The Last Time We Say Goodbye Part 18

I could say, Hi, can I talk to you? and lead her to that empty corner of the library, and give it to her there.

If she'd come with me.

But people would notice that too, and then they might ask her about it.

I could mail it to her.

But then maybe her mom would find the letter first, and read it, and maybe there's sensitive information in there. Ty could have mailed it to her if he'd wanted that. Maybe her dad would read it and maybe she and Ty had s.e.x and he wrote about that and it would ruin her relations.h.i.+p with her father forever.

All of this goes through my mind and more, more questions, more junk, more variables.

I'm ten steps in the right direction now. Ten to go.

Someone says Ashley's name. She looks up from her book and lays it on the table and smiles blindingly, a happy, excited smile. She jumps up and throws herself into a guy's arms.

Not just any guy, either. Grayson.

One of my brother's friends.

"I was just thinking about you," Ashley says.

They kiss. Not a long kiss, nothing pa.s.sionate or showy or French, but a quick peck that says, We're together. We kiss all the time, and it's no big deal.

I've stopped walking. I'm standing there five steps away, watching them kiss. They pull back from each other and Grayson says something I don't understand in his deep, rumbly-jock voice, and then he glances over Ashley's shoulder right at me.

It's clear that he recognizes me. His expression tightens into one part pity, one part I don't know what, like the sight of me brings an unpleasant taste to his mouth. The same look on his face as when he and Fauxhawk brought that box to our house three days after my brother died, when the school gathered up all remaining evidence of Tyler James Riggs and delivered it to our front door.

They took Ty's name off the roster. They even expunged his school records for the year, as if they could erase his existence altogether.

I'd bet good money they didn't do that kind of thing with Hailey McKennett, who lost her battle with cystic fibrosis two years ago, or Sammie Sullivan, who died of complications from pneumonia, or Jacob Wright, who was killed in a car crash driving home drunk from a party at Branched Oak Lake last summer. Jacob got a tree planted for him at the front of the school, a plaque under it that I pa.s.s every day walking in that reads WE'LL MISS YOU, J. Sammie got a moment of silence during first period that year and an entire page of the yearbook devoted to her memory. They read Hailey's name at graduation.

But Ty got his locker packed up and delivered promptly back to my mother, before we'd even had a chance to bury him.

Because it was suicide.

Because they don't want to seem like they're condoning it.

Ashley sees Grayson's expression and turns to see what he's looking at. She sees me standing there frozen. All at once a myriad of emotions pa.s.s over her face: confusion, pity, embarra.s.sment over kissing Grayson, and, oh yes, there it is, an emotion I'm most familiar with these days, rising in her deep blue eyes.

Guilt.

I know guilt when I see it.

I do a quick 180. I leave my tray on the table and walk stiffly past Sadie and her questioning expression, past my other friends, who are looking at me too, out of the cafeteria. I go to my locker, set the letter in its place in the five-subject notebook on the top shelf, and slam the door.

I'm angry, it turns out.

The image of my mother's face swims up in my mind, when she took the box from Grayson after he rang our doorbell, the way she tried to smile at him, to thank him, before she brought it back to the kitchen table and opened it and started crying all over again, lifting out Ty's gym shoes and his extra deodorant and the tiny magnetic mirror that he used to smile into every day.

A-holes. All of them. A-holes.

And Ashley was kissing Grayson. My brother's a-hole friend. The guy, if the slightly crooked nose is any indication, who Ty punched that day when he got suspended from school.

Over Ashley. Ty punched him over Ashley.

I have to consider the possibility that Ashley Davenport, that lovely girl, inside and out, the right kind of girl, the nicest, might be the biggest a-hole of them all.

"Is there still a shredder in Dad's office?" I ask Mom when I get home.

She frowns. "Yes. Why?"

"I got a credit card application in the mail," I explain smoothly. "I would have just thrown it out, but then I remembered that you and Dad always shred that kind of thing."

It's getting marginally easier to lie to my mother.

"Oh," Mom says. "Yes, that sounds like a good idea."

