The Last Hour (Thompson Sisters) by Sheehan-Miles, Charles (reading well .txt) 📕

I was speechless, but Sarah was anything but that. “Plus,” she shouted, “she thinks the accident was her fault. Because we were fighting. And if I die, she’s never going to be convinced otherwise. All over this stupid belt.”

“The one you’re wearing?” I asked. It was a nice belt, made up of gold washed chain links, though the pink heart pendant buckle was extremely out of character for Sarah.

“Yes, this one. Aren’t you paying any attention? I was wearing it when we left the apartment this morning, that’s what she was so mad about, it’s sort of hers.”

I shook my head. “You were not wearing that. I would have noticed that buckle. An axe or something I could believe, but a heart?”

“I kind of replaced the heart with a padlock.”

I blinked. “Okay,” I said. “That I can buy.”

“Yeah, if I live, she’ll never let me live it down. But that’s not it. She lost her virginity. Before me. I mean, it was with a girl, but what the hell? Why doesn’t she talk to me any more?”

At this point, Daniel’s eyes had grown wide, and he stared at Sarah with a combination of awe and shock. Somehow I had the feeling he’d never been involved in a conversation before involving teenaged lesbians losing their virginity. Then again, I hadn’t either.

I shook my head. “I don’t want to hear this. Besides, you aren’t old enough to be having sex anyway.”

She sneered at me.

“If I die,” she pointed out, “I’m going to die a virgin. That is so fucking not fair.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

“You’re no help at all, Ray.”

She spun around, facing Jessica, and put her hands on both sides of Jessica’s face, and said, “It’s not your fault. Not the accident, not anything.”

Jessica, of course, didn’t respond.

Sarah’s eyebrows lowered, and she leaned close. Really close, noses almost touching. She shouted, “Hello?”

Christ. “She can’t hear you,” I whispered.

“Hello!” Sarah screamed. She spun toward me and said, “I am so sick of no one hearing me!” and then she stomped out of the room.

I swallowed. Why did this worry me? I waved at the kid to come with me and followed her out, anxiety forming a pit in my stomach. Sarah was anything but predictable. In the hallway, Dylan and Alex were leaning against the wall together, while Carrie looked in at Sarah and Jessica.

Everything would have been normal, except Sarah was leaning on Alex, cupping her hands at Alex’s ears and screaming, “Can you hear me? Can anyone hear me?”

I was pretty sure we’d already established that. I watched her, trying to figure out what was going through her head. She spun toward me and said, “I can’t take this, Ray. I’m going to crack up. I’d almost rather be in there!” she said, pointing in the room where her mangled body lay.

Then her eyes went wide. “You know what?”

Uh oh.

“No one can see me,” she said. “No one can hear me. So I can do whatever. I. Want.”

She started to stalk off, and as she walked away from me toward the exit, she reached up behind her and began to unzip her dress.

“Ray!” she shouted. “You ever wanted to streak down a busy street?”

“Sarah ... are you nuts? Stop!”

I ran after her, but she’d already passed through the sliding doors. As I burst through them, I found her red dress bunched on the floor. Daniel burst through the door beside me. Without thought, I reached over and wrapped my arm around his head, covering his eyes with my hand.

“Come on, Ray!” she called.

I averted my eyes, even as Daniel started to struggle out of my grip. She was my sister-in-law. I really didn’t need to see this.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Put your clothes back on!”

“Whatever!” she called out, and then I heard her shoes as she went running down the hall, heels echoing off the floor. She started to sing as she ran, what sounded like a silly kid’s song. Her voice faded as she ran down the hallway away from me.

I let my arm drop, letting Daniel go. “Is she always like that?” he asked, eyes round.

I sighed. Okay. I could stay with Carrie. I could go back to the general vicinity of my body. I could chase Sarah.

I really didn’t want to chase Sarah. She’d come back, hopefully sane and fully clothed. And I really didn’t want to be anywhere near where my body was going through that surgery. So I returned to Carrie. Silent. Because she couldn’t hear me anyway.

I leaned against the wall and watched as my wife traded places with Jessica. I took a breath, except it wasn’t really a breath, and sighed, but it wasn’t a sigh, and maybe I understood just a little of why Sarah felt the need to scream, throw off her clothes and go running.

Not everybody gets a second chance (Carrie)

When I was a senior in high school, I was lost at first. I’d spent two years of high school in Bethesda, Maryland, another in a tiny, private English speaking school in Moscow, and my final year in San Francisco. I’d been a nomad all my life, three years at a time, then on to a new place, at least until my high school years. Thanks to some ugly politics, Dad’s appointment as Ambassador to Russia was held up almost two years.

Mostly I adjusted well. I made friends easily, and I didn’t have the traumatic experience that my older sister Julia went through in China. So arriving in San Francisco for my senior year and having to start all over again wasn’t exactly an entirely new experience for me.

Except for one piece. For whatever reason, I’d never really run afoul of the queen bees, the girls who knew how to make other girls’ lives miserable. It had never been a problem. But my very first day at Abraham Lincoln High School, I did something unforgivable.

First, I bumped into Michelle