Page 31 of A Summer to Save Us

I clench my hand, but this time, I hold it up like a threat.

Are you terminally ill, Riv? Tell me! You said that sometimes this would be written in the farewell letters of people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

I don’t know where the sudden anger inside me comes from.

I have no expectations from him, and he never promised me anything.

Maybe I’m merely angry because he ignores this serious question.

Because I fell in love with him and want him to live forever.

Now he’s looking at me with a forlorn expression, seemingly exhausted for the first time since I’ve known him. He takes a deep breath. “No, I’m not.”

Truth or lie?

“Truth.” Moonlight falls across his cheeks, and he suddenly seems fragile, like a beautiful sculpture that could easily be shattered with a hammer.

Swear it! Funny, I’ve never been one for oaths. That used to be more James and Arizona’s thing.

River kisses his thumb, index, and ring fingers and lifts them in the air.

Pinky swear , I insist, just like Arizona always demanded when something important was at stake.

A tender smile crosses River’s face, and he extends his little finger to me and hooks it around mine. “Pinky swear.”

My heart becomes lighter. I’m certain he’s not lying to me.

“Come on now!” This time, he takes my hand and pulls me further through the water to the other side while footsteps crunch on the gravel behind us.

“We know you’re here!”

“Girl, whoever you are and whatever your problem is, he can’t solve it for you! In the end, you’ll fall in love with him, and he’ll be gone! He just leaves behind shattered pieces.”

All These Glittering Pieces .

I falter.

River looks at me. “Don’t listen to them, Tucks. They think I don’t know what I’m doing, but I do.”

I stand still, so River has to, too. For the first time ever, I have doubts. They said he was sick. He may hear whispering voices in his head.

“I. Know. What. I. Am. Doing.” Every word is a soft, choppy sound in the night. He’s only a hand’s breadth in front of me, and I feel his breath on my face again—warm and smoky.

Do you know what you’re doing? Even if you drive a Porsche over a cliff, balance unsecured on a fifteen-foot-high slackline, or have a near-crash with a camper? Are you sure you know what you’re doing?

But… he saved me. From jumping, from Kensington, and from my lonely life. He says and does the right things at the right times. He doesn’t hear voices, certainly not. He can’t be that sick. I think about the kiss on the line and feel a shiver of happiness, fear, and adventure.

But I also think about him wanting to jump off a highline. He needs help, and that’s exactly why I can’t leave him alone.

I start moving faster than before. Suddenly, I just want to get away from these people who say such bad things about him. Maybe they are wrong. Maybe he’s changed. I don’t know and don’t care.

The shouts are growing louder.

Now I’m pulling River along behind me. At some point, the lake flows into a small river that lies calmly as if there was no current.

I glance around. Darkness hangs in the forest, a black cloth of silk and velvet.

The moonlight only falls across the tops of the trees, whose sprawling branches stretch like dark arms over the water.

Without waiting for River’s approval, I wade into the water. We’ll cross here , I tell him. He nods, puts his phone and my bag in his backpack, and holds it over his head with both hands.

“Let’s hope it’s not too deep.”

I feel my way across the slippery bottom, and after a few steps, the water is up to my ribcage.

The cold makes my lungs shrink, and it’s difficult to breathe.

I start shaking. I’d like to turn around immediately, but then we’d run straight into the arms of River’s pursuers.

When I take the next step, I can’t find any footing.

I start swimming, and the icy water turns into a claw that drags me down in my wet clothes.

River grabs my arm with one hand and holds the backpack on his head with the other.

As I climb out of the water, soaking wet and still shaking, I long for my bed and the warm blankets for the first time since I left home.

We cut through the countryside, following one branch of the river after another, fighting our way through creepers and reeds. Once, the backpack even gets a little wet. I just hope our cell phones stayed dry.

“I don’t think that was a lake earlier—just a wide part of Snake River,” River says at some point as we climb out of an arm of the river, completely out of breath.

Wisps of fog hang in the midnight-blue labyrinth of water and forest. I just nod, exhausted and cold.

He digs a bottle out of his backpack, and I drink without thinking about it.

As he puts the bottle away, shouts come from a completely unexpected direction. They’re in front of us, and they’re close—about three hundred feet away.

“Shit,” River mutters. We look at each other. Simultaneously, we hurry toward the tall reeds along the bank and startle a swan, which flutters noisily. I didn’t realize how much racket something like that could make.

“Never mess with one of those,” River whispers to me, pushing the backpack into my hand so he can use both hands to clear a path for us through the reeds.

I wade after him, straightening the stems so the others don’t discover the path.

Since there is a tree jutting into the water next to us, I hang the backpack on a branch so that it dangles above the water but is still hidden by the reeds.

