“Kristen, listen to what you’re saying. You’re the one threatening to betray me.”
She scoffed and took off again. The trail marker emerged on the road, a weather-beaten sign with a map covered in squiggly trails and warnings of every kind: pack water, don’t litter, watch out for pumas. If you see one, make yourself big and tall and loud.
The first chunk of the trail was next to a gravel road. I’d go no farther than the big bend up ahead, I decided—not one step more. We climbed in silence for a moment.
“You are relentless, you know that?” Kristen cried. “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met. I’ve done everything for you, and it’s like the more I try to be there, to put your needs first, the more you turn away. Like I disgust you. I don’t know what you want.” She whirled around to look at me. “Tell me what you want.”
“I want Paolo to be alive!” I roared. The trail, flanked by cacti, had opened to a wide ridge on one side, and my voice echoed across a canyon. “I want to undo everything we’ve done. I want…I want Sebastian to be alive.” Tears rushed into my eyes.
Kristen’s eyebrows shot up. “He attacked you.”
“I know, but…”
I saw it then, my foot hammering against his ribs again and again and again. Without ambiguity, without doubt. I saw what I’d done. Stop. Stop. Stop.
“I didn’t have to kill him.” I lowered my chin and the tears broke free. The parched earth near my feet sucked up the drips.
Kristen placed a palm on my shoulder. We were too close to the edge, I realized. It was the kind of twisty mountain road you’d drive with your heart pounding, your eyes stretched wide to let it all in, your knuckles on the steering wheel white and bloodless.
“Yes, you did. He was a bad man. You had no choice.” Slowly, slowly, she brought her free hand up to my other shoulder. She pushed down a bit, like a coach giving his star player a pep talk. “But this is the problem. We’re bound by what we’ve done. As long as we’re both here and, and free—we’re both indebted to each other. There’s no way out.”
I was trapped. What flitted through my head in that moment wasn’t Ben’s harsh shove all those years ago, his arms right where Kristen’s were now and then the sharp push, the echoing clang of skull against wall. It wasn’t Sebastian’s hands, either, one against my mouth and the other mashing my wrists into the wall, rendering me as panicked and helpless as a moth in a net.
Instead I flashed to my father’s hands, huge against my tiny frame, grabbing me so suddenly my little legs were still midstride and then smacking my bottom in one swift, discombobulating move. A casual spanking, an automatic, unthinking motion, like hitting the Off button on a noisy toy. I didn’t even have time to stop singing the song I’d learned from Lamb Chop’s Play-Along.
Joy turned to captivity. Agency turned to impotence. Contained, controlled, trapped under the thumb and other fingers of a force who saw me only as the end of a preposition. Daughter of. Result of. Cause of noise and mess and annoyance, disturbing the air molecules around us.
Wrath rose up through me, a huge neon plume.
“No way out,” Kristen repeated.
She began to close her eyes, a deliberate blink, and the second stretched out, slow motion. I saw it with clarity, like we were psychically connected again, our neurons firing in sync. This was her villainous monologue, the moment when she explained to me—to herself, to the viewers of the movie she envisioned as her life, in her twisted mind—why she needed to kill me. I’d set it up for her, teed up the perfect climax: Here we were, on a cliff not unlike the one we’d found in Cambodia—only here there was no water underneath, only craggy rock. Above us, a wide-open sky and orangey mountains in every direction. A landscape thousands of miles from Chile’s Elqui Valley, but the set pieces were nearly identical.
Her eyelids were halfway down now, almost covering her pupils. I caught it in her gaze, the tragic inevitability. To kill me was the only way forward. Acceptance.
But she’d forgotten something. She’d miscalculated.
Yes, she’d been the one to kill Paolo, justified or not.
She might have killed her parents and though I didn’t know how or why, she’d had something to do with her best friend Jamie’s death.
And yes, Kristen had been the one who’d devised a scheme to launch Sebastian’s limp body off a cliff, lower than this one but just as deadly.
But I’d been the one to kill him.
All that energy, all the emotional labor and assaults on my nervous system and, and all the internal battery power I’d funneled into fear: fearing the world, fearing men, fearing my unstable best friend, mercurial and destructive.
I saw with piercing lucidity that I’d had it all wrong. They had it all wrong. A laugh rumbled through me, light and clear.
I was a killer; they should fear me.
As Kristen’s eyes squeezed closed, I raised my hands to her collarbone. And in the glint of the morning sun, I pushed.
CHAPTER 39
Her eyes snapped open as her body tipped back; her arms remained outstretched, palms cupping the air instead of my shoulders, so she looked like a zombie or a stiff-limbed action figure toppling over, thunk.
No, a cartoon: Her arms and legs flailed, outlined in rich cerulean sky. Clouds of dust and clods of sandy dirt puffed from the ground as she staggered away from me. Her eyes found mine in the hovering split second before she dropped like a stone.
A split second. They call it that because it’s like a hatchet, the moment when life cleaves into Before and After. In the hanging silence, the weight of what I’d done rushed through me with a wide, downward whomp.
They say your life flashes before you right before you die, but in that instant, as Kristen’s death wafted before us both, what crashed through me was all the good times we’d had: splashing into Lake Michigan, the water brisk on our bare skin; studying for econ finals late into the night, crunching through tall bags of Pirate’s Booty and laughing until our sides hurt; getting ready for nights out in Milwaukee, borrowing each other’s lipstick and earrings and spangly tops; unforgettable experiences in Uganda, Vietnam, even Cambodia.
Even Quiteria. “That’s us,” Kristen had said, pointing toward the horizon. “See those two little stars? You can tell.”
And I’d squinted at them, understanding. “You’re the one on the left, the pinkish one.”
And she’d clutched my arm, giddy and free. “I was going to say the same thing!”
A voice in my head, almost a whisper, wiser than my own: This isn’t you.
The spell broke and I rushed to the cliff’s edge. It took me a second to spot her—the top of her head was a few feet down, and she was gripping a withered shrub.
She looked up at me, her eyes like bright marbles: “Emily, please!”
I flung myself onto the dirt and reached for her. My fingers didn’t come close and she whimpered, unwilling to let go of the plant. Her toes scuffed against the dirt, trying to find purchase, but they just slid along the sloped earth.
I kneeled and whipped off my backpack, then slammed my belly back into the ground and dangled the rucksack from its top loop. Kristen ducked as the dirt and rocks I’d disturbed tumbled over her, and then she looked up again, eyes wild.