He was shaking his head, standing up behind his desk. I kept going.
“—how her death changed everything. I heard it. I know.”
“Oh, Jesus. It’s not…” He didn’t seem to know what to say. The effort of even those few words seemed to push the air out of him, force him back into his chair. He looked dazed.
“I just want to know,” I said. “I want you to admit it. I need to know the truth. I need you to tell me what happened that night. Did she come over? Did she get drunk? What happened?”
He held his head in his hands and didn’t respond.
I hadn’t expected this. I’d expected denial, maybe anger, but not this retreat. I began to get desperate.
“Please. Tell me.” My voice was getting louder. I needed him to say something. To look at me and tell me something. Anything.
He shook his head, his eyes focused on the papers on his desk.
“Did you love her?” I didn’t know I was going to ask that. But once I had, it seemed like the only real question there was. The only thing that could give any meaning to what had happened.
“Jess—”
The second time I almost screamed it. “Did you love her?”
He looked up. In his eyes, I saw horror and sadness. Also pity.
You have no right to pity me, I thought. No right. I’m fine. You’re the one who— You’re the one…
I tried to say something else, anything else, to regain control. What came out was a huge, broken sob.
And then I fled.
He’d looked at it, the photo. It’s funny, he said, but you nailed her expression here—that frown, like she’s angry and on the verge of explaining why. People might think something was really wrong with her, sending a photo like this to a guy she’s never even talked to. The school, your parents, they might be really concerned.
It took a minute for me to understand what he was saying. Then it registered like ice water down my spine.
I’d tell them it was me, I said. I would.
That’s exactly what they’d expect you to say, he said.
Then he put his hand on the back of my neck, like a clamp.
BACK IN FOURTH GRADE, THERE was a long stretch of time when I had the same boring dream every night. In the dream, I sat in the living room with Anna, Mom, and Dad, and we were all reading books and eating apples. That was all there was to it. The only thing that changed was the color of the apples. Sometimes they were red, other times a yellowish green.
Anna still slept in the top bunk back then, and every morning she’d ask what I’d dreamed about. I’d tell her that it was the same dream as before. Then I’d ask what she’d dreamed about, and she’d tell me how her dreams had been filled with strange elongated animals, multicolored icebergs, and other surreal things. And I was jealous. Jealous of how she had the interesting dreams while I was stuck on this same dull dream of our family hanging out together in the living room doing absolutely nothing special.
Now I wanted that dream back. Needed it back. To know that when I went to sleep, I would return to that place. To the security, the normalcy of that moment. Of the luxury of not paying attention to each other, knowing that at any moment I could look up and see Anna there. That I’d look at her and feel like she was someone I still knew.
Because I had messed it all up. I had learned nothing from Mr. Matthews. Nothing about Anna, nothing about that night, nothing about how he’d felt about her. I wanted to bang my head against a wall, kick a tree—anything that made me feel something other than this ever-expanding hole of regret.
I’d spent so long trying to understand what had happened, and now I’d looked back at the wrong moment, looked back and lost what I’d been searching for all along. Mr. Matthews was never going to say anything to me, was always going to be on his guard around me. I’d lost the last fragments of Anna left for me to find.
I WENT THROUGH THE NEXT day in a fog. As if on autopilot, I found myself walking toward the locker room after class. As soon as I got within a few yards, I stopped. I stood, my feet frozen in place, staring at the locker room door. I hadn’t gone to track the day before, and I couldn’t go today either. Couldn’t face Mr. Matthews. Couldn’t bear to see him.
“Hey, you okay?”
I turned to see Nick standing nearby, looking concerned.
“I’m fine,” I said.
He looked at me closely. “I’m not sure that’s true.”
“I just…I’m just not sure if I can take track today.”
“Sick or sad?”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“Sorry?”
“Those are the two reasons why I don’t want to do things I usually enjoy, and I know you love track. Tell me which one it is so I can help.”
Sick or sad. I looked at him: at the planes of his face, at the way a fold had formed between his eyebrows that made me believe he really cared about my answer.
“What would you do if I said sick?” I asked.
“I’d buy you an orange soda from the vending machine to get you some vitamin C and then leave you be because that’s all I can do about sick.” He smiled. “Plus, you might get me sick, and I don’t half-ass being sick, so that’s me laid up in bed for a week, minimum.”
I smiled back, a little. “What would you do if I said sad?”
I expected this answer to be as flippant as the first, but the concerned fold reappeared. “If you said sad, I’d buy you whatever you wanted from the vending machine and then I’d stay by your side until you told me
