He calls me a stupid little cunt as I leave, says I have more beauty than brains.
What he was offering, he tells me, was more than I was worth.
I leave the mall behind, the photos carefully stowed in my messenger bag. Aspera is beyond the city, and I’ll have to ride back through my neighborhood to get to it. My bike’s tires hum against the road as the sun continues its slow rise up the horizon, stirring this sliver of world awake, the air cool and damp with last night’s rain. I pass houses that could all be my house: the same missing shingles on the same weathered roofs, the same flaking blue siding, the same week’s worth of trash at the curb. Tyler will be up by now, glancing at my closed bedroom door, believing I’m inside before leaving for work. He hasn’t spoken to me since last night when he found out what I fucked up—what I did to him—in the name of myself. Our mother always told me, and only me, it’s more important to know who you are than who you think you’re meant to be, as though she could see this betrayal taking root. But if she did, it’s only because she planted the seed. So whose is it in the end—hers or mine?
If my mother thought Aspera was the one place in this world I didn’t belong, it was only because she didn’t imagine me in that storeroom, threadbare carpet digging into my knees while the man above me fumbled with his fly.
I pump my legs harder and before long, Ketchum is behind me, giving way for the lush sun-shimmered green lining its either side. When I finally turn onto the road leading to the resort, a car comes tearing down it out of nowhere and seems to have me in its sights. I swerve in the last-second moment I realize it won’t, that it’ll run me over if I don’t, and it clips the back end of my bike. The violence of it untethers me, and the brutal impact of my return to earth rattles my skull, forcing the breath from my lungs and a different kind of untethering …
I turn my face to the road.
The car is coming back.
I cough, choking my way to consciousness, my lips against gravel, the taste of metal in my mouth. I press my hands into the dirt, gasping as my left arm gives out under my weight. There’s something wrong with it. The agony of that discovery washes over me before I try again, letting my right take on the burden, forcing myself to my feet.
Once I’m standing, I clench my jaw, steeling myself against the involuntary sway of my body. My bike is gone, my bag road-killed at the shoulder, four thousand dollars’ worth of photographs of me crumpled inside. There are faint impressions of footsteps where I lay, circling me. Blood on me where skin and road connected. I try to get a hold of myself, breathing slowly in through my nose and out my mouth, clutching my left arm to my chest, my head pounding. I limp my way forward. Aspera is far, but it’s closer now than home, but even if I was hurt bad enough I should turn myself around—I wouldn’t.
I couldn’t.
This is the closest I’ve ever come.
Aspera. A 12,000-acre members-only resort hidden away in the mountains. What God couldn’t put a price on—all that wild beauty ever-reaching for the limitless blue sky—its owners, Matthew and Cleo Hayes, surely would. There are always whispers about the latest rich-and-famous hiding there to escape themselves, and when my mother worked housekeeping, everyone would ask me for her dirt. I’d beg any little detail, but she wouldn’t talk about the place—at least not in any way I wanted to hear. They call it the heart of Ketchum, but she always said it was its diamond and it’s not shining for you.
Before she died, she tried to make sure of it.
Today, I’ll find out if the promise it made me is greater than the one she broke.
I put one unsteady foot in front of the other, and for the longest time it’s only this until a flash of pink catches my eye. It has to, it’s such an aberration. Not the kind of pink you find in nature. I squint to be sure, and once I am, I move brokenly to it, heading down the ditch, shoes sinking into soggy earth, wet grass tickling my ankles. I wince at how difficult it’s become to do this simple thing. The sunlight overhead is fading fast, devoured by the trees, making it even more impressive, or impossible, that I saw it at all. I press farther on to claim my prize, and the glimpse of color blooms larger the closer I get, slowly taking form.
A girl pressed against the ground.
At first I wonder if we both got hit by the same car.
Her white skin is mottled red, her right leg turned inward, its knobby knee pointing toward the left. Her right arm lies rigidly beside her, the crook of her elbow stained purple, hand palm-up as though awaiting someone to place something inside it. Her left hand is rested against her chest, her stiff fingers reaching toward her throat. Her bright pink shirt is smeared with dirt and her frayed denim shorts are unbuttoned and splayed open, revealing no underwear, revealing the most intimate part of her, a bruise.
Her eyes are open, cloudy.
“Hey, kid,” I whisper. “You all right?”
Her fine blond hair fans over the ground, a strand of it crossing her porcelain face, finding its way into her open mouth. Her lips are pale and chapped.
A fly traces the outline of their delicate pout.
Ashley James. That’s who it was.
The road should be somewhere ahead and I know what’s behind me, but the trees feel endless, everywhere … sunlight skitters over my feet through their leaves, world skittering with it, and I fall once, twice, three times, but I get back up each, moving forward until the ground rises and finally meets the road, and it’s like breaking the surface after so long underwater.
She’s thirteen years old.
I collapse, my legs splayed in front of me, a bitter taste at the back of my throat, a cold sweat breaking out on the back of my neck. I think of her body out there, think of all the things that can no longer happen to it, and then I need to know if I can still bleed. I dig my fingers into the torn skin of my knees. A buzzing fills my head, a thought reaching me on a long delay: call for help. I slip my hand into my pocket and it’s empty.
