That Night Read online

  Also by Cyn Balog

  Unnatural Deeds

  Alone

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2019 by Cyn Balog

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design and image by Nicole Hower/Sourcebooks

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Balog, Cyn, author.

  Title: That night / Cyn Balog.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Fire, [2019] | Summary: The more Hailey struggles to understand her boyfriend’s apparent suicide, despite the discouragement of his stepbrother, her best friend, Kane, the more she remembers and the more secrets are revealed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019000363 | (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Suicide--Fiction. | Secrets--Fiction. | Memory--Fiction. | Friendship--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.B2138 Th 2019 | DDC [Fic]--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000363

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Now

  754 Days Before

  Present Day: Thursday, February 14

  583 Days Before

  Thursday, February 14

  524 Days Before

  Friday, February 15

  514 Days Before

  Friday, February 15

  478 Days Before

  Saturday, February 16

  352 Days Before

  Tuesday, February 19

  256 Days Before

  Saturday, February 23

  193 Days Before

  Monday, February 25

  158 Days Before

  Tuesday, February 26

  53 Days Before

  Wednesday, February 27

  45 Days Before

  Wednesday, February 27

  39 Days Before

  Thursday, February 28

  26 Days Before

  Friday, March 1

  25 Days Before

  Saturday, March 2

  19 Days Before

  Tuesday, March 5

  12 Days Before

  Wednesday, March 6

  9 Days Before

  Friday, June 14

  7 Days Before

  Thursday, July 4

  The Day Before

  Monday, July 8

  The Day Of

  Monday, July 8

  The Day After

  Monday, July 8

  Three Days After

  Tuesday, July 9

  Now

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Alone

  Back Cover

  For all the beautiful fools.

  No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

  —The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Now

  It didn’t end with you blowing your head off in the back shed behind your house.

  It didn’t end with your funeral, where we stood without umbrellas in a driving rain that couldn’t disguise our pain.

  It didn’t end after my resulting spiral into depression, or my six-month stay at Shady Harbor, or the thousands of hours of therapy I endured.

  It didn’t even end with your mom going through your stuff a year later to make room for the new baby—the replacement Weeks child.

  Maybe that was when it started. With what your mom found.

  I thought being the girlfriend of a boy who’d blown his head off was rock bottom. I thought I’d been through hell.

  But I can’t come out of this. Hell isn’t a hallway between two better places. It is a chasm, so deep and wide that the more I try to pull myself out, the farther I fall in.

  There is no way I’ll ever get out.

  The best I can do is try to make myself comfortable.

  754 Days Before

  Kane Weeks likes to be first at everything.

  He was the first kid to learn to tie his shoes in kindergarten. The first of us to use the f-word, the first to get drunk, the first to own a cell phone.

  So it was only natural that he was the first to have sex.

  It was years ago, and that eventful. Everyone knew about it. I know, because I was the one he had sex with.

  Kane’s had a long line of girls since then. But it’s hard for me to forget, since he’s it. The one. The only. The end.

  I was his first too. We were fifteen, too cool to play in all the snow that had graced us with a glorious three-day weekend. Instead, we sat cross-legged on the shag carpet in Kane’s room, playing some zombie video game. I kept losing. After my brains were eaten for the hundredth time, I threw down my controller and shouted obscenities at the television, then turned to him, about to ask what we should do next.

  As usual, he read my mind. He quirked a quarter smile at me and drew out a mischievous “So…”

  That one word, coming out of Kane’s mouth, always means trouble. His blue eyes turned stormy, and his hair fell into his face in a way that recently made my heart flutter. I hated that flutter, hated that the charm I’d been immune to all my life suddenly had an effect on me. At fifteen, he’d never had a gangly or awkward day in his life. He said, “Don’t you ever wonder what it’s like? What all the talk is about?”

  “Um. What are we talking about?”

  “You know,” he whispered, checking the door. “It.”

  Oh. It it. It consumed everyone at the school like the plague. Everyone spoke about it, whispered about it, joked about it. You couldn’t avoid the subject, but I did my best. In a lot of ways, it was even scarier to me than that clown in Stephen King’s It.

  But nothing scared Kane.

  “Sometimes,” I said. I did wonder, vaguely. Mostly I fantasized about having my first kiss with some debonair Prince Charming, and occasionally my mind would stray past that to things I’d only seen in movies. But Kane was used to kissing. He’d had girlfriends since fifth grade.

  “So let’s do it,” he said.