Still in the cold anger I haven't been able to shake from school, I head down the hall to Dad's old office. The door to this room is usually shut, as if Mom can't stand the sight of his absence. When he lived with us he kept the door open, so he could catch us as we walked by. "Hey there, Peanut," he'd always say when he spotted me. And I would stand in the doorway for a few minutes "shooting the breeze with the old man," as he called it, telling him about my day at school or whatever book I was reading or the square root of some number I'd memorized.

I don't stop to look around as I enter the office. I go straight to the shredder. I turn it on.

I take the letter out of my bag.

I want to destroy it. I want this whole mess to be over with, Ty's unfinished business, his presence, real or not, lingering in this house, his problem, his, not mine. I want to go to college and leave this part of my life behind. Start over. Be someone else besides the-girl-whose-brother-died. I've earned that, I think.

I don't want to think about Ty anymore.

I finger an edge of the envelope that's curling up, the glue there coming unstuck. I've been handling it too much and the paper is showing some wear.

It would be so easy to open it and find out everything.

I want to get his explanation. In his own words, I want him to tell me why.

I catch a whiff of my brother's cologne.

"What? You want me to give it to her?" I say.

There's no answer.

Then I ask him the question that's been on my mind all this time. Even though he's probably not even here.

"Why her? Why Ashley? Why would you write her a letter, and not write one to me? Didn't you have anything worthwhile to say to me?"

No answer. But the silence feels like an answer.

I swallow.

I think about the text.

"I refuse to feel guilty about something you did," I mumble, but I don't mean it.

I do feel guilty.

Every single day.

I turn the shredder off. "I got into MIT," I whisper to the empty room.

He would have been proud of me, if he were alive. He would have known how much it meant.

FRIDAY. I'M ALREADY ON EDGE when I get to school. I haven't burned the letter or shredded it or thrown it away yet, all things I've been tempted to do so I don't have to get involved in this Ashley/Ty/Grayson affair. I have it with me, still stuck in the pages of my notebook. I can't leave it home on the off chance that someone else-insert: Mom-will find it. I can't let anybody else find it. In that way, it belongs to me.

I'm hungry. I walk to the vending machine in the corner and fish out a crinkled dollar. I missed breakfast (i.e., Mom didn't get up to make it, and I didn't have the energy to pour myself a bowl of cereal). I put the dollar in. The machine spits it out. I put it in. It spits it out.

It's worse than the Lemon. "Come on," I plead. "I require sustenance."

Not that there's anything good in the machine to eat. Dried fruit. Granola bars. Whole-grain pretzels. Organic gluten-free seaweed chips. This is Nebraska, for crying out loud, land of meat, potatoes, corn, corn, and corn as the five basic food groups.

I'm suddenly struck by a memory of Ty standing in this exact spot, banging on this exact machine until a bag of dried apricots dropped into the slot. He picked it up. Scowled.

"I don't care what the First Lady says," he complained, loudly enough that the people around us started nodding in agreement. "This is not a Pop-Tart. I need my junk food, man. How's a growing boy to survive on all this healthy stuff? Am I right?"

He's right.

My throat closes. I miss him I miss him I miss him. The hole in my chest explodes. I can't breathe I can't breathe. There are people waiting for the machine behind me, so I don't have time to let the hole pa.s.s on its own. I stumble to the side and force my legs to move away, down the hall to the restroom, where I almost run to the last stall and sit down on the lid of the toilet and bend my head over my knees and gasp and gasp and think maybe this drug thing Dave suggested isn't a bad idea after all.

I'm not doing well, here. Clearly.

When the hole fills in again, my body feels achy, like I'm coming down with something. I flush the toilet as if I was in there for a good reason. I go out, take my gla.s.ses off, and splash some water on my face. The girls on either side of me don't say anything; they just return to meticulously was.h.i.+ng their hands.

I lean forward to take a long look at myself in the mirror. There are dark circles under my eyes, and my lips are chapped and colorless. I swipe at a wet tendril of hair that's clinging to my forehead, but then it just sticks to a different spot. The whites of my eyes look like road maps, veiny and red-rimmed and swollen, like I've been crying, even though I haven't been crying.

