Forever, Again

  Before she could answer there was a knock on the door. Britt looked panicked. Maybe she thought it was Grady and she didn’t want him to see her all disheveled.

  “I’ll get it,” I said.

  When I opened the door I found Spence there, looking anxious. “Hey,” he said. “How’s she doing?”

  “It’s just Spence!” I shouted back to Britt. Stepping out onto the porch, I motioned for him to follow me to the chairs. Keeping my voice low, I said, “I’m really worried about her. She hasn’t had anything to eat since yesterday at lunch, and you saw what she had then.”

  “Couple of carrot sticks and a Tab,” he said.

  “Yeah. This whole thing with Grady has her in a tailspin.”

  “I didn’t know she was all that into him,” Spence said.

  “She wasn’t, but he was her date to prom, and the fact that he broke up with her has crushed her confidence.”

  Spence scratched his temple. “What can we do?”

  I wound my arm through his and squeezed. “We’ll take her to prom and let her hang with us. Maybe you could dance with her a few times?”

  “You sure?” he asked.

  We both knew that Britt had a major crush on him. She’d never said anything about it to either of us, and she wasn’t a threat to me, so it didn’t upset me. I was crazy about him, too, so I understood. For his part, Spence pretended not to notice the way Britt would sneak looks at him or laugh at everything he said or occasionally touch him in a flirtatious way. It was super-obvious to everybody, but we loved her like a sister, so we put up with it.

  “It’s fine,” I told him. “I just want her to stop being miserable.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, puffing up his chest. “I’ll be the only guy there with two dates. I’ll become a legend.”

  “Thanks, honey,” I said with a laugh. “How’d the test go?”

  He shrugged. “It went. I did okay, I think.”

  I regretted what I said next the second it came out of my mouth. “But not like last time, right? Not that good.”

  Spence didn’t reply, and suddenly the space around us was filled with tension. He still hadn’t admitted to me that he’d cheated on his SATs, and by now I was convinced that’s exactly what he’d done. I tried to change the subject.

  “I was thinking we could take Britt to that new Michael J. Fox movie to help take her mind off things.”

  When he didn’t reply, I lifted my head from his shoulder to look at him. He was staring off into space, his mouth pressed into a thin line.

  “I can’t,” he said at last. “There’s something I gotta do today.”

  “What?” I asked as he carefully got up and moved away from me.

  “It’s nothing big,” he said. “Just something I need to take care of.”

  I sat there, stunned. Spence was starting to dismiss me so easily these days. It hurt more than I could say. “More secrets?” I said meanly.

  He looked away from me again, toward his car. “I gotta go. Tell Britt to hang in there. I’ll call you later.”

  With that, he was gone and I was left to wonder what the hell was happening to us.

  COLE PULLED OVER AND PUT a hand on my shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Lily, what happened?”

  I shook my head and covered my eyes with my hand, beyond embarrassed. The trouble was that I couldn’t stop crying. I missed Sophie so much, and part of me wanted to call her immediately to comfort her, but then I remembered how heartbroken I’d been because of her and it was all so conflicting.

  “Hey,” he said. “Come on. Tell me what’s wrong?”

  I gulped back a sob and held out my phone to him. He saw the screen and his brow furrowed. And then it rose, as if he’d suddenly put it together. “Your best friend just split up with your ex?”

  I swallowed back another sob and nodded vigorously, wiping at my cheeks and trying so hard to pull myself together.

  Cole handed me the phone, then twisted in his seat to reach into the back. He came up with a small box of Kleenex. “Here,” he said, offering it to me.

  I took a tissue and hid my face while I dabbed at my eyes. “I don’t even know why I’m crying.”

  “Maybe it’s because, as long as she was dating your ex, you could be mad at her and not miss her, but now that she’s split with him, it’s not making you as angry and it means you can miss her for real now.”

  I stared at him, a bit surprised. “Wow,” I said. “If it doesn’t work out for you with the FBI, maybe you should give psychology a try.”

