I looked down at my hands. “I’m sorry. I really am.” And I was. Because I hadn’t really thought about what it meant to do that to someone. Hadn’t really thought of him as a person, not in the fullest sense. Just a candidate, a possible answer to my question.
“Good. I’m glad you understand that.” Then he turned and looked at me, relief but also puzzlement on his face. “What I still don’t get is why you’d ever have thought there was something there. Why you’d even think to spy on me in the first place?”
I could’ve told him about all the things that had seemed so important at the time. How with so little to go on, I’d been grasping at straws and trying to turn them into a raft.
I didn’t want to tell him, though. Didn’t want to embarrass him by telling him about Lauren’s comment, and definitely didn’t want to say anything that might reveal how long I’d watched him for. So I shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense now.”
“There had to be some—” He caught himself and stopped. He sighed. “Look, I don’t mean to put you through the wringer with this. What you did really shook me, really upset me very deeply, but I know you’ve been through a lot. And grief can make people do strange things.”
So many strange things. So many hours of watching him.
And I thought of him with his cat, helping it down from the bookcase, thought of how I’d left Anna’s paper for him. And without meaning to, I found myself smiling.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I was thinking about the strangest part.”
He raised his eyebrows and waited for me to explain. I paused, unsure whether to say it. And then I went ahead, because if there was anyone who was already justified in thinking I was unhinged, it was him. “There were moments when I almost thought that, if things were different, you wouldn’t have been the worst choice for her.”
His eyes widened. I flushed and wished I’d kept my mouth shut, until I noticed the tiniest trace of a smile forming at the side of his mouth. “And by different, you mean if I hadn’t been twice her age and her teacher?”
“Yes,” I said. And gay, I added silently. That also put a wrinkle in things. “I thought you might have made her happy, made her feel special.”
“Oh,” he said. For a second, I thought I could see another version of my mom’s lecture on inappropriate relationships coming. Then he nodded. “Well, I always thought she seemed like a very special person.”
“She was.”
He looked at me. And for the first time, it felt like he really saw me. Not the girl with the dead twin. Not the crazy girl who’d accused him of sleeping with her sister. Me.
“She was lucky to have you,” he said. “I know you meant a lot to her. I know you were her best friend.”
Best friend. I shook my head, even though it hurt to do it. “She was always my best friend, but I wasn’t hers—not by the end. By the end it was Lily.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think by the end the two of them were that close.”
His voice was strained, like it was hard for him to say it. I didn’t correct him. I knew he was trying to be kind. Sometimes it’s good to let people try to make you feel better.
Sometimes I thought of you on that rope swing. About those few seconds when you’d soared before crashing down. For those seconds, it had looked like you were flying, and I’d felt like both of us had wings. And then you’d been on the ground, unmoving.
That had been the worst moment of my life.
I think it still is, despite everything else.
Everything else I can bear, I’d tell myself when I looked at him. At those eyes, with those lashes—beautiful eyes in a face that had become so very ugly to me. Everything else I can get through.
ON SUNDAY, I WOKE WITH a low buzz deep in my stomach.
Because I was going to see Nick.
I started to put on my running clothes. Then I stopped, deciding I wanted to look nicer than that. Not too nice, not fancy, but nicer than normal. I put on a short-sleeved top with a slight pattern and left my hair down rather than pulling it back into a ponytail. Brushed it twice too.
Then I went downstairs for breakfast.
I downed a bowl of cereal, a banana, and an orange and followed that up with some scrambled eggs and sausage links. I checked the cupboard to see if there were any granola bars. No such luck.
Mom sat at the kitchen table watching me, nursing a grapefruit and a piece of whole-wheat toast.
“All that running you do must be catching up with you,” she said. “I can pick up some granola bars tomorrow if you like—maybe the ones with almonds?”
“Thanks, that would be great,” I said.
She smiled. She looked younger in that moment, smiling, her hair back in a loose ponytail, and it reminded me of something I’d meant to ask her about months earlier.
“Were you popular in high school?”
She blinked. “Popular? I guess that depends on your definition.”
Which pretty much answered the question. Because if you weren’t popular, you knew it. It was only the people who were popular who seemed to have trouble knowing how to classify themselves. Still, I clarified. “Lots of friends, homecoming queen, that sort of