  I didn’t always blindly follow Kane Weeks.
But he was my best friend. We didn’t have to swear blood oaths or cross our hearts; we trusted each other, the way you’d trust that your welcome mat would be under your feet the second you stepped to your front door. Whatever he was saying, I was usually thinking. We’d played doctor when we were kids, him groping under my shirt and making me giggle because I knew it wasn’t right but it didn’t feel all that wrong either. So I agreed.

  “Here?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Not that we would have gone anywhere else. The tension in my home suffocated me. His house was the only place we ever hung out. The door to his bedroom was closed. Even so, I could hear his dad down the hall, rattling the keys on the laptop in his office. His dad rarely left that office. Dishes piled up in a fortress around his desk, the smell of stale oatmeal and rotting fruit sometimes wafting down the hall. But Kane’s room was like a trophy showroom—dozens of little gold figures wielding baseball bats stared down at us, our only audience.

  Kane untied his sweatpants. I undid the zipper on my jeans and pulled them off, hiding my panties in them as I neatly folded my pants at the foot of his bed.

  “Now what?” I asked. I looked at his penis and started to get scared because I’d never seen one that didn’t include arrows pointing out the scrotum, the sperm duct, and other anatomical parts I couldn’t quite remember. He was looking at me too, at everything I didn’t have. Not in a lustful way, like in movies—he craned his neck and cocked his head to the side with scientific curiosity.

  He told me to lie down, so I did. He climbed on top of me and told me to spread my legs. He weighed a ton. Suddenly, his body was so much more than a picture in a textbook. It was between my thighs, poking me. I had to stifle a giggle. I was pretty sure that while it was okay when I was seven and we were playing doctor, giggling wasn’t appropriate now. Having his skin against mine was no big deal because we were close, but he’d never been there before. “Is that the right place?”

  “Um,” I managed. The right place for what? “I don’t know.”

  “Geez, Hail. Haven’t you ever watched porn?”

  “No,” I mumbled. Had he? He probed and prodded against me, and I finally had to tell him I didn’t think he was in the right place after all. Frustrated, he moved his hand between us and guided himself closer, his eyes never meeting mine. He pushed again. This time, he got it right. It didn’t hurt. He sank into me like a hypodermic needle without the pinch, like the tampons I’d started using earlier that summer. Then he stayed there, bearing down on me for the longest time, until his heartbeat and the clattering of laptop keys all mingled together and I imagined being so flattened like Silly Putty that he’d have to peel me off his sheets later. The sweat coming through his T-shirt soaked my stomach.

  “Oh shit,” he’d said before I could ask him what was supposed to happen next. More doubt crept in. I’d helped Kane on many of his adventures—trying to sail his raft in the retention pond out back, making barbeque-sauce-flavored ice cream, holiday caroling to make money for a trip to Disney (we made $3.50, and most of that was from our own parents)—but this was certainly one of our stupider ones. He pulled off me, looked down at his sheets, and grimaced. “Whoa.”

  I could’ve asked him to kiss me. He would’ve, maybe, because I never asked for much. But for some reason, that seemed scarier than what we had just done. I knew his mouth much better than the part of his body that had been inside me. Those parts we could hide afterward—forever, if we chose. Go on with our regularly scheduled lives and pretend it had never happened between us. But as I scooted up to the headboard and reached out for my pants, I realized how backward it had been. I’d never had a real kiss, but I’d had sex.

  But this was what everyone was talking about. I figured that if sex was that, then kissing probably sucked hardcore.

  “Is that all it was?” I’d said to him breezily when he sat on the side of the bed and leaned over to retrieve his underwear. “Hardly seems worth the buzz.”

  We never talked about it after that. It was like a footnote, something that I could almost believe hadn’t happened. After that, he went back to having a steady stream of girlfriends, so I guess it was worth the buzz, considering the way they lined up for him, and the way he never turned them down.

  But to me, he was just Kane—nothing and everything at once.

  Present Day: Thursday, February 14

  I’ve lost a lot of memories, but not that one.

  That day—that seemingly stupid, insignificant day—hadn’t only settled in my mind. It oozed around every cell inside my head like glue, taking up all available space. Even now, I can’t think of another memory without that one shading it. Though so much has happened in between, it’s like I’m right back there again in his bed when we were fifteen. As I lean against the door of my Jeep, watching Kane say goodbye to some of his admirers, I’m doing it again, trying to pick that thought out of my brain.

  Damn him.

