Oh, wow. I scramble to say, “We’re just friends, Ivy. Kurt and I have been friends for ages.”
“Isabel said the same thing. At first.”
“Callie and I are just friends,” says Kurt. “She’s not interested.”
“But you are.”
“God, this is all ridiculous.” I force a smile. “What tangled webs we weave.”
Ivy says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This isn’t the time.”
“You’d better tell me, Callie.”
“It’s nothing to do with Kurt. Look, can we just talk about this later?”
“Tell me now.”
My cheeks grow hot. “No. Not now.”
“So there’s no explanation for Kurt being at your house?”
I say in a rush, “I like you, Ivy.”
She says through clenched teeth, “If you like me, why didn’t you want to kiss me? You turned me down.”
“You were high,” I say. “It wasn’t the right moment. I was scared. And I didn’t want it to be like that. It was never like that before—it meant something. At least it did to me.”
“Don’t lie to me! I know what you and Kurt have been doing.”
“Ivy, calm down. This is a stupid misunderstanding.”
“I understand all right.”
“Stop yelling at me.”
Ivy spits out, “I stole Isabel’s motorbike. She was at the party with Diego—she was never on the bike with me. I drove it as fast as I could. I came off the road and hit a wall. Boom … On purpose.”
“What do you mean ‘on purpose’?” I’m sweating.
“That was how I tried to kill myself. Remember?”
Kurt says, “You tried to kill yourself?”
“I wish Isabel had been with me on the bike. Bitch. Then she wouldn’t have ended up with Diego.”
“How can you say that?”
“She deserved to die.” She glances at me. Her eyes are glazed. “I don’t believe you about Kurt. I’m not a fucking idiot.”
“I never said you were an idiot. I think I’m the idiot.”
“What does that mean?”
“I was starting to think I was in love with you, but maybe I don’t even know you.”
Ivy’s words slur. “I’m just like my mom.”
“Oh my God, Ivy. You’re drunk. Stop the car!”
“I’m beautiful. I’m worthy. I’m full of light.”
She steers onto the bridge.
Kurt yells, “Ivy, stop the car!”
She speeds up and turns to me in her seat, lifting her hands. She looks me full in the face and says, “You did this.”
I grab for the wheel. She fights me off. Kurt undoes his seat belt and, from the back, tries to reach the wheel too.
The bridge. The construction. That sign: WAIT HERE—
The car slams into the damaged barrier and flies through the air as my left shoulder rips from the socket and Kurt’s full weight smashes over me into the front windshield. He undid his seat belt … Then he crushes me against the airbag, which in turn crushes me from the front.
I can’t hear anything, but I sense the car falling. The weight of Kurt shifts and now I can see. The sun is low in the sky, scorching the undersides of the clouds, tangling Ivy’s hair in light, and we are plummeting, heavy as tombstones, heavy as last words.
We hit the water hard. Pain and sound and terror fill me, but I’m alive. The car sinks and cold, cold water pours in the windows, and in Ivy’s door—which has flung open on impact.
The airbag presses on me and I struggle to undo my belt. I shove Kurt, and then try to pull him loose, free him.
Where’s Ivy? There’s no time to look.
We are mermaids, slippery, watery, drowning.
I have to save Kurt. I tug at him. It cannot end like this. Water is up to my collarbone. My throat. I fill my lungs with air, plunge under and turn Kurt so his face is toward mine.
Kurt
And now I remember.
Being in the car. Back seat. Ivy talking batshit crazy. The car hitting the barrier. Callie screaming. Flip. Smash.
I think of the way no one has spoken directly to me; even at the party I was ignored. I think of the way Mrs. Foulds stared at me blankly. I think of the second cup of coffee, the one I thought Xander brought for me in the waiting room. I think of the remote that I couldn’t work.
Xander and Mrs. Foulds are still talking but the lights flicker. Strobe effect. Can’t they see it? I stagger away from them, like a drunk.
Dead. That word. It plays over and over in my mind. A dull word, punctuated at both ends.
I’m dead.
The lights go off.
Callie
Things I remember, falling through my mind like leaves through the sunlight.
My mother typing at her desk, the tap of the keys.
My father sitting in an armchair in my bedroom reading The Odyssey.
Cosmo watching me, his eyes carefully focusing, his gummy mouth smiling.
Kurt. The way he scratches the back of his head when he listens to the things I say.
Ivy’s mother, poised like an angel at the edge of the water.
I’m sitting on a branch of a tree, my feet dangling.
I see the moving van two doors down, a green car, the passenger doors opening, a girl getting out.
I see the back of her head before I see her face for the first time.
I remember how I loved her, how she felt in my arms.
All the days rush at me, every day I’ve lived, a photomontage of memories. There’s Kurt standing outside my house in the evening sunshine. There’s my father, leaning against my doorway, telling me a story, turning to kiss my mother. There’s Cosmo grabbing at my finger with his podgy baby hand.
There’s my mother, typing, music playing, concentrating. She sees me and so she pauses mid-sentence. She rolls back her chair and I come into the room. I’m crying and she’s holding me, kissing my hair as I sob into her chest.
I wish I could tell her that I love her.
She releases me, looks in my eyes, love spilling over, and for a moment that look feels strong enough to hold me to her forever.
But I can’t hold on.
I let go.
I’m soaring.
Ivy
Pain shoots through me.
Someone shouts, “She’s hemorrhaging.”
Callie. I’m sorry. Please don’t leave me.
Callie
My granny stands before me and the air smells of rose petals, sweet, floral, edible. Behind her is nothing but sky and it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.
