His eyes widened. I flushed and wished I’d kept my mouth shut, until I noticed the tiniest trace of a smile forming at the side of his mouth. “And by different, you mean if I hadn’t been twice her age and her teacher?”
“Yes,” I said. And gay, I added silently. That also put a wrinkle in things. “I thought you might have made her happy, made her feel special.”
“Oh,” he said. For a second, I thought I could see another version of my mom’s lecture on inappropriate relationships coming. Then he nodded. “Well, I always thought she seemed like a very special person.”
“She was.”
He looked at me. And for the first time, it felt like he really saw me. Not the girl with the dead twin. Not the crazy girl who’d accused him of sleeping with her sister. Me.
“She was lucky to have you,” he said. “I know you meant a lot to her. I know you were her best friend.”
Best friend. I shook my head, even though it hurt to do it. “She was always my best friend, but I wasn’t hers—not by the end. By the end it was Lily.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think by the end the two of them were that close.”
His voice was strained, like it was hard for him to say it. I didn’t correct him. I knew he was trying to be kind. Sometimes it’s good to let people try to make you feel better.
Sometimes I thought of you on that rope swing. About those few seconds when you’d soared before crashing down. For those seconds, it had looked like you were flying, and I’d felt like both of us had wings. And then you’d been on the ground, unmoving.
That had been the worst moment of my life.
I think it still is, despite everything else.
Everything else I can bear, I’d tell myself when I looked at him. At those eyes, with those lashes—beautiful eyes in a face that had become so very ugly to me. Everything else I can get through.
ON SUNDAY, I WOKE WITH a low buzz deep in my stomach.
Because I was going to see Nick.
I started to put on my running clothes. Then I stopped, deciding I wanted to look nicer than that. Not too nice, not fancy, but nicer than normal. I put on a short-sleeved top with a slight pattern and left my hair down rather than pulling it back into a ponytail. Brushed it twice too.
Then I went downstairs for breakfast.
I downed a bowl of cereal, a banana, and an orange and followed that up with some scrambled eggs and sausage links. I checked the cupboard to see if there were any granola bars. No such luck.
Mom sat at the kitchen table watching me, nursing a grapefruit and a piece of whole-wheat toast.
“All that running you do must be catching up with you,” she said. “I can pick up some granola bars tomorrow if you like—maybe the ones with almonds?”
“Thanks, that would be great,” I said.
She smiled. She looked younger in that moment, smiling, her hair back in a loose ponytail, and it reminded me of something I’d meant to ask her about months earlier.
“Were you popular in high school?”
She blinked. “Popular? I guess that depends on your definition.”
Which pretty much answered the question. Because if you weren’t popular, you knew it. It was only the people who were popular who seemed to have trouble knowing how to classify themselves. Still, I clarified. “Lots of friends, homecoming queen, that sort of thing.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “I suppose so. I wasn’t homecoming queen, but I was on the court, if that counts.” She hesitated. “I think I may still have pictures of it, if you’d like to see them sometime.”
I started to say no. Her face had opened up, though, for a second, just a sliver, and as I formed my predictable response, I could see it start to close again.
I adjusted accordingly. “That would be nice.”
She blinked. And then she smiled. A bigger, more genuine smile than before. “I’ll bring down some albums sometime. I should have them in the attic. We could go through them together.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
When I left the house, it was much earlier than when I normally met Nick, but I couldn’t wait, couldn’t sit around until the usual time. So I decided to surprise him at his house. New chapter, I thought. It was right to start it off somewhere else. Somewhere fresh.
It was a long walk, and I took it slow. Walked carefully along the uneven sidewalk, the parts that were cracked and crumbled. Everything was green now; even the trees that had been stubbornly denying the presence of spring were displaying new growth. Anna might’ve written a poem about these trees, I thought. And though I felt a pang, there was also a certain pleasure in thinking that I had, for a second, seen the world through her eyes.
I knew roughly where Nick’s house was, but I’d had to look up his exact address in the phone book. It turned out he lived in a tall, slim gray house. The windows had deep sills and tidy white shutters. There was a tall tree a few yards to one side of it that practically begged for a tree house to be built on its long, sturdy branches. Tulips were planted along the edges of the house, their heavy heads bowing their stems.
I paused halfway down the front path, steeling myself to go knock on the door. I hoped Nick would be the one to answer. That he’d open the door and smile at me like he knew precisely why I was there and what I wanted to say.
I looked down at my shirt, belatedly concerned I might have spilled something on myself during breakfast.
No crumbs, no juice.
I was buying time, I thought. I needed to move forward.
I started to look back up toward the front door. In the process, something caught the corner of my eye, something small by the tulips at the side of the house.
Something small and white with a light sheen.
I left the path and walked over to the white speck, bent over to inspect it more closely.
It was a button. A pearl button.
And through its center was a single piece of thread. Purple thread.
Anna.
Anna, here. Here at Nick’s house.
And suddenly all I knew was that I knew nothing. Nothing at all.
