“Who told you that?” he asked in mid chew.
“Several people, as a matter of fact. Apparently, what happens in Key West doesn’t stay in Key West.”
“Emma was right about you,” he said, his lip curled in disgust. “You have changed.”
My appetite suddenly gone, I threw my bagel in the basket and wadded up the waxed paper. “You should look in the mirror,” I said, biting my lip to hold back the tears.
“Okay, look. Don’t cry.” He grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. “Have you heard anything from Abby or George?”
I shook my head. “You?”
“Nope. I’m sure you’ve seen the shrine on her Facebook page.”
I nodded. “I hope it helps her to know how much everyone cares.”
Ben stared off toward campus, his face masked with concern. But after several long minutes, his expression hardened and he returned his attention to me. “So, are you going to lend me the money or not?”
“I thought I already made that clear.” I stood to leave. “FYI—and you might want to pass this along to your girlfriend—I submitted a request for a roommate change.”
“You did what?” Ben said, raising his voice, no longer concerned whether the people around us heard our conversation. “You can’t drop a bomb like that and then leave. Sit back down.”
“Why are you so surprised?” I asked, lowering myself to the chair. “I don’t like being alone, Ben. My roommate is living with you, not me.”
He leaned toward me. “And just who are you planning to room with?” he asked as though no one on the planet would ever consider being my roommate.
“A friend of Carla’s who’s transferring here from Tulane.”
He pounded the table with his fist. “What about Emma? When were you planning to tell her?”
“I haven’t seen her to tell her, Ben. Anyway, it’s not like it makes any difference who she lives with. She doesn’t need a roommate. She just needs an address to give to her parents—or her mother, rather, in case she ever comes for a visit. I mean, Emma can’t exactly entertain her in your room at the fraternity house, now can she?”
He glared at me for a long minute, as if waiting for me to change my mind, and then he gathered his trash and walked away.
The truth is, I would’ve told Emma sooner if I thought there was any hope the transfer would go through. Campus housing was too tight for the administration to care whether I got along with my roommate or not. All I wanted to do was scare her into moving back in with me, away from Ben. And it worked perfectly, because when I returned from my bio lab late that afternoon, I found her curled up on her bed, facing the wall, her suitcase unopened on the floor beside her.
“Hey there.” I managed to sound cheerful despite the sick feeling in my stomach. I was paying the price for helping Ben by living with someone I despised.
Emma rolled over, and I could see from her swollen eyes she’d been crying, a strategy meant to summon my sympathy.
“I take it this means you’re moving back in?” I asked and she nodded. “Good. It’s lonely without a roommate.”
She sat up in her bed and swung her legs over the side. “You’re not mad at me?”
Mad? I wanted to pull every hair out of her head and rip her nails from her hands and feet. She’d taken my brother, a kind and generous person, and turned him into a self-centered bastard. “Why would I be mad?” I asked, forcing my lips to smile.
She sniffled. “Ben said you made a request for a roommate change. Do you think it’s fair for you not to tell me?”
“About as fair as me having to live alone while you’re shacking up with my brother,” I snapped. The blonde bitch brought out the worst in me. I would have to try harder if I was going to make it work. “Seriously, Emma, this situation isn’t working for me, and I can’t see how it’s working for you either, having to share a bathroom with all those stinky boys.”
“OMG,” she said, pinching her nose. “They smell like sour milk.”
I held out my hand to her. “Listen, if we can try and work things out, maybe I won’t have to make the change.”
“I’d like that.” Taking my hand, she smiled at me, although I was mindful of the smirk playing along her lips.
“Is that yours?” I asked, nodding at the new MacBook Air on her desk.
She bobbed her head up and down. “Ben bought it for me.”
No wonder he’s broke! He must have cleaned out his savings account. Ben was Emma’s sugar daddy. She was taking advantage of him, and he was letting her walk all over him. Silently, I vowed to put an end to it.