I try to concentrate, try not to drift.
Words like river fish.
My granny says, “Oh, Callie.”
I kiss her papery cheek. “I miss you, Granny.”
“Don’t stay here,” she says. And she fades away as if she were nothing but air.
I call for her, but she’s gone. Then I see Kurt walking along the riverbank, searching for something, maybe for me.
I run to him, shivering, and put a hand on his arm, which is cold, so cold.
“Kurt,” I say, testing my voice.
“Where were you? I didn’t know. A ghost of myself without even knowing.” He sounds lost. “The lights keep going on and off.”
“I had to swim. I had to leave you there,” I sob. “Oh, Kurt. Did it hurt?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how I got back here from the hospital. First, I thought I was at the party—I don’t know how I got there. Then I was at the hospital, waiting. But I’ve been dead the whole time. Now I’m here.”
“Hey, hey, shh. You’re not making sense.” I notice the silver dollar round his neck.
His eyes fix on mine. He says slowly, as if he’s speaking through water, “I can’t come back to my parents. My birth-mom. My brothers. I can’t come back.”
“Oh, Kurt, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” he sa
ys, suddenly coherent.
“How could I have been so blind?” I say. “I sit around reading and rereading novels where people do terrible things, but in real life I float in a bubble.”
“You couldn’t fix her.”
“I was so naive. Thought I was so grown up but I was just a—how could I have thought I was in love with her?”
“Shh, stop.” He touches the letters of his tattoo. “I got this after my birth-mom said something to me. —‘Know thyself.’”
“No way? From above the temple of Apollo at Delphi?”
He says, “Geek. No one knows that stuff.”
“I always wanted to go there—to the temple and see into the future—when I was little. All that prophecy stuff is cool.”
“You really are a geek,” he murmurs. He turns serious. “I wish things had been different, Callie.” He adds, “There’s a chance for you. Look.” He points.
We both look at my body where it lies, pale, washed up at the side of the river.
I whisper, “It’s not fair. You don’t deserve this.”
“You need to hurry.”
I think of my family, of my home, of the things I want to do. I think about Flat Earth Theory, the poems I want to write, the story I have to tell. “But I …”
“But nothing. Go.”
I know he’s right. I step toward my body.
He says, “I’m going to miss you, Callie.”
My stomach hurts. My face, my neck too. I reach up and feel my skin. It’s wet. I’m lying on the grass, the river beside me.
TWELVE
AFTER
Callie
I stir. My parents and my baby brother are in the hospital room. The three of them together.
“She’s awake.” That’s my dad, yelling, running out to the corridor, shouting, “Nurse! Anyone? She’s awake!”
My mom leans in to hold me, Cosmo squished between us. She’s crying. I feel her tears through the shoulder of my hospital gown.
Later they tell me about Ivy. She survived the crash but hemorrhaged and died in the hospital. I wish I could talk to her, yell, scream, hate, forgive, but she’s gone.
And then they tell me about Kurt. I knew, but the news is a shard of glass in my heart.
Later still, I tell the police what happened. I tell them everything. My mother is here, her head in her hands.
Mom holds me while I cry. There will be many more days like this.
The death of us
Words slide through my head. I’m so tired.
Rebecca arrives.
I say, “Um, you’re not crying, are you?”
“I might be.”
“You don’t normally cry.”
“Yeah, well,” she says, “you don’t normally go off a bridge either.”
“I’m sorry for … everything,” I say.
“You’re sorry? You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I knew. Deep down. I knew Ivy was messed up. I just wanted … I guess you were right … I …” My voice drops. “I thought I was in love with her.”
“You were.”
Neither of us looks at the other.
Rebecca says, “I can’t believe what she did.”
I say, “I can.”
Rebecca pauses. “When you get out of here, you—I—well, do you want to come to mine? Have that breakfast, or something?”
“Sure,” I say. “Sure. That sounds really good.”
Days pass. Sometimes, when I wake, my parents stand jiggling Cosmo between them. One day, they give me a new phone. It’s full of texts. More days pass. My friends visit; Tilly is back from the cabin, Alison and Alex from Flat Earth Theory stop by. It’ll be time for me to go home soon. My body is healing.
Early one morning I open my laptop. I toy with the idea of writing some lines of poetry onto a blank page, lines that have been blooming in my head since the accident.
She asked you to stop by the river
when the world cracked open like an egg.
The space you never filled, a water glass spilled.
Then I hear Kurt’s voice: I lean against a tree at the back of the yard, the night around me like black water.
“Kurt?” I say into the dawn. “Ivy?”
In the silence, I listen.
Acknowledgements
Thank you:
Hadley (can I thank you twice?!)
Jackie
Maria
Allyson
Leona
Jen
Émile
Dad
Mum
and
above all
Yann
About the Author
ALICE KUIPERS is the bestselling, award-winning author of three previous novels, Life on the Refrigerator Door, The Worst Thing She Ever Did and 40 Things I Want to Tell You, and the picture book Violet and Victor Write the Best-Ever Bookworm Book. Her work has been published to critical acclaim in twenty-nine countries. She lives in Saskatoon. Visit her at alicekuipers.com
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Also from
Alice Kuipers
Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Juvenile/YA Crime Book
Winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Young Adult Literature
alicekuipers.com | @AliceKuipers
Credits
Cover photograph by Svetlana Sewell / Arcangel Images
Copyright
The Death of Us
Copyright © 2014 by Alice Kuipers.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPUB Edition August 2014 ISBN 9781443424127
Published by HarperTrophyCanada™, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
FIRST EDITION
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