I was running even before I knew my feet had begun to move. Running with no coherent thoughts, just one long, loud scream inside my brain. And no matter how fast I ran, I could not escape it.
ANNA.
Nick.
Anna and Nick.
Anna’s button.
Nick’s house.
Anna’s button at Nick’s house.
Nick was the boy. Nick was the destination.
Nick was a liar.
I thought I was completely alone. I thought if anyone found out about him and me they would despise me. That I’d be the one they’d blame.
And then one day someone told me they knew—a friend of his, another guy on the team. I braced myself for him to call me a slut, a whore, but instead he said he wanted to try to help me.
And he had an idea for how.
WHEN MY MOM KNOCKED ON my door the next morning, I pulled my blankets tighter around me.
“Sweetheart,” she called from the other side. “You have to go to school. You can’t stay in your room all day. If you’re sick, we should take you to the doctor, but you can’t just stay in there.”
I could hear her leaning against the door and imagined her with her hand cupped to the door, listening for signs of life.
“I don’t need a doctor,” I said.
“Then you need to either tell me what’s wrong or you need to go to school.”
“I’m getting up,” I said. “I’m getting dressed, okay?” And I slowly made myself throw back the blankets and stand up. Because I really didn’t want to talk to her. Didn’t want to talk to anyone except Lily, who I’d left several long rambling messages about buttons and lying and how she needed to tell me w
hat happened and how I knew everything. She hadn’t returned any of my calls.
I got dressed. And I walked to school so I wouldn’t have to deal with talking to Sarah on the bus. I ate my lunch in the bathroom and moved between classes like a ninja, avoiding anyone who might try to interact with me, including the cheerleaders handing out flyers about the big basketball game.
I did a good job avoiding people. Maybe I wasn’t a ninja, I thought; maybe I was a ghost—maybe I’d been wrong to think I’d been anything else all this time.
In English class, I sat right behind Tom—drawer of the macabre—and watched as he sketched a guy being cut in half with a machete. If you are going to go apeshit, do it now, I thought. Grab your weapon from your bag and I’ll tackle you so hard you won’t have time to aim. Or maybe you’ll shoot me and we’ll both be done with all this.
Nothing happened, of course. His backpack stayed on the floor next to him, probably filled with nothing more than mechanical pencils and textbooks. He kept on drawing in his notebook, going over one area harder and harder until it was shiny and slick with graphite. He might not be violent, but he certainly was angry.
And I envied him that. Anger seemed like such a nice clean emotion. I craved its purity, its lack of complication. All I wanted to be was angry. Just angry.
I wished I were one of Tom’s samurai.
I wished I had a sword and honor and a code.
I wished I knew what the hell I should do.
Because I doubted Lily was going to call me back. And I had no idea how to talk to Nick about it, no idea what I wanted to ask him or accuse him of. All I knew was that he’d lied to me from the second he’d first talked to me in the hallway, telling me his sob sorry about Anna, the girl he’d always liked and never gotten up the nerve to talk to. And I’d believed him. I’d believed every word he’d said.
IT ONLY TOOK UNTIL WEDNESDAY evening before Sarah and my mom ganged up on me.
It wasn’t clear who instigated the attack, which they both pretended was uncoordinated, but at six o’clock on the dot that evening, Sarah appeared at the front door, claiming we’d had plans for me to go over to her house for dinner. I told her this was very much not the case, only to have my mom, who’d started removing all the sharp knives from the utensil drawer the day before, emerge behind me and proceed to all but push me through the front door.
“Go have fun, sweetheart,” she said. “It’ll be good for you to get out of the house for a while—get some fresh air, hang out with your friend.”
Her face was so hopeful, like she really believed this was what I needed. This isn’t something fresh air and friendship can fix, I wanted to tell her. If it was, I’d go over to Sarah’s house every night. Eat mung beans and celery and let her mom tell me all about Pilates and the best colors for my complexion. But what I need right now is to be by myself.
That was too much to try to get out, though; too much like peeling my skin off in front of them both. Instead, I kept it simple. “No, it won’t,” I said. “Really, I just want to stay home. Please.”
Mom hesitated, and I thought could see a crack in her resolve—a tiny hairline crack that I could leverage until it broke open.
“Please,” I repeated.
She looked at me and took a step to the left, as if to allow me to retreat into the house.
Sarah shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “Nice try. We’re doing this. My mom even made a side dish that contains carbs especially in your honor. This is happening.”
I looked at my mom beseechingly, but the rupture in her resolve had disappeared. “Sarah’s right,” she said. “You should go.”
* * *
—
AFTER WE LEFT THE DRIVEWAY, Sarah nodded toward a paper bag on the floor of the car between us.
“There’s a burger and fries in there for you if you want it,” she said. “Well, there’s two of each, actually—one for each of us. If you don’t want yours, though, then I’m happy to eat all of it myself.”
I stared at the bag, confused by this twist. “I thought we were eating at your house?”
