She started to cry. Like, really cry. She just stood there, face in her hands, her whole body shaking.
“This is never what I wanted for you,” she said after a while, the words muffled by her fingers. I wanted to hug her, but I was afraid to. What do I know about comfort, about making things better? I only know how to make them worse.
TWENTY-TWO
158 DAYS, and I saw Laurie this afternoon.
For once, I’d actually been looking forward to seeing her. I figured if anyone would be willing to point out how horrible I am for what I’ve been thinking about J, it’s her.
“I’m mad at Julia,” I said as soon as I walked in, and waited for the pen clicking to start.
When it didn’t, I sat down and added, “I’m mad at her for dying. I’m mad at her for listening to me that night. I…sometimes I hate her.”
Laurie nodded. That was it. She nodded.
I stared at her. She stared back at me.
“Did you hear me?” I said. “My best friend died because of me, and sometimes I hate her.”
“Why do you hate her? For dying? Or because she listened to you?”
“Both!” I said, almost shouting. “I made sure she saw her boyfriend cheating on her. Made sure she saw it, and didn’t just hear about it. Then I told her we should go because she…she didn’t tell him to go to hell like I thought she finally would. She didn’t…she was so sad, and I did that. I broke her heart.”
“Amy—”
“There’s more,” I said. “You know it. I know it. I told her to get in the car. I told her to drive. She did all that, she listened to me, and I hate her for that. She died and I hate her for that too. What’s wrong with me?”
Laurie sighed. “Did Julia always do what people told her to?”
“You didn’t listen to anything I said about her at all, did you? She always did her own thing. But that—” I broke off and glared at Laurie, because I knew what she was doing and I was sick of it, sick of her. “I know what you’re going to say, I know what you’re thinking, but it doesn’t—it doesn’t mean what you think it does. Julia didn’t choose to die.” My voice was shaking. My whole body was shaking.
“No, she didn’t. But she chose to get into her car and drive, just like you chose to drink.”
“That’s it?” I said, and I was yelling now, full of fury and something else, something I didn’t want to think about. “Just like that, just that simple, you say she chose to get into the car and I’m supposed to…what? Forget what I did? Say ‘I see it now, I do, and yay! Laurie’s made everything’s okay!’ and move on?”
“If you can see your choices, why can’t you see hers?”
“Because it’s not that simple. Because you can’t—you can’t make everything all right,” I said, and stood up. I walked out of her office, and I slammed the door behind me so hard it shook. I wished it would crack in half. I wished Laurie’s office would crumble around her.
To my surprise, she came right out after me.
“No one ever said what happened was simple,” she said, her voice firm. She motioned for me to come back inside.
“Why?” I said. “So you can tell me more about choices?”
“Because you’re right,” she said. “I can’t make everything okay for you.”
I hadn’t expected that, so I went back in and sat down.
She followed me, and as soon as she was in her chair, she picked up her pen. I knew it was coming at some point, but now? I glared at her and started to stand up again, but then stopped, frozen. Frozen because I knew what I’d felt right before I left. I was angry, so angry, but I also wanted—I wanted to believe her too. But like she said, she couldn’t make everything okay.
“You know what?” I said, staring at that stupid pen and hating myself for wanting to believe her. For wanting to think I didn’t kill Julia. “Here’s something new for you. I had sex with someone. Why don’t you tell me how I should feel about that?”
Laurie just looked at me.
“Go on,” I said, my voice rising again, and she said, “How do you want to feel about it?”
“I don’t feel anything,” I said, but my voice cracked a little. “It was just—it was the first time I did it when I wasn’t drunk and it was…it was different. That’s all.”
Laurie uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “Different how?”
“I don’t know. Just different.”
“I see.” Laurie clicked her pen, finally. And when she did, when I heard that click, something clicked in me, and I got why she did it. Why I’d heard all that pen clicking time after time after time.
Laurie clicks her pen when she thinks I’m lying to her. When she thinks I’m lying to myself.
“It was different—it was different because I liked it,” I said after a moment, my voice quiet. Saying what I knew but hadn’t been able to let myself say before. Hadn’t even been able to let myself see before. “I liked being with him. I never cared about being with guys before. But with him it was—it meant something to me, and I…I don’t know.”
I waited for her to say something. Anything. I’d told her everything, I’d told her the truth I hadn’t wanted to see.
She just looked at me.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” I finally asked.
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t make everything okay for you, Amy. You said it yourself. But I can tell you this. What you told me just now isn’t about Julia. It’s about you. And you have to make choices of your own, choices only you can make, so I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to answer honestly. Can you do that?”
“No.”
For a second, I swear she almost smiled. “Do you want to be happy?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. What kind of question is that?”
“A simple one,” she said. “Do you want to be happy?”
“I don’t—I don’t think I know how.”
“So you can learn,” she said.
