The Secrets We Keep

by Trisha Leaver

  “What’s going on between you two?” There was no demand in his tone. It was nothing more than a simple question laced with confusion. I watched as his entire body went rigid, tense, almost like he didn’t want me to answer, like he didn’t want to know. In public, when our friends or Josh were listening, he’d be protective and kind, secure in where he stood with me. But here, in the relative privacy of this dark corner, he looked scared.

  “Nothing is going on. He’s upset about Ella. We both are. I was trying to help.”

  “I know he’s the reason you left school early yesterday. You were talking to him in the staircase between classes and you went to his house last night.”

  “Are you following me?”

  He actually looked offended that I would even suggest such a thing. “No, Maddy. I wasn’t following you. I was here, fielding questions about your odd behavior, making up excuses about why you ran out of class and why you’ve decided to make Molly your new best friend. What I don’t know is why you went to Josh’s house instead of mine.”

  “I don’t need you to make excuses for me,” I said, irritated with myself for being too weak to handle one day in public as Maddy. “And Josh, well, I wouldn’t worry about him, he’s pretty much written me off.”

  “So you say.” He was angry now, I could hear it in his tone as he struggled to keep his voice down and not make a scene. He leaned forward, and I felt his breath against my neck. “Because when my girlfriend leaves school without so much as a goodbye, doesn’t answer her phone, and leaves another guy’s house dressed in his clothes later that night … yeah, well, I kinda think I’m entitled to worry, wouldn’t you say?”

  How did he know I was wearing Josh’s clothes? “Who told you that? Who told you where I was?”

  He took a step back and braced his hand against the wall, giving himself enough space to calm down while keeping me from passing. “Doesn’t matter who told me,” he answered quietly. “I just want to know why. Why did you go to him instead of me? Why do you trust him more than me lately?”

  Oh, it did matter who had told him. I managed to duck out from underneath his arm and scan the hall. It didn’t take me long to find her, standing there pretending she was reading the notices on the student activities board. She wasn’t reading crap. Besides, it’s not like she had a life outside of stalking Josh. Kim had told him. That crazy girlfriend of Josh’s had told him.

  I didn’t know who I was more upset with—Kim for sticking her nose where it didn’t belong or Alex for actually thinking for a second Maddy would cheat on him. “You believe Kim? After everything, you believe her over me?”

  “I wouldn’t have two months ago. I wouldn’t have two days ago. But since you came back to school—” He paused and shook his head. “I don’t know you anymore, Maddy, and that scares the crap out of me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I tried for angry, which wasn’t a stretch considering I was fuming over Kim’s meddling. “What are you trying to say?”

  “First Molly, then Jenna, now Josh. Are you trying to lose everything?”

  “So I am supposed to forget what happened, pretend I am happy, and go on like everything is perfect?”

  “That’s not what I meant, Maddy, and you know it. I’m the one person who actually gets what your sister meant to you. I remember every conversation we ever had about her, about how you wished you could be more confident like Ella and not care what people thought. How you wished you had half her talent. How you wished we had friends as loyal and honest as Josh.”

  I shook my head at his words, tears rimming my eyes. Maddy never wanted to be me; she’d said as much that night in the car. How she was tired of covering for me, tired of making excuses for my lack of social skills.

  “You have no idea how much she meant to me. You couldn’t,” I said.

  The anger and confusion I’d seen in Alex’s eyes faded as he held out his hand to me. I took it and let him pull me in to his chest. “Josh may be able to tell you who your sister’s favorite band was or how much salt she liked to dump on her pizza, but he can’t remind you of the things you did when you were kids. He doesn’t know about all the time you spent sitting on the hood of my car scanning the latest issue of the school’s newspaper for her drawings.”

  I didn’t know Maddy did that, didn’t know she cared. “And you can? You can remind me of that?”

  “Every day if that’s what you need. You have told me so much about her, I can guarantee I know her as well as Josh does, maybe better.”

