Page 88 of Carved in Scars

And then we found her body, and my knees hit the concrete, and it was all gone.

Devon is waiting in the hall like he said he would; I follow him out to his car, both of us silent and unsure of what to do with each other now.

Once he leaves the parking lot, I decide to break the silence in the most awkward way.

“Have you ever been to her grave?” I ask.

He sighs. “No. My dad hasn’t either. He wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral.”

“Yeah, neither was I,” I tell him. “I feel like…I still can’t go. Like if someone found out I was there, it would hurt her family all over again.”

“I’ve seen pictures of it online,” he says. “It looks nice. There’s a volleyball with her number on it.”

“I think about her all the time. And I feel so bad—not because I did anything to her like you think I did—but because I miss her, and sometimes I’m so fucking mad at her. I’m mad at her because if she really did just stage that picture like you said to hurt me—”

“Thatiswhat she did.”

“Then that means that in the end, she wasn’t my friend. She didn’t care about me. And I’m mad at her for dying andruiningeverything. I know that’s not fair, butI am.”

“Ally, I think she cared about you. I just think Darci was bad at caring for people in general. I’m not really sure why.”

“Do you really like Audrey?”

He scoffs and shakes his head. “What do you think?”

He pulls the car to a stop on Cypress, and we both just sit there.

“Devon, my picture wasn’t supposed to be creepy. It was just supposed to be you…or what you were to me anyway: light in a very dark place. I’d go back and do it differently if I could. When I try to picture a version of my life where I’m happy—which is getting harder and harder to do—I still picture me with you.”

He sighs, running his hands over his face and then through his hair. “What am I supposed to say to that, Ally? I’d do it differently, too, but probably not in the way that you’d want.”

“Right…okay.”

I unbuckle my seatbelt and get out of the car.

I trudge back to the house through wet leaves. The neighborhood is quiet, aside from the cool October breeze rustling through the trees. The scent of saltwater hangs thick in the air, the way that it always does here when rain is inevitable, but it isn’t raining yet. The houses are all decorated for Halloween, and it makes me miss my mom.

Grace and Mark don’t celebrate Halloween, and my mom wasn’t allowed to either when she was growing up, but the two of us always did together. My dad, too, when he was around. It was my favorite day of the year—more so than Christmas because we didn’t need money to get candy, and it didn’t make my mom sad.It didn’t remind her that we were alone the way the other holidays did. We could just pick up an old costume and a couple of plastic bags, knock on some doors and eat candy, watch scary movies and tell ghost stories.

Now, Halloween is the holiday that reminds me that I’m alone.

When I walk inside, the house is dark, and there’s no sign of Grace, same as the last couple of days.

But there is a padlock on the refrigerator. That’s new.

I sigh, grab a couple of pieces of bread from the cabinet and some peanut butter, and make a sandwich before I head upstairs. I slip out of my jeans and t-shirt and into some sweatpants, then remove Devon’s hoodie from under the mattress, pull it over my head, and crawl into bed.

How much longer can I keep doing this? Everyone has a breaking point, and I feel I’m far past my own. I try to argue with myself that maybe I could stay and make things right with Devon, that he was kind to me. But what does it say about me that my bar for kindness has been lowered to driving me home after getting me kicked off the volleyball team and coming down my throat? I’m disgusted with myself. That isn’t kindness, it’s something else. Pity, at best.

I’m not doing this because I care about you. I’m doing this because no one else does.

I can’t live in this never-ending nightmare anymore.

I’m losing track of time. I know it’s been a couple of days since they found Darci because the sun has come and gone, but I’ve been in my room ever since. They haven’t let me go to school, and Grace watches my every move. I haven’t been able to sleep because I see her bloodied body floating in the water every time I close my eyes.

And I’ve barely been able to move or breathe since Grace called me down to the living room yesterday to show me the picture of Devon and Darci in bed together on the TV screen. The way she smirked when she saw the look on my face…

On the one hand, it makes a lot of sense. It explains Darci’s weird behavior toward me over the past week, the secrets, the things she said about her secret boyfriend, and how she’d never be able to go to prom with him. And if she knew about us like Devon said, it explains why she’d try and push me onto Trevor.

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