During the summer going into fourth grade, I stood in our woods and wondered, to my seven year old self, why the hell I was best friends with Sabryna King.
“Sab, my mom is g-gonna freak out”, I stuttered, shaking as the wind chilled my skin into goosebumps. The sunset was cooling off the forest, and the breeze was picking up. It had to have been at least eight, and we’d left my house at six.
“Shut- ugh- up!” Sabyna hissed, reaching for a branch just out of her reach. Why she insisted on climbing the tallest tree in the forest was beyond me, but I couldn’t have told her no. No one told Sabryna no.
“Your mom probably forgot about us already. She probably went to the grocery store and forgot she even had kids!” She wavered, and wrapped her tan hands around the next branch up.
“What are you even gonna do when you get to the top, anyway?” I wailed as I watched her climb higher. The way the sun glistened off Sabryna made her look like some sort of angel.
Grunting, she made it to the highest branch, and a wide smile spread across her face. “I did it!” she exclaimed, “You didn’t think I could, but I did!”
“I never said I didn’t think you could- you’re being dumb!” I called up. I could barely see her with the setting sun straining my eyes, but I knew she was probably sticking her tongue out at me.
It was impossible to brush the itching thought of my mother at home, calling 911 with tears streaming down her face, wondering where her little girl, paired with a mischievous ten-year-old partner had run off to.
“Okay, come down now!” I yelled up nervously. I knew Sabryna hadn’t planned her escape. She never did. Sabryna did as she pleased, and didn’t care to think about what would come after. She’d written her name, complete with a backward “S”, on our daycare teacher’s white classroom walls and proudly shown off to me, half-toothed smile and all, how she could spell her own name, but had a much different face when she was sitting in the corner in time-out.
“You’re gonna get hurt!” I continued, when she didn’t reply. I didn’t need the sun to be out of my eyes to know that she wasn’t smiling and cheering anymore.
After a few moments of  silence, she came up with a plan.
“You could catch me.”
I imagined one of those Roadrunner reruns from TV. Roadie tricked Wil E Wolf into falling off a cliff while chasing him, but when they landed, he squished Roadie into a pancake.
“I don’t want to be a pancake!” I shouted back. “You’re gonna kill both of us, stupid!”
“I can jump into the lake!” she shouted back giddily. Suddenly, this was an opportunity for a game.
She could, it was true. The Reade lake was as wide as a house, and deep. As one. The big kids were usually there on hot July nights, doing things and drinking things my mother told me I shouldn’t. This was probably one of those things.
“I can’t climb down backwards, I’ll fall”, she said, “And we cant tell your mommy or we’ll both get in trouble!”
I gave it some thought. My mom was probably looking for us everywhere, calling the neighbors, and checking my room for any clues as to my disappearance. We’d snuck out the window of my first-story bedroom two hours ago at least, because Sabryna had gotten bored of Uno and Barbies and decided she wanted an adventure. The sooner we got back, the sooner I was safe and back with my mom.
“Okay, fine,” I said, shakily. “But be careful, okay?”
I closed my eyes and hoped for a splash rather than a scream.
Instead, I heard silence.
“Gabby?”
“Yeah?,” I asked, peeking one eye open.
“I want you to do it with me.”
And five minutes later, there I was, Gabriella Hampton, my mom’s “precious angel”, next to Sabryna King on the highest branch in the forest.
My dark brown hair whipped against my face, and I gripped the branch below me tighter. “I don’t wanna die here, Sabryna”, I said, more whimpery then I intended.
“You’re not going to die, Gabby”, she said, holding my hand, “And even if you were going to, wouldn’t you want it to be with your best friend?”
For the second time in a five minute span, I was wondering again why the hell I was best friends with Sabryna King.
Before I could answer, she jumped, pulling me along with her, into the dark water.
With a splash, we landed in the sun-warmed lake, and when we came up, sputtering, our clothes soaked, and our hair matted to our faces, we laughed, we hugged. I’d never felt so attached to Sabryna before then. We’d known each other for as long as I could remember, but doing something that then seemed so dangerous together made us that much closer. Before that jump, I always stayed on the ground, afraid to climb, or adventure, but with Sabryna’s tan skin and strange way of convincing me, I had strayed from the sidewalk.
That was my answer. That was why the hell I was best friends with Sabryna King. I would never have climbed out the window, snuck to the forest behind Grayson Reade’s woods, and climbed a fifteen foot tree. But Sabryna King would, and she did, and so I did. Sabryna helped me do things I never thought I would do.

That was how it was for the next ten years.
Sabryna jumped, and I followed.

