July, 2006 (8 Years Ago)

"What have you gotten yourself into now, Sara?"

The voice broke through the continuous thump of music, the same thump that had long since passed from entertaining into annoying, every throb of the bass thrumming in my head, resting in the ache stinging my cheek and eye. The vibration stole up from the level below and I felt it buzz against the soles of my flat tennis shoes. I'd been using the cool tile on the bathroom wall as a compress until my sister came barging in without invitation.

I cracked open an eye and glared. "Who called you?"

"Marissa," she answered, exasperation clear in her tone and in the tightness of her mouth. I scoffed, leaning my head back, the elastic tying off the end of my braid creating a hard knot pressing into my shoulder blade. "How much did you have to drink this time?"

"It's a party, isn't that what you're supposed to do at parties?" I quipped. Her expression wore on me like a thousand years of rainfall upon a rock, weathering away the surface until my embittered resolve cracked. "I've had nothing."

"Nothing?"

I repeated myself, irked by her disbelief.

"Then why aren't you standing?"

"Because Alisha Gilman punched me in the face, why else?"

Tara ran a hand through her dark hair and clenched her fist, an aggravated sigh leaving her lips. In the unforgiving bathroom light, she looked tired, dressed in leggings, flip-flops, and an overlarge community college pullover with the sleeves rolled to her skinny elbows, no makeup on her eyelids or cheeks.

She looks like me, I thought, lowering my gaze to the tile floor. She never looks like me anymore.

My sister reached for my arm and pulled until I stood under my own power. "I heard you called her the 'c' word. Again."

"And then she punched me in the face and people wondered why I called her that. I was being preemptive."

"You're ridiculous." She'd said the words to me before, usually with a fond twist accompanying the statement, but now Tara sounded only irritated and put upon. "Let's go home."

The music intensified in the hall and trembled through the windows and glass portrait frames. Tara didn't hide her blank appraisal as we stepped onto the mezzanine and looked both ways along the dark, open corridor, a teeming mass of bodies dancing below where the lights flickered and popped. Tara braced a hand on the railing and leaned forward, a ghost of wistfulness chasing through her expression before she banished it, averting her eyes.

"Looks like half the town's here—well, anyone under the age of twenty-two. Whose house is this, anyway?"

"Dunno," I responded, tracing the growing bruise on my cheek, anger curling and bristling in my gut, needing an outlet, needing something I couldn't rightly name. I'd started the fight with Alisha Gilman and I'd be damned if she hadn't finished it; scrawny Sara Gaspard with her middling grades and her beautiful, genius sister—Sara with her sharp tongue and nothing to back up her vitriol. "One of the rich snobs from back east vacationing. Throwing a house party while mommy and daddy are gone, probably."

Tara hummed in acknowledgment, though the sound lost itself in the overbearing rhythm. "We have a lot of that sort in San Barkett, don't we?"

We did. In a bygone age, San Barkett had been a ramshackle fishing town clinging to the California coast, but time and money and some postmodern revival movement transformed the ugly little village into a bohemian community with trendy mansions dotting the cliffs and our own slew of starving artists on the boardwalk. East coast socialites flocked to the gated estates in the summertime and brought with them their spoiled, disenchanted children.

"And they used to call us rich snobs at school," Tara commented. She pointed out the crystal chandelier half as big as a minivan and snorted.

"Some of us still go to that school and still hear the comments." More and more the whispers turned spiteful; there's Sara Gaspard, did you know her twin sister's already graduated and she's still here? She must be the idiot of her family.

Tara shrugged and my anger flared incandescent as a solar flare. "That's not my fault. You could have graduated early, too, had you applied yourself."

I wiped at my eyes and my fingertips came back blackened by eyeliner, and I started along the hall without another word. Tara followed, and together we walked until we found the stairwell, where I dropped ahead of her while my sister lingered and stared at the canvases faceted to the wall. "Is that a real Murakami?" she asked, one foot hovering above the lower riser, her eyes bright and quizzical in the bleary light bleeding from the upper hall. "It looks like someone spilled juice on it. Not that you can tell, mind."

If she meant to lighten my mood, Tara failed. I pushed the door onto the main floor open and smacked someone in the side, though given the reek of booze wafting off the stumbling sod, I doubted he noticed. Tara hurried after me and her fingers brushed my arm, reaching but not quite grasping before I slipped free and marched closer to the foyer. What opulence inhabited the house felt cheap and grotesque, bent by the too loud music bouncing on mostly bare walls and the somnolent swaying of inebriated bodies, awkward feet shuffling on marble floors made sticky by cheap beer and vomit and whatever else you might find at a party such as this. The grandeur didn't faze me and I hated it as I hated most everything in my life at the time.

Two steps out the front door into the thready heat of early evening and Tara's hand clamped hard on my elbow, dragging me to a halt. "How did you even know about this party?" she asked.

"God forbid socially-awkward Sara Gaspard goes anywhere populated by people," I sniped, trying to pull free. Salt saturated the air and stung in my throat when I took a breath, turning my gaze to the sun dipping into the dark waves, letting the orange light burn until I saw spots. "What does it matter?"

"What—'what does it matter?!' What is with you lately? This isn't exactly your scene, Sara!"

She wasn't wrong. I enjoyed books and quiet places, soft conversations and the unintelligible whispers in a library, not this, never this—.

"No, it's more your scene, isn't it? Or it used to be. Let go of me."

