Tease(87)

Mom smiles at me, tossing some avocados on the counter. She smiles more now, I think. Maybe we all do.

“Can I help?” Carmichael asks. “I can make guacamole.”

“Excellent!” says Mom. “Yes, I will get you a knife and a bowl, and let’s see . . . “

I open the package of hamburger and get out a skillet. In a minute the kitchen is filling up with the smell of the meat. Mom is asking Carmichael about his essay, and he tells her he’s writing about a BMX race where he took a really bad fall but finished anyway. She tells him it sounds perfect. Tommy comes back in and washes the lettuce, I think just so he can spend more time around Carmichael. I cut up a tomato and line up bowls on the counter: tomato, lettuce, salsa, shredded cheese, black olives.

In my head, though, I’m thinking about my letter.

Dear Brielle, What were we so mad about?

Was I a terrible friend?

Were you?

Dear Brielle, I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

Finally Alex feels left out enough to come in and set the table. I hand him the liter of soda Mom’s letting us have—only because it’s Saturday—and he gleefully starts shaking it up. “Hey!” Tommy and I yell at the same time. Alex is still grinning, but he stops. He puts the bottle on the table and comes back for the bowls of taco toppings, transferring them two at a time.

“Can I put peanut butter on mine?” he asks.

“Gross,” Tommy declares.

“You don’t know,” Alex says. “Maybe it’s good! You never tried it.”

“I do know,” Tommy tells him. “It’s gross.”

“Okay, guys, let’s sit down,” Mom says. She pours herself a glass of wine and lifts it, smiling at me. “You’ll drive them to the ER when they get sick on peanut butter tacos, right?”

“Yep,” I say. “You can drink the whole bottle if you want. I got this.”

Tommy rolls his eyes, embarrassed, but by then we’re all fighting over the shredded cheese and the olives, overstuffing our taco shells, making loud crunching noises as we start to eat.

For a minute I just look around the table. It’s not, like, the perfect American family or anything, I know that. It’s not what I thought I’d be doing on a Saturday night my senior year. It’s pretty boring, definitely.

But I take a deep breath and smile. I take another breath. And another.

I just keep breathing.





Dear Brielle, You were a good friend to me. You taught me how to be tough. You taught me to stick up for myself. You thought I was pretty, that I deserved a boyfriend and friends and parties and cute clothes. You made me laugh.

But I wasn’t a good friend to you. I didn’t know how to help you. I didn’t know how to stop all the stuff we did to Emma. I should have said it was wrong. It felt wrong, but it felt good, too, to be angry and hateful and mean. But maybe there could’ve been another way. There must’ve been another way.

I miss you. I wish we hadn’t grown apart. I wish you were at school. But wherever you are, I hope you’re happy. I think I might be happy. I’m working on it, anyway.

Stay strong.

Love, Sara





Dear Emma, I’ll spend the rest of my life being sorry. But I’ll also be more careful. I won’t assume that everyone is strong. I won’t assume I know everything about someone just by how they act. I’ll try to remember, so that maybe someday I’ll feel like I deserve your forgiveness.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re happy. And feeling stronger.

Love, Sara





Acknowledgments


SO MANY PEOPLE helped me through the process of writing this book, and I will be forever grateful. Thanks especially to Rebecca Mazur, Erica Jensen, Devi Pillai, and Abby McAden for being amazing friends and career counselors for many, many years. To my fellow writers in PSCWW, thank you for the much-needed deadlines and the excellent notes.

There aren’t enough superlatives to describe my agent, Holly Root, and my editor, Donna Bray, so I’ll just say: Wow. It is a true honor to work with you. And I am grateful to everyone at Waxman Leavell Literary, HarperCollins Children’s Books, and Balzer + Bray for bringing this book to life.

To my mom: It’s not an exaggeration when I say you’re the best mom in the history of anything, ever, and I love you more than even makes sense.

And to Andy and Calvin, what can I say? You’ve made my dreams come true.





Author’s Note


This book is entirely a work of fiction, but it was inspired, unfortunately, by true stories—and one in particular.

In January 2010, a young student at South Hadley High School tragically took her own life. I went to college in South Hadley, and a dear friend of mine works at the high school, so the event was particularly upsetting—though of course even more so for the families in that small community, who quickly saw their lives turned upside down by a precedent-setting lawsuit against six other students at South Hadley High, accused of bullying and harassing the girl who killed herself.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the girls on both sides of this story. And I couldn’t stop thinking that, no matter what the accused bullies had done, surely they couldn’t have intended for anyone to lose her life—surely no one is that vicious. But we do all have our moments, and our limits. We’ve each felt deeply hurt by the actions of others; we’ve said things we regret.