On Sunday, Sabryna was by my side, on the highest Ferris wheel at the town carnival.
On Monday, I woke up, walked downstairs for school, and found out Sabryna was gone.
That, also, was only the second shock I got that day. With one eye open and one eye still closed against my pillow, I grabbed blindly for my phone nestled on the pillow next to me and pressed the home button. My phone glowed to life and displayed the time. Ten A.M.? School started at seven, and my mom had never been late to wake me up.
Something, I knew then, was up.
Rushing out of bed, pulling on the usual leggings and oversized sweater, and rushing to my mom’s room next door, I saw she wasn’t in bed. This wasn’t rare for my mom; since my dad left when I was a baby, she frequently couldn’t sleep. She’d get up for tea, to watch a DVR’d sitcom, or anything else available at three in the morning. But never, in all my life, had she not woken me up for school.
“Mom?” I took the stairs two by two and walked into the kitchen to find my mom, and two police officers, in my kitchen, huddled over the marble island.
“Gab, I was just about to wake you,” she said, looking up. Her normally blue eyes were now red. Maybe she hadn’t gotten enough sleep. Or maybe she was crying.
The two officers looked up at me and didn’t smile. Instead, they gave me gentle stares, as if I’d break if stared at too hard.
“Uh, hello officers,” my house didn’t feel much like my house anymore, and my mom, usually so eager to make me breakfast, seemed withered and shaky. I walked over to the island and stood next to her, across from the officers.
Was this about the earrings? No. It couldn’t have been. That was last year.
“Honey, Sabby didn’t come home after the carnival last night,” she said, which was the last thing I’d expected to hear. “These are officers McNealon and Rhodes. They just want to ask you a few questions.”
Before I realized it, I felt an unfamiliar hollowness forming in my stomach, and a burning on my ears. The last thing I wanted to do was remember what had happened last night, especially with Sab.
“Okay, so have you talked to her parents?” I asked, trying to act calm, “I haven’t seen her since the carnival. We took separate cars because she had to get gas first.”
McNealon, the younger, maybe thirty-ish, with dark hair and skin and tight stubble framing his wide lips, took a moment, looked at officer Rhodes, who was older, paler, and fatter. “Why did she get gas? Was she planning on going somewhere after you left to carnival? It’s a five mile drive up the road to get there, and even farther into town for gas. She couldn’t have gotten it in the morning?”
Why were they acting like Sab did something wrong? We had more interesting things to discuss at the carnival than her rusted Ford’s gas mileage.
“I… did you call her or text her or-”
“Yes”, Officer McNealon cut me off, looking me hard in the eyes. “We tried calling Sabryna. Her phone has been disconnected. From the first looks of it, she wasn’t taken…”
My mom, I noticed, was staring at her slippers as McNealon talked. Why wasn’t this more interesting than slippers? The girl who I’d known my whole life, my best friend in the world, was missing, and she was focused on her five dollar slip-ons.
I returned my focus to the police. If Sabryna wasn’t in danger, where the hell was she?
My mind formed a thought against my will and I tried to ignore it. Anywhere.
McNealon scratched his stubble, stole a sideways glance at Rhodes, who was eyeing the box of Frosted Flakes on my counter, and let out a small breath. “Sabryna King ran away”, he said, casually flipping my world upside down, “And with no phone, no leads, and a full tank of gas, there’s no telling where or why she disappeared.”
I tried hard not to show my terror. Why would Sabryna do this to me? To her family? To herself? But deep down, begging to regurgitate itself, were two possible answers to Sabryna’s absence.
And I couldn’t tell the police, or anyone, either one.
“I’m so, so sorry, but I don’t know what to do”, I stammered, as everything began to look unfamiliar. My mom’s tear-stained cheeks, the police in my kitchen, the box of cereal on the counter, all seemed to become a blur. All I could see now was a world without Sabryna. The worst thing I could imagine ever happening is real, here, in this nightmare. And it might have been my fault.
I waited for tears to come, but I didn’t feel any fall. I was abandoned, shocked, angry, and broken.
“Well, thank you so much, Miss Hampton, Mrs. Hampton, we’ll be on our way.” McNealon’s words sounded like he was above ground and I was deep underwater running out of air and wishing I could come up. As my mom wrapped her arms around me and whispered against my curly brown hair, I realized I couldn’t come back up, out of the water, and breathe again, without Sabryna.
And I also realized, as I weightlessly wrapped my arms around my mother and stared hazily out the window, another thing.

Sabryna had jumped.
And I needed to follow her.
Anywhere.

