Page 5 of The Towering Sky
“She has a new boyfriend, right?” Ilara fiddled with the strap of her black one-piece. “Do you know anything about him?”
“A little. His name is Max.”
Her mom nodded. They both knew that the old Leda would have bubbled over at the question, offering various conjectures and speculation about Max, and whether or not he was good enough for her best friend. “What about you, Leda? I haven’t heard you talk about any boys lately,” her mom went on, even though she knew perfectly well that Leda had been alone all summer.
“That’s because there’s nothing to talk about.” Leda’s jaw tightened, and she sank a little lower in the water.
Ilara hesitated, then apparently decided to forge ahead. “I know you’re still not over Watt, but maybe it’s time to—”
“Seriously, Mom?” Leda snapped.
“You’ve had such a rough year, Leda; I just want you to be happy! And Watt...” She paused. “You never really told me what happened with him.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Before her mom could press her further, Leda held her breath and ducked all the way under the surface of the lagoon, not caringthat the weird vitamins would make her hair crunchy. The water felt warm and pleasantly quiet, stifling all sound. She wished she could stay submerged forever, down here where there were no failures or pains, no mistakes and misunderstandings, no wrong decisions.Wash me and I shall be clean, she remembered from her days at Sunday school, except Leda would never be clean, not if she stayed under forever. Not after what she had done.
First there had been that whole mess with Avery and Atlas. Hard to believe now, but Leda used to like Atlas—even, foolishly, thought that shelovedhim. Until she learned that he and Avery were secretly together. Leda flinched, remembering how she’d confronted Avery about it on the roof, the night when everything went so terribly wrong.
Their friend Eris had tried to calm down Leda, despite Leda’s shouts that she should back off. When Eris came close, Leda pushed her away—and inadvertently pushed her off the side of the Tower.
After that, it was no surprise that Avery wanted to leave New York. And Avery didn’t even know the full story. Only Leda had learned the darkest and most shameful part of the truth.
Eris had been Leda’s half sister.
Leda found out last winter, from Eris’s ex-girlfriend, Mariel Valconsuelo. Mariel had told her about it at the launch party for the new Dubai tower—right before she drugged Leda and left her for dead, abandoning her at the water’s edge during a rising tide.
The truth of Mariel’s words had resonated in Leda with sickening finality. It made so much more sense than what she thought was going on: that Eris was secretly having an affair with Leda’s dad. Instead, Eris and Ledashareda dad; and worse, Eris had known the truth before she died. Leda realized that now. It was what Eris had been trying to tell her, that night on the roof, which Leda so drastically misunderstood.
The knowledge that she’d killed her ownsisterburned Leda from within. She wanted to pound her fists and scream until the sky split open. She couldn’t sleep, haunted by plaintive images of Eris up on the roof, staring balefully at her with those amber-flecked eyes.
There was only one way to find relief from this kind of pain, and Leda had sworn never to touch it again. But she couldn’t help herself. With a shaking voice, Leda pinged her old drug dealer.
She took more and more pills, mixing and combining them with a shocking recklessness. She didn’t care what the hell she took as long as it numbed her. And then, as she’d probably known deep down that she would, Leda took one too many pills.
She was missing for an entire day. When her mom found her the next morning, Leda was curled atop her bed, her jeans and her shoes still on. At some point Leda must have gotten a nosebleed. The blood had trailed down her shirt to crust in sticky flakes all over her chest. Her forehead felt clammy and damp with sweat.
“Where were you?” her mom cried out, horrified.
“I don’t know,” Leda admitted. There was a flutter in the empty cavity of her chest where her heart should have been. The last thing she really remembered was getting high with her old dealer, Ross. She couldn’t account for anything else in the last twenty-four hours; she didn’t even know how she had managed to drag herself home.
Her parents sent her to rehab, terrified that Leda had meant to kill herself. Maybe, on some subconscious level, shehad. She would only be finishing what Mariel started.
And then, to Leda’s surprise, she learned that Mariel was dead too.
In the aftermath of that terrifying confrontation in Dubai, Leda had set an i-Net alert to flag any mentions of Mariel’sname. She’d never expected it to catch anobituary. But one day in rehab, she found the obit waiting in her inbox:Mariel Arellano Valconsuelo, age 17, has gone to the Lord. She is survived by her parents, Eduardo and Marina Valconsuelo, and her brother Marcos....
Has gone to the Lord. That was even more vague than the usualpassed awayordied suddenly. Leda had no idea what had happened to Mariel, whether she’d been in an accident or suffered a sudden illness. Perhaps she too had turned to drugs—out of grief at losing Eris, or regret for what she’d done to Leda in Dubai.
At the news of Mariel’s death, a chilling new fear began to seep into Leda. It felt oddly like some kind of omen, like a terrible portent of things to come.
“I need to get better,” she announced to her doctor that afternoon.
Dr. Reasoner smiled. “Of course, Leda. We all want that for you.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Leda insisted, almost frantic. “I’m caught in this vicious cycle of hurt, and I want to break away from it, but I don’t know how!”
“Life is hard, and drugs are easy. They insulate you from real life, protect you from feeling anything too deeply,” Dr. Reasoner said softly. Leda caught her breath, wishing she could explain that her problem was more than just drugs. It was the gaping vortex of darkness within her that seemed to pull her, and everyone around her, inexorably downward.