The weeks ahead were challenging, but I was armed and ready to defend myself against Emma’s manipulation. I learned to read her face so I could tell when she was lying, or when she wanted something, or even on the rare occasion when she was being sincere. Much to her credit, she honored her commitment by spending every night, even the weekends, in our room. According to Spotty, who was having lots of time alone with Ben, our plan was working, although we were taking painfully slow baby steps.
Literally, I bounced up and down with joy when Ben agreed to go with Spotty and Reed to Virginia Beach for the long Easter weekend. Relieved to have a few days away from Emma, I accepted a last-minute invitation to go with Archer to her family’s cottage on Smith Mountain Lake. I didn’t see Ben again until our first day back at school when I found him leaning against the wall, his head hung low, outside my chemistry class.
“It’s Abigail, isn’t it?”
Thirteen
Ben opened his arms and I went to him, feeling his body tremble beneath mine as we hugged. We were oblivious to the mob of students moving past us as they rushed between classes. We were on our own island, surrounded only by our grief.
When the bell rang and the halls quieted down, I asked, “When?”
His voice caught in his throat and he took a deep breath. “At daybreak on Easter morning, if you can believe that.”
I wiped my nose on his shirt and pulled away from him. “When’s the funeral?”
“Tomorrow morning at eleven. Mom and Dad are at the river waiting for us. We need to get your stuff.” He put his arm around my shoulders and began guiding me toward the exit. “My bag is already in the car.”
We walked in silence on the way back to my room. Words were of no use to any of us now. It was too soon for expressions of sympathy to ease the pain of the ones left behind, and it was too late for words of wisdom and motivational speeches to inspire Abby. We’d all tried to help her—doctors and family and friends—but we’d all failed.
Emma greeted us at the door, slobbering Ben with kisses. “I’m going with you,” she said in her determined way.
“That’s not a good idea, Em,” he said, his arms dangling by his side while she clung to him. “I need to spend this time with Kitty. Alone.”
To give them some privacy, and to get the hell out of the line of fire of the missile Emma was certain to launch at any minute, I busied myself in my closet. I tried not to listen to them, but I couldn’t help but overhear their mumbled conversation. Emma whined and begged, but Ben remained firm.
I neatly folded my gray knit dress and placed it in my bag, tossing in some underwear and a pair of jeans on top. “I’m going to the bathroom for my toiletries and then I’ll meet you downstairs,” I said to Ben as I hurried from the room.
Ben and I didn’t speak again until we were an hour outside of Charlottesville. Our grief erased the tension of the past months and took us back to a time when it wasn’t a big deal for Abigail to eat three slices of chocolate fudge pie.
“She saved my life, you know,” I said, breaking our silence. “Too bad I couldn’t return the favor.”
Ben glanced over at me and then focused back on the road. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
When I was ten, maybe eleven, Abigail and I were sailing, past the point where we were allowed to go, when the wind changed and filled the sail from the opposite direction. The boom hit me in
the head and knocked me unconscious and out of the boat in one swoop. Despite the constant nagging from my parents, my stubborn preadolescent self wasn’t wearing a life jacket. If Abigail hadn’t jumped in to rescue me, I would’ve immediately drowned.
“She treaded water, holding me afloat with those strong legs of hers until help came.”
Ben smiled sadly at the memory. “Most people mistook her shyness for weakness when she was really the opposite. Do you remember that day when we were fishing for flounder by the bridge and George got his hook stuck in my arm?”
I ran my finger along the scar on Ben’s forearm. “It was gross watching Abigail work it out, but she did it slow and easy, just like a surgeon.”
“Yep. And then there was the time she and George got in a fight over who was going to carry the wakeboard up the hill to their house.” Laughing, Ben slammed his palm against the steering wheel. “She beat his ass good.”
I joined him in laughter. “Remember the steak? Like, who walks around with a raw piece of meat on their eye?”
