Beautiful Broken Girls by Kim Savage

Author:Kim Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult Fiction, Family, Siblings, Mysteries & Detective Stories, Social Themes, Death & Dying
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2017-02-21T08:00:00+00:00

PART 5

Lips

OCTOBER 2016

The day after the climb with Mr. Falso, Ben found Kyle at the quarry, sitting on the lip of the ledge, smiling dully. Every so often, a gust moved the wings of his hair, or he shifted, vertebral nubs snaking up and down his back.

Taking over the Cillos’ ledge was a symbolic move. It came from a primeval place, something laced into the boys’ DNA that made staking out the altar seem a noble thing. The stories had filtered beyond Bismuth, and kids from other towns started coming to the quarry even though it was off-season now, to check out the spot where the girls had jumped. When a pack of boys, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, came out of the clearing laughing, Piggy stood wordless and slapped his palm with the baseball bat he’d packed for the occasion. The encroachers looked at one another and moved away, to a lower, lamer ledge that barely fit them, and sulked.

Louis whispered to Ben. “Did Kulik get stoned while we weren’t looking?”

Ben sat cross-legged on his towel. He had the jitters, a nervousness that had started the moment they chained their bikes behind Johnny’s Foodmaster and begun the mostly silent hike. Besides Eddie, Ben hadn’t seen any of them since the day he knocked Piggy unconscious. Their fight had become mythic: Piggy didn’t remember, and no one was about to remind him that Ben Lattanzi, with his rack-of-bones chest and bulbous Adam’s apple, had taken him down. The quarry did mind-erasing stuff like that, so you were never sure if something had actually happened or it was just one more quarry story.

But that wasn’t the reason for his nerves. Ben had to make his case, and the guys weren’t making it easy. Piggy, hungover and rank with beer, kept trying to nap, and now Louis was climbing down two ledges to talk to some younger girls he knew, only one of whom was a shade over plain.

Worst of all, Eddie had joined them at the last minute.

Piggy pointed his chin toward Eddie at the tip of the ledge getting ready to leap for the nth time. “And that one. That one’s like a robot, jumping and climbing, jumping and climbing. He’s making me tired just watching him.”

Eddie leaped over and over. He had fixed a plastic bag over his hand with rubber bands and duct tape at the wrist, the bag blooming with condensation. Ben understood why Eddie punished his body: it was no different from Ben revisiting the places he had touched Mira. Their answers would be found in pain, and they welcomed it.

Piggy yawned. “This is boring. There’s nothing to look at.”

From the ledge below, the girls giggled at Louis.

“Anything worth looking at is dead,” Piggy added.

Ben hooked his thumb toward where Eddie would momentarily rise. “You might tone it down a little.”

“It’s true. My eyes are actually bored. That’s what Kyle’s thinking. Right, Kyle?” Piggy said.

Kyle stared out over the water. The warm fall was finally turning, and so no one else dove but Eddie.

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