We crouch in the cold water, listening. The voices are sometimes close, sometimes distant, seemingly coming from every direction. On one hand, I want to know more, but on the other, I’m afraid. They must be good friends if they won’t abandon him, I think, but the cold is making me dizzy.

I lose track of time. My teeth chatter, and at one point, I press my hands against my lower jaw to stop the involuntary reflex. At that moment, someone moves through the brush. “Riv? Is that you?”

River looks at me as mesmerizingly as he did in the supermarket.

Say something , I think. Tell me about River . And in the next moment: Keep running. Don’t say anything!

“You know what happened back then! Don’t make the same mistake again.”

The steps move away. “River?”

My heart beats as hard as a blacksmith’s hammer in my chest. Everything below my hips is numb. What mistake should River not repeat? Is it one with a girl? What did he do?

Something bad .

Never. Not him.

I have no idea how long we remain in the icy water, but when River gives the signal that we can return to solid ground, I want to cry with relief.

I feel like someone froze me while I was fully conscious.

Everything is numb, and my legs give way on the shore.

River sits next to me and looks at me worriedly.

“Get some rest, Tucks,” he says softly, pushing my wet hair back.

I’m shaking like a leaf, but I pick myself up and shake my head.

I don’t want to hear from the others anymore. We have to get out of here.

I don’t know how long we’ve been wandering in these wet clothes or what time it is.

At some point, I trip over my frozen feet, fall, and don’t get up.

River peers down at me, deep circles under his eyes, which I can see in the moonlight that falls in individual streams of light through the tree canopy.

Without a word, he sits next to me and fishes a few clothes out of the soaked backpack.

He gently pushes them into my hand, and I pull the wet clothes off, happy to finally be rid of them and able to rest. Luckily, the jeans and sweater he gave me remained mostly dry.

I decide not to take off the wet bra until I have the sweater. I’m about to slip into it when I notice River’s expression. He’s already changed and is staring at me, wide-eyed, shock and horror reflected on his face.

Only then do I realize I’m sitting in a strip of moonlight that falls across my upper body, highlighting the countless bruises. They’ve turned from blue and purple to a yellowish-green.

I immediately cross my arms over my chest, which, of course, doesn’t do any good since he’s already seen everything. Obviously, he knows the bruises must be older and can’t be from slacklining; I haven’t fallen that badly.

I feel dizzy and frozen at the same time. I haven’t put the sweater on yet and just hold it awkwardly in my hand.

Now he knows—knows I’m weak. The eternal victim. The familiar feeling of shame rises within me, and I look away into the darkness.

“Tucks,” he says softly, his voice like a caress. I can’t look at him. My hands dig into the sweater as I try to think of nice words, but I can’t think of any.

“Tucks, look at me, please.”

I bury my face in his sweater. My eyes burn. I wish I was invisible. I don’t know how long I sit there, but suddenly, I feel a touch on my arm, exactly where the worst hematoma is fading—the one that was almost black.

Startled, I drop my hands along with the sweater and see River swallow.

He gently strokes my arm and touches each of the injuries individually.

There are many, so many, I only now realize as he brushes them one by one with his fingers, as if he wants to make up for the pain and everything that came with it with his gentleness.

At first, I tense up even more, digging my fingers into the wet Handana and sweater, but then I think of his words.

A fist disappears when you open it . I don’t have to fight—not with him. I consciously open my left hand and take a deep breath.

“No one should do that to you,” he says, and I feel anger despite the tenderness with which he touches me. Anger at who is responsible.

“Family?” he whispers.

I shake my head. The burning in my eyes intensifies.

“Boyfriend?”

Again, I say no.

“School? Teacher?”

I nod, shaking my head.

“Classmates?”

Tears well up in my eyes for the second time today, for the first in an infinitely long time. I try to blink them away, but it doesn’t work. My defenses are down, and the tears stream down my cheeks unchecked. I don’t want to cry, but I sob silently and tremble.

Classmates .

That one word from River is so tiny and yet so cruel at the same time.

Suddenly, the pain of what they’ve done is so powerful that it throws me headfirst into a wall.

Just like the Hills have repeatedly done to me, again and again.

It’s not filtered by my silence and distance, not distorted by the belief that it was all my fault, that there’s something wrong with me, or that I’m simply too weak and too pathetic.

River carefully slides over to me, pulls me against his chest, and wraps his arms around me.

This time, he remains silent, which is the best thing he could do.

He simply holds me, and I cry and cry, pressing my face into his sweater, which soaks up my tears like a sponge.

I can hear his heart beating in my ear and it calms me, telling me that everything can be okay if I want it to be.

At that moment, I firmly believe that I can find the way from one world to the next if River is with me. When he’s with me, everything is fine. Then my soul can rest, like it had been screaming the whole time and could now be silent.