The Secrets We Keep(34)

“I’m sorry. There is a lot of stuff from that night I still can’t remember.”

“Alex heard you yelling at Jenna and came in,” Molly said. “He grabbed you and told you to be quiet before you ruined everything. You screamed at him to let you go, to leave you alone. I went to help you, but he told me to stay out of it, that you were drunk and that he’d take care of it.”

“I wasn’t drunk.” That was the one thing I was certain about. I’d seen Maddy drunk plenty of times, stumbling and giddy as I handed her ibuprofen and Gatorade at two in the morning, then lied to my parents about her having cramps the next day when she could barely move. That night, Maddy wasn’t drunk. She was upset, maybe a little bit scared, but not drunk.

Plus, I had the hospital’s blood test to prove it.

“I know you weren’t drunk, but to Alex—”

“A drunk, rambling Maddy is easier to explain than the truth.” I finished the thought for her.

She tossed her hands out in agreement, and for a moment, I remembered that she knew these people, these so-called friends better than I did. Probably better than Maddy did. “You think if I ignore them, if I give it a little bit of time, things will go back to normal?” I asked.

“Umm, no.”

That was okay. After talking to Molly and seeing what my sister and her friends were capable of, I wasn’t sure Maddy’s normal was what I wanted.





21

I eased open the door to the school’s back staircase. Hardly anybody used it. It was out of the way, the third-floor entrance to it tucked between the art room and the janitor’s closet. Most of the school preferred to use the main stairwell, whose wide steps dumped you within feet of the cafeteria, the front office, or the exit to the student parking lot. This narrow back staircase dumped you nowhere but into the dark corners of each floor.

It was quiet, the echo of my own thoughts keeping me company, and that was what I wanted—an out-of-the-way space to think and regroup.

There was a large window midway up the stairs with a ledge big enough to sit on. There was fifteen minutes left of study hall and walking in this late would draw more attention to myself. Attention I didn’t want or need. Not yet anyway.

I loved it here: the cold cinder blocks at my back, the heat vent below roasting my feet. I spent hours each week in this very spot, with my sketchpad, watching the world outside, trying to replicate in my drawings every movement, every dropped leaf, every parked car.

I reached down and grabbed a notebook out of Maddy’s bag. It was lined, so I flipped to the only blank space I could find—the back cover—and dug around in the bag again until I found a pencil. It was nothing but a standard number 2 pencil, but it would do.

Lost in my drawing, I startled when the bell rang. The few people who used this staircase were making their way through the doors. I ignored them, my focus on the notebook in front of me and the janitor emptying trash into the Dumpster outside. If he would stay still for more than half a second, I’d get his expression down right. But he kept moving, picking up stray bits of paper that had blown free of the container.

The halls went quiet. My next class had started—Physics, I think. It was Basic Physics, not Honors. I could miss two months of that class and still come out with a B. Missing one more day wasn’t gonna kill me. I had lunch, four more classes, two hours of field hockey practice to watch—a sport I didn’t know how to play—and a crapload of homework to make up, and yet I couldn’t get myself to move from that spot.

I tried to hold it together, purposefully thought about random things like the small crack in the windowpane I was leaning against or the faded parking lines in the lot below. It didn’t work; my body still trembled with unspent energy.

I closed my eyes and saw Maddy’s face smiling at me through the darkness. I thought back to the last time I’d seen her happy. It was the morning of the accident. I was talking to myself, muttering about how the admissions board at RISD would have to be out of their minds to accept me. I’d balled up my fifth attempt at the same sketch and tossed it at the door, not even knowing Maddy was standing there, watching me, listening to me. She caught it and opened it, studied the drawing before tucking it into her back pocket.

“Perfection isn’t everything,” she said as she turned and walked away. “I think the flaws are what make it perfect.”

Without opening my eyes, I started drawing her. The deep set of her eyes, the dimple in our left cheeks, that crazy strand of hair she was always fighting into place. Her image flowed through me onto the paper as if drawing her kept me connected to her, bringing a small piece of Maddy back to me.

The doors above me opened and I heard footsteps.

“Hey,” a familiar voice added.

I looked up and saw Josh standing there. He looked confused instead of angry at me. He was a little thinner and paler than usual, but it didn’t matter because just seeing him brought the sense of calm I’d been sitting here struggling to regain.

God, I missed him.

I followed the line of his shoulder down his arm, then to his hand, intertwined with somebody else’s. I didn’t have to look up to know whose it was. Kim’s.

Jealousy, as thick and tainting as bile, rose in me and I winced. I had to swallow it down and remind myself who I really was, how much more I meant to Josh than she did. I’d always liked Josh, figured eventually we’d become more than just friends. But I never had the courage to tell Josh how I really felt, and he never made a move, so I waited, comforted by the fact that even though Josh was technically dating Kim, he spent all of his time with me.