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Chapter One
Declan
It feels like a story I’ve heard on repeat.It was a horrible accident, and we lost him. We almost lost Declan, too.
A crash.
But I don’t remember it. Not really. I just remember him being gone, and all the shadows he left behind when he was. They darkened everything, and my mom became someone else inside of them. A completely different person. And my dad… well, he just became…worse.Worse than he already had been. And for that, I’m thankful my brother wasn’t around to see it—who our parents turned into when he died.
It doesn’t feel like they should have been able to leave their mark on me. These scenes of ugliness feel like someone else’s life. Raging, screaming battles, and being told they wished I was never born. Or worse, that they wished I had been taken from them instead of him. That Ishouldhave been taken instead of him. But now that I’m leaving, I know they have somehow.
They’re awful memories, every single one of them. My dad shoving me down into the bathtub until I couldn’t breathe, and then laughing about it later like it was all some joke. Being slapped across the face for saying Quinn’s name out loud. My mom turning a blind eye far too many times to countless scenarios painted in the same ugly hue.
I don’t know, exactly, how something like that digs deep and embeds itself in you; it just does. It creates a blockage in the veins of your soul, and it changes who you are from who you might have been.
Sometimes I’m almost sure I can feel the degrees of separation between that person and who I am. The dark void between existences, tied together somehow but never the same.
I yearn for that version of me. The one whose brother is still alive, and who finds it easy to smile. The one who hasn’t fought these kinds of battles against her own parents. The one who knows, deep down, that even if something as devastating as losing her brother had still happened, it wasn’t her fault.
Or… maybe I’m wrong, and it’s just who I wish I could be.
I hate that I’ve let them inside my head. Hate that their fucked-up words have twisted my own thoughts into something similar.
I know it wasn’t my fault. I do. I was just a child when it happened. But I still find myself wishing it was me sometimes, too, who had been taken instead of him.
______
My well-loved, but beat-up car is loaded down with one whole suitcase full of all my belongings. I didn’t tell my parents goodbye.Why the hell would I?I slipped away in the dark in the middle of the night, and when they wake, I hope they never think of me again.
But Quinn…
I can’t leave without saying goodbye to him one last time before I go. Because once I’m gone, I’m never coming back. Not for anything or anyone.
I pull into a spot at the cemetery, letting my car idle as I tap my fingers against the steering wheel. My chest shakes with the rapid beats of my heart, and my throat closes around the knot that’s settled in there, making it hard to breathe. I close my eyes, my hands tightening around the steering wheel. I clench them so tight that my fingers hurt, but it keeps me here, in the present,making it easier to find my breaths, my thoughts, the will to open my eyes again.
The clock on my dashboard reads 3:01 a.m.
A cemetery, at three in the morning.I’ve lost my mind.My leg bounces and bounces, ratcheting up my anxiety. I glance around the dark grounds, the sidewalks, the parking lot. No one is here. No one but me.
Of course no one is here, it’s three in the morning.
Shutting off the engine abruptly, I plunge myself into silence save for thetink, tink, tinkof the motor cooling down. I grab my purse, curl my fingers around a small tube of pepper spray, force my body out of my car, and slam the door shut behind me.
I don’t really slam it, but it sounds that way when the world is so quiet.
With quick feet, I make my way across the lawn to his headstone.
Quinn Malcom King.
Fifteen letters engraved in stone that hold my heart in a vise.
I run my hand over his name, trace each letter with my finger. When I get to the end, I do it again. My throat grows thicker, my chest shakier. “I still miss you,” I whisper. “Every day.” Every single day since I was thirteen years old. Wondering what he would look like now, what his laugh would sound like, the kind of things he would say that would make me smile. Wondering about his future and what it might’ve looked like, too—if he’d be leaving California with me to go to New York, or if he’d already be off doing his own thing somewhere, and where that somewhere might be.
I wonder about the stupid, inconsequential things, too. Like what his Instagram feed would look like, or what kind of music he’d be into, or what shows and movies his Netflix watchlist would be filled with.
But mostly, I wonder about us and how close we’d be. I wonder about the things I’d be able to say out loud because he would be the one listening to them.
“I got into NYU,” I say. “Addy, too.” I think he’d be proud as hell of the both of us.