1:10 pm, Monday
I’d walked weakly to my car, started up the engine, let my body flimsily jerk in the front seat as it revved up, and found that I didn’t know how to get to school without picking up Sab first. And I guess it was then that I realized, for the first time, that maybe I couldn’t do anything without her.
I walked into school with my throat tight and an annoying itch where I wore the painted-metal bracelet Sabryna had given me for my ninth birthday. She was the only one at the party.
I knew that as soon as I walked in, everyone would suddenly remember my name, existence, and the fact that I was with Sabryna at the fair last night. “Did she tell you anything?” “I’m so, so sorry, that really, really sucks but they’re going to find her.” “I miss her too.” I could see the Twitter hashtag: #FindSabryna.
But they weren’t so, so sorry and they didn’t know how I felt because none of them felt like half of their body was cut in half and God knows it’s not easy to function and live and laugh and eat ice cream and just watch movies and be happy with half of your body gone, taken from you so suddenly.
And they didn’t know what it was like for your missing half to be taken because of something you did.
I did.
Sabryna didn’t jump this time,
I pushed her
And the worst part was that I didn’t know
Where she landed.

1:11 pm, Monday
Nothing. No whispers, no worries, no hashtags.
I ate alone, I sat alone, I cried alone, and I wished, alone
To no longer be alone.

2:00, Monday
Walking out of school was even worse, for the first time, than walking in.
Because even though I didn’t want the pity, the hashtags, the fake-caring, and the side hugs
I did want them, I needed them
And I needed Sabryna.

1:30, Wednesday
After a day of staying home, overthinking, wishing I had any idea where Sabryna was, and wishing my mom seemed to care or even remember that the police, two days ago, had stood in our kitchen, school seemed like a better option.
I drove to school well. I remembered the turns, the new route from my house and not another, and remembered, but didn’t want to remember, the silence that had snaked into my car on Monday, seeped into the rusted car like carbon monoxide, an invisible poison, and made me feel ill by the time I escaped it.
And by D period on Wednesday, Alfred Tennyson had come into my AP Lit classroom, and with his poetry, led the poison from my car into room B107.
Red-eyed, I opened my textbook, at the request of Mr. Liguette, and read Tennyson’s quote, one meant to be a beautiful Hallmark card cover.

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”

And for some reason, that quote that should have made my heart feel soft and that sunflowery garden bloom in my mind, made the garden dry, and brown, and curling, and nothing that anyone wanted to touch, or visit, or see.
So that the dead garden would be alone.

2:00, Wednesday
As the bell rang, I realized that I wasn’t the reason Sab had jumped. Grayson Reade as.
Conveniently, he was in my was in my AP Lit class. He was in all the AP classes, and I was almost positive they scheduled them around his personal desires. As he got up, and began to walk out of the classroom and down the hallway with Yeena Lin, I got up to follow him.
Grayson  Reade and I had never exchanged a word. He had exchanged much more than words with Sabyna, though, and somehow I knew, or at least got the feeling, that he knew where she’d gone.
My feet rushed down the hall without my approval, and after he parted with Yeena, probably a candidate to be his next one-night girl, I began to speak for the first time in hours.
“Grayson!”
He was making his way to his matte black Cherokee, and I had pretended for a few moments, that I was making my way to my beamer. He turned, his blonde hair swished in an annoying way across his forehead, and he turned, surprised to see me, or possibly remembering my existence.
His eyes made their way over my dark jeans and loose sweater.
“What do you want.” It wasn’t a question. People, I guessed, didn’t approach Grayson. He approached them. I’d broken rule one.
“Sabryna is missing”, I stumbled, “I’m sure you know. I’m sure everyone knows and I’m sure you know even more than them or me.”
A look I’d never seen crossed Grayson’s face, even when handed an essay prompt asking for the analyzing of a poem that would have taken five months to even comprehend, his eyebrows had never knit together that way, his full, tan lips never so frozen.
“I know what happened last summer, and I know what’s happening now,” I said, watching him get into his car and ignoring me. Helpless, I grabbed the top of his driver seat door without realizing I’d done it.
“Get the f*** away from me, Gabriella,” he whispered as he slammed it shut, not caring if I hadn’t jerked my hand away. I heard his car gear into drive. “And don’t ever, ever mention that name to me again.”

