The Valley and the Flood by Rebecca Mahoney (10 best books of all time TXT) 📗

drink down the front of your dress. No one’s noticed. No one’s noticed you for a while now. Gaby was the one who babysat you at these kinds of things. They’re not doing it on purpose. It’s been months, and you seem okay. And that’s good. You didn’t want them watching you. You’re fine. You’re supposed to be fine.

You go for another breath. It catches hard and short in the back of your throat. You’re dying. You’re dying, and you’re not even going to say anything about it. The bass pounds away, hijacking your pulse, reeling and shivering and squeezing and clawing—

You wrap your arms around your ribs like that’ll hold your insides in, you drag the air in and out of your narrow throat, but someone laughs, and someone else screams, Marin Levinson’s sound system keeps pound, pound, pounding at you from your feet up. And when you can’t stop it, you try to outrun it instead. Distance doesn’t help. It’s just as fast as you are.

You hit the railing of Marin’s front porch with both hands, but you’re not done. You keep going, down the stairs and down the street. You don’t remember where you parked, it doesn’t matter where you parked, nothing matters more than running as fast as you can.

At the end of the cul-de-sac, the sidewalk dips and flings you to the pavement. The gravel bites into your palms. The wind, unseasonably warm, hits you like a wave. With every gasp of your breath, a little more color seeps back into the world. Exactly five seconds pass.

And this is when you finally think to wonder what you’re doing.

You push yourself back to your knees, and you stare down at your hands, watching the beads of blood swell through the skin. The air’s still warm. But for some reason your teeth keep chattering.

“What the hell . . .” It comes out in a huff of air. It’s then that you notice how sore your chest is, how scratched your throat feels. Slowly, you stand up, look around. But if anyone heard you, no one’s coming out to look. The only movement is the rippling of the trees in the middle of the cul-de-sac.

You should get it now. You have everything you need to piece together what’s been happening, slowly, these past few months. But nobody saw you leave. And if no one’s here to ask if you’re okay, there’s no one to think up an answer for.

But you’ll catch up. Gaby’s gone. What else do you have if not time to think?

Six THE SPLIT SCREEN

FACT NUMBER ONE: I’m sitting in my car, parked along the cul-de-sac down the street from Marin Levinson’s house.

Fact number two: I’m also standing in front of my car, directly in the headlights, watching myself through the windshield.

But other than that, everything’s fine.

I lift a hand—carefully at first, and then right in May 24 Rose Colter’s face. She looks straight through it. But to be fair, she’s looking through pretty much everything.

“Neat trick,” I say softly. She doesn’t hear that, either.

I keep looking at her, this living, breathing aftermath of my first panic attack. She doesn’t look like how I remember feeling. She’s fished her—my—flannel shirt out of the back seat, and she’s blasting heat from the front vents. I know, I remember, that she’s waiting until she feels steady enough to drive. But other than the occasional, subtle shiver, her face is still, placid. Distracted, maybe. But normal.

It’s not cold—I can still feel that unseasonable warmth through the memory, or the flashback, or whatever this is—but I shiver, too. Sometimes, when it gets bad, I have this disconnect. Like everything’s gone quiet and muffled, like I’ve stepped outside my own trembling mess of nerves and sound to try to get a good look at myself.

To literally step outside myself, though—that’s a little different. But it’s also a little easier to look at myself and know, for once, exactly how I’m feeling.

She takes the car out of park, and I jerk back onto the curb, unsure if this place can hurt me, but not willing to test it. But she drives past me—down the street, round the corner, out of sight.

Marin Levinson’s neighborhood doesn’t disappear with her.

I turn in a slow circle. The path from Marin’s house to where I’m standing has gone from black-and-white to full color: from the sidewalks, to the houses that surrounded me, to the tiny dots of blood on the pavement where my hands hit the ground. In the cul-de-sac, the trees have started rippling gently, gray shadows slowly defining into individual leaves.

It’s Marin’s house that looks flat and lifeless now. The colors and lights have dimmed, and as my car ventures farther down the street, the thump of the bass gets quieter. As my taillights turn the corner and disappear, the music stops. Like now that I’m gone, the party has ceased to exist.

Sliding my phone out of my pocket, I turn on the camera and take a long look at myself. My face white in the streetlights, whiter still next to my dark auburn hair. My shoulders straight, drawn up to my full gangly height—lanky, Gaby would want me to say, because supposedly that sounds sexier. My brown eyes big and dark. The image, splintered in the cracked screen, shakes with my hand. But I look as normal as I did that night, sitting in that car.

At least this answers one question I’ve had all these months. If I looked like this the entire party, it makes sense that no one came out to check on me.

I pull up my text messages and flip back to the one Maurice sent the day I left. In case anything comes up. And his number.

I tap the number with my finger. It isn’t until it starts ringing that I realize I didn’t plan any further than this.

It rings again, which means it’s officially too late to hang up. It’s going to look weirder if