Page 106 of Dead Girls Don’t Forget

Soon enough Lia steered the conversation toward the years they had grown up together.

“You should’ve seen Jackson at thirteen,” she said, smiling faintly into her drink. “He got into a fistfight because some kid told me I looked annoying.”

Rick barked a laugh. “You do look annoying.” Lia kicked his boot.

Jackson groaned. “I was thirteen.”

“You broke Devin Walsh’s nose,” she said.

“He deserved it.”

“You only say that because you won.”

Jackson shrugged. “Nobody bullies my chosen sister.”

Lia’s smile slipped for a fraction of a second before she found it again. After that she kept reaching for old memories—the water tower the summer they turned fifteen, the night Jackson carried her two miles home on a broken ankle. Names I had never heard, fights I had never seen, a whole shared history I couldn’t step into. Every memory circled back to the same place, and I was absent from all of them.

"You kind of had to be here for it," she said once, warm, apologetic. "It's a pack thing."

"Sounds like it," I replied.

The boys didn’t seem to notice. To them it was just Lia getting nostalgic. But I sat on the outside of it, and I knew her well enough by now to understand she had placed me there deliberately, one shared memory at a time.

I let it go. A girl reminding me I was new barely registered after everything else today. I held my hands closer to the fire and let the boys pull me back into the present, where I still had a place.

The conversation drifted away from the past soon after. Jason launched into a story about a professor everyone hated while Jackson crouched by the woodpile for more logs. When he came back he dropped into the chair beside me and fished something from his pocket, opening his palm to show me.

A heavy-duty laser pointer rested there, the kind used for outdoor presentations.

“Why?” I asked.

“It has extra range.”

I kept staring at it. He shrugged, then aimed it across the yard until a bright red dot appeared on the far fence.

My eyes tracked it on instinct. The dot danced and I followed, only jerking my gaze away the second I realized what I was doing.

Jackson’s mouth twitched.

I kicked his boot under the chair. The dot disappeared, and he slipped the pointer back into his pocket.

That was when the frog appeared. A fat, ordinary little thing hopped out from beneath the woodpile and straight toward Lia's chair.

Before I could blink, Lia made a strangled sound halfway between a gasp and a shriek and launched herself upward. The blanket flew off her lap. Logs scattered across the ground. Suddenly she was in Jackson’s lap with both arms locked tight around his neck, her feet dangling completely off the ground.

“You cannot be serious,” Jason wheezed.

“I thought you outgrew this,” Rick said.

“It touched me!”

“It hopped within six feet of you,” Rick corrected, clearly fighting a laugh.

“That’s basically assault.”

Jackson was laughing too now, trying unsuccessfully to pry her arms from around his neck. “It’s literally a frog,” he said.

“I hate them.”