TWENTY-THREE
DURING DINNER TONIGHT, Mom and Dad asked me to watch a movie with them. I took a bite of black bean burrito and chewed for as long as I could, hoping they’d ask me something else, or at least stop looking at me. I was still processing the Laurie thing from yesterday, was still raw from the things she said, the things I’d felt, and wasn’t ready to do anything else, much less play happy family.
“You can decide which one while your father clears the table,” Mom said, and grinned at Dad before looking at me. I stared down at my plate. I didn’t want to see her grin falter. I wish I’d never seen her cry like I did the other day because no one’s life should be driving their kid home from school and then sobbing.
“Oh, I see how it is,” Dad said. “You want me out of the way to influence the selection. You’re sneaky and beautiful.”
Mom laughed and I watched the two of them sparkle and wondered why we kept pretending. I was so tired of them trying to be what they’d never wanted to be before, of the whole “we’re available! and dedicated!” parents routine. I was tired of how they were always acting like they didn’t mind living with me.
“You know you love my taste in movies,” Dad said, picking up his plate and Mom’s and kissing the top of her head. She tilted her head back and grinned at him.
I never thought my parents deserved their…thing, their endless swallow-up-everything love. I hated it because it made me nothing. Love, to me, was all about exclusion.
I hated that we weren’t a family. We were a couple with an extra person tacked on because they simply happened to forget birth control one night sixteen years ago. They’ve never said it—not directly to me, anyway—but I heard them talking about it once. Mom realized she was going to have me, and eight months before I was born, Dad had a vasectomy. You don’t forget hearing something like that.
I pushed my plate away.
“You don’t have to do this anymore,” I said. “You don’t have t
o play perfect family with me. Things can go back to how they were.”
My father froze. So did my mother, head still tilted back toward him, the smile on her face fading.
“All right, I promise I won’t suggest any possible movies,” Dad said, trying for normal but failing. Teenagers only want to spend evenings bonding with their parents in old sitcoms, and no one in this house ever asked me to watch a movie with them before Julia died. And no matter what Laurie had said and how much part of me wanted to believe her, believe that I’d made choices and Julia had made them too, I couldn’t—I couldn’t forget what I’d done.
“Look,” I said, and my voice was rising, all the things I’d wanted to say and never had spilling out. “I know your story, yours and Mom’s. True love forever and ever, and then I came along and made the perfect couple into perfection plus an eight-pound shackle. You don’t have to pretend that this”—I gestured at the three of us—“is what you want.”
Dad sat down, the plates he was carrying making a cracking noise as they hit the table. He looked at me like he’d seen something surprising. Maybe even frightening. Even when he came into the emergency room the night Julia died he hadn’t looked at me like that.
“It’s true,” he said after a moment, his voice very quiet. “Your mother and I love each other very much. And it’s true that we—that we didn’t plan on having children. But Amy, it doesn’t mean we didn’t want you. That we don’t love you very much and want to make things better for—”
“Stop,” I said, and looked at Mom. “Please, just stop this. Make Dad stop. Make all of it stop. I saw you the other day. I was there. I made you cry. I know you can’t stand this. That you can’t stand what I did.”
“Amy, that’s not—that’s not why I cried.” She stretched her hands across the table toward me. “I cried because I can’t reach you. I can’t stand to see you so sad, so determined to be alone. Your father and I, we need to be better parents to you, need to—”
I shoved her hands away. “Why are you doing this? Why are you pretending? You know what I did to Julia. You know I—”
“Don’t,” Mom said, her voice shaking, and I could see the words she didn’t want to hear written on her face.
“I killed her. You know that. I know that. Why can’t you just—why won’t you just say it?”
“Because you didn’t!” Dad said, pushing away from the table and running a hand through his hair. “How can you even say it? How can you even think it?”
“How can I not?” I said. “I told her to get in the car!”
“But she chose to do it,” Mom said.
I shook my head, shoving her words away, shoving away her echo of what Laurie had said. Shoving away how those words—from Laurie, and now from Mom—made me think, hope.
Mom leaned over and grabbed my hands.
“Listen to me,” she said, and when I tried to pull away, she wouldn’t let go. She held on to me. “We all make choices, Amy. Sometimes we make good ones. Sometimes we make bad ones. You made choices that night, but Julia made them too. What happened was terrible, but it isn’t your fault—it isn’t—and you have to stop blaming yourself.”
“I—but if I didn’t do it, then it—”
“It was an accident,” Dad said, and his voice was so gentle. So sure. “A horrible one, one where you lost your best friend, but that’s what it was. What it is.”
“But—” My eyes were burning, all of me was burning, shaking, and Mom said, “Amy, honey, it’s all right,” and then she put her arms around me, she was hugging me.
She hugged me, and I let her. I wanted her to.
“Your father and I want to spend time with you, we want to be here for you,” she said. “We want you to see that Julia’s death isn’t your fault. We want to be a family. Those are our choices.”
“I—” I pulled away, and looked at her. I looked at her, and then at Dad.
