by L. E. Flynn
I was already pissed off at Jenny. Not because of her loud voice or little snub nose or perky butt or the fact that she barely ever let me get a word in edgewise. I was irritated because we couldn’t even have a conversation anymore without Toby Hunter’s name coming up. But that day, she said another name that made my breath catch in my throat—Beau Hunter.
“He asked me out,” she said, her words rushed. “It’s not like I could say no. I mean, the guy’s brother just—well, you know. Offed himself.”
I knew. Of course I knew. Everyone in Morrison Beach knew what Toby Hunter had done, and half of them had their own theories about it. But Jenny knew my truth. I thought about that night, which was long before I knew Trixie, when Jenny and I drank wine coolers outside on Alison’s deck and I told her I loved Beau Hunter. She had hugged me and told me to ask him out, because he was too shy to ask me.
Eight minutes before I met Trixie, I wanted to wring Jenny’s neck.
I waited for Jenny to say something, anything, to acknowledge that night, the way we were close enough for me to smell her bubble gum–flavored lip gloss when I told her my biggest secret.
But she didn’t. I could have almost convinced myself that she didn’t remember, but then I saw her lips curl up, ever so slightly. She knew. She moved on, started talking about the football game on Friday and some party after. I lagged behind, digging my fingernails into my palms so hard my hands hurt. Then I stopped walking altogether.
“I forgot my uniform in my car,” I said, my voice flat. “I’ll catch up with you.”
She was my best friend and should have known it was a lie. I never forgot anything. But she just flipped me this dumb little wave and kept bounce-walking away.
Tears blurred my vision as I turned and walked back down the hallway, breaking into a run in the parking lot. When I got to my car, I opened the door and collapsed inside, the leather burning my thighs from the heat. I wrapped my hands around the steering wheel, even though it set my palms on fire. I balled my hands into fists and pounded the wheel. I opened my mouth to scream.
Then my passenger door opened, and Trixie was in my car.
“Can you do me a favor,” she said, sliding down the seat, her skin making a smuck sound as it stuck to the leather. “Can you give me a ride? I just need you to drive. I just need to disappear for a while.”
It wasn’t a question. She told me to drive and slunk down farther, until her legs were bent under the dashboard. I noticed the scrapes on her knees, like a little kid who kept falling down. She kept her hands in her lap and her nails were badly chewed, and she looked at me out of the side of her eye as if to say, What are you waiting for?
And for no reason other than that, I listened to her. I didn’t ask who she was or tell her to find her own ride or tell her to go to hell.
I drove.
I drove away from cheerleading practice, away from Jenny. I drove away from Robson High. I waited to feel guilty, but I never did.
She put her head down as we left the parking lot, and I wanted to ask her who she was hiding from, who she was running away from. Where we were supposed to be going. But it didn’t seem to matter. She hummed and tapped her fingers softly against her bare thigh, and I stared at the back of her head, at her dark roots and the peak of hair on the nape of her neck, and I wanted to go where a girl like that was going.
I drove past the beach, past downtown. I kept driving until she sat up and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.
“Hey, do you want to get something to eat?” she said.
No thank you. No explanation. After all that, she was the one who had the question.
“Sure,” I said, even though I wasn’t hungry.
“Turn left at the intersection. There’s a place that has the best cheeseburgers. Sorry, but I’m starving. I skipped lunch today.” She stretched her arms over her head like a cat. I noticed the raised pink lines on her left wrist, under a throng of bracelets, but pretended I didn’t. “I really owe you one. Let me buy you lunch.”
I didn’t tell her that I had eaten lunch hours ago, or that I didn’t eat meat. That I hadn’t eaten a cheeseburger since I turned twelve and Mom watched a documentary about how eating meat was evil. I thought about my cheerleading uniform waiting in my locker, how a cheeseburger would make it that much harder to squeeze into.
“Sure,” I said. Trixie had reduced me to one-syllable answers.
“Seriously,” she said. “Whatever you like, I’ll buy it for you. What’s your favorite food?”
I realized nobody had asked me that in years. “Salad,” I said instinctively, because that’s what Jenny and Alison would say.
The corners of her mouth turned up. “Come on. Salad sucks. What’s your real favorite food?”
I stared down at my patchwork jeans, the ones I had deconstructed and put back together myself. Jenny thought they were ugly, but suddenly I didn’t care what she thought.
“Chocolate,” I said, the very word filling me up. “Chocolate anything.”
She broke out in a huge grin. “They have the best chocolate milkshakes at this place. See, it’s perfect.” She paused. “I’m Trixie, by the way.”
“I’m—”
“Fiona, right? I’ve seen you around.”
I stifled a smile. She had seen me, and that seemed important somehow. Maybe because nobody else did.
“Yeah. I’m Fiona.”
I was Trixie’s getaway car that day, and I never told her so, but she was mine too.
6
WHEN I GET to school, I park my car in the student lot and make myself get out and walk through Robson’s red double doors. I mostly keep my eyes fixed on the ground, because the ground is the safest place. If I keep staring down, I can pretend he’s not here, beating heart and all, walking the same halls. And I can pretend that she is here, and that her heart really is still beating.