My phone is gone.
Lost? Taken?
I turn my face toward the road.
A car is coming.
I wave my hand weakly until it gets close and then my arm drops to my side. The car eases to a stop next to me, and I stare at the blurry edge of the driver’s side door as it opens and a beige heel descends to the ground.
I follow it all the way up to the woman it belongs to.
Oh.
The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.
An aura of light surrounds the curves of her body so perfectly, I can’t help but wonder if she’s real. She crouches in front of me, her eyes a pale blue, their sweet concern offsetting the devastating angles of her breathtaking face. Her white skin is summer-tanned, glitter-flecked, rays of sunlight threading themselves through the short strands of honey-blond hair hanging loose at the nape of her neck. She looks like something out of a magazine, her beauty almost defiant in the face of everything that’s put it before me, refusing to be less than what it is even though there’s a dead girl out there right now, rotting.
I need to go to Aspera, I tell her.
There’s a body in the woods.
Ashley James.
The deputy sheriff’s little girl.
The woman makes some calls and then everything she says after that seems to end in my name, but I don’t remember telling it to her. Something about the gentle persistence of hearing Georgia, Georgia, over and over again keeps me from floating too far away. And then we’re in her car and it’s the nicest car I’ve been in in a long time, and I shiver against the cool leather seat, my head lolling against the window.
Every time my eyes drift shut, she says my name.
Georgia.
The view changes and there’s a gate in the distance stretched across the road. Even from here, I can make out the gold lettering across its top, sparkling in the light, declaring itself:
A S P E R APRIVATE. NO ADMITTANCE. MEMBERS ONLY.
“What if they don’t let me in?” I manage.
But the gate opens before we even reach it.
My pulse quickens as the lodge slowly appears on the horizon, only to unmake itself before I can get a closer look.
“You’re already in,” the woman tells me.
I finally realize who I’m sitting next to.
“Georgia,” she says, alarmed, stopping the car as my head falls forward. Her hand comes to rest against my cheek and carefully turns my face to hers, as though she wants to be sure she’s the last thing I see.
“Was I at Aspera?”
The shape of my brother stands at the window, staring out at the hospital’s parking lot view. I don’t realize I’ve asked the question aloud until he moves to my bed, reaching for the cup of water on the stand beside it. Ice rattles against plastic as he brings the straw to my lips and then: a cold miracle against the sandpapered insides of my throat. Beyond my room, the soft sounds of doctors and orderlies moving down the corridor, beds being rolled from one place to another, beeps from machines I wouldn’t know the names of …
Tyler comes into focus slowly, his thick brown hair knotted in a bun at the back of his head. The cold white glow of the room’s lights casts the lines in his light brown face in sharp relief. He works construction all day, every day, the wear and tear of the job belying his thirty years. Mom had him when she was twenty-seven and then I came along, an accident when she was forty-one. He got the benefit of her youth and the heart that body housed, and I got—something else. We don’t look the same. Different dads. Mine was a fuck-and-run, the way Mom told it, but Tyler’s is Tony Ruiz. Lives down in Roanoke. Tyler visits him sometimes, but mostly keeps him at an arm’s length, like if Mom couldn’t make it work with him, he shouldn’t either.
That loyalty to her is the difference between us.
“Sheriff Watt’s going to come down to the house tomorrow to question you,” he says. “I might put him off a little longer. Doc Abrams says it’s important you rest.”
“I’ll be okay tomorrow.”
“Tell that to me when you’re not hooked up to the good stuff.”
I breathe in, the chemical clean of the hospital coating my tongue.
“What’s he going to ask me?”
“I’m sure he’ll want to know anything you can tell him about the car that hit you, its driver … the body. Maybe what you were doing out on that road.”
I close my eyes and some of what I see there is more than I want to see, but the rest is like an overdeveloped negative, details all blown out. I can’t remember the car, can’t conjure the face belonging to the person driving it.
Footprints around my body.
My bike, my phone, gone.
I open my eyes.
I suddenly feel like I survived more than I realized.
“He thinks it’s connected?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like how it’s looking.”
I stare at my IV line. The painkillers keep me from my concussion, my broken arm, from skin turned raw meat and all my newly stitched together places. I wish it would keep me from other things too. I’m not as numb as I want to be. I’m more awake than I’d like. Tyler sits in the chair next to my bed and leans forward, his shoulders slumped.
“Just heard this morning about the James kid. She was missing a couple days. Can’t fuckin’ believe it took this long to reach our side of town … white girl, cop’s daughter.” He lets out a breath, his fingers twitching, itching, I know, for that pack of Camels he keeps lovingly tucked in his shirt pocket. They’ll kill him one day, just like they did Mom, and I don’t want to be around for it when it happens. “Ashley James, goddamn. She’s not much younger than you. Her sister in your grade or older?”
Copyright © 2022 by Courtney Summers