The Secrets We Keep(16)

I remembered her words clear as day. It was the first time she’d ever yelled at me, the first time she’d ever physically pushed me away. I also distinctly remembered her calling me Ella. Me. Ella.

Seeing my sister lying there on that steel table unlocked a piece of my mind I’d lost a few short days ago. A history, dreams, a future that belonged solely to me. They came back … every memory I ever had, hurtling to the surface. The My Little Pony lunch box I got the first day of kindergarten. The matching dresses we wore for Christmas each year until we were ten. The day we graduated from junior high—Maddy in heels, me in flip-flops. Josh arguing with the pizza guy last week over whether or not he should get his steak-bomb pizza for free because it took them more than thirty minutes to deliver it. And Maddy, yelling at me in the car because she thought I was a loser, someone to be ashamed of.

I turned my head toward the hallway, half-expecting my parents to walk through that door, to have somehow come to the same horrifyingly insane conclusion I had: that they were so completely wrong. That it was Maddy who was dead. That it was me—Ella—who had survived.

“Maddy, this was a bad idea,” Alex said. “I shouldn’t have let you do this, not without your parents here at least.”

My parents. Mom was so excited when she realized Maddy was the one who had survived. Dad standing there next to her, immersed in the same joy. They didn’t see me; they saw Maddy. Everybody saw Maddy.

“Josh?” He was the one person who knew me, who would see me. “Where’s Josh? I want to talk to Josh.”

Alex’s hand tensed around mine, his eyes looking everywhere but at me. “He’s at home, Maddy. After Ella … he’s home.”

“What?” That didn’t make any sense. Josh and I had been inseparable since ninth grade. I had to kick him out of my house most Saturday nights, and he’d be back first thing Sunday morning with a new anime movie or some extra-credit project for physics. The only reason he wasn’t at my house the night of the accident was because I’d kicked him out. I’d needed to finish my last sketch and the constant chiming of his phone with incoming texts from Kim had been distracting me. But why wasn’t he here now? “This doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense.”

“He came to the hospital with me, Maddy, but by the time they got you settled into your room…”

“No, wait.” The burning in my chest amplified and panic began to wash over me. I yanked on his hand until he stopped. I wasn’t ready to leave. Not yet.

“Miss Lawton, we need to get you back upstairs,” the nurse said. She stood up from her seat in the corner and grabbed the wheelchair I’d left sitting in the middle of the room. “I want to take your vitals and give you something to calm down.”

I waved her off and took a step closer to Alex. I didn’t want to sit down and be wheeled away. I wanted an answer. “Why did Josh leave? Why didn’t he stay?”

Alex hesitated as if weighing his words. He started to step back, but I reached for his wrist, holding him in place. The tears had begun again, my body shaking with frustration over the truth that everybody refused to see. How could I make him understand that I was Ella? That the hand he was holding on to was not his girlfriend’s but her sister’s. Mine.

“Alex?” There was a demand in the nurse’s tone, a plea to him to do something to calm me down, or she would.

“Don’t worry about Josh,” Alex said as he gently guided me into the wheelchair. “He knows it wasn’t your fault.”

Oh, it was absolutely my fault. I remembered everything now, every last gruesome detail of how I’d killed my sister. My sobs echoed through the hall as he wheeled me onto the elevator, the sound so hollow, so pitiful, that I winced. But it wouldn’t stop: not the tears, not the sobs, not the pain.

“Nobody blames you, Maddy. Nobody,” he continued as the nurse leaned over to take my pulse. She looked worried, scared even. Alex looked like he was going to be ill.

I pushed the nurse away and turned toward Alex: “Look at me. Stop telling me it isn’t my fault and look at me!”

He circled around to the front of my wheelchair and looked into my eyes. “I’ve been looking at nothing but you since the accident, Maddy, and I still see the same strong, beautiful girl I always have. This … what happened to your sister doesn’t change that.”

I couldn’t help but wonder what he would say when he figured out that it was Ella and not his precious Maddy he was taking care of.





10

The elevator doors opened at my floor and Dad rushed toward them at the sound of my cries. Mom was there, too, hollering at Alex for not waking them up.

“Not Alex’s fault,” I managed to sob out. “Ella.”

That last, heavy word took an enormous amount of energy, and I felt myself slipping, my mind closing in on itself.

“Maddy?” Alex said, the fear I felt pouring off him rivaling my own. I didn’t want to see the hope in their eyes die as I forced them to realize that I was Ella.

I studied my dad, my own father, the man who I’d had breakfast with every day for the past seventeen years. The man who coached my middle school soccer team. The man who tried to teach me how to ride a bike one afternoon when I was seven and sat with me in the ER later that same day as they splinted my sprained wrist. Years of time together … of experiences, and my own father didn’t even recognize me.