I bump into a bunch of people going the other way. I hear them mutter Watch where you’re going and Get out of the way and then Oh, that’s the girl whose friend died. Because that’s how I’ll now be remembered at Robson. The girl with the dead best friend.
Beau is around every corner, behind every open locker door, in front of every classroom. He’s everywhere and nowhere. Then, without warning, he’s actually right in front of me.
I don’t expect him to say anything. He stares at me like a deer caught in the headlights. I stare back, my brain flooding with all the stuff that never happened: drooping white roses and broken glass and cold tile and the sound of confessions slipping out just to be sucked back in.
“Hey,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
I’m numb, too numb to think of something to say. What does that mean, I’m sorry? What does it mean, coming from Beau Hunter? How many times has he said those two words in his lifetime, and how many people has he said them to?
Anger bubbles up so fast that it takes me by surprise, so hard that I want to punch him in the face to see if he bleeds. But I don’t, because his voice is so fragile and he’s still the Beau who took poetry books out of the library and got shy in big crowds, the Beau who brought me snow in Southern California, the Beau who offered me rides on his bike before any of us could drive, the Beau who gave me his chocolate milk at lunch. I don’t want to hurt that Beau, because he wouldn’t hurt me.
“I know what it’s like,” he says, “when someone just goes away.” Then he clears his throat, jams his hands in his pockets, and walks in the other direction, all crumpled over, like he’s trying to fold himself in half. I wait for him to turn around, and the fact that he does—only for a second, with his hair covering most of his face—is enough proof that I do still know him, at least a little bit.
Pressure builds behind my eyes and I count backward from ten, telling myself I’m not going to cry, not right here in the middle of the hallway, like a pathetic loser.
The next time I see him, he’s opening a classroom door for Jenny, just like a perfect gentleman. I wonder if he’ll go home
with her after school, if he’s taking her out on a date, or worse, if they’re staying in and they’ll be alone together. I told myself I could handle this but now I feel like I could shatter at any minute.
He looks around before entering the classroom after Jenny, but he doesn’t see me. Or he does a really convincing job of pretending he doesn’t.
Then again, he’s good at that now.
7
I WAS MAD at you the night of Alison’s party. I was mad because things had changed between us. You had been lying to me, and I wanted to ask you a thousand questions about why.
Why she really quit her job at the restaurant, and why she didn’t think she could tell me. Why she was always messaging Jasper on her phone when she claimed they were just friends with benefits and nothing more.
I was mad at her, but I still clung to her like a pathetic piece of Saran Wrap. I used her as a shield, dogged her like a shadow, hoping she’d give me the power to remain invisible.
“What are you drinking tonight?” she said. “I’ll get you something.”
“Anything alcoholic,” I said, because it didn’t matter. I just wanted to be out of my body. When I slunk through the crowd, the whispers and stares started. I couldn’t actually see or hear them, and maybe it was all in my head, but it didn’t feel that way. I tried to read their lips, imagined what they were saying.
Oh my god, she’s so big.
How’d she let herself get like that?
How does anyone let themselves get like that?
My eyes darted around the room. I was even angrier with Trixie because she had made me wear the red dress and I knew I must have looked like an overstuffed sausage. She had picked this outfit and dragged me here and stuck me inside a nightmare. It was like she knew I wanted to talk to her and she kept slipping around it, dodging the sharp edges of my questions, taking me to the one place we couldn’t be alone. Pushing me away and pulling me back, like seaweed caught in the tide.
I knew the bathroom was upstairs, first door on the left. I ran up the stairs. I was breathing hard when I got to the top, and I opened the bathroom door without knocking to make sure it was empty.
I should have knocked, because it wasn’t empty.
The lights were on and Jenny was sitting on the counter, with her legs wrapped around Beau’s waist. I saw Jenny’s eyes fly open, watched her expression go from shock to annoyance and back to shock again. Then I made the mistake of making eye contact with Beau in the mirror.
I saw the one thing there that could break me: softness. He was still in there, the old Beau, the one I fell in love with, the one who looked for the quietest room at a party because he couldn’t stand the noise.
I turned around and ran back down the stairs. And I hated Trixie the whole time. It was easy to blame it all on her. Because if she hadn’t jumped in my car that day, I would have screamed and pounded the steering wheel and went back to cheerleading practice and lived my old life. Maybe it would have been me in there with my skinny jeans–clad legs wrapped around Beau Hunter. I would have been invited to Alison’s party instead of just showing up. Maybe listening to Trixie when she told me to drive was the biggest mistake of my life.
But when I got to the bottom of the stairs, she was waiting with two plastic cups. She thrust one out toward me and told me to drink it, and then raised her cup up to mine.
“Cheers,” she said, and my drink was so strong that I sputtered. “Hey, is something wrong? You look upset.”
“It’s fine.” I took another gulp of my drink. “Seriously.”
“Okay,” she said, dragging out the word. “You know you don’t have to lie to me, right?”
“I know. Everything’s fine.”
