Think.

My shirt is wrinkled, and damp, and smells like sweat. My jeans—the same ones I wore last night—pinch in a thousand places and are caked in dirt and sand. My boots are gone. Next to the bed is a pair of dirty pink flats that I don’t recognize.

Think. Breathe. Try to remember.

A jump cut; Brent cradling my foot in his lap, asking if it hurts, and splinters of broken beer bottles glowing emerald in a dying fire.

The beach. The bonfire. Did Brent take me home last night?

A sudden punch of nausea, and I hobble into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet in time, to throw up mostly bile. I feel a little better, but just a little and it’s fleeting. It was the Valium that did it—that, and drinking too quickly, continuing to drink even after things turned watery and warped.

Why did I do that? I’ve never been big on pills, not since a flirtation with Adderall in my first year at CEAW that landed me in therapy and nearly lost me the job. Still, I’ve taken Valium before, but it never worked like it did last night: like a saw to the brain, cutting out everything important.

Why can’t I remember?

Think.

The shower water runs freezing at first while I strip down to my underwear, throwing my dirty clothes in a ball on the floor. I gasp in the cold, and the shock dislodges another memory: Brent’s lips, cold and mossy-tasting, like the reservoir. Shouting.

Hold her down. Hold her down. I’m pinning her wrists…

No. That can’t be right. That’s an old memory—a memory of my father trying to get my mother to swallow the pills she was refusing. Hold her, he told me. Hold her down. I grabbed her wrists and felt all the way down to her bones, as he forced open her jaw, shoved his fingers down her throat so far she couldn’t do anything but swallow.

I scrub hard with soap everywhere—in between my toes, under my fingernails, between my legs. I shampoo my hair, and rinse, and shampoo again.

Still, the anxiety and panic stay.

I turn the water as cold as it will go, close my eyes, and stand shivering as long as I can bear it. Images bob like ice cubes to the surface: the lullaby sway of a boat on the water; someone saying, “You shouldn’t have come,” beer bottles arcing into the water, hurled by hands that belong to no one I can see.

No. Someone is definitely screaming. No. Stop. No.

—

Saturday. One P.M.

Without the rest of the team, our makeshift headquarters more closely resembles its former life as a functional barn. The smells of hay, old wood that’s been wet and dried a million times, and corn feed waft through the open air. Outside, crows caw in the fields, and a tractor revs to life.

I was hoping that work would help me focus and would pull me back to whatever it is I’ve forgotten—about Kaycee, about what happened last night, about the reservoir. But memories of Brent, pulling me close as the smoke curled around us, keep interfering. Brent pressing his lips against mine. Voices laughing and joking in the background and the gentle sloshing of lake water against the pebbled shore.