Page 28 of We Were Liars

A PAD IS left from several summers ago when Gat and I got obsessed with graph paper. We made drawing after drawing on it by filling in the tiny squares with colored pencil to make pixelated portraits.

I find a pen and write down all my memories of summer fifteen.

The s’mores, the swim. The attic, the interruption.

Mirren’s hand, her chipped gold nail polish, holding a jug of gas for the motorboats.

Mummy, her face tight, asking, “The black pearls?”

Johnny’s feet, running down the stairs from Clairmont to the boathouse.

Granddad, holding on to a tree, his face lit by the glow of a bonfire.

And all four of us Liars, laughing so hard we felt dizzy and sick.

I make a separate page for the accident itself.

What Mummy’s told me and what I guess. I must have gone swimming on the tiny beach alone.

I hit my head on a rock. I must have struggled back to shore.

Aunt Bess and Mummy gave me tea. I was diagnosed with hypothermia, respiratory problems, and a brain injury that never showed on the scans.

I tack the pages to the wall above my bed. I add sticky notes with questions.

Why did I go into the water alone at night?

Where were my clothes?

Did I really have a head injury from the swim, or did something else happen? Could someone have hit me earlier? Was I the victim of some crime?

And what happened between me and Gat? Did we argue? Did I wrong him?

Did he stop loving me and go back to Raquel?

I resolve that everything I learn in the next four weeks will go above my Windemere bed. I will sleep beneath the notes and study them every morning.

Maybe a picture will emerge from the pixels.

A WITCH HAS been standing there behind me for some time, waiting for a moment of weakness.

She holds an ivory statue of a goose. It is intricately carved.

I turn and admire it only for a moment before she swings it with shocking force.

It connects, crushing a hole in my forehead.

I can feel my bone come loose. The witch swings the statue again and hits above my right ear, smashing my skull.

Blow after blow she lands, until tiny flakes of bone litter the bed and mingle with chipped bits of her once-beautiful goose.

I find my pills and turn off the light.

“Cadence?” Mummy calls from the hallway. “Supper is on at New Clairmont.”

I can’t go.

I can’t. I won’t.

Mummy promises coffee to help me stay awake while the drugs are in my system. She says how long it’s been since the aunts have seen me, how the littles are my cousins, too, after all. I have family obligations.

I can only feel the break in my skull and the pain winging through my brain. Everything else is a faded backdrop to that.

Finally she leaves without me.