A Fractured Light (Beautiful Dark)

room for me in her life. She had Dan.
    I took a deep breath.
    “I better not feel like the third wheel all the time, now that you guys are couple of the year,” I said loudly. Dan whipped around so fast he almost fell off the swing.
    “Skye! Holy crap, really?” He bounded over to me, grabbed me off my feet in a huge bear hug, and twirled me around.
    “Ow.” I choked. “You don’t know your own strength.”
    “Sorry,” he said, putting me down gently. “It’s just—you’re back! We missed you!” He turned to Cassie, as if she was going to chime in. But she still had her back to me.
    Oh no , I thought. She’s mad. This is it. She thinks I abandoned her, and I’ll never be able to tell her the truth and I’ll have to find a new best friend and—
    “Skye?” Cassie said breathlessly, and it sounded so normal—so like us— that she may as well have been about to say, This gossip isn’t going to spill itself! She tried awkwardly to turn around. “Is that really you? Shit, ow, wait—” She gripped the chains of the swing. “Dan! Crutches?”
    “Oh, right, sorry.” He ran to her and picked the crutches up off the ground. Slowly he helped her lift herself onto them and turn around.
    Cassie’s cascading reddish-blond waves had been hiding a neck brace, and her right leg was locked in a huge blue cast that went all the way up to the middle of her thigh. She looked up at me, and our eyes met. Half of her face was bruised, which gave her sort of an angry look.
    I swallowed.
    “Cass?” I said. “Oh my god.”
    “Oh, whatever,” she said, a small smile lighting up her face. She was secretly into the fact that she looked like an invalid, I realized, as I broke into a smile, too. It was definitely dramatic looking. I bet she was getting tons of attention for it.
    “You’re totally milking this, aren’t you?”
    “What? No,” Cassie said, her smile widening like she really wanted to say, Who, me? “But listen, you’re going to have to come to me, because it’s effing impossible to move with this stupid cast on.” Before she even finished talking, I ran across the yard and threw my arms around her. “Ow,” she cried. “Ow, neck brace, neck brace!” But she was laughing. We both were.
    Cassie pulled away and gave me a once-over. Her eyes looked glassy, but I knew she’d die before she let herself cry in public.
    “Dan?” she said sweetly. “Can you get me that thing?”
    Dan looked at her blankly. “What thing?”
    She rolled her eyes. “You know, that thing . The thing I use to scratch inside my cast?”
    “Oh, that thing. ’Course, babes.” I was surprised by the tenderness in his voice. He bent and kissed the top of her head. She smiled after him as he walked away, then turned to me.
    “ Babes? You guys say babes now?”
    “Don’t change the subject,” she said, pointing her index finger at me accusingly. “Where the hell were you? I woke up and you were gone. And I thought something terrible must have happened to you, because there’s no way you would have left me there alone.” A tear brushed down her face, but she stubbornly ignored it. “So tell me that’s it, right?” she said. “You were kidnapped? You were abducted by aliens? A tribe of hot nudist boys whisked you off to their native land, where they hailed you as queen?” She looked hopeful.
    I swallowed. Face to face with Cassie, the story I’d told Aunt Jo about being scared felt flimsy and stupid. Cassie would never buy that. I was the strong one. I was the one who was supposed to be cool and levelheaded and unemotional. I was good in a crisis. I didn’t panic and run away. Cassie, of all people, would know I was lying.
    “I don’t . . . have . . . a good reason,” I said. She stared at me, and the silence hung between us. I couldn’t keep lying to her like this. I opened my mouth to tell the truth, but something flashed in the woods behind her yard.
    Guardians.
    My head snapped up, and I glanced behind her toward the trees. Was it my imagination, or could I see a streak of white disappear behind an evergreen? It was a reminder that I could never tell Cassie the truth—no matter how much I wanted to. “I was scared,” I said quickly, trying to sound convincing. “I guess . . . I guess I didn’t handle it well.”
    “That’s it ?” She hobbled backward on her crutches. “Oh, gee, Skye, you think?” Well, thank god one of us was scared. It couldn’t have been me, you see, because I