  “She applied to the Rhode Island School of Design, did you know that?”

  Alex nodded. “Of course I did. You showed me the three drawings she was working on for her application.”

  The look on my face must have told him I had no memory of that because he laughed before explaining. “The weekend before the accident we were at your house. We had stopped there on our way to Narragansett Beach because you wanted to change. Something about not having the right shoes on for the bonfire and sand. Ella was out with Josh. There was a modern art exhibit in Boston she wanted to see.”

  I remembered that day like it was yesterday. The exhibit was fantastic, but the two-hour ride to Boston sucked. That, and Kim had called every ten minutes asking when Josh would be home.

  “I was complaining that we didn’t have time to stop by your house and pick up the beer, but you insisted I come in, said it would only take a minute.”

  Nothing ever took Maddy a minute. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m not.” Alex grinned, and I got the feeling they’d done a lot more than grab a different pair of shoes. “You went into her room to borrow her hairbrush and saw the application sitting on her desk with her sketches.”

  I’d actually shoved the application underneath a bunch of homework to keep Mom and Dad from seeing it. Maddy must have had to move a lot of stuff around to find it, but whatever. “Which one was your favorite?”

  Alex dropped his backpack and pulled out his wallet, then handed me a folded piece of paper he had tucked inside. It was a photocopy of a picture I drew of Maddy freshman year. We were about a month into school and the sting of her no longer wanting to be seen with me was still raw. I used to sit at the table and sketch while Josh and his friends talked. I’d draw everything from the trash can to the clock on the wall, but this one was of Maddy. It was crude—sucked, actually—but it was definitely her. And it wasn’t one I even had in the pile of contenders for my art school portfolio.

  “I know where she kept the real one,” I said. “You can have it if you want.”

  “No. You keep it,” Alex said as he took his copy back.

  “She got in to RISD. That’s what I was talking to Josh about. They were planning on going together. That’s why he was so upset.”

  “Did you think she wouldn’t get in?” Alex asked. “She was amazing, Maddy. Better than Josh.”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know how to make any of this right.”

  He shook his head, his words coming after a long sigh. “There is nothing to make right, Maddy. The roads were wet and you weren’t going that fast. I was there when you woke up, when the police questioned you. You weren’t drunk. They gave you two blood alcohol tests and both of them showed nothing. It’s been ruled an accident. What happened to your sister was an accident.”

  “I know that.” I was mumbling, could hear the sad desperation in my voice. “But things are different now. I’m different now. The Maddy before the accident … it’s like I don’t know her anymore. I don’t know what to say or how I am supposed to act.”

  It felt good to finally admit it, to acknowledge that I was as confused as he was. “Everything was easier then,” I whispered. “I want to go back to that night and start over, trade places with her.”

  “You mean you wish you had died instead of her?” Alex asked. I didn’t expect the flash of pain I heard in Alex’s voice, didn’t expect him to shrink away from me.

  “Yes. No. M
aybe. I don’t know anymore. I’m tired of pretending. I’m tired of trying to be someone I am not.” It was the first honest thing I’d said to him, and it felt good, fantastic even, for once, to be myself.

  “You mean you want to be like her? Like Ella?” Alex asked as he pulled me into his arms and guided my head to his chest.

  “Maybe I do. Maybe I want to be exactly like Ella,” I whispered.

  “That’s not who you are, Maddy.”

  That’s exactly who I am, I said silently to myself.

  “Remember when you first learned what happened to Molly? Remember how hard that was?”

  I thought back to last year, tried to connect Maddy to Molly’s social downfall, but I got nothing. If anything, Maddy was her normal, I-don’t-have-time-for-you self. When she wasn’t home or at school, she was wherever Alex was. But that wasn’t unusual; since freshman year, since the day she first sat down at his table, they’d been inseparable.

  “And?” I didn’t know what else to say and that seemed like the vaguest way to keep him talking.

