See You in San Francisco

10 | she's still dead

          "What do you think she meant?" I asked, staring down at June's immortalized handwriting. "See you in San Francisco. I've never been there; why would she . . ." I risked a glance at him, finding that he wasn't looking back at me; instead, he, too, couldn't look away from the note. His jaw throbbed. "Mer?"

          "We have a house in San Francisco," he explained. I tried my hardest to not think about how his arm was still wrapped around me—especially when I was a sweaty, crying mess. "I mean, my grandparents do. June was supposedly borrowing it for Spring Break, for whatever reason."

          "So? What does that have to do with me or—or with anybody else?"

          He exhaled through his mouth. "I heard her talk on the phone about San Francisco once. I didn't give it much thought at the time, honestly, because she'd wanted to borrow that house for so long, but . . . at some point, I started putting the pieces together. She mentioned something about ruined plans, but I was like, 'yeah, I'm not going to stand here and eavesdrop'." He finally turned to me, blue eyes so striking in the middle of my badly lit bedroom, and we were sitting so close I was almost certain he could count all my freckles. "She was arguing with Leon. It was . . . pretty bad."

          My stomach sank.

          Meridian looked away from me almost immediately, almost as though he was ashamed of what he had just told me, while I couldn't find any words to say. I couldn't sit there, look him in the eye, and pretend that I had never asked myself how in the world June put up with Leon, who rarely had anything nice to say about anyone, ever. Those two were polar opposites and, to the present day, I still didn't know what she had seen in him.

          Then again, that had been typical June. She always tried to see the best in people, often being awfully stubborn about it as well, and she must have seen something in Leon that made up for his less than pleasant personality and attitude towards the rest of us.

          It wasn't my place to judge. After all, it hadn't been my relationship and I wasn't being that stellar of a friend either, considering I had spent a considerable amount of time being in love with her brother.

          Nevertheless, June and Leon had gotten along just fine. She had been, pretty much, the only person outside of his family he actually liked, and I couldn't remember ever hearing or seeing them argue. June liked to keep things private, so we never talked about her relationship that much, but things seemed fine, normal.

          The fact that Meridian thought that particular argument had been, quoting, 'pretty bad' was a red flag. I truly wanted to believe June's death had been an accident and that Leon would never hurt her, but what if I was wrong? Suicide was obviously out of the question now that we had the cause of death—if June truly wanted to hurt herself, she wouldn't do it by smacking her head against something and knowing, for sure, her neck would snap upon contact with the floor—but accident and foul play remained up for discussion.

          I felt like throwing up. Everything inside me hurt.

          "You couldn't have known," I said, even though I wasn't quite sure which of us I was trying to comfort. Meridian had plenty of bottled-up anger inside of him and I just knew he'd end up snapping eventually, but I wished he would talk to me about it instead of exploding. He was my star, my supernova, and was one of the few good things I still had left. "Like, I didn't know about it. Things seemed . . . normal."

          "But wasn't it my job to know stuff like that?" His voice was quieter, almost like a murmur, and I was thankful for how quiet the house was. My bedroom walls were pretty much soundproof and, even though I had been forced to keep the door slightly ajar, we hadn't been bothered yet. "I was her brother, Sofia. If I couldn't have known, then who could have? Who's to say that, if he really had anything to do with what happened"—he clenched his hands into fists—"I couldn't have done something? I could have—I could have saved her. She could still be alive."