And in that moment, it hit me:
Enough. Enough secrets. Enough of living this way.
It was time to conquer my fear—and take care of Lydia for good.
I stared up into his eyes. “I can’t tell you what it was, but it’s not going to happen again.”
“Well…” He looked around helplessly. “Good, I guess. Because seeing you like this—I mean, I thought somebody had attacked you.”
“No,” I said.
“I’m serious, Alexis. I saw you standing there, and I wanted to kill whoever did this to you.” His whispery voice held the smoky scent of whatever he’d drunk in the kitchen. His eyes were soft and deep and brown, like the saddest puppy in the world. His jaw was tight with worry. Under my arm, his was solid and unmoving. He was like a suit of armor around me.
Nothing could get past him.
“I wish you could trust me,” he said, his lips brushing against my hair.
I sat there, in shock from the heat of his breath, wrapped in warm flannel and soft cotton and strong arms.
And in that moment, it all seemed so pointless. All of the lonely, empty nights. Isolating myself at school and at home. Always holding Jared at arm’s length—and why? Because I thought Carter might take me back?
Even if he weren’t dating Zoe, he would never come back to me. “Do you even know how to trust?” he’d asked me the day of Lydia’s funeral—our last day. The day he’d broken up with me.
Everything I’d been doing for the past two and a half months was about being afraid. It wasn’t living. It was just…hiding. Hiding from ghosts. From my family. From people at school. From the reality that Carter had moved on and left me behind.
From Jared.
Suddenly, desperately, I needed to stop hiding. I needed to do something real and new and meaningful.
“Jared…” I said.
He turned to me, perfectly attentive and gentle. “Yes?”
The small cuckoo clock on the dustless mantel began to tweet.
Midnight.
“Happy new year,” I whispered.
Then I kissed him.
Our kiss was like a stormy night—the end of something and the beginning of something else—hungry, almost frantic. After a minute, I pulled back, and we stared at each other, my heart pounding all the way up to my ears.
Tears fought to escape my eyes. I pushed my fingers through Jared’s hair and turned my face into his chest. For a few minutes, I let myself be tangled up against him, listening to the distant buzz of the dryer as it finished tumbling my clothes, trying to comprehend what I’d just done.
What I’d started.
Jared didn’t speak or move. After a minute, our breathing aligned. I must have drifted off, because the next thing I heard was Jared’s voice.
“Alexis.” His whisper was quiet and intimately close to my ear. “What time do you need to get home?”
“One,” I said.
“Okay. It’s only twelve thirty.”
“Good,” I said, sleepily turning toward him.
“I’m so glad you came here tonight.” His hand absently stroked my hair. “I’ve been…I don’t think ‘hoping’ is the right word. But I’ve been…waiting.”
“Really?” I said, even though I knew it.
“You don’t have to be sad or scared anymore.” He pulled me closer. “You’re safe with me.”
I could have said, That’s nice or You’re sweet or some other generic thing.
But then he leaned down and started a line of light kisses across the back of my neck, and I didn’t have to say anything at all.
The next morning, I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling.
I’d slept in Jared’s T-shirt. It was warm and soft against my skin.
Yeah, so he wasn’t Carter. But he was decent and kind, and there was something else about him—some secret undercurrent of intensity that I couldn’t imagine Carter ever having.
Jared had walked me to my car the night before. “You’re not going to wake up in the morning and regret this, are you?” he’d asked, leaning down and resting his elbows on the window ledge.
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
His eyes crinkled. “Are you kidding me?” Then he’d kissed me in a way that made me believe him. Thinking about it, nestled under my comforter, I felt myself starting to smile.
A few minutes later I got up and went to the bathroom, where I carefully covered the bruise on my chin and combed my hair over the cut on my forehead. Then I went out to the kitchen, where Mom was making pancakes.
“Happy new year,” she said, giving me a hug. “Let’s make it a good one, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, pouring a glass of orange juice.
“Do you have any resolutions?”
I took a swig of juice and thought of what I’d promised myself I would do that day. “Just one.”
I DROVE SLOWLY THROUGH the west part of Surrey, my stomach doing unhappy backflips. At first I wasn’t sure I’d remember where to turn off the main road. But when I passed a mini-mall with a burned-out, boarded-up beauty salon in the middle, the odd twinge in my abdomen turned into a spasm.
Who was I trying to fool? Like I’d ever forget this route as long as I lived.
A few more turns led me to Lydia’s house. What had been a mild air of homeownerly neglect back in October had matured to a very real sense of impending collapse by January. The garage door was dented like someone had driven right into it. One of the porch steps was missing altogether, and flies swarmed over the mountain of trash bags just outside the front door.
I remembered that the doorbell didn’t work, and knocked gently. I counted to fifty-Mississippi, but just as I was about to leave, the door opened a few inches to reveal a haggard face defined by sharp gray shadows.
“Mrs. Small?” I asked.
She stared dead-eyed at me, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
“I’m…I was a friend of Lydia’s,” I said.