It seemed disloyal to be laughing, but in our own way, we were honoring Abigail as much as we were easing our pain.
When our fit of laughter ended, the sober reality returned. “If she was so strong, Ben, why’d she do it? Why’d she starve herself to death?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m hoping George can tell us something that’ll help us understand.”
Our parents left a note asking us to join them at the Turners’ house to pay our respects. While neither of us had the energy for a crowd, Ben and I very much wanted to see George. It didn’t take us long to choose the first song. Abby’s favorite. Springsteen. “Born to Run.” George responded right away with “Independence Day,” and from there we moved on to more of her classic-rock favorites.
When I noticed specks of light coming from the Turners’ yard, I grabbed the binoculars from inside. It was so dark I had a hard time making out the faces of the people standing on the lawn, but every one of them was holding a lit candle toward the sky.
“Here.” I handed the binoculars to Ben. “You need to see this for yourself.”
He adjusted the binoculars to fit his face. “Holy shit. Her very own candlelight vigil. I hope Yabba can see this from heaven.”
Ben and I gathered every candle we could find from inside and lined them up on the porch railing. It took a few minutes of fighting against the breeze but we finally got all of them lit. When the crowd started singing, we joined in, our voices ringing out our farewell tribute across the water. “Viva La Vida.” An appropriate, bittersweet tune to end on.
Thirty minutes later we heard George start his motor and make his way across the creek. By the time we got down to the dock, George had tied up and was waiting for us, sitting on the side of his boat with his feet dangling in the water.
“Isn’t that water cold?” I asked him.
He swung his legs around to the inside of the boat. “I can’t feel it,” he said, looking up at me with a sad smile. “Like the rest of my body, my feet are numb.”
The tide was so low Ben and I had to sit on the edge of the dock and slide off into the boat. We wrapped our arms around George in a group hug. None of us tried to hide our tears as we clung to one another. An eternity later, reluctantly, George pulled away and suggested we take a ride out to the bridge.
It was a beautiful evening despite the chill in the air. When we reached the bridge, George killed the motor and moved to the front of the boat, stretching out on the seat across from Ben and me. We stared up at the stars and listened to the sound of the cars overhead while we drifted. We were each lost in our own thoughts, acutely aware of the void created by Abigail’s absence.
In our younger days Abby and I would occasionally spend time on our own, sailing or catching butterflies, while the boys were off fishing or spying on the Herrington twins around the bend. But for the most part, we’d done everything as a foursome. Three just didn’t feel right. Three felt lonely.
“Talk to us, George,” I said when I could endure the silence no more. “We’ve been so worried.”
George looked bewildered, as if he’d just woken from a nightmare to find himself floating in the boat with us. In a way, he had. “I’m not sure where to start,” he mumbled.
“Abigail seemed fine, all things considered, when she spent the weekend with me in early November. But by the time we came down here for Thanksgiving, she was in the hospital. Can you tell us what happened after that?”
George sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees. “Mom refused to leave Abigail’s side, not once during the whole four months. Dad got up there almost every weekend, but because Baltimore is a six-hour drive from Chapel Hill, I only managed about every third. Sundays were the hardest, having to leave, not knowing what condition she’d be in the next time I saw her. I had no idea it would ever come to this. It wasn’t my decision to keep the two of you out of the loop. Or Yabba’s either, really. My parents were just trying to protect her.”
“Protect her from whom?” I asked.
He hesitated a minute before he admitted, “From people obsessing over how much she was or wasn’t eating.” I sensed from the anger in George’s voice his parents were worried about more than a little gossip.
“Go on,” Ben said.
“You know, she talked about the two of you all the time,” George said, smiling at Ben and me. “Especially at the end when she was too weak to do anything except listen to me tell her stories from our summers past.
