The Secrets We Keep

by Trisha Leaver

  “She mentioned that you said something to her about her father and money. I asked you not to, Maddy, but you did it anyway.”

  I had. I was pissed, and she had it coming. I wouldn’t apologize; I wasn’t sorry. “So you and Jenna—”

  Alex shrugged, and my heart sank. “We spent a lot of time together in school when you were out recovering from the accident. You refused to talk to her, made me be the one to answer her calls and relay information. What did you expect?”

  I resisted the urge to answer, to yell that his getting close to Jenna was in no way my fault. That I had expected him to give me some time, not run to Jenna for comfort. Instead, I shook my head and ground my nails deeper into my palms.

  “I’m not sleeping with her,” Alex said.

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. Just because they hadn’t had sex didn’t mean something wasn’t going on. It didn’t make all the time he spent with her okay.

  “You’re different now, Maddy,” he continued. “Distant and quiet. I can’t even get you to open up to me, never mind your friends.”

  I thought about challenging him, asking him what he thought our conversation in the hall yesterday afternoon was about, but I didn’t. I went on the defensive: “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Nothing, but it’s nice to spend time with somebody who knew the old you.”

  The old me? The original Maddy? Even Alex, the boy who ignored every indication that I wasn’t Maddy, was beginning to doubt me. And without him, I couldn’t navigate this lie … this life of Maddy’s. I’d killed my sister, and then in some attempt to give her back her life, I’d completely destroyed the one good thing she had—Alex.

  “If I try harder, if I start talking to you about what happened and going to parties and field hockey practice again, will you stop spending so much time with Jenna? Will you stop letting her come between us?”

  He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, then sighed as he shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think you can go back to the way you used to be. I don’t think anybody could after going through that.”

  I knew what he was saying—it wasn’t Jenna who had driven a wedge between Alex and me, it was me. Alex and my parents were the one constant in this whole mess, and they were starting to slip away.

  I could feel the tears building behind my lashes and cursed them. Tears weren’t going to help me and they couldn’t bring my sister back. And at the end of the day, that was the only thing I wanted—my sister. Alive. The promise that they’d call her name right after mine at graduation. The knowledge that even if we went to separate colleges, she’d only be a phone call or a spring break away. I wanted to meet her future husband for the first time over dinner, and laugh as Dad grilled him with asinine questions. I wanted to help her pick out her wedding dress and complain about the short maid-of-honor dress she’d undoubtedly make me wear. And I wanted our kids to play hide-and-seek in Mom and Dad’s house while Maddy and I did the dishes and served up dessert. That was what I wanted. That was what I needed, and it wasn’t ever going to happen.

  Alex reached for my hand, and I let him take it. “It’s not that I don’t love you, Maddy. God, I so do, but I am beginning to think I’m not the one to help you get past this.”

  Nobody could help me get past this.

  I yanked my hand away and shoved it underneath my legs. I didn’t want to be touched, or consoled, or eased into being dumped. At this point, I wanted to be left alone.

  I quickly swiped at the lone tear I could feel rolling down my cheek. Until a month ago, I didn’t even like Alex Furey and couldn’t figure out why my sister was so utterly fascinated with him. But he’d come to visit me every day in the hospital, stopped by each night while I was at home. He did everything he could think of to try to pull me out of the darkness in my mind. And when I’d come back to school, he protected me, shielded me from the questions and speculation. That was what Maddy saw in him. That was the Alex she knew and loved. And I’d destroyed that like I’d destroyed her.

  “Go,” I told him. He started to argue with me, and I pushed him away. “I’m fine, Alex, go.”

  He kissed my cheek before reaching into the backseat for his bag. “I love you, Maddy. That won’t ever change.”

  The cold air hit me as he opened the door, the few pieces of paper I had left on the floor taking flight. Alex caught a gum wrapper, balled it up, and shoved it into his coat pocket. The other piece of paper, the one I’d been carrying around in my back pocket, the one about Molly, managed to make it outside the car. He picked it up and stared at it, his face going white as he realized what it was.

