She’s ahead of me on the trail. Signs. Danger. Unclear paths. Red crosses. What’s this park called? I’m eleven. Teeth sharp with braces. Sixth grade? Seventh? Doesn’t matter. Moaning Myrtle. Little girl. Daddy’s busy, Moaning Myrtle.

‘Come here.’

Sky. Sky full of those wispy skeletal half-clouds, and I’m staring, and then suddenly it’s hands, hands much bigger than mine, and they’re pulling me over to the ravine.

‘Celeste! Stop!’

‘It’ll be fun. I just want to find out what’s over the edge, Myrtle.’

Water drips into my lungs and I guzzle it and choke, hands slipping against the slimy rock of the cave, anchoring me. Please, please –

I dig my heels in, sprays of dirt kicked over the edge into oblivion, but the trail’s all debris and slippery and there’s nothing to grip, nothing to hold. Grunt. Pull. She won’t let go.

Celeste and I are at the ledge and my feet look for something, anything, solid ground, because below me is a cliff, impossibly deep. I’m too small. I’m too small to fight and she’s got her hands on my shoulders and with the whole world stretched out below me I’m too scared to speak. I want nothing more than to claw or bite her, to taste her blood, but I can’t twist round far enough.

‘What are you gonna do, Myrtle? What if I dropped you? What would you do?’

I clench. The sky is immeasurable and the world is stretched out before me, yawning like a giant, and my feet find their grip on something sturdy and I wrench, pull, heave myself from her. I summon all of it, every hurt, every hollow of my skin that she both scooped and filled, scooped and filled; she made the girl who could do this, with enough anger to focus like a fire-hot poker and press hard.

‘Get off me!’ I scream.

There’s the scrape of feet against hard undergrowth. An underwhelming scuffle.

no way out

‘Fuck you, Celeste, get off me –’

no way out

‘Get off me!’

And then she does.

The edge of the ravine crumbles and Celeste goes with it.

It takes forever, it seems, from the short moment where we had both realized she was going to fall, for her to finally slip over the edge.

So unextraordinary. Body limp and heavy crashing against the cliffs, blood spurting from her in bursts like swarms of red flies. She was probably dead after the first connection of bone and cliffside, but the hill was so steep and she just fell and fell and fell and fell until she was out of sight completely, down the merciless curve of the earth. There’s her eternity.

She didn’t even scream.

I lowered myself, calmly, to the ground.