Page 83 of What We Bury

The house is the same as it was this morning. Quiet. Boring.Safe.

While waiting for the kettle to boil, I flick through my contact list. Sophie’s name is at the top. Her contact photo is from a hike last summer—sunburned, grinning, alive. I tap the call button.

It rings three times before diverting to voicemail. “Hey, you’ve reached Sophie, leave a message or text me, texting’s better.”

I hang up before the beep.

I stand in my kitchen, phone in hand, and think about how in five years, I haven’t made it through a phone call with my sister without lying to her at least once. Lies layered so thin and so practiced they don’t feel like lies anymore.

It feels like me.

Eli, the liar.

I want to tell her how I’m feeling. I want to reach out to someone—anyone—and have them understand. But if she picked up right now, I don’t even know what I’d say.

Soph, there’s a man I’d put my life in front of without thinking twice. I keep pushing him away because I don’t know how to hold him the way he holds me.

Soph, there’s a girl, and the only reason I met her is because I was hanging the man who was assaulting her.

Soph, the other day, I stopped by her house before school. I just wanted to see her, but then I stood in her bedroom and directed her and my best friend in one of the most erotic moments of my life. But when she reached for me, I left and acted like I was noble instead of selfish.

Soph, the things I do to keep you safe are the horrors that eat me alive. I don’t know how to dismantle one without destroying the other.

I put the phone down.

I make dinner. Eat. Don’t taste it.

I wash the plate.

At 10:30 p.m. I open my texts.

Milo has sent through a bunch of drawings—designs for our bowling uniforms that I know none of us will get a say in. I swipe out of the group chat without looking at them.

Micah’s name is third from the top.

I tap it.

The thread goes back six weeks. Mostly logistics. Pickup at 11. Wear black. Don’t forget the gloves. Occasional jokes—Micah has a way of dropping a one-liner into a thread about body disposal that makes me laugh out loud at inappropriate moments. There’s a photo from August he sent me, no caption, of a cocktail he’d built. It’s layered pink and gold. He was proud of it. I’d written back “pretty,” and then I’d jacked off thinkingabout his mouth and hated myself for being too much of a coward to just ask him to come over.

Micah and I have always been a collision of heat and need. We don’t do gentle requests.

I scroll down to the empty space at the bottom and start typing:

I’m sorry for being an asshole Monday morning.

I look at the words, hesitating over the send button.

I’m not sorry I walked in. That’s the thing I’m sitting with. I’m sorry about the way I handled it. I’m not sorry I saw what I saw. I needed to see it. I needed to know that Micah and Sage had done that, were doing that, were going to keep doing that.

I needed to see it and not have it.

I try the message again:

I’m sorry about Monday morning. I handled it badly. You didn’t deserve that.

I look at the two sentences. They’re true but woefully insufficient.

The honest message would be . . .