The Secrets We Keep(49)

“I know where she kept the real one,” I said. “You can have it if you want.”

“No. You keep it,” Alex said as he took his copy back.

“She got in to RISD. That’s what I was talking to Josh about. They were planning on going together. That’s why he was so upset.”

“Did you think she wouldn’t get in?” Alex asked. “She was amazing, Maddy. Better than Josh.”

“I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know how to make any of this right.”

He shook his head, his words coming after a long sigh. “There is nothing to make right, Maddy. The roads were wet and you weren’t going that fast. I was there when you woke up, when the police questioned you. You weren’t drunk. They gave you two blood alcohol tests and both of them showed nothing. It’s been ruled an accident. What happened to your sister was an accident.”

“I know that.” I was mumbling, could hear the sad desperation in my voice. “But things are different now. I’m different now. The Maddy before the accident … it’s like I don’t know her anymore. I don’t know what to say or how I am supposed to act.”

It felt good to finally admit it, to acknowledge that I was as confused as he was. “Everything was easier then,” I whispered. “I want to go back to that night and start over, trade places with her.”

“You mean you wish you had died instead of her?” Alex asked. I didn’t expect the flash of pain I heard in Alex’s voice, didn’t expect him to shrink away from me.

“Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know anymore. I’m tired of pretending. I’m tired of trying to be someone I am not.” It was the first honest thing I’d said to him, and it felt good, fantastic even, for once, to be myself.

“You mean you want to be like her? Like Ella?” Alex asked as he pulled me into his arms and guided my head to his chest.

“Maybe I do. Maybe I want to be exactly like Ella,” I whispered.

“That’s not who you are, Maddy.”

That’s exactly who I am, I said silently to myself.

“Remember when you first learned what happened to Molly? Remember how hard that was?”

I thought back to last year, tried to connect Maddy to Molly’s social downfall, but I got nothing. If anything, Maddy was her normal, I-don’t-have-time-for-you self. When she wasn’t home or at school, she was wherever Alex was. But that wasn’t unusual; since freshman year, since the day she first sat down at his table, they’d been inseparable.

“And?” I didn’t know what else to say and that seemed like the vaguest way to keep him talking.

“It got better. After a few months, people stopped gossiping about her. You stopped worrying so much that people would figure out what you’d done and things went back to normal. In time, this will get better, too.”

“Time,” I repeated. It seemed like such a simple solution. Such an insanely logical and completely stupid solution.

Alex reached down and picked up the backpack I’d dropped and looped it over his own shoulder. “Just be yourself—the you of the last three years, and I promise you, everything will be fine.”





31

Being the old Maddy wasn’t as hard as I thought. With Alex thinking I was two steps away from losing it, he made running interference his full-time job, deflecting any question that came my way. He opted out of lunch in the cafeteria and let me retreat to the library where no one would bother me. Although I think that was more about keeping me away from Molly and Josh than my mental stability. The reason didn’t matter; it worked the same.

I kept my distance from Josh for the rest of the day. It helped that he and Maddy weren’t in any of the same classes. I caught him glancing my way in the hall the following afternoon, but Alex quickly moved in, blocking my view and distracting me. I didn’t catch what he was saying, just the words Snow Ball and colors.

I quickly looked up at the posters covering the walls. Some were advertising ticket sales and others were promoting Jenna for Snow Ball queen. They all had some combination of pink and purple in them so it seemed like a safe guess. “Pink, I think, maybe purple,” I said, then went back to sorting books in my locker.

“You want me to wear a purple tie?”

“What?”

He took the few books I had in my hand and shoved them into my bag. “I asked if you expected me to wear a purple tie.”

I shook my head, trying uselessly to understand why the color of his tie mattered. He could wear a black-and-orange-striped one for all I cared. “Uh … no,” I said, hoping that was the correct response. “Wear a black one or a blue one. Either one is fine; I don’t care.”

“Well, what color is your dress?”

“What dress?” The closest I’d come to wearing a dress in the last ten years was an overly long shirt, and even then, I threw on a pair of wool leggings.

“The one you bought with Jenna way back in September.”

I mentally shuffled through Maddy’s closet. She had at least a dozen formal dresses in there. I’d gone through her entire closet the past three days, trying everything on in an attempt to make myself look exactly like her. But I hadn’t seen any dresses with tags or still wrapped in plastic. “I don’t know. Brown?”