The Lies About Truth(19)

I’ve always been a tad obsessive.

Gina and I read about the class in the school newspaper and convinced our parents to sign us up. That was a tipping point for Trent. He’d had his eye on Gina since she’d beaten him in a race on Field Day. Trent convinced Gray that pottery class wouldn’t be too lousy, and our four mothers happily sealed the deal during one of their Wine-Down Wednesday book clubs.

One thing followed another followed another, like ants on their way to a picnic.

Gray was really skinny. He had an older sister, Maggie, and he wore her Marvel T-shirts. Being an only child, and having no T-shirts to thieve, that was super cool to me.

I set down my book and told him I loved comics.

He told me his mom read him the book I was reading. I’d read Where the Sidewalk Ends dozens of times, but I kept that to myself.

When Gray chose the seat next to me, I was glad he was there, rather than sad that Gina was at another table. That week I painted five things—one for each day. Gray painted one. It was a vase with a Where the Sidewalk Ends poem and drawing on it.

Secretly, I coveted that vase. I wished I’d thought of the idea, but I wasn’t a copier.

The last day, when we were allowed to take our pottery home, Gray didn’t show up to class.

All those hours he’d spent perfecting lines and painting and repainting the picture of the sidewalk broke my heart.

“What will happen to Gray’s?” I asked the teacher.

“We’ll put it on the sale wall. It’s really good. Someone will buy it.”

I stuck out my lip and promised my mother an extra week of sweeping sand out of the foyer. She bought Gray’s vase for five dollars.

The night of our first date, four years later, I tried to give it back to him.

He laughed and said, “Pass me your cell phone.”

He directed the light into the vase’s small opening.

I read the scratches.

For Sadie.

“I didn’t know how to give it to you, so I told my mom I was sick,” he said, his face growing as red as a hazard flag.

“You could have just kept it for yourself,” I told him.

“No, I couldn’t. It was always yours.”

After our relationship ended, I’d thrown out the love letters and theater ticket stubs and given him back his T-shirts in a box. I’d kept the vase.

I still love you, Sadie Kingston.

I huffed.

On the bedside table were all the things Max had mailed me over the past year. I liked everything I saw—maybe I’d ride over to Willit Hill and throw the vase into the woods. After all, that was where the sidewalk ended for us.

It was far too early to think that much.

I poured a glass of orange juice and jogged out to the mailbox, enjoying the solitude of six a.m. on our street. Between the house and the end of the driveway, I convinced myself the mailbox would be empty.

I changed my mind when I tugged open the door. Another envelope with my name typed across the front was inside. I treated it like poison. Lifting it by the corner, I walked quickly back to my room so I could look at it and Big at the same time.

The typing and placement were the same as before. The secret was new.

I dared Gray to jump off the Destin Bridge. It backfired. He double-dared me to jump with him. So we did.

—From a friend

I didn’t think anyone else had known about that. People, mostly Air Force guys, jumped off the bridge pretty regularly. It was dangerous, and illegal, but the cops rarely found out in time to stop it. As a confession, this was fairly innocuous. But still, someone had been through my stuff, and that made me want to throw knives.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said aloud.

From a friend? Bullshit. A friend would talk to me. A friend wouldn’t jerk me around like this. A friend wouldn’t invade my privacy.

Someone close to me had rummaged through Big, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around why, much less who. If his or her motive was good, in some distorted way, why was he or she picking these particular memories from Big’s arsenal of thoughts? He or she had to be picking specific things. I was convinced of that. But skinny-dipping and bridge-jumping? Those were hardly blackmail-worthy events. Was the culprit leading up to something else?

Both of those nights were fun.

Was that the point of this?

Regardless, I added this note to the first one and put them between the pages of an old book. Even with them out of sight, I couldn’t sweep the questions from the corners of my mind.

Gray randomly appearing on the beach last night, telling me he still loved me. Was that a coincidence? He knew exactly where our spare key was. Knew I jotted down ideas and memories and put them inside Big.

It could be him.

Except this didn’t feel like him.

Gray was many things; theatrical wasn’t one of them. Trent could have hatched something like this, but Gray was a straight shooter. This was sideways and cockeyed.

I worried it was Max. Thanks to our emails, he had more than enough information to pull this off.

Stop following. Start leading. Here was an opportunity. I needed to eliminate someone as a suspect, and I’d start with Gray, the friend I could afford to lose. Throwing on a pair of crops, a loose long-sleeve shirt, and a straw hat, I hurried back outside.

Three claps greeted me from the McCalls’s back porch hammock. Max lowered his graphic novel and waved.