The door opened, and Mrs. Small backed away to let me inside. She wore a long nightgown, tattered at the hem, with a knee-length robe over it. The ties of the robe fell limply down to the floor.
The house was dark—all of the shades were pulled down. And the smell of cigarettes, beer, and rotting food hung heavily in the air.
I took a shaky breath and forced myself to speak. “I’m really sorry about Lydia.”
That got her attention—kind of. But her eyes couldn’t seem to focus on me.
“I was wondering if…” Even though I’d made up this story and rehearsed it a dozen times, I could hardly spit out the words. “She borrowed something from me and I wanted to get it back…to remember her by.”
It sounded weird and false to me, but Lydia’s mother just pointed at the stairs.
“Thank you,” I said, leaving her behind.
There were three doors at the top of the stairs, all closed. I went through the one with the Dead Kennedys poster on it.
Lydia’s bedroom was much cleaner than the rest of the house. Her closet door was open, revealing a perfect line of shoes and rows of neat skirts, shirts, and dresses. No sign of the ripped jeans or baggy black Goth clothes she wore during the brief period when we’d been friends freshman year. Naturally, she would have thrown them all away. They were useless to a Sunshine Club girl.
Her jewelry was laid out in a grid on the dresser, and a hook on the wall held three purses—black, brown, and red.
Two hangers were tossed sloppily on the bed, and I realized that they must have been the hangers from which her mother pulled the clothes Lydia was buried in—a gray silk skirt and black angora turtleneck.
I closed my eyes for a moment.
No matter how awful Lydia had been at the end (very, by the way—let’s be clear on that), I couldn’t forget what Carter said at the funeral: She was just sad.
Thing is, she wasn’t “just sad” anymore—or she wouldn’t be trying to kill people.
I began to inspect the room, though I was ha
ving a hard time figuring out what might be her power center. I had absolutely no idea where to start. What would I do, destroy every last thing in the room?
I was on the verge of utter hopelessness when the door opened behind me and Mrs. Small came in, looking around in bewilderment. It was like someone had dropped her off outside and she’d wandered in to ask for directions.
Until last year, she’d owned one of those hair salons where they valet park your car and give you champagne while they do your hair, but it had gone out of business when people stopped paying two hundred dollars for a haircut. Now she was a faded version of her former self. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed in about a week, and the gray roots crept over the top of her head like a river overflowing its banks.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“It’s, um, a shirt,” I said. “But I don’t see it, so I’ll—”
“She got rid of a lot of things before she died.” Mrs. Small’s voice sounded strained. “She might have let someone else have it, or…I don’t mean to say she would throw something of yours away—”
“No, I understand,” I said. “Now that I think about it, I probably told her it was okay to lend it to someone else. It’s all right. I should get going.”
It felt like my lungs were compressed, and no breath I could take was deep enough to fill them.
No matter how determined I was to get rid of Lydia’s ghost, bursting into this place, which was filled with sadness that was a direct consequence of my own actions, was too much for me. This whole thing had been a serious strategic misfire. I was treading behind enemy lines without a single weapon. It was time to retreat.
But Mrs. Small sat on the edge of the mattress and looked up at me. “Are you one of the girls from her little club?”
I didn’t know whether to confirm or deny. I gave up and nodded.
“I was glad she found so many nice friends.” Mrs. Small’s fingers toyed with the hem of her robe. “I’d been worried about her. But she started hanging out with all those girls—all you girls—and she got so…pretty. She looked happy. So I stayed out of her way. But now I wonder if I should have…I don’t know.”
I started to feel like I was suffocating. I almost excused myself, but now that Mrs. Small had begun talking, the words poured out of her mouth.
“The doctors said there was no way we could have known. You can’t predict an aneurysm. But don’t you think a mother should be able to tell there’s something wrong with her baby?” She reached out, grabbed one of the hangers, and brought it down hard against her leg. “I wasn’t paying attention. I can’t even remember the last time I told her I loved her. If I could just go back and have one more minute—”
So she didn’t blame me.…
She blamed herself.
Tears bit at the edges of my eyes. “I should really get going.”
“They remember her, don’t they?” she asked. “The other girls? They think about her?”
“I do.” At last I could speak the truth. “I think about her all the time.”
To be honest, I didn’t know if the Sunshine Club girls thought about Lydia or not. You certainly never heard her name mentioned in casual conversation. Maybe I was the only person who ever thought about her. How depressing would that be?
“I just like to think people aren’t forgetting.” Mrs. Small refused to stop staring up at me, her tired eyes wide and pleading.
“I’m sure they’re planning some kind of memorial,” I said. “In the yearbook or something.”
There was the tiniest glimmer of hope in her eyes. “Yes, they might be…that would mean so much to her.”
“Yes,” I choked. As if Lydia cared in the least about the yearbook. “I’m sure.”
“Could you—” She looked afraid to speak, but steeled herself and kept talking. “Could you ask and see if they are? Could you tell them how much it would mean?”
What? As in, actually go to the yearbook office and make an official request to memorialize the girl who was actively trying to destroy my life?
No freaking way.