I look wrecked.

This whole thing has warped me, I think. I'm a board left out in the rain, and it's impossible to go back to being straight and undamaged ever again. This is who I am now.

The girl whose brother died.

Plus there's the fun fact that I am losing my mind. I'm here at school freaking out about a stupid letter that my dead brother wrote for his ex-why exactly?

Because some part of me thinks that Ty's still around. Because I think maybe that drawer being open that night and that letter being in that drawer means that he wants me to deliver it. Because, no matter how much I try to be rational, some part of me wants to believe that I am seeing his freaking ghost.

This, for some reason, makes me laugh. The sound is sharp and bounces off the tight white-tiled walls of the bathroom.

Hilarious.

One of the girls next to me gets the heck out of there-she just bolts for the door. But the other girl waits for me to pull myself together. She hands me a paper towel to dry my face. And when I put my gla.s.ses back on, I realize it's Ashley Davenport.

Awesome.

"Hi," she says. "I saw you come in here, and I wanted to talk to you, so . . ."

So she witnessed my little breakdown. Even more awesome.

She's wearing a bright pink cardigan over a white sequined tank top, silvery lip gloss gleaming off her Cupid's-bow lips, and a gold heart-shaped necklace that's resting in the hollow of her throat. She's beautiful. What sticks out to me most about her is that she looks . . . healthy is the word that comes to mind. Not just in her athletic legs and s.h.i.+ny red hair and bright eyes and dewy porcelain skin. It's more than that. She has all the signs of a person who life has left almost completely undamaged. I bet her parents are still together and still hold hands and still kiss. I bet she volunteers for some kind of charity. I bet the most tears she's ever shed in her whole life were over her childhood dog when it died of old age.

She's not an a-hole, I think. She's a nice girl.

But that doesn't change how I feel.

"There's nothing I want to talk about," I say. "Not with you."

She puts her hand on my arm. Gently, but insistently. "Wait. I know you saw me and Grayson in the cafeteria yesterday. You looked upset, so I thought, you might have thought . . ."

"I might have thought what?" I challenge. "That you cheated on my brother?"

Her eyes widen. "But I didn't cheat on Ty. I would never. He broke up with me, not the other way around. I would never have cheated on Ty. I-"

"But what about the fight? When Ty punched Grayson? Why would he do that?"

She bows her head. "I was . . . sad after Ty broke it off. He didn't even tell me why. He just came up to me that morning and said things weren't working out between us. He said he was sorry, and then he walked off. I was shocked. I thought we were-I cried. I was upset. People thought he was being a jerk. And the next day Grayson said something rude to Ty about it, and . . ."

"Ty hit him," I fill in.

She squeezes my arm. "I wasn't into Grayson back then. We just started dating like a week ago. I swear."

I don't know what to say.

Her lip starts trembling. A tear s.h.i.+nes on the edge of her eye.

I wish I could cry so easily.

"Your brother was an amazing guy," she continues. "Everybody liked him. They were only mad at him because of me, but they would have gotten over it. . . . I don't know why he would . . ." She pauses, of course she does, but then she looks at me like I'm going to tell her now, why Ty did it, why someone like my brother, who everybody liked, who was cute and funny and popular, thought his existence was so terrible that he chose to end it.

Because I'm his sister. I should know the reasons why.

"I should have realized that he was . . . I didn't know . . ." She lets go of my arm and presses her lips together, like she's about to start really crying. "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry, Lex."

"I have to go." I back away from Ashley, then push out of the bathroom and into the noisy, crowded hall. I walk on autopilot back to my locker. I lean against it, watching everybody pa.s.s by, ready to head toward cla.s.s, ready to start their days.

I lean my head back until it touches the cool metal of the locker, and close my eyes.

She didn't dump him. She didn't cheat on him.

It's not her fault.

She doesn't even know why he broke up with her. Which makes Ty the a-hole in this scenario.

My eyes snap open. I unzip my backpack, pull out my five-subject notebook, and retrieve the letter. I don't give myself any time to think about what I'm doing. I don't make a plan.