  He grinned. “It’s not that hard to figure out, Lil. She’s been your best friend for how long?”

  “Eleven years.”

  He nodded knowingly. “Do you know Chris Borgus?”

  I furrowed my brow. “No. Should I?”

  “I’ll make the intros next week. He’s been my best friend since we were in sixth grade. If he broke the bro code, I think it’d be really hard, but I’d still be his best friend. I mean, Lily, eleven years is a lot of history to try and forget. No way can you just shrug that off like it’s no big deal.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I really do miss her, Cole.”

  “Then call her.”

  I turned my head to look out the window. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do that yet.”

  “Okay, so text her.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Sure it is,” he said. “I mean, what’s the harm? Yeah, what she did was really shitty, but she seems sorry. I don’t know; if it were me, and we’d been friends for eleven years, I’d probably forgive her.”

  I heard what Cole was saying, and it made a lot of sense, but I think I was still a little too hurt to just forgive and forget. Tucking the phone away, I said, “Maybe later.”

  Thankfully, Cole let it go, and we got back under way. He stopped just a minute or two later, across the street from the same house that’d brought on a panic attack—his grandmother’s place. I started to feel anxious just looking at it.

  “I can go in alone if you want to stay here,” Cole offered.

  “Nah,” I said, not wanting to look like even more of a wimp. “I’m cool.”

  Cole got out and I followed after him, looking over my shoulder to see if anybody was watching us. He didn’t seem at all nervous; he just headed up the drive like he owned the place, and undid the latch on the gate that let us into the backyard. When we reached the back porch he moved aside a planter and retrieved a silver key.

  “Ta-da!” he said.

  “What if she comes home while we’re in there?”

  “She won’t,” he said. “She works a ten-to-four shift on the weekends at CVS. And even if she did come back, we could always sneak out the front door. Come on, we’re cool.”

  We entered the house and I immediately took note of the gloomy interior. Every shade in the place was drawn, and the hum of the air conditioner could be heard from the kitchen to the left. Cole pointed to the doorway leading to the family room.

  “How about I wait by the door?” I suggested. I couldn’t help it; I was super-nervous about trespassing.

  Cole gave me a thumbs-up and went off to retrieve the yearbooks. I waited in the kitchen and looked around. The place was very simple, but clean. Honey-colored cabinets and off-white Formica counters. The kitchen looked dated, like something out of the eighties, when Amber was my age, and I suddenly remembered that Cole’s grandmother had known my former self. Still, as I gazed around the kitchen, I couldn’t say that it looked familiar, but maybe there was something about the general layout that tugged at my memories. Or Amber’s memories.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to picture the house. I was sort of surprised to realize that I knew that if I walked out of the kitchen and through the living room, there’d be a set of stairs to the left that led up to Mrs. Spencer’s room, and little Stacey’s. Spence’s room would be at the front of the house, off a short hall leading to the bathroom.

>   So weird.

  “Got ’em,” Cole said, and I jumped, opening my eyes to see him in the doorway with three leather-bound books very similar in color and style to the ones on his own bookshelf.

  “Thank God,” I said, turning to the door and rushing back outside. I quickstepped to the gate and was about to open it when I heard a car pull up the drive on the other side. Behind me, Cole was busy locking the door.

  “Cole!” I whispered. I pointed to the gate, and mouthed, Someone’s here!

  Cole’s eyes widened, and he rushed to lock the door and shove the key back under the flowerpot. Darting down the steps, he grabbed my hand and pulled me to the side of the house, where we flattened ourselves against the aluminum siding.

  From that angle we had a view of the car in the driveway through a crack in the gate.

  “It’s my gram,” he whispered. “What the hell is she doing home?”

  My heart was pounding against my rib cage. “What do we do?” I said softly.

