Sixteen

It’s Evie,” I say. “It’s Evie. She called me.”

I practice the words over and over again. I say them into the dawn hours, fully dressed under my sheets, waiting for light to come.

I have it in my hand, the answer, the key, the way to end everything. Pete Shaw gave it to me. I just have to figure out how to use it. I have to figure out if I want to protect him, or if he even wants me to.

I choose to protect him.

In those minutes, that half hour after he gifted me in this way, well, I gave him what I could and I don’t regret it.

It was just my hands on him and it was nothing but a kind of healing, a try at the laying on of hands.

Hearing the catch in his throat, the tight gasp, my hands there, I’d given him something, hadn’t I?

I know I could not heal it—the wound torn across him will always gape hollow, deathless, but I tried, I tried. Or maybe I tried for other reasons.

Whatever the reason, I did it and I’m not sorry.

And now, my mother off to work, I’m standing in the driveway, Mr. Verver has his arm propping the screen door open, open for me. He’s saying good morning and he has a cup of coffee in his hand, and he’s wearing a maroon T-shirt with a picture of a sunset on it and it says, I know I will remember this always, “Paradise Is Yours.”

I open my mouth.

The lie is immense, and I don’t hesitate.

“It’s Evie,” I say. “It’s Evie. She just called me.”

In my bedroom, practicing into the pillow, in the bathroom, saying it to the mirror, it had sounded grave and real.

Now it sounds like a quavering string, a girl’s sputtered nothing.

But that doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter because all he hears are the words. The words are magic.

He’s looking at me, and he’s not saying anything at all.

I feel a shaking in me, and it’s the ground. It’s like the ground is shaking and I will slip through.

Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world.

I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand.

And my thunderbolt hit.