Never Missing, Never Found (24 page)

“Scarlett,” she says, and that one word evaporates the dread, makes it rise through my skin and dissipate into the air. “Scarlett. I need help.”

“With what?”

Connor backs away, hearing the urgency in my voice, but I motion for him to stay. If he leaves, he might never come back. “Melody?”

Her voice cracks in a sob. “Katharina,” she says. “I…I was trying to…she tried to…after what she did, she…” She falls silent for a moment, then adds, “It was an accident….” I don’t know if she actually sounds completely and thoroughly unconvincing, or if it’s all in my head. “An accident, I swear.” And then she stops, haltingly, and takes a little gasping breath. Like she’s trying to hold in something horrible.

The fifth choice isn’t mine. It’s Melody’s.

All I need to know now is that she used Scarlett’s name. That she used
my
name. “I’ll be right there,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says, and her voice breaks again. “Scarlett.”

Melody is teaching me how to make banana muffins. “Mash the banana in, but leave some chunks. You want chunks,” she directs, watching closely as I smash the fruit with my fork. “Then mix in the melted butter, the egg, and the sugar, and mix, but not too much. Okay, that’s good.”

We’ve already mixed the dry ingredients—the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, and nutmeg—and so she has me mix everything together now. “Don’t mix it too much or the texture will be weird,” she says. “Like I said, you want chunks. Chunks are good.”

I mix it carefully and present it to her for her approval. She peers down her nose at it, then gives a regal nod. “Good. Now put it in the muffin tin. Make sure all twelve are equal. I’ll make the crumble.” I guess the crumble isn’t quite up to my skill level yet. I’m okay with that. “Make sure you grease the muffin tin first, just rub some butter in each of the holes.”

A few months ago, I would never have expected to spend a day in the kitchen with Melody, having her help me with something completely and totally voluntarily. I would have wanted it, yes, wanted it so hard my chest hurt.

She told me it was an accident. That’s what she said. She’d been horrified by Katharina’s willingness to scare Matthew, maybe even hurt him or kill him, and so when Katharina lunged at her as she was leaving the cabin, Melody grabbed the knife on impulse, to protect herself, and Katharina lunged too close. She didn’t mean it, not really, but as she stood there, watching Katharina gasp and bleed on the dirt, she didn’t feel sorry and she didn’t call for an ambulance and she didn’t try to stanch the bleeding. She felt shocked, yes, and gutted, and she cried in great, gasping sobs even as she couldn’t breathe, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel sorry.

“The crumble’s done,” Melody says, and our eyes meet over the muffin tin. She smiles grimly at me. She’s changed in the last three months; her cheeks have thinned, she cut her hair short, and she has permanent dark shadows under her eyes. She looks older. That’s what happens when you have dark secrets. When you make the darkest of dark choices. When you do what’s necessary to protect your family from someone who is, at once, a loved one and a destroyer.

I would know.

I smile back. I think we’re friends now. We haven’t braided each other’s hair yet, or painted each other’s nails, but we’ve told each other our secrets. Everything is out in the open, and now we share the biggest secret of all, the secret that points back to a patch of disturbed earth deep in the woods, a patch that by now should be covered in dried brown pine needles and squirrels hiding acorns for the winter. “Can I bring a few to Connor?” I ask. “I’m seeing him after school on Wednesday.”

“Of course,” she says, sprinkling the crumble on top of the batter. “They’re yours, too, you know.” Her smile twitches, turns into something more genuine. “That is, if you can keep them from Matthew. Three days is a long time for anything to last in this house.”

As if on cue, right as the muffins start to become fragrant in the oven, giving off clouds of banana and cinnamon, Matthew races into the kitchen. “Oh, are you baking something?” he asks, like he hasn’t been lurking outside the door, waiting.

Melody rolls her eyes. “I don’t know, what do you think?”

“I think yes,” Matthew says, and beams, pressing his face up against the oven’s glass front. It must be hot, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. It’s clearly not hot enough to burn him, so I let him be.

“You okay?” I ask Melody—quietly, so Matthew doesn’t hear. “I heard you yelling again in your sleep.”

Her lower lip trembles, but only once. She is strong. She will be okay. “When will it stop?” she asks.

I swallow hard. This isn’t the answer I want to give her, but it’s the truth. “It will never stop, not really,” I say. “But it will get easier.”

I grab her hand and squeeze. She squeezes back. She is strong, like me, and she will be okay, like me, because we are sisters. Sisters by choice. We might not share blood, but we do share a secret, and secrets are stronger than blood.

This book was informed by the two summers I spent working at Six Flags Great Adventure. Thank you to the park for such a memorable first job and to the people with whom I worked, played, and fell in love during the summers of 2007 and 2010. We had a wild ride, and I could not have asked for more.

Thank you, as always, to my publishing team: Merrilee Heifetz, Sarah Nagel, Allie Levick, and Michael Mejias at Writers House; Chelsea Eberly, Michelle Nagler, Jenna Lettice, Aisha Cloud, Jocelyn Lange, Nicole de las Heras, Alison Kolani, and Barbara Bakowski at Random House; and Kassie Evashevski at United Talent. You are all the best, and I feel lucky every day to have you on my side.

Jeremy Bohrer, thank you for supporting me and brainstorming with me and making my life better—I love you. Fearless Fifteeners, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin, Twitter community, friends, and extended family—thank you for your cheerleading, your help, your friendship, your love, and/or all of the above. My friends and critique partners Annette Dodd and Alix Kaye—thank you for helping make my writing better and my stories stronger.

Thank you, finally, to Beth and Elliot Panitch. I would publicly apologize for making all the parents in my books terrible people, but maybe they’re only that way because it would be impossible to write parents better than mine.

AMANDA PANITCH
grew up next to an amusement park in New Jersey and went to college next to the White House in Washington, D.C. She now resides in New York City, where she works in book publishing by day, writes by night, and lives under constant threat of being crushed beneath giant stacks of books. Visit Amanda online at
amandapanitch.com
and follow her on Twitter at
@AmandaPanitch
.