  “Follow me,” he said. Grabbing my hand, he pulled me to the back of the yard and over to a small shed. We ducked behind it, and not a moment later, we heard the squeak of the back gate opening, and then the clang as it closed. Footsteps told us that Mrs. Spencer had moved up the stairs to the door, and then we heard it open and close.

  I looked at Cole and he mouthed, Let’s go! and just like that we were off and running for the gate. Keeping low, we hustled through it and dashed to the left down the driveway. We didn’t stop running until we’d made it to Cole’s car.

  Cole handed me the yearbooks as he struggled to retrieve his keys from his pocket. I made it around the side and into the passenger seat by the time he pulled open his door.

  And that’s when a sharp, clear voice rang out from across the street. “Cole!”

  He froze, but I crouched down as far as I could, tucking the yearbooks on the floor mat by my feet.

  To my surprise, Cole adopted an easy smile, shut the door, and turned around to face his grandmother.

  “Hey, Grammy!” he said, moving toward where she stood in the doorway of her house. “I came over to see if your grass needed a mow.”

  Cole’s grandmother was fairly tall. She had salt-and-pepper curly hair, glasses, and a little bit of a gut. To my relief, she hadn’t seemed to notice me ducking down in the car. Still, she put her hands on her hips and snapped, “You just mowed it Wednesday.”

  Cole rubbed the back of his neck lazily and said, “Yeah, but I’m gonna have to put you back on a Saturday rotation now that school’s started. I’m gonna have a lot of homework this year. Less time to mow lawns after school.”

  “I don’t like you here when I’m not around,” she said tersely.

  “Okay,” he said. “Sorry, Gram. What’re you doing home, anyway? You sick?”

  She held up a large prescription bottle. “Forgot my blood-pressure pills.”

  An awkward sort of silence followed and Cole said, “Okay, Grams, I’ll let you go. If I can’t make a Wednesday, then I’ll have one of my guys take care of you.”

  “I don’t like strangers, Cole,” she snapped again. She didn’t seem to like much of anything.

  “I’ll get Tyler to do it,” Cole said easily. “You’ve met him.”

  All she did was frown.

  “Okay, Gram,” Cole said, backing up toward the car again. “Don’t work too hard today.”

  She went back inside and shut the door without so much as a good-bye. The second the door was closed, Cole pivoted and rushed to get into the car, inserting his key into the ignition and getting us the hell out of there.

  “You can sit up now,” he said when we’d reached the end of the street. I couldn’t help noticing that he was grinning.

  “Do you think she saw me?” I asked, inching my way up from my crouched position.

  He shook his head. “She would’ve said something if she had.”

  “She seemed mad.”

  He laughed. “She’s always like that. You can’t take it personally.”

  I marveled at how easily he shrugged it off. My own grandmother’s terse and domineering personality set me right on edge, but Cole rolled with it.

  “Do you think she’ll notice that the yearbooks are gone?” I asked.

  “I doubt it,” he replied, but then his smile faded and he looked a little nervous. “At least I hope she doesn’t. I’ll catch hell for it.”

  I stared at the bound volumes still at my feet. “Maybe we should take them back? I mean, she was heading to work again, right? Maybe we can put them back before she notices.”

  Cole shifted in his seat. “We’ll take ’em back after lunch,” he promised. “I want to look through them and get a list of people to talk to.”

  That brought up another uncomfortable topic. “How’re we going to get these people to talk to us, Cole? Won’t they think it’s a little weird that two teens are investigating Ben and Amber’s murder?”

  “We can tell them that we’re researching a school project,” he said, quick enough for me to believe he’d already thought of this approach. “I’ll tell them that Ben was my uncle, and I’m doing a biography on him for my English class.”

  “Huh,” I said. “That’s not bad.”

  Cole flashed me a Cheshire-cat smile and bounced his brows. “I’ve got mad skills, remember?”

  That made me laugh, which helped stem the flow of all that adrenaline pumping through my veins. Then I realized that I hadn’t had a panic attack in a few days. Not even with the recent developments.