  “It got better. After a few months, people stopped gossiping about her. You stopped worrying so much that people would figure out what you’d done and things went back to normal. In time, this will get better, too.”

  “Time,” I repeated. It seemed like such a simple solution. Such an insanely logical and completely stupid solution.

  Alex reached down and picked up the backpack I’d dropped and looped it over his own shoulder. “Just be yourself—the you of the last three years, and I promise you, everything will be fine.”

  31

  Being the old Maddy wasn’t as hard as I thought. With Alex thinking I was two steps away from losing it, he made running interference his full-time job, deflecting any question that came my way. He opted out of lunch in the cafeteria and let me retreat to the library where no one would bother me. Although I think that was more about keeping me away from Molly and Josh than my mental stability. The reason didn’t matter; it worked the same.

  I kept my distance from Josh for the rest of the day. It helped that he and Maddy weren’t in any of the same classes. I caught him glancing my way in the hall the following afternoon, but Alex quickly moved in, blocking my view and distracting me. I didn’t catch what he was saying, just the words Snow Ball and colors.

  I quickly looked up at the posters covering the walls. Some were advertising ticket sales and others were promoting Jenna for Snow Ball queen. They all had some combination of pink and purple in them so it seemed like a safe guess. “Pink, I think, maybe purple,” I said, then went back to sorting books in my locker.

  “You want me to wear a purple tie?”

  “What?”

  He took the few books I had in my hand and shoved them into my bag. “I asked if you expected me to wear a purple tie.”

  I shook my head, trying uselessly to understand why the color of his tie mattered. He could wear a black-and-orange-striped one for all I cared. “Uh … no,” I said, hoping that was the correct response. “Wear a black one or a blue one. Either one is fine; I don’t care.”

  “Well, what color is your dress?”

  “What dress?” The closest I’d come to wearing a dress in the last ten years was an overly long shirt, and even then, I threw on a pair of wool leggings.

  “The one you bought with Jenna way back in September.”

  I mentally shuffled through Maddy’s closet. She had at least a dozen formal dresses in there. I’d gone through her entire closet the past three days, trying everything on in an attempt to make myself look exactly like her. But I hadn’t seen any dresses with tags or still wrapped in plastic. “I don’t know. Brown?”

  “Really, brown?” Alex looked surprised and grunted in disgust.

  I immediately understood my mistake. Outside of a pair of gloves and a scarf, Maddy didn’t own a single article of clothing that was brown. Nothing even tan. Crap. “Doesn’t matter, I wasn’t planning on going.”

  “Uh, yeah, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.” The last dance I went to was our father-daughter dance in elementary school. Dad had to split his time between Maddy and me. Half an hour in, I gave up, let Maddy monopolize his time while I played mat ball with the boys in the gym. “Why does it matter if I go, anyway? You go.”

  “I am going. With you.”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t budging on this one. It was one thing to be Maddy at school where I could escape to the bathroom or the library to regain my sanity. It was something completely different to be put on display, to have to walk in heels and make small talk about who was wearing what, or more accurately, who was doing who. It was only a matter of time before Jenna, Alex, and this entire school figured out what Josh already had—I was no Maddy Lawton.

  “You are the one who told me to avoid Josh and Molly. I think not going is the perfect idea,” I told Alex.

  He laughed and started walking away, then turned around when he was a few feet from me and held out his hand. Apparently, I was supposed to follow. “Last I checked, Josh wasn’t going,” he said. “And I doubt Molly will go without a date, so you are good there, too.”

  I couldn’t help the sudden joy that filled me. I knew Kim wanted to go; she’d been talking about it since they started dating. How cool it was going to be to go to the Snow Ball with a senior. She went so far as to try to set me up with someone, figuring I could double with them. I didn’t have to put a stop to that; Josh did it for me, warning her that setting me up was nearly as horrible an idea as him going to the dance in the first place. I’d assumed by now she had worn him down.

  “Josh isn’t going?”