  Dropping his bag to the ground, he climbed back into my car and locked the door. Tossing the article onto the dashboard, he turned in his seat to face me. “Talk, Maddy. Now.”

  38

  “Why are you bringing this up?” Alex asked. “You put this behind you a long time ago, Maddy. We put it behind us. Leave it there.”

  Maddy hadn’t put it behind her. She’d buried it in a shoe box in her closet with a bag of pills. And judging from the most recent addition to her quasi scrapbook, which incidentally was a copy of the anime club’s September newsletter, she had revisited the memory often.

  I suspected Maddy’s interest in Molly’s drug tests was more than friendly concern. It wasn’t like Maddy had kept shoe box files on her other friends. But judging from the panic I could see written across Alex’s face, I’d have bet my life—if I still had mine to give—that Maddy felt guilty, that she’d done something she regretted and couldn’t fix. Something that had been slowly, painfully eating her alive.

  Now I needed to figure out how deep that connection went. “Why did you let me do it? If you love me so much, then why didn’t you stop me?”

  I held my breath as I waited for his response, hoping that I was wrong and Maddy had nothing to do with any of this.

  “If you remember correctly, I tried. I told you it wasn’t worth it, that I didn’t care if you were captain of the field hockey team or a JV player who never made it off the bench,” Alex said.

  “That’s not true,” I said, baiting him so he’d tell me more. Alex loved being popular, he and Maddy both did.

  “So you’re guilty of what—giving her one too many beers last year at one of my parties? Let it go at that, Maddy. For both our sakes, please, let it go at that.”

  “I didn’t just give her a beer,” I fired back. I was walking a fine line now and risked exposing myself. But I needed the truth. I needed to know what huge secret of Maddy’s I was supposed to live with. “I have the bag of pills.”

  “Jesus, Maddy. Why didn’t you get rid of them? Why are you hanging on to them?” Alex shook his head, his tone softening. “You slipped a pill into her beer on Saturday night. It’s not like you had any idea that they were going to test the entire team at Sunday’s practice. It’s not like you would’ve done it had you known.”

  I held my hand up for him to stop. I knew what had happened to her next. I’d read it five thousand times in Maddy’s little collection of facts. Molly had tested positive and got kicked off the team. The colleges that were scouting her were no longer interested, and she found herself in rehab for a drug problem she didn’t have. And when she came back, none of her friends wanted anything to do with her.

  Maddy wasn’t stupid. She had to believe, on some level, that this was completely her fault. And now she was trapped, living with guilt about what had happened. Not unlike me. But she had had Alex to get her through it, to tell her to let it go. I didn’t have anybody anymore. Not even Josh.

  “I don’t understand why I did it in the first place, why I cared. She was our friend, Alex. Why would I want to screw over my friend like that?”

  He looked at me as if I were crazy. “It was the beginning of our junior year, Maddy. We were finally upperclassmen. You were elected homecoming queen, and I had been given a starting position on the soccer team. You … we had everything you ever wanted,
except—”

  “Except what? Being co-captain of the field hockey team?” It seemed like such a selfish reason. My emotions shifted. I didn’t feel bad for Maddy anymore. I was angry, disgusted that my sister had been so catty and concerned with her own popularity that she would treat someone like that.

  “Yeah. That is exactly what you wanted, what I assumed you still wanted. Jenna was a shoo-in; it was between you and Molly. You know how it goes, captain spots go to the team members who clock the most playing time, the best players. You and Molly … you were both goalies. If she had missed Sunday practice or played crappy because she was sick, the second captain spot would have gone to you. You weren’t trying to ruin her life, Maddy, just eliminate her chances of becoming co-captain.”

  “Of course Jenna was a shoo-in.” The mere mention of Jenna’s name had my blood boiling. The more I learned about Maddy’s life, about her friends, the less I liked Jenna. She had her hands in everything, and none of it was good.