By the third drink, I could barely taste the alcohol. My head was spinning, but in the best possible way. I felt light, airy, uncomplicated.
Trixie was beside me, matching me drink for drink.
But when I think about it, she didn’t seem drunk at all.
8
THE WORST PART of starting senior year with no best friend isn’t feeling alone. I was prepared to start the year without seeing Trixie in the halls, but that was in a world where I’d see her after school and tell her how horrible it was without her. But this new world is all phantom pain. It’s the morbid sensation that she’s still here, that any minute she’ll spring out from behind an open locker door and ask me what I think of her purple lipstick, and I’ll tell her it looks great on her, because it does, because somehow she can pull off everything that I never have the courage to try.
It’s watching people move on, people who didn’t know her and read the news about a missing girl—which she was, for forty-eight hours—then read the news about her suicide and got the Talk from their parents about being open and honest. I’m sharing the hallways with people who will never question the idea that Trixie Heller walked into the ocean and drowned, because Trixie Heller was wallpaper to them, a girl who didn’t smile much and kept to herself. Trixie Heller was a cautionary tale, a tragedy. By the time they start college, they’ll forget all about her because other tragedies will be layered on top—a bad haircut or a bad breakup. I want to grab them by the shoulders, leap on their backs, and tell them who she was. That she was wickedly funny. That she was just plain wicked sometimes. That she had great taste in clothes. That the ugly JERSEY GIRL tank top she left behind on the beach, folded neatly on top of her flip-flops, was not really her at all. That the fact she wore it that night feels like a message.
The locker we shared is mine now. We cleared it out together at the end of last year because the school makes all the students dump their locker contents before summer starts. As a joke, we left a picture of us inside a magnetic frame. Except, when I open the locker door now, the frame is all that remains. The picture, one of the only photos existing of the two of us together—taken by Trixie’s dad on her last birthday—is gone. Somebody must have taken it, but I can’t think who would want it.
I turn around like I’m being watched, and I am being watched. Jasper is lurking by the door to the art room—okay, he’s only standing there, but everything about Jasper’s posture is creepy. He hunches, like his shoulders have given up on trying and decided to just cave in. Plus, his face is etched in a permanent scowl, like he has never had a happy thought. Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe his whole life has been one long series of disappointments.
Maybe we have that in common.
I feel like I should say something to him, that we should try to find some shared ground. Because he’s the only other person in this school who actually knew Trixie—who knew her laugh lost its sound when she thought something was really funny, who knew she had zero patience for slow walkers and slow talkers and, most of all, slow drivers, even though she was always the passenger because she never got her license.
He’s the only other person in this school who might not believe she actually walked into the ocean on purpose and let the tide carry her away, because she wouldn’t have had the patience for that either.
But when I open my mouth, hoping the right words are there, it doesn’t matter. He’s already gone.
9
YOU KNEW MY mom didn’t like you, and you didn’t care. You were used to the judgment, wore it as easily as your clothes.
Trixie wasn’t anything like Jenny, who was forever trying to suck up to my mom. Always complimenting her on how young she looked and asking for her vegetarian lasagna recipe and inviting her to watch movies with us. Hi, Ms. Fontaine. You look nice today, Ms. Fontaine. That just wasn’t Trixie.
Trixie came back to my house with me after we ate cheeseburgers on that first day. I didn’t invite her—she just got back into my car, like we had already made plans.
“Can we stop at that convenience store quickly? I just want to get some snacks. I know we just ate, but I’m always hungry.” She patted her flat stomach, and before she went into the store, pulled a blue baseball cap out of her purse and jammed it on her head, a clumsy disguise. It was too
big for her, as if it belonged to a boy.
I could tell Mom disapproved the second her eyes skirted over Trixie. She saw the bag of potato chips in Trixie’s hand and the ring in her lip, and then she looked right at me and asked why I wasn’t at practice.
“It was canceled,” I said. I was surprised at how easily the lie slid out. It had been waiting to escape the whole time.
Trixie never asked what kind of practice I was supposed to be at. She never asked me why I wasn’t there. The way I saw it, she didn’t need to.
“You look like your mom,” she said matter-of-factly when we were upstairs in my room, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“I guess,” I said. “I’ve never even seen a picture of my dad. He split before I was born.”
I don’t know why I told her that. I never told anyone that. Jenny and Alison both had parents who were still together, who wanted them home to eat dinner as a family. I felt embarrassed that I was different, and I waited for Trixie to judge me.
“People suck sometimes,” she said, staring up at the ceiling.
“How about you? Do you look like your mom or your dad?”
“I don’t know.” She shoveled a handful of chips into her mouth and wiped her hand on her shorts. “I’m adopted. My birth mom got rid of me.”
I felt like an idiot, but maybe we were alike. We had both been abandoned by somebody.
“Is this what you’re all about?” she said, touching my jeans with her fingers and pointing to the sewing machine in the corner. “You make clothes?”
I’d never heard it put like that before. Is this what you’re all about? But I just nodded, hoping she didn’t think it was lame. I could tell Jenny didn’t get it. She liked to shop at the mall, where everything looked the same.