Invisibility, to me, never seemed like a superpower, but like a curse. What if you wanted to say something, meet someone, look at yourself, be tangible and you couldn’t? You exist but don’t really, and I never really saw that as a gift. In school, from kindergarten on, I was invisible, not by choice, but my nature, I guess. I never stood out, never had much luck with friends.
I had a few acquaintances because of Sabryna, mostly guys, since she seemed to always lure them in with her crayons and drawing skills at first, in kindergarten, to senior year, with her long legs, green, sea-like eyes, and shoulder length wavy blond hair. I hated being invisible.
But when I walked, reluctantly, into the foyer of the Granger Mansion, and every head in the area tuned to me, for the first time in my life, I wished they didn’t see me. They didn’t turn because I had transformed into a stick-thin runway model. I was still a healthy weight with curls and glasses and too-big brown eyes. They turned because what the hell was I, Gabriella Hampton, doing at the Reade mansion? I didn’t know either.
Two hours earlier, Sabryna and I had sat in my room, scrolling through our phones and discussing whatever tweet Sabryna found preposterous that night, when the conversation switched to our plans.
“We could find something on Netflix”, I suggested. It was eight and I was already in my sweats, glad we were staying in for the night like the usual Friday.
“I was thinking”, Sabryna mused, not meeting my eyes, but still scrolling through whatever social media feed was displayed on her phone, “We would go to the Reade’s.”
I stole a glance out the window. It was already pretty dark, and I was ready to pull a few blankets out of the closet, pop some popcorn and relax. It was practically Friday tradition. “The woods? It’s already dark and-”
“No…” her eyes still avoided mine. “Grayson Reade’s party is tonight.” She suddenly met my eyes after the big reveal. “We totally don’t have to! It’s just an open house and everyone’s going to be there,” she added quickly.
The woods behind Grayson’s mansion were our favorite spot. Our secret place. The SAB + GAB ARE FAB tree was our hideaway, our escape from reality. But the Reade mansion was about as or “secret” as the fact that Grayson was the king of our school. Class President, merit scholar, “the hottest guy in the school and potentially the world”, according to Sabryna. And he definitely didn’t know about our tree. It was ours, no matter whose property it was. The thing was, even thought Grayson was the tanned, Axe-soaked, most popular person in our school, he was still a jerk. The number of girls Grayson snuck through one of the various backdoors of his mansion at the top of the hill was more than I could count on my fingers, and the number of girls who never heard from him again was double that. He was charming and friendly with teachers, scoring essay grades well above what he deserved, wore polos, boat shoes and khakis year round, had a rumored second home in Hawaii, and had an indoor and outdoor swimming pool, frequently the location of most Instagram photos and underage drinking in the region.
Something about Grayson Reade allured and intimidated people. I had no interest.
“I’ll go.” I said after a moment. I knew Sabryna saw this as her shot. At popularity, at a hookup with Grayson, at drinking free alcohol. And I also knew none of those things were going to happen tonight. But Sabryna would go if I wanted to go, and so two hours later I was in one of Sabryna’s flowy white shirts, dark jeans, and flip flops, standing near the notorious Reade pool, trying my best to avoid being splashed by Asheligh Tafte and Jagger Lee, who were intoxicated and jumping off the dicing board, making eye contact with Grace Markey, who was being felt up by Frank Cortanda, and uncomfortably pretending to sip my beer.
“Let’s sit, sit”, Sabryna giggled, motioning to two pool chairs that were unclaimed. I got the one next to Ashleigh and Jagger who were moving further along and not seeming to care that I was within arm’s reach.
I sat.
“This is so fun!” she giggled again, taking a sip of her beer, even though anytime it was mentioned she said it tasted like cat pee.
“Yeah…” I looked around and saw all the faces that usually avoided making eye contact in the hallways. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom. I’ll be back.”
Making my through a forest of drunk girls, handsy guys, and spilled drinks, I found one of twenty bathrooms in the house, and opened the door to find Reeve, the shy kid from my AP history class and Jeremiah Williams, the quarterback who’d taken up a full schoolbus seat since fifth grade, really getting to know each other. Shutting the door quickly, the pushed past more people I recognized and some I didn’t, and, wishing once again for invisibility, found another bathroom, slammed the door, and breathed a sigh of relief.
I wanted nothing more than to be home, and I knew Sabyrna did too, secretly. She realized that this plan to become something she wasn’t in one drunken night needed to be aborted. And even if she didn’t, I did.
I slid my phone out of my pocket and shot her a text.
“Sab, I’m not feeling too great. Do you wanna head home soon?”
Immediately, she responded. But not with what I expected.
“Grayson just asked me if I wanna take a walk. Holy s***, Gab. WTF?!”
I blinked and made sure I hadn’t imagined the text. Not that Sab didn’t look stunning tonight and always, but she wanted her first time to be with Grayson Reade?
I sat down on the closed toilet seat and typed back fast as my cheeks grew hot. “Well…?”
Another quick response. “You can head home, Gab. I think I’m gonna show him our tree, our place. OMG so nervous tho.”
Then another. “GRAYSON READE WANTS TO TAKE A WALK WITH ME!!”
I let my back fall against the ceramic toilet back with a sudden bubbling of emotion inside me. Sabryna said I could head home. She chose Grayson over me, and Grayson had never spoken to her in her life, and now she was going to…
Before I knew it, before I knew why, tears were flowing down my cheeks, and anger rushed through me, through my veins, and my thoughts. Sabryna was drunk, and everyone always said drunk decisions are sober thoughts. Sabryna wanted to abandon me in a beautifully decorated bathroom in Reade’s mansion. She wanted Grayson, she wanted to show him our place, our tree, everything that was just for us, everything we were, he was now invading.
And after I wiped my tears, left to house, and began my way home in the dark of my world, I realized that the emotion exploding inside of me wasn’t anger.
It was jealousy. Grayson could never love or know or understand Sab like I did. He could never let her scratch his back, or know that her favorite parts of movies were the sad parts, or jump off a tree with her, or want to spend every moment, every second, and every part of life with her because this wasn’t making love, this was what they called making love this was tearing our love apart.
As more tears, not of jealousy, but of knowing that I was alone, and she was at our tree with Grayson Reade and his khaki shorts, began to hit the damp, summery grass, I knew that this time

