56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

23 Days Ago

She doesn’t close the door to the bathroom, and Oliver doesn’t want to go in there and loom over her while she’s being sick, so he waits in the doorway of the living room while she retches.

“I’m so sorry, Ciara,” he says. “I know those are just words, but I am. I’m so sorry I did this to you.”

After a while, she climbs to her feet, splashes some water on her face, and meets his eyes in the reflection in the mirror over the sink.

When she turns around to face him, she looks pale and broken.

“So who’s Laura?” she says.

“I don’t know. I don’t know her. But presumably, she’s found out where I am and is trying to get to me. To write about me, I suppose.”

“But you said you were Boy A and Boy B. She can’t report your name.”

“No, but . . . she could still cause trouble.” He pauses. “She already has.”

There’s a silence then that he doesn’t dare break, because he isn’t quite sure what is happening here.

Ciara is still here. That’s not what he was expecting.

And she’s asking questions, which . . . He doesn’t know what to make of that. But he’ll let her dictate these next few minutes. They can go at her pace.

He knows this must be a lot to take in.

“How did you get your scar?” she asks. “Really?”

“In the rec room at Oberstown.”

“What happened?”

She’s wrapped her arms around herself now; she looks likes she’s literally holding herself together. He wants to reach for her, wants to do the holding-together for her, wants to tell her everything will be all right.

But he can’t. He doesn’t know if it will be.

“Shane did it to me,” he says.

She blinks at him. “What?”

“We’d been in a few years by then. He’d grown pretty disturbed. He just fell apart when we were in that place. Couldn’t cope at all. And he . . . he blamed me. For not sticking to the story, I suppose.”

Ciara is looking paler still.

“What happened in London?”

“I met someone,” Oliver says. “Lucy. And she was careless. I mean, I didn’t tell her the truth so she didn’t know not to be, but . . . Reporters can’t print my name or show my face, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who wouldn’t know me, who wouldn’t recognize me, and go running off to Facebook or Twitter to tell everyone what I look like now and who I am. Guys I went to primary school with, old neighbors—relatives, even. No one apart from my brother really even speaks to me now. So I have to be careful. I don’t put anything online. But Lucy did. Instagram stories, with me in the background. I didn’t realize. And there’s all these forums, you see, where these nutjobs, these vigilante idiots who think it’s up to them to be judge and jury and the prison system while they’re at it . . .” He shakes his head, angry at some long-ago memory. “A picture from Lucy’s Instagram somehow made its way on there. Onto one of these forums. They couldn’t confirm it was me, of course. How would they know? There’s nothing to compare it to. But that didn’t stop them trying. They had Lucy’s name—from the account—and started messaging her, asking her questions, and then she started asking me questions . . .” He exhales. “I had to leave, to stop things from really blowing up.”

Ciara starts to cry.

“I have to, too,” she says, her voice wavering. “Now. I can’t stay.”

Oliver takes a step toward her, then another when she doesn’t react to the first.

He holds up his hands as if to signal that he comes in peace. She holds up hers to tell him not to come any closer.

He stops. “Can I hold your hand?”

She shakes her head but doesn’t move, doesn’t resist when he reaches out and takes it. He presses it to his chest, to his heart.

“This is me,” he says. “Here, now. Not that boy, that child, who was stupid and cruel and made a terrible, terrible mistake that he can never undo and never be sorry enough for and never take back but—”

“Why did you do it?”

“Ciara, you know me. I am who you think I am, who I’ve been these last few weeks. This is me. The real me. And I wanted you to see that, to know that, before all this—”

She jerks her hand away, takes a step back.

“Why did you do it? Back then? Why didn’t you put a stop to it? Why didn’t you savehim?”

She’s crying harder now, cheeks glistening with tears.

“I don’t know,” Oliver says. “I really don’t know. I’ve thought about it so many times . . . For years it was all the time. But I can’t explain it. It just happened, I wasn’t thinking . . . A therapist told me once that when you’re that age, you have no sense of permanence. It’s hard for you to intellectualize forever. You understand the difference between right and wrong, and you sort of understand that your actions have consequences, but you don’t really accept that those consequences can’t be undone. It’s not an excuse, but . . . that made sense to me. And things like this, Ciara, they’re not about good and evil. I wasn’t some psychopath-in-training. Things happened, a series of things, that created this moment in time when Shane and I made a decision we shouldn’t have and, you know what? That happens all the time. But in our case, the stupid thing we did had the worst consequence imaginable.”

Ciara starts moving toward the bedroom door. “I have to go.”

“Please don’t, just stay, for—”

“You don’t get to ask me for anything,” she spits at him.

She goes into the bedroom, pulls her suitcase up onto the bed and starts throwing her things into it.

He watches, helpless, hanging back at the door.

“Where will you go?”

“Back to my place,” she says.

“For how long?”

“I don’t fucking know, Oliver.”

“I’m just trying to figure out—”

She reels on him. “You’ve just told me you killed a child.” It comes out as a scream whose volume seems to surprise even her.

He nods, acknowledging this.

“When I was a child,” he says quietly.

This freezes her in place for a second, and hope rises in his heart.

But then she turns back to the bed and zips up the case. Lifts it by its handle and plonks its wheels on the floor. Turns around and waits for him to step aside so she can get out of the room without having to touch him.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I don’t know—”

She pushes past him and leaves.