The Great Alone

“But—”

“Do you like me, Leni? Do you want to be friends?”

She nodded. The moment felt solemn. Serious. A pact being made.

“And I like you. So there. It’s done. We’re friends. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

Leni knew how naïve he was, how wrong. Matthew knew nothing about angry, irrational parents, about punches that broke noses and the kind of rage that began with vandalism and might go places he couldn’t imagine.

“My dad is unpredictable,” Leni said. It was the only equivocal word she could come up with.

“What does that mean?”

“He might hurt you if he found out we liked each other.”

“I could take on your dad.”

Leni felt a little burst of hysterical laughter rise up. The idea of Matthew “taking on” Dad was too terrible to contemplate.

She should walk away right now, tell Matthew they couldn’t be friends.

“Leni?”

The look in his eyes was her undoing. Had anyone ever looked at her like that? She felt a shiver of something, longing maybe, or relief, or even desire. She didn’t know. She just knew she couldn’t turn away from it, not after so many lonely years, even though she felt danger slip silently into the water and swim toward her. “We can’t let my dad know we’re friends. Not at all. Not ever.”

“Sure,” Matthew said, but she could see that he didn’t understand. Maybe he knew about pain and loss and suffering; that knowledge of darkness was in his eyes. But he didn’t know about fear. He thought her warnings were melodramatic.

“I mean it, Matthew. He can never know.”

FIFTEEN

Leni dreamed it was raining. She stood on a riverbank, getting drenched. Rain slicked her hair, blurred her vision.

The river rose, made a great, cracking thunderous sound, and suddenly it was breakup. House-sized chunks of ice broke free of the land, careening downstream, taking everything in their path—trees, boats, houses.

You need to cross.

Leni didn’t know if she heard the words or if she’d said them. All she knew was that she needed to cross this river before the ice swept her away and the water rushed into her lungs.

But there was nowhere to cross.

Ice-cold waves arched up into walls, ground fell away and trees crashed. Someone screamed.

It was her. The river hit her like a shovel to the head, knocked her sideways.

She flailed, screamed, felt herself falling, falling.

Over here, a voice yelled.

Matthew.

He could save her. She gasped, tried to claw her way to the surface, but something had a hold of her feet, dragged her down, down until she couldn’t breathe. Everything went dark.

Leni woke with a gasp and saw that she was safe in her room, with her stacks of books and the notebooks full of her pictures along the wall, and the box full of Matthew’s letters beside her.

Bad dream.

Already fading from memory. Something about a river, she thought. Spring breakup. Another way to die in Alaska.