Sabryna had jumped without me
And I wasn’t going to follow.
I was on my own.

Cotton candy and seeing Grayson Reade weren’t a good mix.
I discovered this at the county fair the night before Sabryna disappeared and more specifically, when I was buying cotton candy, letting the sugary pinkness turn to grit on my tongue, and hearing the notorious Grayson chuckle from behind me.
Sabryna and I snapped our necks around at the same time, glanced at his sweatshirted back, surrounded by more than a few people the moonlight helped me recognize.
“Let’s just pretend we don’t see him,” she suggested, fingering her blue cotton candy with unpainted, yet perfectly shiny nails.
But I couldn’t not see him. And everytime I did, I couldn’t not see flashes of his back pressed up against our tree, his veined hands creeping up Sabryna’s shirt that night,
Her letting him, exploring his mouth with hers,
Letting him see more of her body in the reflection of the lake than she ever revealed to me
And every time I saw him, I couldn’t not wish that I hadn’t said “yes” that night.
“Agreed,” I said, “It’s getting really late, anyway.”
And yet Sabryna’s gaze had trailed off, to the Ferris wheel looming above the cotton candy stand, its blue, and pink, and yellow, and far away even though they were close, lights placed like gems around the perimeter.
I looked with her, at the dancing lights, and then her again, but I still saw her at the tree with him.
But this time I didn’t feel sick, because as Grayson slid her flowy blue top over her head and kissed her lips, what I saw made me feel the opposite of sick.

As the Ferris wheel reached its peak, Sabryna’s arm grazed mine. It wasn’t on purpose, but I’m not sure it was an accident either.
When I tried to meet her eyes, to take in this tiny and unimportant and exhilarating moment in, I traced her line of sight, again, to Grayson. His tiny form, so unimportant from up here, clad in a red crew team hoodie, was laughing. It had been almost a year since his party. Almost a year since I went with Sab and almost a year since I left alone. And that was something I wanted so hard to forget, and I thought Sabryna wanted the same.
“I wish I could escape.”
She said it as she turned back, and the neon lights shone, just at the right moment, on her face, I saw that she was crying. A hollow feeling carved itself into the bottom of my stomach, and I looked down at him, wearing the signature khakis and undercover-asshole personality.
I looked at my cotton candy. “He’s not important, you know.”
“But you are,” she said, her voice starting to clear as she choked back her tears, “And I really, really hate myself so much for that stupid f***ing night.”
“You always live in the moment Sab.” The memory of preschool flashed back to me, “Remember in Mrs. Simms’s preschool class, when you wrote your name, in the tomato red crayon on the wall?”
To my surprise, she laughed at my example. A hiccupy, fairy laugh. “And the S was backwards, I remember.” She smiled at her shoes. “She was a real b****, honestly.”
I, suddenly, then, became the serious one.
“What did you do that night, Sabryna?”
A shaky breath filled the space of our little cramped seats, and the squeaking of the chain holding us on the wheel suddenly became loud.
We hadn’t talked about it. In fact, we never even talked about the fact that it happened, and because of that, I had trouble staying and at her.
She didn’t rub in my face that she’d left me for Grayson, and I was silently grateful. But now, seeing her so vulnerable and different in some way that only the glow of the carnival could explain, made me want her to tell.
She was silent for what seemed like minutes. “I walked him to the tree, he touched my hair, and he kissed me and he did everything so rushed and fast so no one would realize we were gone that it seemed like an old memory. I was drunk, I guess, but he wasn’t. I was surprised, because when he kissed me I didn’t taste alcohol. And it was good, Gab, it was really good. But for the few minutes it lasted. And then when he pulled up his jeans, and I tried to ignore how bad it hurt now that I was paying attention to it, and realizing what I’d just given up to him, I realized it was really, really awful. It was awful because the only reason I was hurting was because he’s Grayson and he’s every girl’s and guy’s dream. But when I walked out of the forest, and you were gone, it wasn’t a  dream anymore. It was a really bad nightmare. And seeing him makes the nightmare come back. All the cloudy moments, the moans, his smell, come back, and force me to remember that I was one of so many on his list, and he was the only one on mine. So I really f***ing do. I wish I could escape. Live somewhere where I never got giddy over going to the woods with him, or getting drunk, or leaving you. I’ve wished that every day of the past year, and every time I hear his stupid laugh or smell his stupid smell when he gets up at the end of class, I wish it even more.”
I didn’t know what to say to Sabrina, for the first time ever, in that moment. I wished she hadn’t gone with him either.
I wished
“I wish you’d gone with me instead.”
I guess that was the moment that made Sabryna King jump this time.
I leaned forward, and let my mouth touch hers, and our pink and blue cotton candy tongues melted that s***ty grit sugar together and feel as close to her as I had our whole lives.
Maybe my kiss was the reason I woke the next morning with two policemen in my kitchen telling me she was gone.
Maybe Sabryna hadn’t jumped.
Maybe I’d pushed her.