  “Don’t blame this on her, Maddy. She may have given you the idea, but you are the one who actually did it.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “You and I talked about this for days. I told you to let it go. It didn’t matter to me whether you were captain or not. I doubt it mattered to your parents or the colleges you wanted to apply to. You were good, that was enough.”

  “Molly was good, too,” I mumbled, remembering the one game of my sister’s I went to. Molly played that day, and she was as good as, if not better than, Maddy.

  “She was. But remember, it wasn’t about Molly. It was about Jenna. You were the one who didn’t want to be one-upped by Jenna.”

  I already knew the answer to the question I was about to ask. Jenna had made it pretty clear earlier today, but I asked anyway, wanting to see exactly whose side Alex was on. “So she knows. This whole time she’s known that I drugged Molly and she hasn’t said a word? Hasn’t tried to use it against me? Don’t you find that the least bit odd?”

  Alex flinched, as if what I said had caught him off guard. “Of course she knows. Her older brother got the pills for you. And no, she would never use it against you. She can be conniving sometimes, I’ll give you that, but she is not that cold.”

  I thought about selling her out to Alex, clueing him in to her little ultimatum in the bathroom. It took me less than a second to decide not to. That’d make me no better than Jenna.

  But I wasn’t going to let that comment go unanswered either. “I don’t think you know Jenna as well as you think you do, Alex.”

  “Maybe it’s you I don’t know as well as I used to.”

  He was spot-on there. “Probably.”

  Neither of us said anything after that. I’d gotten what I’d come for. I had the answers I had been seeking, but somehow that knowledge didn’t help. Having to carry the weight of my sister’s secret was something I wasn’t prepared to do. I hadn’t signed on for this. I could play Barbie doll, pretend I wasn’t smart, and fake interest in things I hated, but this … I didn’t know what to do with this.

  Sitting here in the dark with Alex waiting for the rest of my world to crumble down wasn’t going to help either. “I don’t know what to say.” I didn’t look at him when I spoke, didn’t have the energy to dissect the emotions playing across his face.

  “I don’t think there is anything else to say.”

  Alex tore the newspaper clipping in two and shoved it in his coat pocket. He could destroy that one and the dozen others sitting in that shoe box if he wanted to. It wouldn’t change anything.

  He opened the car door and got out. “Go home, Maddy, and forget about this. It wasn’t your fault, and there is nothing you can do to change what happened.”

  I disagreed. An apology to Molly would be a good start.

  “Take tomorrow off from school and get a handle on yourself. I’ll cover for you, tell everybody you have a doctor’s appointment or something. I’ll pick you up at three and take you to your field hockey game. And on Monday…”

  Alex didn’t finish his thought, but I didn’t need him to. I knew what he meant. On Monday, I had to get up and do it over again. Pretend to be my sister, try to find a way to deal with the emptiness that filled me while making pointless conversation with her friends … with Jenna.

  I waited until Alex had pulled out of the lot to start my car. Going home wasn’t an option. Mom was there and Dad was probably trying to coax her out of their room, away from the collection of my stuff she had surrounded herself with. I didn’t need another reminder of how I’d messed everything up.

  I pulled out my phone and texted the one lie I was sure Dad would buy: Staying at Jenna’s.

  It took a few minutes, but the phone finally chimed with a simple message: Have fun.

  I drove around for hours that night, pulled into our driveway twice, then pulled back out. I would’ve gone to talk to Maddy, curled up on the ground beneath my own name, but the cemetery gates were locked at dusk, leaving me with nowhere to go.

  It was past midnight when I pulled up across the street from Josh’s house. The house was dark, the streetlight at the end of his driveway broken and flickering to its death. That’s where I spent the night—in my car, parked across the street from Josh’s, watching, remembering, and dreaming about what I would’ve done differently had I known, as soon as I woke up in the hospital, that he loved me, too.

  39

  The sharp rap on the window jarred me awake. I snapped my head up, making contact with the back of my seat. My neck hurt, not from the sudden motion but from sleeping hunched over my steering wheel for the past few hours.

