Far From You

25

NOW (JUNE)

“Thanks for coming.” I step aside to let Rachel into the house.

“Sophie, was that the—” My mother catches sight of Rachel, with her flaming hair, the mustard-yellow sweater she’s buttoned wrong, the chunky skull pendant dangling from the bike chain around her neck. “Oh,” she says.

“Mom, you remember Rachel.”

“I do.” Mom smiles, and it’s almost genuine, though her eyes linger on Rachel a moment too long. I wonder if it’s Rachel’s appearance or if Mom is remembering that night. Rachel had stayed by my side until my parents showed up. I hadn’t really given her a choice; I wouldn’t let go of her hand.

“How are you, Mrs. Winters?” Rachel asks.

“Well. And you?”

“Fabulous.” Rachel grins.

“There’s something wrong with my computer. Rachel’s gonna check it out for me.”

“Bye!” Rachel says cheerfully, following me up to my room. When we close the door behind us, she tosses her purse on my bed, collapsing next to it. “Okay, I’ve only got forty minutes. I have to drive to Mount Shasta to spend time with my dad. It’s his birthday.”

“Can you hack a thumb drive in forty minutes?”

A smile tugs up the ends of her red-painted lips. “No way. I’m good with taking computers apart and putting them back together. Code is another monster. It’ll take me a while.”

I hand over the drive. “I appreciate your trying. My method involved entering as many passwords as I could think of.”

“Probably not the most effective approach.”

“Agreed.”

“So how did it go, talking to Mina’s supervisor at the ­Beacon?” Rachel asks, grabbing a pillow to prop her chin on. She tucks a leg underneath her, the other dangling off my bed.

“He’s out of town, but he’s coming back next week. I’m going to go back then to talk to him.”

“And obviously getting inside the house went smoothly,” Rachel says, holding up the drive, wiggling it in the air.

I shrug. “Trev hates me.”

“I really doubt that,” Rachel says.

“He wants to,” I say. “And he should. He would. If he knew the truth.”

Rachel shifts on my bed, turning the thumb drive over in her hands. But she looks up to meet my eyes when she says, “The truth?”

I don’t say anything else, because when you hide, it’s instinctual. It’s something you have to train yourself out of, and I never trained myself out of this secret, even when I wanted to.

“Soph, can I ask you something?” She looks me in the eye, and there’s a question there.

The question.

I can look away and stay quiet. I can say no. I can be that girl, hiding from the truth, denying her heart.

But it’ll eat at me. Through me. Until there’s nothing real left.

I twist our rings on my thumb, and they bump against each other, trading nicks and scratches earned through the years.

“Sure. Ask away.”

“You and Mina, you two were…” She switches tactics, suddenly so blunt, just like her letters, starting in one direction and veering off into another midsentence. “You like girls, don’t you?”

My cheeks heat up, and I pick at the hem of my comforter, trying to decide how to say it.

Sometimes I wonder what my mother would think, if she’d try to sweep it under the rug, add it to the ever-­growing list of things to fix.

Sometimes I wonder if my dad would mind that someday he might walk me down the aisle and give me away to a woman instead of a man, gaining another daughter instead of a son.

Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like if I had been open from the start. If we’d never had to hide. How much would it have changed things if we’d been honest?

I’ll never know. But I can be honest now, here, with Rachel. Maybe it’s because she met me at the worst moment of my life. Maybe it’s because she stuck around, even after.

Maybe it’s because I don’t want to be afraid anymore. Not of this. Because compared to everything else—the addiction, the hole that losing Mina left inside me, the guilty knot that Trev twists me into—being hung up on this isn’t worth it. Not anymore.

Which is why I say, “Sometimes.”

“So you like guys, too.”

“It just depends. On the person.” I’m still fiddling with the comforter, wrapping the loose strands of thread around my fingers.

She smiles, open and encouraging. “Best of both worlds, I guess.”

It makes me laugh, the sound bursting out of me like truth. It makes me want to cry and thank her. To tell her that I’ve never told anyone before, and to tell it and have it be accepted like it’s no big deal feels like a gift.