7:00 PM
Grayson Reade had something to do with my being alone.
He had something to do with Sab’s disappearance, that I knew. His words were a constant stream in my mind. Nobreaknorelentnostopping.

Donteverevermentionthatnametomeagaindonteverevermentionthatnametomeagaindonteverevermentionthatnametomeagaindonteverevermentionthatnametomeagaindonteverevermentionthatnametomeagaindonteverevermentionthatnametomeagaindonteverevermentionthatnametomeagain

What had he done? What did he know about Sabryna that he was so terrified of hearing her name? That when he did, his whole face and demeanor transformed from cool and confident to shocked and defensive?
I needed Sabryna. I needed her so much that missing her felt like I was physically hurt, but the cut was on my back, and there was nothing I could do, alone, to help it.
I got in my car.

7:23 PM
Officer McNealon was certainly not happy to see me. I caught him just as he was packing his briefcase, alone in the police station, and bleary-eyed from finding clues. Or eating donuts. He wanted to go home, escape the lack of investigation he’d been doing all day, and have a c***tail that would wash away the fact that he hadn’t found Sabryna.
“Officer!”

“SabrynahadsexwithGraysonReadelastyear,andhecantevenhearhernamewithoutshrinkingawayandIwashopingyoucouldusethattofindherbecauseIneedherbackbecauseIveneverlivedwithoutherandIcantstartnow”

He paused, midway through putting a file in his tan leather briefcase, and met my eyes with his. His left eyebrow dipped and he scratched his head.
“Sorry… small town but I still can’t seem to remember names. Who are you, again?”

Donteverevermentionthatnametomeagain

“Gabriella Hampton, sir, you were at my house the other day. Sabryna King is my best friend.”
“Sabryna King”, he said, clicking around on his computer now.  “That name sounds so familiar for some reason…” He made a little ch-ch-ch with his tongue.
Who hired this man? I couldn’t help but wonder. A teenage girl has been missing for three days and you forgot her name?
“Ah, got it up here,” Officer McNealon said while scrolling. Then he met my eyes with a strange sort of empty yet not empty but hiding sort of way.
“I’m so, so sorry.”
My ears began to feel hot and my throat began to feel tight and I was so terrified for him to tell me they had found her, dead, or alive but something was wrong, and maybe Sabryna had just gone to a motel under a fake name or maybe she’d been stopped at the gas station by an axe murderer or maybe my kiss was just too much for her and she is just driving and driving and still driving away from me and he is saying that he is so, so sorry because Sabryna King is never coming back because
of me.
He turned the computer screen to face me, and the words on the screen were fake but they weren’t but they had to be fake because they couldn’t be real and in an instant, I wasn’t in the police station anymore.
I was back with Sabryna, I got to see her, feel her, smell her, hear her, and then I knew that the words on the screen were true.