  Cole drove us to a place called Jersey Mike’s for lunch and after we sat down, subs in hand, we each took up one of Ben’s yearbooks.

  “Whoa,” I said, running my hand over the inside cover, where Amber had quoted a love poem to Ben.

  “Find something?” Cole asked, setting aside his sandwich to lean forward and look at the yearbook.

  I pointed to the smooth, almost elegant black cursive text in the upper left hand corner, which was very different from her suicide note and was even closer to mirroring my own handwriting. “This is a quote from a love poem written by a woman named Christina Rossetti called ‘I Loved You First,’” I said, stunned by what I was seeing. “I did a paper on her in my English Lit class last year and this is by far my favorite poem of hers. Rossetti was amazing, but she’s not super-well-known, so it’s a little freaky that Amber knew about her, too.”

  Cole squinted at the text, and I swiveled the book so that he could read it. “One more connection for you to Amber,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, marveling at the newest coincidence. “So what’re we looking for again?”

  Cole took a bite of his sub and chewed it before answering me. “See if you can find any photos of my uncle or Amber with other people, or maybe there’s something in the notes from their friends who signed the yearbook.”

  I flipped to some of the signatures in the yearbook’s beginning page and frowned. “Nobody is signing here with their last name. Everybody’s just putting their first names in.”

  Cole leaned over as I pointed to a few of the personal notes. “Damn,” he muttered. “Okay, we’ll see if you can cross-reference any of the first-name signatures to kids Spence or Amber were photographed with.”

  “How is this going to help us again?” I asked, thumbing a little more through the pages.

  “Some of their friends could still live in the area and we could interview them to see if they knew of anything weird going on with Ben and Amber.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  As I turned the pages of the yearbook, I quickly became fascinated. The kids were dressed so differently. Lots of upturned collars, huge earrings, rubber bracelets, and wild patterns. I couldn’t get over how pronounced the fashions seemed to be. Everything was flashy, big, and dramatic. And I didn’t see a single hoodie or pair of sweatpants. The guys all wore jeans. Almost nobody wore shorts or T-shirts. And the hair! I never saw so much frizz, feathering, or high bangs. And a few of t
he kids had Mohawks. Everybody seemed to be trying so hard to stand out, which was the complete opposite of how it was in school now. I kind of marveled at the boldness of those kids. They didn’t seem to be walking through the hallways with their chins down, hurrying to their next class. Instead they appeared to swagger down the corridors, brimming with confidence.

  We studied the yearbooks in silence for a while, and then I thought of looking in the back to the index to find the pages that Ben and Amber would be on. I quickly discovered that Ben was the captain of the football and track teams. There were photos of him in uniform, on the field, and racing around the track.

  Amber wasn’t a jock, though—she was a brain. She was recognized her junior year for having the highest GPA, and she also scored the highest for the entire class on her SATs. She was the junior class vice president, and led the debate team to regionals.

  Still, most of the photos of her were on Spence’s arm, but I did find two shots of her with two other girls: Sara Radcliff and Britta Cummings. The caption under the photo read, Best friends forever. It dawned on me that these were the very girls that I’d mentioned to Dr. White when I was hypnotized and speaking as Amber.

  “Here,” I said, swiveling the yearbook around so that Cole could see. “These two might know something.”

  Cole made a note of the girls’ names on his iPhone. “We can look them up on the web after we get these back to Grams’s.”

  “Did anyone stand out in the sophomore yearbook?” I asked.

  Cole nodded. “This guy,” he said, pointing to a photo of a tall, thin boy with braces. He and Ben were wearing suits with shoulder pads, long chains around their necks, and fedoras tipped low. They posed with their arms crossed and major attitude on their faces, rapper style.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Bill Metcalf,” he said. “They did a skit for the school talent show. Also there’s this guy,” he said, thumbing through the yearbook to the last few pages. “Grady Weaver. There’s a photo of him and Ben at a track meet high-fiving each other.”