I was so fucking selfish. So fucking stupid.

“Amanda Beauty Hart?” one of them asked, both of them towering awkwardly over my bed.

I was faint with dread, certain they were about to start reading me my rights as they dragged me from the bed and handcuffed me. “Yes?” I didn’t so much as flinch at my middle name.

“The driver of the car, Carolina Salazar, lost control at high speed and went into a spin as she attempted to recover and overcorrected,” the same officer intoned, as if he were reciting the plot of a movie he didn’t find to be all that exciting. “She hit two cars stopped on the side of the road.”

I swallowed hard. “Is she okay?”

The other cop, a woman, picked up the narrative in only a slightly warmer tone of voice. “We regret to be the ones to inform you that Carolina Salazar died in the wreck.”

My hand flew up to cover my mouth before my shoulders began to shudder with grief.

This was my fault. All my fault. I’d been the one to suggest we go driving. I could’ve said anything else, but I’d wanted to go driving. Now, Caro was dead. It was all my fault. All of it.

“Are you all right, Amanda?” the doctor asked from the doorway.

“Can I please call my parents?” I sobbed. I needed them. I needed something. I needed to wake up and for all of this to be a bad dream brought on by too many beers the night before.

“That’s the other thing we need to tell you,” the female police officer continued. “The cars that Carolina hit…one of them belonged to your parents.”

Shock and disbelief numbed the worst of it as her words washed over me. A person could only take so much in a day, after all. And later—much later—when I’d pored over the police report, grappling with my new reality, scrambling to understand all that I’d done to ruin my life and so many lives around me, I finally got the complete story.

Caro had taken a curve too fast. We would’ve had a breathless laugh about it, possible ending up in one of the fields bordering the road with a little minor damage to her car, if not for the two cars parked on the side, just after that curve.

Caro had seen them and panicked, and the out-of-control car had spun into my parents, standing outside the second car, the owner of which had been blacked out of the police report.

Most of the details about that second car had been blacked out, which frustrated me for a time, until I decided that I probably didn’t have a right to know the stranger my decision had killed. They would just be one of a quartet of ghosts I would have to carry around.

What I did know was that, for whatever reason, the two cars had stopped on the side of the road.

For whatever reason, my parents were standing outside the driver’s side window of the second car.

For whatever reason, Caro’s side of our speeding, spinning car had struck them, pinning them between the vehicles, and hitting the other car with such force that the driver of the second car had also died.

And, for whatever reason, my selfish, stupid, ungrateful, horrible ass was the sole survivor of one of the most terrible wrecks in the history of my community. Before I’d gone to college—and in the circles of people I avoided on campus that knew the story—I became something of an object of pity.

I couldn’t go to the funeral; I couldn’t face the sympathetic tears and bewildered platitudes. I couldn’t look myself in the face in any mirror I happened to pass. All of it was my fault. All of it. Four lives cut short because of me.

There were lawyers and more police officers and an extended stay at the hospital for the majority of the summer before everyone around me seemed to agree that the best thing for me to do would be to get my education, as my dead parents intended, and try to get on with my blighted life.

The struggle lasted all of two and a half years. I tried to submerge myself in anything to distract myself from my overwhelming guilt, the crippling sorrow. I tried having loads of friends, always chatting or hanging out or partying, then exiled myself when I decided that, since I’d denied four human beings the chance at making and maintaining friendships, I didn’t deserve any.

I tried to give myself over to my studies, tried to bury my past in new information, facts, interpretations, and mounds of homework. Yet, it wasn’t enough. I lost interest too quickly, gave up too readily, didn’t care about the consequences of not completing homework or attending class or studying for tests. Who was going to hold me accountable? I’d been responsible for my parents’ deaths. I didn’t deserve to learn new things, to be a lifelong learner, as one of the professors urged the class, because I’d cut four lives short in one act of stupidity. I didn’t want to learn new things to support some distant professional future because I didn’t want a future. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I didn’t want to be alive, and yet here I was, continuing to trudge to class.

I immersed myself in alcohol, attending every party I caught wind of, getting a reputation for being “that girl”—the one who drank like a fish but always ended up puking and weeping for reasons she wouldn’t disclose.

I drowned myself in sex, seeking the nothingness after it was over, the relief to be blinded by intensity and then ushered back down, the sweet pain of meshing my body with another person and punishing myself after by pushing them away, refusing to see or talk to them again, giving myself an even worse reputation than before.

When there was nothing else I could find to lose myself in, no liquor that remained a mystery, nobody else I was willing to give my body to, I decided to literally lose myself. In one night, I packed up my clothes and what few belongings I cared for, shoved it all into my trunk, and just drove. I rolled along highways I’d never seen, past cities I’d never see again until my car started sputtering. Then, I put more gas in it and kept driving. I repeated this pattern until I was in a state I’d never been in and thoroughly out of money. I’d inherited something from my parents’ deaths, but I’d left it in the care of estate lawyers, sick at the thought of spending money linked to their demise by my idiocy.

I found a parking spot in a semi-darkened lot and went to sleep, not waking up until someone knocked on my window and asked if I was all right.

That’s how I worked my way across the country; traveling when I had money, staying still and restless when I didn’t. I did anything and everything to earn money. There wasn’t a job I didn’t try in my pursuit to flee from myself.

I thought often of just ending it all, ending my suffering with a knife or a rope or an acceleration into a wall in the car that had become my home. I wallowed in misery, unable to escape, unwilling to try to get over the tragedy my life had inspired.

In the end, though, I decided that death was too good for me. I didn’t deserve any kind of relief from my sadness and regret. I’d ended four lives—three of whom were the most important people in my own—and I’d survived with just a bump on my head. Some part of me wished I’d been maimed, disfigured in some way, just so the world around me could appreciate the irony.

My name might have been Beauty, but there wasn’t one goddamn beautiful thing about me. I was a monster.

Chapter 4

“Are you going in, dear, or are you lost?”

I whirled around from staring at my reflection in the door at Shepard Shipments, flung my mind away from my torturous past, and was faced with a tiny, old woman with the very beginnings of a hump at the top of her back.

“Lost?” I repeated helplessly. If only. I wanted to be lost from myself, to be lost from all of this. What was I doing here? I didn’t have any right to be doing this. My punishment wasn’t over with. I should’ve taken all of the money Dan had given me and given it to a homeless person or something. I should never have spent it on myself.