floral print, peeled at the edges like the corners of a long-forgotten photograph. Becca hadn’t touched anything in fifteen years.
A shrine to her dead sister.
My breathing came hard and fast. I tried to calm myself, to think rationally, to not scream—because no one would hear me anyway. No one could out here when the closest house was my own.
Becca sat in the rocking chair beside the bed, one of Livvie’s notebooks clutched in her hands like scripture. She flipped through the pages with purposeful fingers, her lips pressed tightly together, as if she were trying to hold in the storm. But her eyes—her eyes were wild.
She read from the Livvie’s words again, over and over for hours. “June 27th…‘I hear them talking. Dr. Scanlon is happy with my progress. He thinks he’s cured me. He thinks he will be rich. He doesn’t know I lied.’”
Becca looked at me sharply, as if the weight of the lie fell squarely on my shoulders. My lips parted, but no sound came. My throat was too dry, my mouth too filled with fear.
“What was she lying about, Scarlett?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I told you already.”
She turned another page, more frantic now, her breathing lifting her chest faster and faster.
“July 2nd. ‘More students are here this summer. More students who will go through what I went through. I feel bad for them, because I know what will happen to them.’”
A lump rose in my throat. The words rolled over me, each one striking with the force of a memory I didn’t have. Yet it was as if Ididremember. In the way my muscles recoiled from the confines of the ropes. In the way being tied up in this room made my skin crawl because it felt familiar.
I had been tied up before. And not just physically like this—but emotionally, mentally.Conditioned. I remembered the lodge. I remembered not being allowed to leave my room. The door that locked from the outside. The shadows at night. The vibration of a machine near my head. The dizzying sensation of days going by.
And a scent I couldn’t place.
“The boy knows I lied. I don’t know how, but he knows.” Becca leaned close to my face, hers red with anger. “Who is the boy, Scarlett? Who knew she was lying?”
I flinched. My heart pounded so hard I felt the reverberation all the way to my toes.
She jabbed her finger at another diary entry. “‘He tries to make me forget. But all he makes me do is lie again. I think the boy knows I’m lying. I’m afraid of him.’”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. My throat felt raw. “Becca, I don’t know who she meant.”
She slammed the notebook shut so fast I jolted even without hearing the sound.
“Don’t lie to me!” she screamed over me, her face contorted. “You were there! Youknewher! You—” Her voice faded as she turned away, her shoulders rising and falling in an erratic rhythm.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “I don’t. That’s the point, isn’t it?” I swallowed hard. “He made us forget.”
Becca’s head snapped around.
“Who?” she said.
“Scanlon,” I said slowly. “He…I think he hypnotized us. Or…drugged us. Or both. I don’t remember entire months of my life. I have fragments. Smells. Vibrations. Flashes of light. A strange smell…rosemary, maybe? But they don’t connect. I think he wiped it all away.”
Becca stared at me, her eyes scanning my face as if trying to detect a lie.
“Why would she say she lied? Lied about what?” she asked. “Why would she say she was fine when she wasn’t?”
“She was scared,” I said gently. “She was trying to survive. Maybe she thought if she pretended to be cured, they’d stop.”
“But she was cured, Scarlett.” Becca leaned close again. “She could hear fine again.”
The words hit me like a slap. A realization of what the lie might have been.
