The Secrets We Keep(52)

Tossing the box aside, I continued reading. The article didn’t say why she hadn’t played. It made no mention of her testing positive for drugs the day before or the school suspending her from the team for the remainder of the season. The reporter did say, however, that had Molly played, Cranston High School would’ve won. A few lines down, the details got too real … too close to home. Maddy had highlighted her own name, underlined every reference to the three shoot-outs she had lost, but left any mention of her nine saves untouched.

I moved to the bed and dumped the rest of the box out, pushing aside everything that related to me until I was left with a pile of things related to Molly. There was a blurb from the newspaper’s police log indicating that they had broken up a party at Alex’s house two nights before divisionals, citing a noise violation, and a letter from the athletic director explaining the disciplinary actions taken against a member of the field hockey team for failing a random drug test. Behind that was a picture of my sister and Molly, one I think she had clipped out of a yearbook. It was them in their sophomore year, at the first field hockey game they’d played together at the varsity level.

I froze when I found a bag of pills, wondering why my sister had them. She had passed the drug test the day before divisionals. That one and every other one the school had randomly subjected them to since.

I emptied the bag of pills onto the bed, counting three. These didn’t come out of a bottle you could get at any drugstore. They were different, powdery and white, not a single identifying mark on them. And they were hidden in Maddy’s closet in the bottom of a shoe box.

I put them back in the bag and shoved them under the mattress. I should’ve flushed them. I wanted to flush them, but something forced me to hang on to them.

There were a few more pictures of Molly in the pile and a copy of this year’s team roster. Molly was on it, but her name was at the end of the list. She’d made the team this year, but I doubted she’d play.

Near the bottom of the pile was an index card with an address for the Lighthouse Clinic and a room number.

That name sounded vaguely familiar, and I quickly Googled it on my phone. What came up had my eyes growing wide as my mind spun in circles. It was a hospital, a drug treatment center for teens, to be exact. In an instant, I knew why Maddy had it and who had been a patient there—Molly.

I remembered the day she went. I’d overheard my parents telling Maddy why Molly would be out of school for a few weeks. Molly was still claiming she hadn’t taken anything, but the school had two positive test results showing otherwise. Mom wanted to know if anybody else on the team was using drugs. Dad wanted to know if Maddy had ever taken anything. I clearly remembered Maddy denying everything. Everything.

I sifted through the scraps of paper on the bed, trying to figure out why my sister was keeping bits and pieces of information on a person she’d essentially shunned. There wasn’t a personal note in there. Aside from the clinic’s handwritten address, everything she had collected was official—letters from the school about the incident, newspaper clippings, photos. Nothing gave me a clue about why Maddy seemed to have been secretly obsessed with Molly.

Every shoe box in the closet got opened, every drawer in her desk was torn apart, each of her ten unused purses was searched, but I found nothing. Not a ribbon-tied stack of letters from Alex. Not a scrapbook of Maddy’s own accomplishments. Nothing but that shoe box outlining my life and Molly’s demise.

I tossed everything related to me back into the box and neatly stacked the papers referencing Molly into one pile, then shoved it under the mattress where the pills were. I no longer cared about the last two field hockey games of the season, or the dance, or how I was going to lie my way out of going to either. I was concerned with one thing—finding out what Maddy had done to Molly and why.





33

As far as I could tell, Dad hadn’t come home last night. His car wasn’t in the driveway, and the coffee cup he always used was still sitting in the cabinet. I let myself believe he was traveling; that was better than contemplating the obvious.

Before leaving, I turned the coffeepot on for Mom and laid out her cup. I didn’t want her to think that nobody had come home, that nobody cared. I did, I just didn’t know how to tell her.

I skipped my first period class and parked myself outside the door of Josh’s AP Physics class. He was beyond upset with me, and I didn’t deserve his help, but I didn’t know who else to turn to. If anyone could help me figure out what was going on, it was him. And if he couldn’t, then at least he’d listen to me.

I could hear Mr. Walden asking questions about potential energy, electric potential, and electric potential difference. I didn’t know the answers. Less than a month of being Maddy, and I was already losing intellectual ground. Bonus was, I’d figured out how to curl my lashes. Who needed to understand what a joule was when you could do that?

The bell rang, and I stood up, watching and waiting for Josh to walk out.

“Hey,” I said, and reached out to stop him. He’d seen me and was planning on ignoring me. “I need to talk to you.”

“You get Alex’s approval for that?” he asked.

“I don’t need Alex’s permission.”

Josh laughed and walked past me. I hurried to catch up with him. He was my best friend, and I deserved his anger for what I’d done, his hatred even, but I didn’t want to lose him.