I'd Give Anything(49)

Avery considered not answering, but then she sighed and typed in, I’m fine. I needed some time alone. Don’t worry. I’ll go back to school soon.

Avery could imagine her mother staring at her phone in disbelief at the mind-blowing news that perfect little rule-following Avery was skipping school. She braced herself, waiting for her mother to freak out, explode, demand that Avery tell her right this minute where she was so that she could come pick her up.

“I won’t,” Avery whispered. “I won’t.”

Her mother’s text popped up, and it took Avery a moment to fully absorb what it said: That makes sense. I’ll let the dean know you’re fine. See you at 3:00. I love you.

Avery felt a rush of wonder at this answer, but then she regrouped. We are not in this together, Mom, she thought, and I am still mad at you.

At the quarry, Avery thought to herself that this was the place in the story where you take on a sidekick or meet a cute boy. But she found she liked being alone, filling her own hours in her own way, letting her thoughts loose to wander and loop. Maybe as adventures went, hers was tame. But it didn’t feel tame. She walked around and sat on the cold ground and then walked some more. Once, she lay on her back in the stiff grass and watched a buzzard—huge, with fringed black wings—circling, circling.

She let her mind circle, too, lightly spiraling inward and inward, until she found, in the center of the circles, her father and Cressida Wall.

How simple it would have been to believe the rumors, the ones that claimed Cressida had preyed on her father to get money or fancy stuff—a Gucci purse, a dark green Mini Cooper, a new phone—that her own father couldn’t afford because he was a loser or a meth head or bipolar. Or the rumors that said Avery’s dad had paid attention to Cressida only because he was nice and felt sorry for her. But what Avery knew was that her dad had changed. He smiled at her and talked to her tentatively now, like a person who thought he might not deserve to smile at her or talk to her. And he’d lost weight. And he’d gotten fired. And her parents were splitting up. She doubted that those things happened because a man had just been a little too nice to someone.

How much did the truth matter? Did it actually set everyone free? What if finding out the truth about her father and Cressida meant she couldn’t love him anymore?

Avery got out the journal and sat in a patch of sun, with her back against a tree, and read it all again. She thought about Zinny, CJ, Kirsten, Gray, and Trevor. Closed her eyes and populated the brown grass at the quarry’s rim with the people from the journal, but when she opened her eyes, they weren’t there.

Zinny had been a truth-teller, writing down even the saddest, hardest stories, and then, in fifteen minutes, so fast, she’d turned into a person who tore out the truth and burned it and was still tearing it out and burning it twenty years later.

You didn’t tell someone part of a story and leave off the ending. It just wasn’t right.

So Avery decided to throw her lot in with the old Zinny. In a scary, exhilarating instant, like Zinny on the edge of the quarry in the black of night, Avery took a breath and jumped. Let the truth come, she thought, no matter what.

When she got back to school, even though Avery felt as if she’d been gone for hours and hours, lunch was still in progress. Some of the high school kids were sitting on the school lawn, eating outdoors in spite of the cold, and Avery could’ve joined them, but she wasn’t quite ready to be with people. Instead, she slipped among the branches of the row of trees at the edge of the parking lot, the place where Zinny and Kirsten had waited for Gray and CJ to come out of the burning school. The theater wing had been replaced a long time ago, right after the fire, but Avery looked up at its roof and invited sadness in, and sadness came.

A man died here, she told herself, and his son stood over his body, and a friendship died, too, a special one that should have lasted forever, and people walk by here every day and don’t even know because there is no sign, there is nothing marking the spot.

But that wasn’t true. She was marking it, Avery Beale McCue, Zinny’s daughter.



When Avery’s mother picked her up, she said, “Do you want to tell me where you went?”

Avery shrugged. “I went to the quarry. I wanted to see it.”

Her mother said, “Oh! I loved that place so much. But I haven’t been there in twenty years.”

Twenty years ago, when her mom had turned from Zinny to Ginny.

“Mom, why did people call you Zinny back then?”

“Oh,” said her mother, flushing. “Trevor called me that when we were little—I think that’s just how he pronounced ‘Ginny’—and it stuck. But not everyone used that name on a regular basis, mostly just close friends. Other people called me Ginny. And, of course, my mother called me Virginia, always.” She smiled. “How I loved the name Zinny, even though it was weird. Because it was weird.”

“It was original,” said Avery.

“Thank you. But ‘weird’ was a compliment to me back then. I loved everything oddball. Z was my favorite letter, probably because hardly anything begins with it.”

“What’s your favorite letter now?”

“Oh. Huh.” Her mother frowned. “I guess I haven’t thought about that in a long time. I used to have a favorite everything. For some reason, it seemed very important to keep track of all the things in the world that I loved best.”