Page 80 of When We Believed in Mermaids

Josie tried to jump on the bike behind him, flinging her arms around his waist, and for one second, I hated her. She had caused this mess. She always made trouble everywhere, and now I would lose them both.

But for one second, I saw how alike they were, how lost. Dylan’s face bloomed with a bruise. Josie’s lip was still swollen. Each of them was so beautiful, like creatures from the sea, all limbs and fair hair and shining eyes.

Dylan barked out an order. “Get. Off.”

Josie started to protest. “Please, he hates me—”

“Get off the bike.”

He didn’t look at her. His limbs were rigid with fury. Josie slid off, and the instant her feet hit the ground, he was gone.

Gone for days.

When he returned, he was broken in a dozen pieces, that broken cheekbone the least of his injuries.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Mari

By the time I was fourteen, I stole entire bottles of vodka and tequila out of the storage closet and shared them with boys on the beach. Not the cove, our safe, isolated little place, but the actual beach, which I reached by hitchhiking down the highway.

I learned to sip, not guzzle. Learned to space out the drinks so I didn’t end up heaving my guts out behind some rock or accidentally black out and have sex with someone. I never went all the way, but I would make out with just about anybody once I started sipping the vodka.

I learned so many things.

One of them was that there was a crack in the wall between Dylan’s bedroom and the one I shared—ever more reluctantly—with Kit. The house was sliding down the cliff long before the earthquake hit, and everywhere the walls were cracked, the floors uneven and full of tripping hazards. It makes me feel dizzy to imagine it now, that all these things revealed the fact that the house was going to fall into the ocean at any minute, but my oblivious parents did nothing. What if it had happened when we were all sleeping?

I discovered the crack along our closet door, along the shared wall with Dylan’s bedroom. It was situated above our heads, so you had to stand on the end of Kit’s bed to see, and then you had to close one eye, but it was a perfect view of his bed.

Where he had a lot of sex.

The first time I spied on him, I felt guilty and giggly. I could see the girl’s naked butt and her tattoo of a butterfly. The girl covered Dylan the first time, but another time I watched him lying on the bed naked while she touched him, and I was both fascinated and repulsed. It was technically some of the same stuff Billy had made me do, but it was different somehow with Dylan.

Kit would have thrown a fit if she’d found out, so I did it when she wasn’t around. Everyone said he was like our brother, and I know that’s how Kit thought of him, but I never felt that way. Never.

We had a special connection. Everybody commented on it. People thought we were actual siblings because we both had such blond hair, such long legs, and could ride a longboard like we were the original Hawaiians. Because we spent so much time in the sun, we were tanned as dark as varnished cedar, and if he was the most beautiful boy on the beach, I was growing into the most beautiful girl. King and queen of the ocean.

The big secret we shared was the weed. From that first time, when it calmed me down, I loved it. It soothed the shattered, angry girl who lived inside me, screaming all the time. It mellowed me out, just as it mellowed Dylan. We’d lie on the beach in the cove long after everyone else was in bed, after the restaurant was closed. We smoked. Often, we didn’t even talk, just sprawled there looking at the stars.

Sometimes we did talk. One night, I asked about his life before he came to us, and he sighed the longest, saddest sigh. “You don’t want to know about that.”

I turned my head, and the movement sent soft, happy ripples through my body, a combination of the beers I’d stolen and the pot he’d brought. I was so very high, I was pretty sure I couldn’t get up even if I tried. “Maybe I do want to know. Maybe you need to tell somebody.”

“Do I?” he asked, and his voice rasped into the night, unsure.

“That’s what you told me.”

“I did.” He touched my hand with one finger, and in his eyes were the stars that had fallen. “Will you tell me?”

“You first.”

“Not this time.”

I looked back up at the sky. “You know what happened. A man made me do things.”

“What things?”

I shook my head, feeling myself tremble all beneath my skin. I felt the places in my body where he hurt me, and something swelled right over my throat to keep me from speaking.