Free The Secret Year by Jennifer R. Hubbard Page B

to figure out how much to tell her. “The truth is—there’s somebody else.”
    “What?”
    I didn’t want to say it again.
    “You’ve been seeing somebody behind my back?” she said.
    “No. I mean there was somebody before you, and I’m not over it yet.” I thought:
She’s dead, but we won’t go into that
.
    “Jackie? You’re still hung up on Jackie?”
    “No, not Jackie.”
    She knelt there, staring at me. I noticed then that her T-shirt was on backward, the tag poking out of the neck hole. “You haven’t had a girl since Jackie. How could you fall in love with someone and not tell me?”
    “I didn’t tell anybody.” I reached over to touch the tag, to let her know her shirt was backward, but she jerked away.
    “Who is it?” she asked.
    “I can’t tell you. Anyway, it’s over now.”
    “You’re unbelievable.” She dragged a shoe out from beneath the bed. “You’re such a liar! You made me think you loved me.”
    “I never said that.”
    “No, you just
acted
like it and let me
believe
it.”
    “I’m screwed up right now.”
    “You sure are.” Her eyes brimmed over. “I don’t want to see you, or talk to you, ever again.” She found her other shoe and jammed her foot into it. Her jacket was stuck between the end of my mattress and the footboard. She wrenched at it, and I got up to help her.
    I pulled the jacket free. “I know you’re mad right now, but—”
    “Go to hell.” She grabbed the jacket and slammed out of my room. I flopped down on the bed and stuck the pillow over my head. I had done what I needed to do, but it didn’t make things any better.
     
    I had another dream about Julia that night. She came into Barney’s with Austin when I was working, and I had to set a table for them and pretend I didn’t know her. I tried to catch her eye, but she kept looking at Austin.
    Then the scene switched, the way it does in dreams, and I was alone in the tree house with Julia. “I heard you’re seeing somebody else now,” she said.
    “I was, but I had to break up with her.”
    “Because of me?”
    “Partly, yes.”
    She smiled. Then her smile faded and she said, “I don’t feel right. I think there’s something wrong. . . .” She lifted her hand, and it was full of blood. Blood pooled in the palm of her hand and dripped all over the floor of the tree house, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from.
    “What happened?” I said. I grabbed her other hand, but that was bloody, too.
    “I think it’s from the accident,” she said, frowning.
    “What accident?”
    “The
car
accident. It was very bad. Didn’t you hear about it?”
    I woke up then.

chapter 11
    On Sunday Tom went back to school and I went walking down by the river, alone. When I got to the bridge, I crossed under it to the south side. The bank was rockier here; boulders jutted into the water.
    I passed some small ripples that barely counted as rapids. The Willis River was no whitewater paradise. I looked around, remembering that Kirby had said that she came here sometimes, but I didn’t see her today. Or anyone else.
    I sat on a log and watched the water. I had seen the river just about every way you could. Chocolate-colored after floods, green and still in August, boiling during storms, hard-skinned in January. Today it ran blue and serious, a real winter river.
    I knew that if I stuck my hand in, the water would burn and sting and turn my skin red. When we were little, Nick and Paul and I would dare each other. We’d grit our teeth and plunge our hands in, count to three, pull them out and howl. Then we’d stick them in our armpits, to ward off frostbite.
    I had to laugh, remembering that. And still I felt the smallest itch to do it again today, to walk up to that water and let it sear my hand, shock me all the way through.
     
    When Nick picked me up for school that week, I had the whole backseat to myself, since Syd and Fred weren’t there. “The lovebirds want to be alone,” Paul