Stay With Me Read Free

December 21, the kid whose deepest, darkest secret was the worn childhood copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar she’d stolen out of a to-be-donated-to-the-library box and kept hidden in the back of her bookshelf.
    I’m sorry , Maya , Brenna thought. I’m so sorry . . .
    She’d had no idea crazy DeeDee Walsh would show up at her apartment when Maya was there alone. If Brenna had known that, she would have dropped the entire case, forgotten all about it, no matter how much it had to do with finding her sister. Nothing—not even Brenna’s twenty-eight-years-missing sister—was worth rushing back to her apartment at 8 P.M. on December 21 after receiving crazy DeeDee’s text. Nothing was worth the feeling of unlocking her own door with that texted picture in her mind—DeeDee’s knife at Maya’s throat, Brenna’s hand shaking as she slips the key in, her heart pounding up into her neck, sweat trickling down her back . . .
    Stop . Stay here . Brenna reached into her bag again and touched the journal. She pulled it out and opened it, slowly turning the pages, not reading them so much as looking at the letters, the soft indent where the pen had moved against the thin paper, the swirls at the ends of the Ys and Js. She imagined her sister’s hand, Clea’s hand, holding the pen, and that kept her here.
    Ironic, wasn’t it? Clea, whose disappearance had been the traumatic event to trigger Brenna’s hyperthymesia in the first place. Clea—well, an artifact of Clea, anyway—keeping Brenna in the present.
    The journal had turned up in Brenna’s mailbox four days ago, in a padded brown envelope with no note, no return address, and a Los Angeles postmark. She’d known who it was from and what was inside. She’d even seen Xeroxed versions of the handwritten pages. But still, when she’d opened it, Brenna had gasped. Her journal. The journal Clea had kept for years, before and after Brenna had watched her get into that blue car at dawn, a man she couldn’t see behind the wheel but whose voice she could hear, deep and resonant.
    You look so pretty, Clee-bee .
    A man whose name was Bill. Brenna had learned this from the journal, which began when Clea was thirteen years old and ended one month after her disappearance at seventeen. So strange that he would have such a prosaic name, this shadow that haunted Brenna’s dreams, her life. Over the years, Brenna had called him so many names in her mind—The Big Bad Wolf, He Who Shall Not Be Named, Voldemort—never Bill.
    Clea hadn’t revealed his last name in the journal, or why, two weeks after running off with this man she’d more than once referred to as My Great Love, she’d hit the road and started hitchhiking on her own. I’m free now , was all she had written on the topic. Free and alive and hopeful, at last .
    Brenna still couldn’t bring herself to read parts of the journal. (When you remember everything you read word for word, you need to be careful.) But the pages Brenna was able to read consistently surprised her.
    Clea had loved so many boys—loved them deeply and thoroughly and with every inch of her heart and soul—yet when the journal was being written, Brenna hadn’t known about any of them. There was her sister in her pink room with the pink shag carpet, Clea with her Elvis Costello records blasting and her Adam Ant poster on the wall. There was Clea, repeatedly telling Brenna to “stop snooping on me, weirdo.” And there was Brenna, always snooping, always spying, thinking, I know her better than anyone. Whether she likes it or not, I do.
    It had taken Brenna twenty-eight years and the strange emergence of this journal to finally realize that she hadn’t known her sister better than anyone.
    She hadn’t known her sister at all.
    Was Clea with one of those boys now? Was she alive and well, or had she perished twenty-eight years ago, one month after her disappearance, her life ending with this journal? Brenna was beginning to doubt she’d ever be