Beneath Her Skin by Gregg Olsen (best smutty novels TXT) 📕

half-naked boy on the well-turned cover. Indeed, the swelling size of the crowd at her memorial service had little to do with Katelyn specifically. People were there because of her youth. Nothing, all ministers know, brings out mourners like the death of a child. Katelyn might have been more than halfway to adulthood, but she was still a little girl.

A very dead little girl.

Hayley, Taylor and their parents sat in the third row, two rows back from the Berkley family. Colton James sat behind the Ryans, and three rows farther back were Beth Lee and her mother, Kim. The order was as it had been the night of Katelyn’s death: the closer the relationship with the deceased, the nearer to the casket.

Occupying the seats across the aisle from the Berkleys were Starla and her family. Next to them mourned the rest of the Buccaneers cheer squad.

Taylor whispered to Hayley, “Look, it’s the pom-pom posse. If you ask me, Katelyn’s spinning in her grave now.”

“She’s not in her grave yet,” Hayley corrected.

“Ya know what I mean. She hated it when Starla ditched her for cheer.”

“She hated it even more that she didn’t get on the team.”

Valerie put her finger to her lips but thankfully didn’t follow the gesture with the librarian’s shushing noise.

Someone pushed a button and a CD recording of an abbreviated verse of Celine Dion’s bombastic classic, “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, tinkled aloud.

Hayley kept her mouth zipped, but she couldn’t help but think she’d rather be dead than have that song played at her memorial. And in which case, even if she were dead, she still didn’t want Celine, Mariah or Whitney piped into her service.

* * *

Valerie Ryan gripped her husband’s hand as they looked up at what had to be the saddest sight in the world: the pink casket in the front of the Port Gamble church, a place in which historically the denomination changed with the tide and the whims of the mill boss’s wife. St. Paul’s was home to an Episcopal congregation then, but it had once been a Lutheran, Catholic and even a Baptist church. It didn’t matter. The faithful went regularly, no matter what religion the wife had decreed for the town. Taylor and Hayley cried, not in the way that close friends shed a stream of tears, but tears born of a shared moment of tragedy. Some who lined the spaces in the old oak pews sobbed because they loved Katelyn. Others cried because of the overwhelming sadness that comes with a young life lost.

Valerie’s own tears came from memories of when her girls were small, memories from the darkest time of her adult life.

The event had been long ago, but the feelings of hopelessness and the fragility of life came to the mother easily while the minister talked about Katelyn’s abbreviated life. Valerie’s own girls had been side by side in Seattle’s Children’s Hospital for thirty-one days after the crash, their eyes fluttering, scanning under eyelids both parents prayed would open. The hospital wouldn’t allow another bed in the room. Apparently, fire codes were more important than an aching heart of a mother or father. So Valerie brought a foam mattress from their home in Port Gamble, and she and Kevin took turns sleeping on it in the space between the girls’ beds.

“Why aren’t they waking up?” she asked, over and over.

“We really don’t know,” said the doctor, a pleasant, bespectacled man with nicotine-stained fingertips. “It isn’t physiological.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” Valerie caressed her girls, gently touching their cheeks to remind them that wherever they were right then… wherever their minds were… that she was with them and she would never leave.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Sometimes medical science doesn’t seem very scientific.”

Valerie positioned herself between the two beds. Twin beds. Hayley’s and Taylor’s beds were tucked into a web of tubes and wires. “I just want to know what you’re going to do to get them to…”

“Snap out of this,” Kevin said, entering the room with two cups of coffee and a granola bar for Valerie, who’d stopped eating. The worry for all three of his girls was evident on his face—haggard eyes, dark circles. And as tired as he appeared to be, he never once wanted anyone to think he wasn’t grateful for what he had. Other parents had lost their children.

Hayley and Taylor had been spared.

But for what? What kind of life would this be if they never woke up?

The Ryans’ prayers were answered, of course. The girls did recover and they did get out of that hospital and back home where they belonged. It was true that both parents knew their daughters were not the same as they had been before the bus crash that almost killed them, but they never talked about it. Not really. It was easy to avoid because the change was invisible.

In the church pew alongside her grieving family, Valerie pushed those memories aside. She looked over at Sandra and Harper Berkley in the front row. Harper had his face buried in his hands; Sandra had tilted her head and was resting it awkwardly on his shoulder. Valerie could imagine how they were feeling sitting there, thinking about how cruel life had been to them.

Katelyn had survived the crash, only to be snatched by death as a teenager. There was something very, very wrong with the world.

Valerie just didn’t know how wrong.

* * *

Her tear-soaked tissue kneaded into a near-perfect sphere, Hayley looked on while the minister talked about Katelyn… her love of orcas, baseball, Claire’s boutique and Cinnabon rolls served hot at the mall in Silverdale. The list made her smile and cry at the same time. She and her sister—she and everybody—had let Katelyn down. What had they missed? How could it have been prevented?

She looked at Taylor, her mother, her father. Over at the row of cheerleaders. She noticed how Katelyn’s grandmother, Nancy, seemed to just stare straight ahead, while her