“Last one to the tree is a rotten egg!” Sabryna shrieked, giggling ferociously, and began running against the sidewalk toward the woods.
“You gave yourself a head start!” I called after her. She kept running, and the sound of her bare feet slapping the cement was fading.
Running after her, not wanting to earn the title of “rotten egg”, I ended up at the tree minutes after she did.
“Rotten egg, rotten egg!” she cackled, already climbing the trunk, her toes curling in a monkeylike way around the bark, and her slender fingers wrapped tightly against the branches, so unafraid.
With a sigh, I began to follow her up, watching her instead of paying attention to my own safety. I was so clumsy getting to the jumping branch, and she was so gracefully secure and sure. When we reached the top, the wind carried her blonde hair to my face, and her hand reached out and we would jump, land in the cool water with the sun beating down on us like we did every day and we would splash each other even though we were already wet.
But Sabryna slipped.
It was silent. Maybe silent because of the speed of it,
Maybe silent because that was how Sabryna liked to jump, silence, and just the birds, the wind, and the leaves
Maybe silent because that would be my world when she was gone
On the wooded ground, fifteen feet below, Sabryna didn’t look like Sabryna anymore. She looked like a doll a careless child had tossed who knew their mother would get it back for them anyway.
She was bent in ways I never wanted to see even a doll bent
She was swimming in blood I never wanted to see so much of
And she was looking at me, with her cold, blue eyes, the way I never wanted her to look at me.
And when I brought myself down from the tree, I didn’t look at her again.
I didn’t think about the way she was bent
Or the way she was swimming
Or the way she was looking
Because I knew then
That they lied when they said everything happens for a reason because
Nothing
No reason in the world was a good enough reason for that

And I ran so far away and so hard and so confident and so sure and it was the way she climbed that tree. She knew where she was going, and where she would wind up and that it would all be fun in the end and
I knew that it wouldn’t be.
And I knew, when I got down from our tree, and I stood, for just a second, on the green and brown and beautifully imperfect ground, that it was Grayson Reade’s eyes staring back at me from the trees, and it was his lip that parted with the most slight, invisible, shock. As if his lower lip was trying to cling onto its partner, his upper lip, but it fell, like her, and
I knew that this time was different because
Sabryna jumped
And I ran
And ran and
Ran
And

8:00 PM
Run
And
Run and
Run and
I run again, like that night
It’s flashed into me,
Hit me like the worst tsunami of truth
And I am the little village it’s washing away
And years of it, all the village built and
Loved and worked for
Was washed away and left barren,
Raw
And lifeless
I hear the doctors who talked about me
After
Hear my mother telling
Me over
And over
And
Over
How she was gone
And how I had to remember
And how I was there
And now after
Seven years
Seven
F***ing years I know
I’ve read about it before
A disease
For Iraq vets
For those old men who come back from Vietnam wooden duck cane
In hand who
Shot a woman and her baby because
That was what he had to do
And he ran too
And he forgot
His mind,
I’ve heard on some 60 Minutes program,
Is a tool for him that has blocked out
Everything
He
Didn’t
Want
To
Remember
Sometimes it replaced those memories with
Something new
Sometimes  he forgot he went to Iraq in the first place
But his brain is fool proof too
It knows that people will tell him how
He shot the woman and the baby and
He will block it right out again
Because his mind doesn’t want to
Can’t
Process it
And let him live that way
But sometimes the brain lets things
Leak
In that aren’t supposed to
His wife shows him a picture of a baby with its dark skinned mother
On the cover of National Geographic
Or
He smells the incense that burned as he took the life of
An innocent mother and child and his façade
His brain’s masterpiece
Begins to crack and let more of the truth
That evil poison gas
Leak in

Everything makes sense but I don’t want it to
Everything is so broken and so unfixable and
I haven’t been living the truth for so long
And Sabryna is actually dead and I saw her
And I held her before she fell
But I couldn’t hold on strong enough
And I never got the chance to kiss her
And I won’t
Ever
And I’ll never ever be the same person again
Because the person I loved was the other half of me
And it was so
So
So
Unimaginably hard to take in air and think and feel anything
Even your own tears cutting through your cheeks like little
Razor blades that you
Deserved to be cut by
When you’ve been ripped in half
Not gently and without warning
And the prosthetic half you’d gotten to have
Has been stripped away
And you’re alone and
Thinking
That maybe you could have stopped being
Cut from
Head to toe
In the first place
And now that she’s gone,
And my façade has broken like a mirror and
Left itself all over the floor
I have no choice but to see myself in the pieces,
Broken, remaining, but not useless,
Nothing without
Her

8:45 PM
The filet mignon my father had Mariana home-cook that night wasn’t sitting well. I was already freaked out about that girl, that one who was with Sabryna in the woods behind my house. Why had she chosen to harass me today? And why now? Sabryna had been dead for seven years and every night for the past seven years I’d remembered it. Vividly. I saw the life come out of her the second she hit the ground and I heard the almost silent snap as her neck broke and the life flowed out of her.
The filet mignon was also bothering me because that girl had said something else. That Sabryna was missing, and that I knew, and so did everyone else.
For the past seven years, I’d tried to do everything I could to forget that day in the woods. And for some reason, girls were a way to forget.
Touching them, and feeling them, and being one with them was my way of coping, I guess. My way of being with the girl I never got to talk to, who died as I watched.
And for some reason, Gabriella’s attack had made it even worse. I hated seeing her, a constant reminder. We both knew what had happened, we both knew we ran home, never spoke of it again, and let the police find her, and we let he town weep tears for a life gone too soon and not weep for the lives who were taken too, but in a different way.
Because when I closed my eyes on nights like these I saw her, in the woods just steps from my room, her eyes still open after all these years, and bugs, black, disgusting, f***ing terrifying creatures, pouring out of her mouth as she got up, her neck still crooked from the fall, and her eyes unmoving and glassy, and looking at me the way I looked at her. Horrified, sick, weightless, and uninnocent.
The howling outside my window started then, as the filet mignon gurgled in my stomach. Not howling, though. Deep, loud, screams that were so painful and full of such awfulness and so haunting that I forgot about the steak in my stomach and made everything stop.
That image, the bugs, her eyes was glued in my head. I could see her out there, in the dark, waiting for me.
And I had to get rid of it.