“We are, but I figured you might be pissed about being hijacked from your self-imposed exile, so this is my peace offering. Plus, you know what my mom’s food is like—I don’t know if I have the strength to deal with you if you’re both angry and hungry.”
“I’m not angry,” I said, slumping against the window, watching the houses pass. They all looked the same to me; only the paint was different.
“No? What are you, then?”
What was I? It felt like the million-dollar question. I settled by giving a ten-cent answer, directed at the window. “I’m tired and I’m confused. All I want is to be left alone.”
“You’ve been alone for the last three days. You’ve had three days of not talking to anyone—of ignoring me, freaking out your family. So we’ve officially tried that and it hasn’t worked. Anyway, nobody gets to be left alone forever.” She paused, and her tone softened. “Look, tell me what’s wrong. If you talk to me, then we can skip dinner and do anything you like—go to a movie, get milk shakes, go to the basketball game—”
I flinched involuntarily. “I don’t want to go to the basketball game.”
In the reflection of the window, I could see her glance at me.
“Is this about Nick?” she asked. “Did something happen?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” I closed my eyes. “Let’s just have dinner.”
“Fine,” she said.
We drove in silence after that. I breathed in the smell of the hot, salty fries, trying to remember when I’d last eaten. Eating seemed like an activity that went with another version of me, one from a long time ago. I wanted to be that version of me again. I wanted to want to eat the burger and fries she’d brought me. Instead, I handed the bag to Sarah at the next stop sign.
* * *
—
I DON’T KNOW WHAT SARAH told her parents, but when we got to her house, her mom eyed me with pity, as if I were a doomed baby bird that had fallen out of its nest, and she took my jacket and placed it on the coatrack with such care that it could’ve been made from spiderwebs. Sarah’s dad, on the other hand, practically had to be physically restrained from hugging me.
“She’s not a hugger, Dad,” Sarah told him. I nodded and looked away. I didn’t know how to meet his gaze, didn’t know how to fuse this man with the one who’d stood across from Mr. Matthews, brokenhearted but resolute.
The dinner, as advertised, did include a small bowl of pasta salad in addition to the other, more fiber- and protein-intensive dishes.
“You look nice,” her mom said to me after we all sat down and began loading up our plates.
After three days of not eating and only one shower, this seemed doubtful, but I thanked her anyway. It was, I knew, a well-intentioned remark.
“Did you do something new with your hair?” she tried again. “It’s shorter, maybe?”
“I did get a haircut,” I told her. And I had. Three months earlier.
“That must be it,” she said. “Well, it looks lovely.” Then, to my relief, she turned to Sarah. “Which reminds me—you’re going to need a trim soon. You’re starting to get split ends.”
“I like split ends,” Sarah said without missing a beat. “Love them. Why do you think I haven’t been cutting my hair?”
Sarah’s mom sighed and poured herself some more water. A round of contemplative chewing commenced. I fiddled with the food on my plate, taking a few cursory bites before putting down my fork and focusing on the art on the wall in front of me. Someone in the family was clearly a huge fan of desolate farmscapes, preferably ones with sad-looking horses in the foreground.
Sarah’s mom caught me looking at them. “My uncle painted those,” she told me.
“They’re very nice,” I said politely.
“He used to have a ranch up north. He loved his horses very much.”
Perhaps sensing that my enthusiasm for conversing about horses was limited, Sarah’s dad intervened and addressed the table at large. “Speaking of horses, did you hear someone tried to burn down that old barn again? The one on the Kilmans’ property?”
I hadn’t heard, but it wasn’t surprising. The Kilmans had both moved to an assisted-living facility several years earlier, and ever since, their property, which their children appeared to have no interest in either living in or selling, had been an easy target.
“Tried?” Sarah asked, raising an eyebrow. “How is it possible they didn’t succeed? It’s pure wood and it hasn’t rained in ages. It should have gone up like kindling.”
“I guess their neighbors saw it and were able to get the fire department out before it got too far.”
“They should just tear it down,” Sarah decreed with a wave of her fork. “It’s falling apart anyway.”
“Maybe it’s sentimental for them,” her mom said. “I think Mrs. Kilman’s grandfather built it. Besides, they shouldn’t have to tear it down just because our town has too many men who like to play with fire.”
“Or women,” Sarah said. “It could have been a woman, you know.”
“In theory, but I bet it’s a man. It usually is. There’s something very male about fire. Fire and any kind of property damage, really. Woman don’t do that kind of thing.”
“That’s sexist,” Sarah said.
“It’s not sexist. I’m saying it’s a good thing.”
“Good things can be sexist, Mom,” Sarah informed her.
Her mom ignored her. “I mean, property damage is just so pointless. Burning things, smashing windows, breaking things, scrawling graffiti on walls—it’s always men doing it.”
“Not always,” Sarah said.
“That’s true,” Sarah’s dad chimed in. “Especially graffiti. Just back in the fall, a girl at your school did that.”
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