Read Online Unforgivable by Amy Reed - Free Book Online

embarrassment, this combination of sadness and disgust. I want to look away, but I can’t.
    Mom is on her knees, her face blotchy and wet with tears. She cries, “You’re going to see her, aren’t you?”
    My father looks down at her coldly, his dark brown skin so smooth and untroubled, as if he cannot be bothered by her antics. The scene looks like something out of a play, staged for ultimate dramatic effect, my father and mother actors cast as husband and wife, but who barely know each other in real life. The contrast between them is so great. The contrast is all they are.
    I wonder in this moment who I resemble more—my mother or my father. I am undeniably black, though I am much lighter than Dad. My hair is kinky like his, but I have Mom’s green eyes and straight nose, am thin and lanky like her, not stocky and broad shouldered like Dad. But then there are the other, deeper traits. Am I the serious, driven, unfeeling man towering above my mother, or the needy and erratic woman on the floor next to him?
    I feel David slide next to me at the top of the stairs. We sit there for a moment, listening to Mom beg, listening to Dad bark, “Renae, pull yourself together. This is pathetic.”
    David puts his arm around me. He says, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
    Our parents don’t notice us come down the stairs. We walk right past them, through the kitchen, and out the back door, and we drive away in Bubbles, David’s new vintage Mercedes station wagon, not talking, not needing to talk.
    I know where we are headed as soon as we get off the freeway,even though it has been a few years since Mom has taken us there.
    We sit on a piece of driftwood, the beach empty except for a couple of seagulls. David pulls out a pipe and fills it with sticky green herb, lights it with a lighter, and inhales. He hands the pipe to me and I put it to my lips, giddy to be joining him in this secret. It feels like some sort of initiation into manhood, like our dysfunctional family’s weird version of a bar mitzvah. David puts up his hand to block the wind, lights the bowl for me, and I inhale and cough, surprised that the smoke does not taste minty. We pass the pipe back and forth until all we have left is ash. David blows and it floats away on the wind, breaks into particles, smaller and smaller, and is swallowed into the bay.
    I don’t know if I’m high, but I know something is different. I am sitting next to my brother and we are somewhere no one can find us. Mom probably forgot this place exists. Now David and I have something that is just ours. In a couple of months, summer will be over and I will finally be a freshman at Templeton with him, a senior. David and I will share the same world. He will take up the space where I hold my worries. He will be so big, he will crowd everything else out.
    â€œI don’t feel anything,” I say.
    â€œYou will,” David says, looking out across the water. He picks up a rock and throws it. “And then none of this shit will matter.”

here.
    I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED TO FIND, BUT I WENT BACK to the beach. Maybe I thought there’d be a clue. Or maybe I thought the clothes Evie took off before she entered the water would still be there, piled on a piece of driftwood, her phone charged and tucked safely in her pocket. Maybe I thought they would be untouched, unbothered by human hands or the weather, that I could bury my nose in her shirt and still smell her. But every sign of Evie was gone. Someone had probably thrown away her clothes, taken her cash and whatever else they could use out of her wallet, and hacked her phone to sell. The beach was just a beach, covered by rocks and seaweed and what seemed like more garbage than usual.
    I found nothing. I am running out of ideas. So now here I am again, waiting for Evie’s sister outside her school, even though she made it clear that she wasn’t interested in