Betrayal by Gregg Olsen

Author:Gregg Olsen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
Published: 2012-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Beth flopped on her bed and buried her face in her favorite squishy pillow. She wanted to shut out everything that had to do with Olivia Grant just then, but she couldn’t. She felt such guilt, such deep shame, over what she had said to Olivia the day she died. Trying to make it go away only served to push it more in the forefront of her thoughts. It ran over and over in her mind even as she desperately sought to erase it forever. Right after she had snapped the Polaroid, before she opened the door for Drew, Beth had begged Olivia not to go to the party without her.

“Don’t be so bloody needy, Beth,” Olivia had said, running her fingers through her long red hair. “You’re so intense about everything. Everything is so important. I mean, costume shopping with you was fun, but now I need to get out of here.”

“Don’t go! Let’s just stay here and have our own Halloween party,” Beth had thrown out in desperation.

“Are you kidding? That’s crazy. I wish I’d been assigned to another family. Cheers,” she said and slipped out the door.

At the time, Beth had considered jamming out Olivia’s eyes with the chopsticks in her hair, but the idea was only a thought, not a plan. As the front door closed, in an undertone so very low, Beth let out her final thought: “I wish you would drop dead.”

The memory sent a pool of acid to her stomach, and Beth fought the urge to throw up. Saying something so ugly to another person wasn’t who Beth was or wanted to be.

Yet she’d done it once before. She hated thinking about it, but that horrible memory came back so, so clearly.

The night before the Daisies’ crash a decade before, her sister, Christina, refused to let her use the periwinkle-blue crayon. Beth had wanted it for some flowers she was drawing, but Christina was using it to color a Disney princess and refused to hand it over.

“It’s the wrong blue,” Beth had said, trying to give her sister a better color.

“No,” Christina had said firmly. “Mine. You use another.”

Beth had shoved the box from the tabletop to the floor. A rainbow of crayons scattered. She pushed back from the kitchen table and started for her room.

“I wish you were dead,” she had said, stomping away. “If you were dead I’d use any color I want any time I want. You’d never boss me around again. You’re such a brat!”

“You’re mean!” Christina had cried.

By the middle of the next day, rain pouring down, wind howling across the Hood Canal Bridge, Christina and four others had perished in the choppy, cold water. For two years the Disney princess coloring book page hung on the Lee refrigerator. It was the last thing that Christina Lee had made.

Every day Beth had looked at it and wanted to tear it into confetti and flush it down the toilet, because she’d never get a chance to unsay the awful thing she’d said.

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