  The knock was softer now but equally urgent. I cleared my eyes and looked toward the window. The thin layer of ice covering the glass made it difficult to see, but eventually I could make out a face. It was Josh. He had his hat and gloves on, his backpack slung over one shoulder. I turned on the car and jacked up the heat before rolling down the window.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  I looked past him to his driveway. Kim was standing there staring straight at me.

  “I asked you what you are doing here,” Josh said again.

  “Nothing.”

  “Go home, Maddy.”

  “But—” I started to argue, to tell him to stop calling me that, to give me a second chance, but he waved me off.

  “You had your chance yesterday. There’s nothing here for you anymore.”

  I didn’t wait for him to walk away this time, couldn’t stomach watching him get in the car with Kim. I put my car in gear and left, driving until I hit the town line. I sat there for hours, parked in the breakdown lane with my flashers on, literally feet away from a new town … a new life.

  Nobody stopped to help me. Not one cop or Good Samaritan pulled over to see if I needed help. Funny how I could sit here for two hours and seventeen minutes and not one of the hundreds of people who drove by thought to stop. Yet spend two seconds acting weird in the high school cafeteria and you were suddenly the object of everybody’s attention.

  A thousand thoughts flew through my mind about Molly and what my sister had unintentionally set into motion. I knew Maddy was sorry for what she’d done. I could feel it in my heart, saw it in the tears she’d tried to hide the night of Alex’s party. And I’d taken away her chance to apologize to Molly.

  The emptiness I’d been struggling to overcome settled around me like a dark, unwavering cloud. My sister, my best friend, the one who shared my birthday, was gone. Forever. And it was there on the side of the road, as I raged in my car, screamed and cried and cursed my sister for leaving me, that I finally embraced the pain and made my decision.

  I turned the car around in the middle of the road and drove, without thinking, back to school, back to the two people I wanted to apologize to first.

  The school parking lot was full. I could either wedge my car between the Dumpster and the buses-only zone in front of the school or park way over on the other side of the fields. The Dumpster-
buses-only spot worked; I wasn’t planning on being here long anyway.

  I didn’t bother to sign myself in. The front office had probably already marked me absent. By the time the school secretary got around to calling my parents this afternoon, it’d be too late. By then, they would know the truth.

  It was noon, and the hallways were crowded with kids at their lockers swapping out books for their next class or going to lunch. The fact that I was wearing the same clothes as yesterday didn’t go unnoticed. I could see people pointing as clearly as I heard their hushed comments. My hair was pulled into a messy ponytail, and what little was left of yesterday’s makeup was smudged. I didn’t care. I was done pretending. I was done trying to fit in. I was … done.

  The cafeteria doors were closed, the roar of noise inside barely audible from the hall. But I knew they were there.

  It went dead silent the minute I walked in, one hundred and twenty-nine senior heads and a handful of underclassmen turning in my direction. I didn’t have to waste time trying to find them, they’d be in their assigned sections of hell. Molly was at the end of Maddy’s table, a safe three empty chairs between her and everybody else. Alex was sitting there, too, Maddy’s friends crowded around him and Jenna cozying up to his side.

  Alex pushed Jenna away when I walked in, the color draining from his face. Dismay—no, fear was what I saw in his expression, pure fear. “Maddy,” he called out, his eyes signaling me over.

  I shook my head and walked toward Molly. I’d get to Alex, but not yet. Molly had been kind to me, extending her friendship and an offer to help. Because of that, she was going to be first.

  Alex was up and out of his seat the minute he realized I wasn’t going to quietly retreat to the hall and wait for him. “This isn’t what I call laying low,” he said.

  I actually laughed at his words, a distorted chuckle that took even me by surprise. “I’m not trying to lay low, Alex.” I’m trying to fix what I did, I finished silently to myself. “I’m sorry I took Maddy from you, sorry I can’t be the girl you used to know, you used to love.”