But then I saw how Mrs. Small looked like an actual living human being for the first time since I’d come into the house, and I couldn’t help myself. “Yeah, okay.”
“I’d offer to pay for something, but money’s a little scarce.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’s free.”
“Thank you,” she said, getting up and going to the dresser. “I’m so grateful that she had such nice friends…at the end.”
She turned to me, her fingers lightly petting some tiny object. When she saw me looking at it, she held out her hand and dropped something small and cool into my palm: a delicate gold chain with a little glass bird charm, black with a red head.
“It was her favorite piece,” her mother said. “A gift from my mother for Lydia’s ninth birthday. It’s a woodpecker. It means you have a guardian.”
Her favorite piece.
Her power center. The key to getting rid of her once and for all.
Mrs. Small’s fingers hovered in the air near mine, like she was eager to grab the necklace back.
“You know…” I said, “I could take a photo of this and…put it in the yearbook.”
I pictured myself taking it into the garage and smashing it to bits with a hammer.
Her hand trembled.
“It would be really nice, I think,” I said. “I think Lydia would have liked it.”
Welcome aboard, Alexis. This train goes straight to hell.
Mrs. Small’s mouth was open, and she looked at the bird one last time before reaching over and closing my fingers around it. “All right. Just…please…be careful with it. Promise me.”
I felt the cool glass on my skin, and I thought of what Lydia had done to Kendra. And to me.
“I promise,” I lied.
I really did intend to take pictures of it before I destroyed it.
But I didn’t get the chance.
When I got home and retreated to my room, after sneaking the hammer from the toolbox in the garage and setting a protective layer of cardboard on my desk, I dug down into my bag for the charm. But it wasn’t there.
Instead, there was a hole in the corner of the bag where a seam had come apart.
I retraced my steps to my car, and then I drove all the way back to Lydia’s house and retraced my steps there. I looked at every square inch of space within ten feet of where I’d walked, not even caring if Mrs. Small looked outside and saw me.
But the bird was gone.
SCHOOL STARTED UP AGAIN on a Wednesday. I took a deep breath as I got out of my car. New year, hopeful new outlook. (Or at least slightly less terrible outlook.)
The 700 wing was the newest building in the school. It had wide, spacious hallways with skylights and classrooms with air-conditioning that actually functioned. The only reason to stray this far from the center of campus before school was to be part of an advanced science lab or some sort of extracurricular organization, so all the kids I passed moved with purpose, like they had somewhere to be.
Halfway down the hall was a door marked PUBLICATIONS. A printed sign hung beneath that with the name of the yearbook: THE WINGSPAN.
I pushed the door open and walked into a large room that was painted nonregulation dark blue, with a row of computers along the far wall and bookshelves along the near one. About a third of the floor space was taken up with matching file cabinets, and next to those were a conference table and a small, untidy cluster of desks. Five or six kids sat on the desks, staring up at a giant whiteboard on the side wall. The whiteboard was covered in printed pages that seemed to represent an early draft of a yearbook.
A girl was talking. She had short curly hair, thin wire-frame glasses, and dark olive skin. Her baggy sweatshirt read harvard.
“It doesn’t make sense to try to divide clubs up by grade level. There are only six that determine their membership that way.” She pointed to a sheet with a list o
f club names on it. “We’re going to list them either alphabetically or grouped according to the type of activity. Actually…both. Alphabetically by activity.”
One of the boys opened his mouth to reply.
“Forget it, Chad,” she said. “That’s my final answer.”
They all scattered, with no one taking any particular notice of me. I hung back, not knowing whom to approach.
Finally, the curly-haired girl glanced over at me. “You look lost.”
“I’m looking for…” I consulted the note the office secretary had written for me. “Elliot Quilimaco? Is he here?”
“Hmm…someone’s looking for Elliot.…Is he here?” She put her hands on her hips and looked around the room, speaking in a loud voice. “You know, the boy in charge of the yearbook, because of course no mere female could ever be a yearbook editor. Has anyone seen Elliot, the exalted male?”
Nobody looked up. But the boy she’d called Chad, a burly guy with spiky dirty-blond hair, said, “Did you skip your meds today?”
She ignored him and turned back to me. “I am Elliot Quilimaco.”
“Sorry.” Couldn’t she have just said so? I mean, it is a boy’s name.
“Bless my stars!” she said, eyes widening in horror. “A girl named Elliot! Stop the presses!”
“Wait, really?” asked a boy a few feet away. He was hovering over a humming machine.
Elliot rolled her eyes. “That’s not a press, Kevin. It’s a laser printer.”
If I hadn’t already been saturated with regret about my promise to Mrs. Small, this would definitely have tipped me over the edge.
“What brings you to our humble corner of the school, Alexis?” she asked. “I thought you spent your time in the courtyard with the important people.”
She knew who I was?
She tapped her foot, waiting for my answer.
“Um,” I said. “I have a favor to ask.”
“I’m listening.”
I lowered my voice, not that anyone in the room seemed to be paying attention to us. “I was wondering if it would be possible to have some sort of memorial in the yearbook for Lydia Small—I mean, if you weren’t already planning something.”
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