  Alex gave me a cursory glance, no doubt wondering why I cared. “Last I checked, he doesn’t do much of anything. Since the night of the accident, I’ve seen him at school and at your sister’s burial service but that’s it. Outside of school, he is a virtual shut-in.”

  I yanked Alex to a stop and pulled my hand free. “Wait. Him and Kim.”

  Alex shook his head. “How should I know? And besides, why do you care?”

  “I don’t,” I said, hoping he’d believe me. “It would suck if he didn’t go because of—”

  “Don’t worry about him. He needs some time, Maddy. Everyone does.”

  * * *

  Alex threaded his fingers through mine and tugged me the few remaining feet to the girls’ locker room. He knocked once before opening the door a crack and yelled in to see if it was empty. School had ended over a half hour ago. Anybody still in there was going to get chewed out for being late for practice.

  When no one answered, he pushed the door all the way open and peeked inside. Seeing nothing, he pulled me in. “I figured you hadn’t seen this yet.”

  With the exception of gym, which my broken wrist had blessedly excused me from, I never set foot in the girls’ locker room. I didn’t play a sport and saw no need to shower at school. But I knew exactly where Maddy’s locker was. There was an entire block of them set aside for the field hockey team. Maddy’s was smack in the middle, her name artfully etched into the metal.

  Tucked in the corner of the locker room was a roll of paper, not unlike the ones Josh and I used when we were sketching out murals. Alex handed me the edge and motioned for me to lay it flat on the floor. I did, using one of the field hockey sticks sitting on the bench to anchor it.

  It was huge, easily spanning the length of seven lockers. WELCOME BACK, MADDY. Names of people I didn’t know covered the entire surface. Alex’s was there, Jenna’s, too. Keith, Molly, Hannah, and a couple of other kids I recognized from Maddy’s lunch table. The rest …

  I gave up trying to place faces with the names and started counting. Seventy-three total.

  “They’re planning on hanging this at the field hockey game this Friday,” Alex said as he held the other side down with his hand. “To celebrate your first week back at school.”

  I read a few of the notes, glancing over most. Alex’s message was tagged with an I love you,
and Jenna had scribbled out a curt Get well soon. Molly’s was the longest. She’d wished me well like the rest of them, but also written an offer of help, her pretty handwriting saying she’d be there to listen if I needed someone to talk to. Funny how the one person Alex had warned me to steer clear of was the one person who had offered to help.

  “That’s why you are going,” Alex said, cutting into my thoughts. “Jenna may be pushing hard for Snow Ball queen, but she won’t win. I made sure of that. And, well, no one is running against me for king, so…”

  I turned and stared at him. I’d pegged him completely wrong. I had expected him to be egocentric and obsessed with popularity. But at the end of the day, no matter how obsessed he seemed to be with his image, he cared more about Maddy.

  “I have been back at school for three days, Alex. Three short days. I’m not ready yet.” And seeing well wishes sprawled across the banner didn’t help. If anything, it made it worse, kicked the expectations up a notch.

  “I know,” he said. “But it’s only November. You have a couple more weeks to figure things out. Besides, it’s not like you have a choice, and it’s not like you’ll be alone. I’ll be there to help you. Our friends will, too.”

  32

  It was past six when I got home. I expected Mom to be worried, maybe angry. I hadn’t talked to her since Monday when I ran out and left her crying on her bedroom floor.

  The house was dark and the driveway was empty except for Mom’s SUV. I opened the front door and was greeted by the dog. No smell of dinner cooking, no TV blaring the news. Only darkness surrounded by silence.

  I flipped on a light and dropped my backpack to the floor. The kitchen looked exactly the same as this morning—coffeepot still filled with sludge, dishes still in the sink, dog still covered with day-old soup. I turned off the coffee, dumped the grounds into the trash, and gave Bailey a quick paper towel and water bath. I thought about doing the dishes, but the dishwasher was full and clean. That meant I’d have to empty it first, which I didn’t want to do.