  Kane Weeks doesn’t have to lift a finger to be a magnet to the opposite sex. He has female admirers coming out his ears, more girls than he knows what to do with.

  “Please tell me those aren’t all yours,” I mumble as he saunters up to me holding a cardboard shoebox filled with flowers.

  “They are,” he says, smiling down at them. “I only sent one, though.”

  “Stupidly.” I pull the sleeves of my oversize sweatshirt down and hook my thumbs through the holes I’d ripped in the seams of the cuffs.

  He ignores my comment. “You got it, right?”

  “I did. Homeroom. Thanks.” I try to sound sincere, but I didn’t want a dumb pity flower. From him, from anyone.

  Every February, the Key Club sells carnations, which are delivered to students throughout the day on Valentine’s Day. It’s never mattered to me in the least, but there are always rumors about girls giving blow jobs to win the honor of receiving the most.

  The male winner is no contest. It’s yet another talent that comes effortlessly to Kane. He inspects his fingernails nonchalantly as he waits for me to pop the locks. I watch him secure the lid and toss the box into the back seat of my Jeep as if it’s his gym bag.

  That’s the most perplexing thing. He doesn’t even care about the attention.

  “You like what it said?” he asks.

  I nod as I squeeze into the driver’s seat, cranking the heat to ward off the frigid 20-degree air. Happy Day of Suck, it’d said.

  Valentine’s Day. This time last year, it’d been snowing. We’d huddled together in the backyard of his house, his arms around me, and I’d cried so hard that I couldn’t breathe. That was the last time Kane touched me.

  “I was going to text you, but I forgot about your technological deficiency,” he says. “When are you going to remedy that situation?”

  I haven’t had a phone in nearly a year, ever since I smashed mine. Not that I care. Other people seem to miss me having it more than I do. “Never,” I reply.

  He scowls. “Your parents?”

  “No. Me. I don’t want one.”

  “Weirdo.”

  I know. That’s actually being kind. I shrug.

  I drive him the three miles to our neighborhood as he uses the glove compartment, the center console, his thighs, my head to pretend to play the drum solo to the music on his iPhone. No one would ever accuse my red Wrangler that’s just shy of two hundred thousand miles of being a smooth ride. When I got it the August after my sixteenth birthday, Declan called it my Pretty Piece of Crap. He’d managed to fix it up to run, but it’s been withering from his lack of attention, so it has trouble doing even that now. Every one of its parts rattles, and the wind blows steadily through the Swiss-cheese soft top. Kane has to yell to talk to me when I drive, so we don’t talk much.

  I don’t mind that. I don’t mind the noise either. It helps me avoid thinking too much. I don’t want to think too much. Not today.

>   He yells over the roar of the engine to tell me that he won’t need a ride for the rest of the week. Baseball is beginning soon, and he needs to start lifting again to get in shape. Last spring, he made Varsity All-Stars. Somehow he was able to get right back into the swing of sports and after-school activities. Unlike me. His college application shines. Unlike mine.

  We live in a gated community, which might sound fancy, but it’s not. Our houses make up half of the homes on the Fox Court cul-de-sac. The homes are tall and thin and right on top of each other, so they remind me of dominoes. Kane’s house is almost a mirror image of mine. When Declan and his mom moved in three years ago, the Mayflower truck got stuck in the throat of the roundabout. Thank God for trees, Declan once said, or we’d all know each other’s business.

  Kane texts Luisa as I downshift and cruise into the court. “She’s insane, you know. How’ve you guys been friends this long?”

  He has to know that we’re not friends anymore. I haven’t been friend material for anyone except the cocoon of my bed for a long time. I haven’t been a lot of things I used to be. “What are you talking about? You’re the one who’s been going out with her for years.”

  “Not consistently. I can only take her in small doses.”

  That’s Kane. Most people annoy him. I’m the only one who knows this. On the surface, he’s this happy-go-lucky guy who loves everyone. Underneath? He has this dark, glass-half-empty, biting sarcasm. That bitterness is one of the reasons I can still tolerate him. I don’t need anyone telling me, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life!” or “Time heals all wounds.” When we get together, which is rare these days, we grumble. We complain like two old men who were denied their free senior coffee at McDonald’s. “So what’s bugging you about her currently?”

  “Everything. She had an attitude today.”

  I scratch the side of my head and pretend to think. “Gee. Maybe it’s because you sent me a flower instead of her?”

  He shakes his head like that can’t be it. “I only had two bucks. And I explained how it was to her.”