“Her health went back and forth. One minute she’d go downhill, and then she’d rally, and we’d think she was getting better. But in February, around Valentine’s Day, she stopped eating altogether. You have no idea how much it sucked to watch her waste away like that during those last few weeks.” George pressed his forehead against his arms, staring down into the dark hole between his legs.
I moved over next to George, nudging him to make room for me. “Do you know what caused her to stop eating?” I asked, rubbing his back.
“She never told you?” He sounded surprised.
I shook my head. “I tried to get her to talk many times. . .”
“She was just so damn proud.” George shoved his balled fist in his mouth to stifle a sob. “It’s all those girls’ fault. Those fucking bitches.” George rolled over on his side and broke down, crying uncontrollably.
Heartbroken at the sound of his sobs echoing out across the river, I curled up to his back, spooning him, holding his trembling body tight. I wanted him to explain about the bitches, but to push him to continue would have been cruel.
It seemed like hours before George sat up again. He pulled a wad of tissues from his pocket and blew his nose. “Yabba would be horrified if she knew I’d cried in front of y’all—especially you, Ben.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, man. Once, when we were little and I stubbed the hell out of my big toe on the pool deck, Abby told me that real men aren’t afraid to cry.”
I smiled. “According to Yabba, real men aren’t afraid of a lot of things, like wearing pink or taking a girl flowers.”
“And now she’ll never know her real man.” George’s eyes filled with tears again. “That’s the tragedy, isn’t it, in someone dying young? All the people they’ll never meet, the children they’ll never parent, the successes they’ll never enjoy. Abby will never get to fulfill her dream of exploring the Great Barrier Reef.”
“Wrong again, bro,” Ben said. “That’s where she is now, except she won’t need scuba gear and oxygen tanks. She’s swimming with the fishes.”
We talked for a few minutes about all the discoveries Yabba would make in the magnificent world of the beyond. And for the rest of the evening after that, we spoke only of happy memories, our private farewell to her. Even though she was physically absent, I felt her spirit in solid force, more than I had in months.
It was late, almost midnight, by the time we pulled up to our dock. I had one foot out of the
boat when George said, “My parents and I would like for the two of you to sit with us at the funeral tomorrow.”
I stepped back down into the boat and faced him. “That’s very kind of you, George, but I’m sure you have plenty of family who need those seats.”
“That’s sort of the point, Kitty. You and Ben are family.”
“But what about Yabba’s other friends?” Ben asked.
“None of them meant as much to her as the two of you,” George said, looking back and forth between Ben and me. “Trust me. It’s what Yabba wanted. She told me so.”
Ben climbed from the boat and headed toward the house without saying good-bye. Halfway up the dock, we watched him stop and pull his shirttail up to wipe his eyes.
“We’re honored, George, really.” I hugged him close, feeling his body relax as he released months of built-up stress. He’d been strong for Abby, and now he would need to be strong for his parents. His life had changed forever, and I knew it would be a long time before his world made sense to him again. “We’re here for you, Porgie. Anytime you need us.”
Fourteen
Hearing Ben’s muffled sobs, I tiptoed next door to his room and crawled in bed with him. I placed one earbud of my iPod in each of our ears and selected the playlist I liked to listen to on nights I couldn’t sleep. The sound of his breathing changed after a few minutes, and I assumed he was asleep, but when I made a move to leave, he grabbed a handful of my T-shirt, pulling me back.
“Don’t go,” he whispered. “I don’t think I can handle being alone right now.”
I curled back up to him.
He sniffled and reached for the tissue box on his bedside table. “I feel like an idiot, blubbering like a baby.”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Ben. In fact you should feel proud. You were always so good to Yabba. Most guys find their friends’ little sisters annoying, but not you. Whatever was wrong in her life, you were one of the bright spots.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Kitty. She was the bright spot in my life. She was so innocent and pure, a reminder of the goodness in a world full of hate.” He rolled over to face me. “I did a little research on anorexia and I can kinda relate to how Abby must’ve been feeling.”
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