My father’s glock was waiting for me in the drawing room.

My bones,
As they broke under my skin
That seemed not strong enough,
Thick enough,
Carried me through the trees and grass
And shut down when I reached the tree
I was blind I was
Not me
I was
So bloody but not
Bloody at all
My fingers gently felt the trunk of
The aged wood
And traced our letters
That we’d carved that year
With a rusted knife and
Both of us pushing the tip into the strong, unyielding bark at the same time with the same effort because that was how we did things
And we wouldn’t do them that way again
The S of Sab is so
Sharp and feels like every line of it I touch, I am cut, and the pain is so strong and so enticing and the only thing
I can feel
That I press harder and harder and I touch her name and I make noises that
I didn’t know I could
And I feel ways I never knew I could
My hand is battered now
Thin pieces of shredded skin I can’t see
In the dark
Just barely clinging on, the I feel the blood
Flow from my heart to my shoulder
To my arm to my hand to my fingers to the tree to her name to
Us
To Grayson Reade’s eyes and his lip that
Couldn’t cling on
And to Sabryna’s arched back
To her tenderest skin that I could see in the pitch dark
So vividly
And my blood was all gone
And I was wailing and barking and
Letting so much pain leave me
And everything leave me
Even though
It already
Had
And someone is
Behind me
And I don’t have to have the sun up and the birds
Chirping to know who it is

Now
Today I snuck
Up
On Grayson and now he has snuck up
On me
And as I hear him call out with his raspy, clear, deep,
Addams apple voice
Whostherewhostherewhosthere
I swallow up everything that is pouring out of me,
The sounds like somehow come
From me
But sound inhuman
And I hear the little
Tiny
Waterfall in the lake
With little tiny stones
And little tiny water
I hear Grayson’s little tiny footsteps
And my hand stops bleeding
And my skin heals
And all of me had left
Me
And was in that tree somehow
And he says Gabriella?
And I say Yes but was it in my head or in my body
And he says
In the blackness
What the f*** are you doing here?
I’m not I whisper quietly I’m not anything
I was thinking about her says Grayson Reade I think about her every night
I was with her every night I say out loud But I wasn’t
You didn’t know he says and I know I can’t see him but I know he isn’t Grayson Reade Anymore
He’s not the undercover-asshole or the party thrower or the Sabryna kisser he’s
Vulnerable
And he’s thought about her every night and he misses her too even though he never knew her
She was so amazing I find my mouth saying She was amazing when she was real and when she wasn’t
Grayson Reade was very
Silent
I just wanted her to be with me again I said
And then I realize that he holds
The key
Grayson Reade has a gun
And for the first time in my life I want something I never thought I would
Something from Grayson Reade
I want to be with her so bad
I want to feel her beside me
And see her tan hands and her cotton candy tongue
And her tears and her teeth when she smiles
Gabby?
It’s her voice
And I feel her near me
Not broken like after she fell
But whole and beautiful and illuminated like on that Ferris wheel
Yeah I say but it’s not my voice its my voice from seven years ago and through the night
I can see her climbing the tree
And I wait for the words that are pounding over and over in my head
Like a record stuck on its spindle
You’re not going to die

It's her crystal tinkling voice 
I close my eyes
And even if you did
Pull the trigger Grayson
Wouldn’t you want it
I need to be with her
To be
End it for both of us
With your best friend?
I open my mouth and say her name
Maybe so quietly that he doesn’t hear
But then he says something
Do you see her too he says
I nod in blackness
I want you to I whisper
And I crouch in front of our names
GAB + SAB ARE FAB
And I run my still bleeding fingers
And my still bleeding mind
Over the letters
As the bullet comes though me
And I follow

There would be no more jumps
No more follows
There would be just us
And like the tree
We would be jagged, sharp, undamaged, woven, stronger, and forever
And we would be side by side
Sab + Gab
Gab + Sab
Us