“Try,” Dad said. “Try to see how much we love you, try to see that Julia didn’t die because of you. That’s all we ask. Just…try. Please.” He cleared his throat, blinking hard. “Now, do you know what movie you want to watch?”
So I picked a movie, and we watched it. I didn’t know what else to do, and everything else, all the things they said, I…
I want to believe them.
I think about what Laurie said, about learning to be happy, and think that maybe—that maybe I can learn how to do that. How to be that.
Maybe.
Julia’s still gone, though. I still have to live with that. I still have to live without her.
TWENTY-FOUR
I WENT TO A PARTY TONIGHT.
There’s six words I never thought I’d say again.
The party was at Mel’s. His parents are in Aruba or something. I wasn’t invited, obviously—Mel hasn’t spoken to me since he asked me what I’d done to Patrick—but I knew all about it because Mel talks very loudly and also because right after English today he asked Caro if she was going.
Actually, what he said was, “I really hope you can come tonight. I need to talk to you.” And he said all that in front of Beth. I was in the student resource center during lunch, so I missed the drama, but Caro’s eyes were red afterward so it was easy to guess what happened.
I was in the student resource center because I’ve given up on lunch in the cafeteria. It’s not worth the daily race with mustache girl to get a crappy seat and eat crappy food. I can eat yogurt in the resource center instead. The whole thing was Giggles’s idea, actually.
She cornered me as I was skulking down the hall, late to physics class, and made me come to her office. (Patrick had been standing outside the classroom door, looking like the world was going to come smash him in that way he does, and I’d ducked into the bathroom till after the bell rang. Fifteen days. It’s been fifteen days, and I still keep thinking about him.)
When Giggles realized I didn’t have enough tardies for detention, she said I needed to “give back to the school” and told me I had to work in the resource center every day during lunch for a month.
I can’t wait to see the look on her face when I tell her I want to keep doing it. Maybe I’ll even say she’s inspired me. She’ll probably explode.
Anyway, Caro came up to me in the hall after physics and said, “Can you come over after school?” while people—meaning Beth—were watching. That’s when I knew something huge was going on.
Caro didn’t want to go to the party. What Mel had said to her made Beth so furious that she’d stopped talking to Caro.
“Which explains why you actually spoke to me at school,” I said as we were sitting in her bedroom. I was lying on her bed and Caro was pacing around eating an ice cream bar. Her mom always buys the kind I like best now. I didn’t think I was over here that much, but I guess I am.
Caro looked at me and then tossed her wrapper in the trash. “Yeah, I guess it does. I sort of suck, don’t I? Why do you even talk to me?”
“Free ice cream. And besides, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk to me at all.”
“You would too.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “You’re the worst liar in the whole world.”
She flopped down on her bed and nudged me with one foot. “Fine. I’m too freaked out to argue with you. What am I going to do?”
“Go to the party and talk to Mel.”
“But Beth will—”
“What? Make you cry during lunch? Get you so upset you ask someone even the honors losers—sorry, but it’s true, you guys suck—avoid to come over after school in front of everyone?”
She sighed. “I know. But I can’t go.”
“Okay, don’t go.”
“But…I kind of want to go.”
“Duh.”
Then she surprised me. “So will you come with me?”
And that’s how I ended up at the party. I told Mom and Dad I was spending the night at Caro’s. I figured that and the fact that they hadn’t had to come pick me up after school was enough excitement for
them. Mentioning a party would just be too much.
And besides, I didn’t think I’d actually go. I just…I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see myself at one without Julia. I figured I’d wait outside or something. Be alone.
That, I could see.
Caro and I went over her “plan” on the way there. She was going to go in and talk to Mel, then leave. I was supposed to stay with her the whole time.
“Seriously, you can’t leave my side,” she said.
“Seriously, you’ve already said that. But you don’t need me there.”
“I do too.”
“Fine,” I said, just to humor her. “But remember, you promised that even if Mel declares eternal love we won’t be there more than—”
“Ten minutes, tops. I know. We’ll go in, he’ll be with Beth, we’ll leave. I don’t even know why I’m doing this.”
“Yeah, you do,” I said, and tried not to think about the fact that I was going to a party and that the last one I went to was with Julia. It didn’t work, and by the time Caro and I walked inside Mel’s house, I was feeling really bad. Just walking through the door made me dizzy.
And inside, my stomach hurt, my hands were sweaty and shaking, and I could tell people knew I didn’t belong.
I’ve always felt like that at parties. It’s why I started drinking before J and I got there, so that walking inside wouldn’t be so hard. I needed that escape from myself.
I turned to Caro, ready to tell her I needed to leave, that I had to leave, when Mel showed up. He looked as freaked as I felt and like he was trying to hide from someone.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he told Caro, and that’s when I knew Beth was out there, in the crowd of people around us, newly single and extremely unhappy about it. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”
Caro looked at me and I knew the ten-minute, we-stick-together plan was gone. I don’t know why I even fell for it in the first place. How many times did I agree to it when Julia and I went to parties where Kevin was going to be and end up alone?