The driveway twisted away from the house along a sloped ridge exposed to the temperamental thrashing of the Pacific below. San Barkett gleamed in the sunset, caught between the arching shadows of the mountains and the brilliant glow thrown across the water, looking deceptively large when—in truth—it was the same ramshackle fishing town it had always been, just painted prettier and touted as something it was not.

"This is getting stupid," Tara said as she followed me from the front walk to the road. Neither of us drove, as San Barkett was the kind of place where home was never farther than a brisk walk or a bus trip away. We grew up wandering the boardwalk and the pier, the tidepools and the foothills, walking through a leg of the national forest on our way to school, the same national forest that looped around the stretching range and touched Verweald in the south, where our grandparents Rene and Blanche lived. Still, home always sat on our horizon, waiting for us to return.

I didn't respond to Tara. I bit my tongue, my lip, my cheek—anything to swallow the unhealthy temptation of betrayal, because the frigidity in her voice, the furrow between her brows, made me feel as if she'd given up on me like all the rest.

"We're not thirteen anymore, Sara! We're beyond juvenile crap by now. You can't keep doing this."

"Doing what?"

"Acting out whenever you feel like it. Expecting me to drop everything and drag you home. Getting pissed off at every third word Mother says—."

"Don't bring her into this."

"But that's just it, isn't it?" She grabbed my arm again and jerked hard enough for me to stumble. "This is all about her. You and Mother and this stupid vendetta you have against her and everything she tries to do—."

"You wouldn't understand."

"How mature," she drawled, nails digging into my skin.

"You wouldn't understand!" I repeated, louder now, the breeze caught in our hair, stealing the words and whisking them out to sea. I wish this whole argument could go out to sea, too, that we could be as we'd been that morning, exchanging tired greetings over breakfast, ignoring Eleanor's nagging and the flutter of paper pages turning in Dad's hands—but we couldn't. It was the Gaspard in us, our father liked to say. There's a lot of anger in our blood. Anger and stubbornness.

"Why? Why wouldn't I understand, Sara?"

"Because you couldn't possibly get what it's like. Because you're the golden child," I retorted, yanking myself free yet again. "Because Eleanor has a very specific idea of what our lives should be like and you fit right into that pretty little frame and I don't. Mother loves you—actually likes you, and she just tolerates me. You wouldn't understand because you can't, Tara! When you're the brightest fucking star in the sky, you don't understand what it's like to be a speck in the distance and you never will!"

Tara's face darkened and something unfathomable glazed her eyes. "Let's go."

"Get off of me!"

Later, I would learn that Tara's day had been just as long and stressful as my own, that she'd been tired and unhappy to be called by Marissa Stipe so she could come pick up her injured and uncooperative sister. The frustration rankled, reddened her cheeks and tightened her jaw, and the hand that had been reaching for me shot forward to shove instead.

She didn't push hard, but my coordination suffered after the fight with Alisha Gilman and my stance weakened, forcing me a step backward, legs smacking the hot metal of the guardrail, knees buckling, toppling—.

"Sara!"

The weightless pull of gravity felt like nothing compared to the sudden agony in my arm when the elbow bashed against a protruding rock—and then I broke the ocean's surface and the collision hurt, a soundless gasp of pain consumed by the overwhelming tumult, the water folding about my body like a closing fist, clenching hard, pulling down.

The cold drove itself into my very bones when water sluiced through my lungs, so cold it burned, eyes and nose and throat stung by the brine, blind to everything but the dark, frothing shallows and the black mass of silt tearing at my skin. Impact forced the air from me and I struggled for a single breath, crippled by an immense pressure that could have been the tide or the rocks or the hungering darkness itself. It was so cold.

I had never experienced terror as I did in that moment, in that indefinable space between shock and acceptance where I swallowed the ocean and wondered why I couldn't just breathe. The sun hid behind the twisting water and the waves' continuous assault upon the cliff roared in my ears, like static between radio stations, a murmur between channels that might have been my own screams or the sky's elusive echo. I reached but couldn't find it.

Then, when the cold seemed endless, when the frozen ache blotted holes in the memory of sunlight and warmth, silver light flickered in the dark as quick as a knife's edge and gave relief to the swirling granules of dirt and sand, and a great force struck again, harder now, a voiceless shriek tearing my last breath from me before—.

Daylight. The sun had almost descended beneath the horizon, the barest rim of its corona remaining, and those slanted rays seemed brighter than noon in my bleary eyes as I scrambled onto the rocks and crawled higher. I gasped and choked and heaved water from my lungs and stomach, trembling, until a body collided with my own.

"Oh, God—Sara! Oh my God, I'm so sorry—. Please—." Tara gripped my arms and hoisted me farther from the water with frantic strength. Her warmth enveloped me and I clung to her, frozen fingers buried in her damp sweater, Tara's nails and knuckles torn bloody from scrambling over the rocks and brush to reach where I'd fallen. Her heart raced just as quickly as my own, a snare drum thrashing in the chest beneath my ear, thump-thump-thump-thump.

"What was that light?" I slurred, hardly noticing how tight Tara's grip had become. "That silver light—?"

My sister started to sob, and I said nothing else as we held each other and the Pacific lapped at our heels.

We never fought after that. I never went to another party in San Barkett. Tara and I never spoke of that day again—and I never forgot death's cold, squeezing fist, and how it had felt when tightening around my heart.