Everything You Are(18)

Phee feels the tears gathering in her eyes, blinks them back as best she can. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she says. Impulsively, she hugs him. Before he has time to react, she turns and rushes down the hallway and out the door.

Braden doesn’t follow.





Chapter Nine

ALLIE

Allie used to love Mondays.

Today, her steps slow as she approaches the high school and she begins considering the alternatives. She’d thought about driving, had actually slid behind the wheel of her car and put the key in the ignition before a mental image hit her of her mother’s car, twisted and broken, and she’d bounced right back out again.

So she’s on foot, which is not unusual. She’s always liked the quiet time of walking to school, a chance to get her thoughts together and prepare for the day. Now her thoughts are to be avoided, and the whole idea of school, with its chaotic hallways and inquisitive teachers, is overwhelming.

But she can’t stay home, can’t be so close to her father all day. There’s the library, but the last time she went there, a tent was pitched, right there on the sidewalk, and a woman with two dirty little kids sat in front of it asking for a handout.

It made her cry to think about people living like that. She’d given the woman all of her allowance money, despite Steph’s vehement whispers that it was probably wasted and going to fund the drug trade. Allie didn’t care. She doesn’t think she can handle despairing faces today.

She could go to the zoo. Or the locks. Or Golden Gardens Park. Or she could just snag a table in a coffee shop and spend the day surfing the internet. But she seems to be utterly incapable of making a decision. When her phone chimes, she stops to look.

Steph: Are you coming to school? Please say yes. It’s a wasteland without you.

Allie sighs, letting Steph make the decision for her. There in a minute.

She starts walking again, but the closer she gets, the more she dreads what awaits her. The questions. The murmurs. She reminds herself of who she is and what she has done. School is part of her penance.

Besides, she can’t think of anywhere else to be. The house is a mausoleum. The cello mournfully calling her. Trey’s room, exactly the way he left it, with dirty clothes all over the floor, a cereal bowl full of souring milk in the middle of the bed. Even the TV is still on, set to the channel where he left it before he went to school that morning. Aunt Alexandra was going to turn it off, that first day home, but Allie had fought her, consenting only to put the thing on mute.

Her mother’s room is also unchanged. If Braden has slept there, there’s no sign of it. The bed is neatly made, the pillows undisturbed. This morning, when she slipped out the back door, he was asleep on the couch. She’s taken aback by a thrill of relief she feels at having him there, home, despite all of the reasons she has to hate him.

Now, as she enters the school and presses through the crush of bodies to get to her locker, she keeps her head down, avoiding the sympathy or pity or curiosity she’s sure to see on the faces of her classmates. She doesn’t want to answer questions or pretend to smile or have to talk to anybody.

Steph, waiting by her locker, is expected. Ethan, leaning against the locker next to hers, is not.

The old Allie wasn’t interested in dangerous. Playing the cello when she was supposed to be studying was as close as she ever came to breaking rules. Ethan is everything she is not. He manages to pull off grades just above the failure line without ever seeming to attend class or study. He’s heart-stoppingly gorgeous, with dreamy dark eyes and hair that falls in silky black curls onto his shoulders.

Allie has been aware of him in the same way she is aware of stars in the sky, beautiful but outside her reach. She hangs out with the music kids and takes AP classes. He dates the wild girls and is in the general track. Stars and boys like Ethan are great at a distance. Too close, and they’ll burn your wings and dump you into the sea, a lesson she learned both from the story of Icarus and watching the drama of other girls who have dared to fly too close to the sun.

But now here is Ethan, inexplicably hanging out beside her locker.

Steph catches her eye and shrugs, indicating that she is also clueless about the reason for this sudden visitation.

“Hey,” Ethan says.

“Hey.” Allie busies herself with her combination lock, hiding her face behind her hair and then behind the open locker door.

“Thought maybe you’d like to get out of here today,” Ethan says. “I could take you for a ride.”

The bell rings for class. Lockers slam. Kids start moving down the hall. Allie needs to go to class. She’s missed all last week. The teachers will cut her a little bit of slack, given the tragedy and the funeral, but they can’t extend that forever.

Her hand rests on her biology book. She envisions herself in her preferred desk, front and center, book and binder open, ready to take notes. Mr. Gerard looking down at her, his prize pupil, but instead of pride and joy in her mastery of the material, there is pity in his eyes. She feels sick thinking about it.

They are studying bones, and if she looks at the pictures, she knows she’ll see her mother’s body and all the ways it must have been broken. Trey’s skull, with the fracture lines running through it.

Ethan is offering an escape. She looks up at him. “For real?”

He shrugs one shoulder. “Too nice of a day to be stuck in class. I’m thinking of a ride to Mukilteo. Take the ferry to Whidbey Island, go hang out on the beach.”